Dream Kitchen

Making Lunches at Home: The Dark Side

2012-02-08T12:30:00.001-05:00

DISCLOSURE: The child in these statements is a composite and the events here did not really take place all in the same week.

Let's be frank. This practice of making lunches has a rarely acknowledged dark side. Let me walk you through it.

Lunch is prepared by a devoted parent, late at night when said parent would rather be sleeping or making her way through Season 4 of Six Feet Under, or at 6:40 AM, when this parent would rather be mainlining coffee and reading the entertaining Republican primary results.

This lunch, packed carefully in reusable containers, is then trotted out either at 11:00 or 1:30 or some other odd assigned lunch period, where it may or may not be eaten. Here are the possibilites, and I'm just tellin' it like is, America.

1. The entire lunch is eaten. This is theoretically possible but . . . has this ever happened? Get back to me, readers.

2. The lunch is not eaten at all. This happens five percent of the time because "I thought I was buying" or "I couldn't find it" or "Jimmy had a birthday party and he brought doughnuts" (elementary school only).

3. Two bites or less are taken out of the sandwich (if it is a sandwich) because "It smells funny," "It's dry" or "I ran out of time." Occasionally in these circumstances, said child will eat more of the fruit or vegetables than usual. That's rare.

4. The sandwich is eaten and the fruit and veggies are untouched. Again, "I ran out of time." This is a valid point. It's true that they must do lunch and recess in a short time, and recess rocks. Whereas a stinky cafeteria full of yelling kids and grumpy "monitors" does not rock.

This neglect of lovingly prepared foods is then compounded by the following practices:

1. (I love numbered lists so much.) The child leaves the lunchbag and contents in the locker. Middle school introduces this whole new private, dark place where junk and valuables accumulate in a heap. It's like the unconconscious only it smells.

2. The previous problem causes a cascading set of issues. Now the parent must pack the next lunch in a CVS bag and GLAD containers.

3. Repeat #1, only with Target bag that's too big.

4. Repeat #1, only with newspaper bag with a hole in it.

5. Repeat #1, with Victoria's Secret bag.

6. The child brings home all the lunches at once on Friday because now there's room in the backpack for them, because the huge bursting binder is left in the locker because there's no homework. Are you following this?

5. Someone must then must dispose of the molding, decomposing food and wash the containers on a lovely Friday afternoon. Someone is crabby and repercussions make themselves known.

Makes you shiver, doesn't it?

How to Be the Boss of Kale

2012-02-07T14:32:00.002-05:00

Perhaps you are afraid of kale. You're intimidated by its huge dark green leaves and its commanding bulk, you're rendered mute by its assertive bitterness, or you're not brave enough to break its toughness.

It's true. Kale has been around the block a few times. In fact, kale was the dominant vegetable in Northern Europe through the Middle Ages. How do you think King Arthur became so wise? It wasn't from eating petits-pois.

And Scotland was basically a giant kale garden, where the writer J. M. Barrie, who wrote Peter Pan, was a member of the "Kailyard School" of fiction.

So let's not be cowards when it comes to kale. You just have to show kale who's boss. You must tame its strength. Here are a few tips:

--You can eat it raw. But it's best cut up into thin strips. This is true for lots of strong winter vegetables. Thin strips tame the bitterness and allow more surface area for dressing or sauce. I made a dressing the other day of olive oil, lemon juice, and salt. I used the kale as a bed for roasted onions, squash, and sweet potato. The sassy kale was a perfect partner for the sweet vegetables.

--You can throw it into soups or stews. I even put a whole bunch in a lamb chili last night. Again, it was cut in small pieces. One reason I make small pieces is to make it that much harder for certain boys to separate it out from the rest of the food. I'm shrewd that way.

--If you are sauteing it, pair it with bacon. Cut up some bacon slices with kitchen scissors and cook the pieces, stirring occasionally. Drain any excess fat and cook some kale in with the bacon, again stirring occasionally. Add salt and pepper. Other tasty additions are Sriracha or tamari, depending what taste you are seeking.

And if you are already a kale fan, or becoming one, you will be glad to know that the northern Germans have a kale celebration every winter, centered around eating boiled kale! Is that festive or what? The name of the ritual is Grunkohlfahrt (pronounced grune-cole-fart--yes, I know) and it also seems to involve wurst (of course) and schnapps. I would imagine a great deal of schapps.

And, seriously, all fart jokes aside, kale is a great anticarcinogen (not boiled) and has tons of other vitamins including calcium. So boss around some kale today. And in the mean time, Happy Grunkohlfahrt!

Alice's Revolution

2012-01-05T10:00:00.000-05:00

40 Years of Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering.

Chez Panisse, Chez Panisse. Alice Waters, Alice Waters, Chez Panisse. Are you getting sick of hearing about this place? Me neither. Alice Waters is the one who started this whole farm to table movement, and for the past few years she and the Chez Panisse Foundation have spearheaded the Edible Schoolyard, a way of empowering children to grow and eat their own food at school.

All Alice ever did, at first, was so modest and simple. She opened a restaurant that served a three-course fixed-price menu. The staff would decide on the menu that day, depending on what produce, meat or fish they had procured. They actually told the diners where the food came from, which was never from far away. And the diners came, year after year, decade after decade, and now it's been forty years. Chez Panisse's philosophy has become de rigueur. She started a revolution.

At Chez Panisse, they even serve mulberry sorbet, the berries always from the same big old tree in Sonoma. I always thought they were flavorless, and although we had a giant mulberry tree when I was growing up, we kids only used the berries to smear on our arms as "blood." Then we went inside and ate canned fruit cocktail.

A revolution, no matter how small, threatens institutions. That's why it's called a revolution. If everyone in the United States ate local, that would be the end of agribusiness, supermarket chains, corporate food services, and the end of a whole industry of transport, refrigeration, shipping, and distribution systems. To say nothing of genetically engineered produce. And in its place? A nation of people who either grow their own food, or buy what is near them, in season. Or they "put up" for the winter. They nourish their land. They share their bounty with those in need, and teach those in need how to grow and forage.

It's happening, but slowly. Even in my "progressive" town, our local elementary school serves an impoverished lunch full of factory meat and white flour. The flavorless apples remain largely untouched, the children preferring--you guessed it--canned fruit cocktail.

Much work remains to be done. But we can do this. So it's January. Buy turnips instead of tomatoes. Invite friends over for a simple meal. Use the money that you would use for a diet program on organic eggs or locally grown meat. Invite friends to cook with you. Plan a modest garden this year.

Let's take on Alice's revolution, one mulberry at a time.

And The Highest Purpose of Green Tomatoes Is . . .

2011-09-20T10:47:00.003-04:00

I was going to say the special purpose of green tomatoes, but once you've seen The Jerk you can never say "special purpose" again. So the highest purpose of green tomatoes is a gratin. They're fine pickled or fried, but in a gratin they reach their apotheosis, their verdant tartness marrying the rich creamy sauce so perfectly.

The link to the recipe I worked from is in the previous post, but I changed it enough that I'm including my own version here. I tripled the recipe, using scallions instead of shallots, and breadcrumbs from homemade bread instead of panko, and lots more breadcrumbs than originally called for. In other words it's a bigger bolder recipe. Not to imply that the original recipe is dinky and timid.

Green Tomato Gratin, Chez Dream Kitchen

This will feed 10 people if they like it. And they will like it.

3 lbs green tomatoes

For breadcrumb topping:

2 1/2 C breadcrumbs (diced stale bread)
Kosher or sea salt
black pepper
3 T olive oil

For Mornay sauce:

4 1/2 T butter
1/3 cup finely chopped scallions
6 T flour
2 1/4 C heavy cream
2 t Kosher or sea salt (less if you use regular salt)
3/4 C fresh grated parmesan or pecorino
1/4 t fresh grated nutmeg

You can cut the tomatoes a few hours ahead of time, and you can also make the sauce ahead of time. Just warm the sauce up in the microwave a little before mixing it with the tomatoes.

Preheat oven to 450.

Mix all the ingredients for the breadcrumb topping together and set aside.

To make the Mornay, put the butter and scallions in a medium saucepan and saute over medium heat for about five minutes. Add the flour and stir for about 1 minute. Whisk in the cream then add the cheese, salt and nutmeg. Continue whisking until the sauce thickens, then take it off the heat.

Spread the tomatoes evenly between two large shallow glass or ceramic baking dishes. Pour the sauce over the tomatoes. Sprinkle the breadcrumb topping evenly on top then place the dishes in the oven.

Bake for 15 minutes or until the sauce is bubbling and the breadcrumbs are golden brown.

For selfish reasons, I'm sad that this disappeared so quickly at the dinner party. I did take three or four slices that were left on a child's plate . . . is that pathetic?

Fall Menu: Brisket Braised in Stout, Green Tomato Gratin.

2011-09-16T21:42:00.002-04:00

I wish you could smell my kitchen. I've been braising a six-pound beef brisket for a couple of hours, and the stout, bay leaves, homemade chicken stock, homegrown thyme and sage, mustard, and 2 1/2 pounds of onions and six prunes create just the perfect heady richness for the first crisp day of "fall." (Well, it's not really fall. Yet.) Here is the recipe, from Epicurious. I confess a great, unrequited crush on prunes, and these six prunes are such winsome little fellows, like the seven dwarfs. How can you resist a huge recipe for brisket that calls for six prunes?

What else to serve? Because I took down a couple of tomato plants to make room for lettuce, I now have a bag full of green tomatoes. So I looked on the friendly old internet and found this recipe, which I'm tripling. I've made the mornay sauce ahead of time, and I've delegated tomorrow's actual slicing to Mr. Dream Kitchen, who will enjoy using our new kitchen scale to measure the three pounds of green tomatoes. Yes, I got tired of estimating the weight of produce and finally bought the scale. It's like getting a GPS; every little thing is quantifiable now. In a world gone daft, politically (not going to get more specific . . .), it's nice to have a few things that make sense, no matter how small. Little kitchen scale, you make me happy.

Rare Adjectives, Sliced and Pickled

2011-08-18T19:50:00.000-04:00

"The fusilli is a picaresque delight, a bumptious fugue of octopus and bone marrow." --Andy Borowitz, in his "first and last restaurant review."

From whom we also have:

"The Long Island duck breast is a bumptious delight, a picaresque fugue of mulberries and mustard."

This restaurant review--and Andy, I can guarantee that it's not the last, my friend--caused me to think about how I, too, could use the words "picaresque" and "bumptious" to describe food. Not "fugue" because the word deeply depresses me--the sound, the spelling, everything. The way it slides and thuds, like a dead body falling down an elevator shaft.

What about "picaresque"? "Of or relating to a rogue or rascals." Mulberries and mustard does sound like a roguish combo, like something 10-year-old girls would make each other eat at a slumber party.

Let's look at "bumptious:" "Offensively self-assertive or conceited." Octopus and bone marrow? The combination sounds like an accident at sea, but is it bumptious? Or, after being cooked for a while, would it be "unctuous"?

By the way, I did find the phrase "bumptious homoerotic picaresque" in my Google search. Not sure where to go with that.

Anyhow, five pattypan squash in a row, on the kitchen counter, is picaresque AND bumptious. Picaresque because in my house squash is a mischievous vegetable that hardly anyone likes. I have to quash its bumptious personality.

Here is what I did, and it worked:

Pattypan Squash Pickle

Slice five or six pattypan squash thin with a mandoline. If you don't have one, get one! Dice a jalapeno and add. Sprinkle a tablespoon of salt over all, and give it a good squeeze every few minutes until not much water comes out, maybe 20 minutes later. Rinse and squeeze one final time. Add one teaspoon of rice wine vinegar and a drop or two of dark sesame oil.

Five little squashes, sliced, salted and civilized.

When Humorless People Edit Humor: A Local Case Study

2011-08-16T14:32:00.001-04:00

Here is the title and introduction for an article that I wrote for a very local paper. Very. Local. So very local and folksy that it publishes several fake stories on April 1, so very local and folksy that after July 4, it is covered with photos of cute kids at the parade. Got it? Let's carry on.

I am on a committee at the Swarthmore Food Emporium (pseudonmym) and my main role is to write stuff. This article is publicizing a fundraiser so we can make healthy meals for people who need them, and the meals are made on Sunday nights.

Here is the BEFORE:

The Swarthmore Food Emporium Commits Senseless Acts of Kindness: More Accomplices Needed

by Lauren McKinney, Food Emporium Committee of Blah-Blah

One Sunday night in the spring, after the Food Emporium closed its doors to shoppers, some fresh food disappeared under suspicious circumstances. The scene of the crime looked like this: A local woman took some whole wheat off the shelf to boil on the emporium's stove. Soon thereafter, pasta with chicken and homemade sauce was seen leaving the premises. Meanwhile, fresh berries were cut, Caribbean black bean soup bubbled mysteriously on the stove, and another accomplice made a green salad. Officer Pardo of the Swarthmore Police Department was baffled.

And here is a quote from a committee member upon reading my draft:

"My biggest concern is actually the tag line and 'crime scene' theme. While it was really cute and catchy, I did not like going anywhere near associating an outreach effort with something criminal."

She rewrote it and here is the AFTER:

The Swarthmore Food Emporium Is Taking It To the Street: More Support Is Needed

On a Sunday night this spring, after the Food Emporium closed its doors to shoppers, the store was anything but quiet. Food was collected from the emporium shelves, whole wheat pasta was doused with olive oil and homemade pesto, chicken was sautéed, fresh kale was chopped, local berries were cut, and Caribbean black bean soup bubbled on the stove. In just over two hours, Food Emporium members Holly Norris and Kelly Shire [pseudonyms], together with eight volunteers, had prepared enough food to provide 4-5 meals for 10 people. Why?

I went along with it, because I know how to do committees. And I added their names to the byline. Inside, I'm thinking BLOG FODDER. I lament, and today seems to be a day for lamenting, the humorlessness that is floating out there in the world, dully, pointlessly, inexorably. A gray cloud of humorlessness dampening high spirits everywhere!! (Nothing against the color gray or clouds.) So what do you say? Grab your whimsy, put on your satire, attach your hyperbole and even your litote (if you can find one),and let's fight this thing together.

Honeysuckle: A Late Summer Lament

2011-08-16T12:12:00.000-04:00

Innocent in June,
You now hold tomatoes in
A knowing death grip.

Queso Blanco on a Summer's Day

2011-07-22T08:30:00.001-04:00

My cheesemaking buddies Roxane and Oonie met Tuesday to spend a few hours making cheese and butter. (Remember that gallon of cream? I'm thinking maybe it was TWO gallons.) It was well worth it, for the conversation at least as much for the cooking.

First we went to the local health food store, Martindale's, and bought a gallon of raw milk. Then we heated it up to between 185 and 190, while keeping each other up to date on the latest divorces, deaths, and home sales. At that point we added, slowly, 1/4 cup of apple cider vinegar. When curds formed, we ladled them into a colander lined with butter muslin. Then we hung the butter muslin from the kitchen faucet and allowed the whey to drip into a bowl in the sink.

A couple of hours later, after we ate a lunch of hummus, veggies, and Oonie's homemade yogurt,the cheese was solid enough. Then we whipped up a couple of batches of butter in the food processor. We split up the butter, cheese, and expenses and said our goodbyes. I got to keep the fresh buttermilk, which isn't tangy like cultured. To me it just tastes like delcious whole milk.

The cheese was so easy to make, and it has that full raw milk flavor that makes you realize what we've been missing all these years. It's the kind of cheese that doesn't melt, along the order of paneer or halloumi. You can fry or grill it. I cubed it and added it to a main dish salad of cucumber, tomato, and onion, with an olive oil and lemon juice dressing.

The cheese recipe is on p. 93 of Ricki Carroll's Home Cheesemaking, 3rd ed. Oh, and I used the whey in a bread recipe that I'll share with you all in the next post.

Blessed are the cheesemakers.

Extreme Rustic Blueberry "Pudding"

2011-07-21T13:00:00.000-04:00

A Mennonite man who grew up on a farm in Iowa once told me that on summer days sometimes his family would eat bread and milk with berries on top for lunch. That sounded appealing to me, so today I made a version of it.

Ingredients
day-old homemade bread
blueberries
sugar
cream or whole milk

Toast the bread. Set it in the bottom of a wide shallow bowl. Cover it with blueberries, add some sugar to taste and and crush some of the berries and sugar with the back of a spoon. Or just skip that step; I like a little smushiness. Pour the cream or milk over top, and warm it up a little in the microwave if you want. (I did.)

You may then labor in the fields. Or take a nap.

A Gallon of Cream? For Me?

2011-07-11T10:10:00.076-04:00

One day in March I went to collect my Winter Harvest buying clu49055555 (kitten on keyboard, sorry)buying club 6cylby4 order (OK, kitten, have some liver treats.) and instead of a gallon of skim milk I found a gallon of cream with my name on it. Let's pause here for a moment to absorb how horrifying it was, to see a gallon of cream with my name on it. In block letters on a white label. I took this vat of fat home and emailed their office immediately, but there was nothing they could do. I had accidentally checked the cream column instead of the skim milk column.

What to do? I learned that cream can be frozen, so I froze it a pint at a time in quart freezer bags, which is what we had on hand. That would buy us some time. I knew we would use some for ice cream, which Mr. Dream Kitchen makes. When the weather warmed up, we pulled out some to make mint ice cream with the mint from our garden. It transcends store-bought mint ice cream several times over.

Last week I got started thinking about butter. I looked up how to make it, and saw that you can just whirl cream around in a mixer. I poured in a quart of the thawed but still cold cream into the mixer. Without a splash guard, I had to go at too slow a speed for anything to happen, especially with the cream being so cold. So I transferred it all to the food processor and gave it a whirl. I wish my sons had been there to see it. For a few minutes you think nothing is happening and then you can watch it seizing as the butter suddenly separates from the buttermilk.

At this point I gathered up the butter with my hands and kneaded it gently in a bowl of ice water, in order to rid it of the buttermilk, which would cause the butter to go rancid. I didn't save the buttermilk because I was in a slight panic about a leakage from the Cuisinart (was it something I did?), but next time I'll save it.

Here is the takeaway point: Butter made from organic local cream tastes the way butter is meant to taste. Strangely enough, the day that I made the butter I learned about a new book called Make the Bread, Buy the Butter by a local writer, Jennifer Reese. In it, she figures out what's worth buying and what's worth making. Butter doesn't seem worth it to her. I'm not sure it's worth it for baking (it may be?), but for spreading, yes. Yes! Next I'm going to order a butter bell to keep it in. You pack butter tightly into the "bell," and a seal is formed with water that you keep in the bottom. If you change the water every few days, the butter can last 30 days at room temperature.

The next project I want to attempt is ghee, in which you melt butter and simmer it for a while, skimming off the top layer. Also called clarified butter, ghee has a very high smoke point, and you can keep it on your counter, right near the stove for a long time. Ghee is used in Indian cooking, and is one small but important reason that Indian food is entirely marvelous.

And today's math lesson is this. A gallon of cream could yield two quarts of ice cream, and two pounds of butter, some of which could be made into ghee. My current CSA supplies cream for $10.95 a gallon, so that's $2.93 for a pound of butter. That's four "sticks" of the best butter you've ever had.

The next time I see my name on a gallon of cream, despite being condemned to Weight Watchers' Seventh Circle of Hell, I will rejoice.

"Dirty" Mother's Day Brunch at Longwood Gardens

2011-05-09T15:10:00.001-04:00

Yesterday the Dream Kitchen family and grandpa had a Mother's Day brunch at 1906, the restaurant at Longwood Gardens. The salad I ordered came with mushroom soil, the menu said, with no explanation or asterisk. I asked the server, "This can't actually mean mushroom soil, correct?" Mushrooms grow in something even less suitable for eating than regular dirt. She said,"No, it just looks like mushroom soil. It's tiny bits of creminis and shiitakes sautéed with a little olive oil. Baby radishes appear to be growing out of it."

I am none too sure they should ever have gone down the mushroom soil path, conceptual or actual, but once they had started down it I guess there was no turning back. It was the only salad on the brunch menu, so I ordered it. The salad was very fresh and interesting, and included tiny edible flowers and a hibiscus immersion and something that was sliced in narrow ribbons. Perhaps it was a bit too precious in its execution, but on Mother's Day I wasn't going to be picky.

Let this be a lesson to you, dear readers. As I said to the server regarding the mushroom soil, "This is where quotation marks would come in very handy."

P.S. In answer to the question from Zane, when you learn to spell I'll give you all the bacon you want. In answer to MemeGrl, the Gouda was a little dry as you know, but there may be more feta on the horizon. The mozzarella we made in the cheesemaking class was great but I left the recipe there! Am about to buy Ricki Carroll's cheesemaking book.

The Negroni Cocktail: The Bitter and the Sweet

2011-05-06T11:53:00.000-04:00

The cocktail called the Negroni is very trendy right now. I had my first one last October at Cicchetteria, and have even had another since then. (My cocktail consumption is very small.)

Negroni

One part gin
One part vermouth
One part Campari

Serve on the rocks. You can add a twist of orange. I love the interplay between the juniper of the gin, the sweetness of the vermouth, and the bitterness of the Campari.

A word about Campari. A long time ago I spent four weeks in Rome with a bunch of other grad students, supposedly studying aesthetics but actually hanging around in cafes, tasting gelato, going broke, and gossiping about each other. Temple Rome Program, I love you! So one day my friend Jesse and I ordered Campari and soda because it sounded daring. I'd seen ads for it in The New Yorker.

It was dreadful to my 30-year-old palate (I'm a late bloomer). "This is like paint-thinner!" But slightly more than 20 years later, I think Campari sassy and strong in a good way, and I like the way its childish Hi-C Fruit Punch red color belies the bitterness.

You see, I've befriended bitterness in my middle age. Not emotional bitterness, which I used to find thrilling to discover in other people and energizing to cultivate in myself. Now that, like anyone my age, I actually have a few things to be bitter about, I try as hard as possible not to fall into that particular self-indulgent abyss. I try to cultivate gratitude instead, and take my bitterness in my Campari. And in my coffee. But that's for another post . . . .

Meanwhile, celebrate the bitter and have a Negroni this weekend. Or, if you're very grown up indeed, Campari and soda.

Dream Kitchen Reboots! With a Super Special Reader's Choice Post!

2011-05-05T14:15:00.000-04:00

Complete with exclamation marks!

Dear reader(s),

It's hard to sneak back onto (into?) a blog, dust off the shelves, and quietly start typing a brilliant or even a just so-so post.

To ease back in, I'm going to answer your questions. Please ask 'em in the comment box below (NOT on Facebook).Food history, etiquette, recipe questions, favorite apps, favorite appetizers, why is everyone suddenly drinking Negronis, you name it.

Please address your questions "Dear Dream Kitchen" as it will help me feel vaguely authoritative. I thank you, dear readers. Should I get a flood of fascinating questions, I will use some inscrutable or arbitrary method for deciding which ones to answer.

Bloggily yours,

DK

My Brief Career Writing Online "Content"

2011-02-08T12:34:00.008-05:00

Several weeks ago, I signed up to write that dreaded stuff called online content, for Aidem Dnamed (spelled backwards, you can figure this out). Or you could just move a couple of letters around and call it "Damned Media." I thought oh, what the heck, it's easy money. I can use a pseudonym to avoid the shame.

First, I set up an account and then they sent me their list of "titles" for me to claim, so that I could then write how-to articles based on the titles. These are computer-generated strings of gibberish based on searches, mostly technical. I scoured the arts and literature lists, which were empty. I looked up food, pets, family life, anything nontechnical, so that I could claim a title. Nothing. I found nothing. And then I came to my senses and had them delete my account.

But I do want to share with you, dear readers, some titles that captured my imagination, with brief answers that I made up. Yes, these are real computer-generated titles. But just for fun, I prefer to think that these particular ones were composed by a stoned beat poet, or perhaps Jimmy Webb in his MacArthur Park phase.

How Make a Stone Crock

Easy peasy. Enroll in a pottery class and they'll give you some nice clay and you can make one on a potter's wheel. Or--I could lend you mine!

How to Make a Wine Glass out of Wine Charms

Hmm. This is a tough one. This would imply that you are trapped in a room with wine and wine charms, and no receptacles. Let's think outside the box. Put the wine charms on your fingers. Drink the wine out of the bottle. I hope it's a screwtop!

How To Dress a Horse in a Renaissance Costume

Rent a horse trailer. Go to a Renaissance Faire, as they like to spell them. Lure a horse already dressed in a Renaissance costume into your trailer. That way you get out of having to put the massive, sweaty creature in the costume yourself. Choose the smallest, gentlest horse you can find. Don't stand close behind it. Good luck!

And the Latest Shiny New Appliance is . . .

2011-02-02T13:48:00.000-05:00

. . . a food processor. The last one had developed tiny hairline cracks that were making me nervous. We gave it away and went without one for a couple of years, because it just took up so much room and we didn't use it that much. But now that everyone in my family loves hummus, I'd like to make it at home. And lots of recipes from my latest healthy cookbook, The Food Matters Cookbook, depend on one. I am trying to increase the amount of vegetables and fruit we eat, so anything that makes it easier to chop, dice, and slice is a good thing. And . . . I love it. In fact, I just sliced half a red cabbage, a cucumber, and a carrot. I don't want to stop. This is great! Now to make ginger tahini dressing.

We got a Cuisinart this time, and it's plainly much better than the old Hamilton-Beach. It's heavier, the blades are sturdier and sharper, and it includes a special lid for when you mix doughs and batters.

Next on my agenda: to watch the hour-long DVD that came with it.

Just kidding. But it really did come with an hour-long DVD.

An Evening at Slate Restaurant in Philadelphia

2011-01-25T10:32:00.003-05:00

Back in early December I snagged one of those excellent online coupons for a restaurant. This particular one was dinner for two (drinks, entrees, desserts) for $40.00 at Slate, a chic little neighborhood restaurant on 21st Street, between Chestnut and Sansom. We used the coupon on Friday night, to celebrate Mr. Dream Kitchen's birthday. I met him in the lobby of his building and we walked through the extreme cold for a neverending 8 1/2 minutes. What with the wind and the hood on my jacket, I was having a thoroughly bad hair day. Which I forgot about right away when we were led to our draft-free table in a side alcove.

(By the way, we know it was Restaurant Week, but ever since being served a dull Caesar salad at Brasserie Perrier (R.I.P), in a brightly lit banquet room, not even the fun part of the restaurant, we have religiously avoided Restaurant Scam Week.)

When it comes to deciding which chair to sit in, I have a strong preference. I want to face the action, not a wall. I assume that's how most people feel. Mr. Dream Kitchen had the "good" seat this evening, as birthday boy. I did get to evaluate a painting with super gloppy brushwork--I can't think of the formal word for that right now, but I'm sure it's French--the paint was so thick that the lighting created a nightlike shadow under the biggest glop. Browns and greens were stripily smeared, vertically and horizontally, in a large checkerboard pattern. It was the way a forest would appear, if you had observed it while spinning on a whirligig and jumping on a pogo stick.

I'd always wanted to try a Manhattan, so I ordered the "Slate Manhattan," which had sour cherries and some of their juice. It was very strong and very good. The cherries were a nice match for the bourbon and the whole concoction went smoothly with my cassoulet. Not an especially complex drink, but regal and warming. John ordered a ginger pomegranate mojito, which was wonderfully herbal, astringent, and sweet in the same sip, just the way a mohito should be.

Now don't you think it's a little strange that our server came up to me and said, "Our chef accidentally started to make the Glazed Duck Breast instead of the cassoulet. We wanted to give you the opportunity to order that if you want." I stopped myself from saying "I already had the opportunity to order it, and I didn't, so why would I order it now?" Instead, I politely said, after a brief pregnant pause, "I'd like the cassoulet," without making a fuss. Making a fuss or being sarcastic isn't my style in a restaurant. The server should not have made me rethink my order, thus feeling a little guilty for whatever food waste may have been incurred. That was the kitchen's problem, not mine.

Speaking of making a fuss, the next day I took my Dad to lunch, not where I planned to go, but to a restaurant conveniently located next door to where my car had broken down. I should really have made a fuss about some desultory blobs of Cheez Whiz that were lying obscenely in my taco salad, instead of actual cheese. However, I was too busy keeping an eye out for the tow truck's arrival in the parking lot next door. I was also pretending my Dad and were having a nice lunch when we weren't (the company was great, not the "food"), and so creating unpleasantness was not on the agenda.

I need to wipe the image of the Cheez Whiz blobs out of my mind, so let's return to Slate. My cassoulet was perfect, with crisp duck and smoky, creamy beans. John's filet was rare and tender, with a truffly sauce. And he had very civilized mashed potatoes with decorative ridges from a pastry bag.

Now for the dessert. Be forewarned that I often find dessert choices problematic. John ordered chocolate cake with a hazelnut praline filling, and I ordered a chocolate cake with a citrus filling and a blueberry compote. I thought the hazelnuts in John's were not fresh, but my cake was very fine. I'm not totally convinced about blueberry and chocolate, but it was a nice try. Our other choices were Rollo bread pudding and--yawn--crème brûlée. I detest this fad in which pastry chefs get cute with processed candy, and am dying for it to be over already. In between the faddish Rollo bread pudding and the tired crème brûlée the only other options were two chocolate cakes? Slate must try a little harder. I always look for cobblers, crisps, tarts, and pies in a dessert menu. Or what about rice pudding? Stop trying to be clever. Have one chocolate option. Just use the freshest ingredients and execute the dishes well.

And, dear reader, why does crème brûlée persevere so?

My First Miso

2011-01-18T13:13:00.000-05:00

Can you believe I've never cooked with miso? In the recent Bon Appetit there's an article about it, which includes a recipe for apple cobbler with miso in the biscuit topping!

So a couple days ago I found myself picking up some white miso, the mildest kind, just to taste it and sense what it wanted me to do with it. To just back up for a minute, miso is a fermented soybean paste from Japan. It's injected with a mold from either rice, barley, or soybeans, and then aged. The white miso does reminds me of cheese, which makes sense.

I didn't have the right apples for cobbler, but I did have several turnips on hand, so I made a dish from Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything. It's called "Braised and Glazed Turnips with Miso." I braised peeled, cubed turnips in white wine and butter, and when they were almost done, added a half-and-half mixture of white miso and water. I thought the miso tempered that turnipy bitterness and gave the dish a satisfying level of complexity. My older son's pithy review of the dish was, "It makes me want to gag." My younger son didn't even bother to taste it. I guess for the boys, turnips are too deeply disgusting to be garnished, sauced, or even disguised. Not to be deterred, I'll no doubt I'll offer them more turnips in a couple of weeks.

Why is it that some of us constantly search for ways to add complexity to a food's flavor, while others want to leave well enough alone? All I know is that when I get some decent cooking apples, I'm making that cobbler.

Tandoori Popcorn

2011-01-13T16:33:00.001-05:00

I can't leave popcorn alone. To me, its blandness begs for something more. Somehow, I discovered that popcorn is delicious with powdered buttermilk, and today I added some, as well as a sprinkling of Penzey's Tandoori Seasoning. I've also tried smoked paprika, Penzey's Turkish Seasoning, and chili powder. Not all at the same time. About a quarter cup of buttermilk powder is good for a big bowl of popcorn (I start from almost a cup of unpopped). I salt to taste and add the spices to taste. The kids love this popcorn, too. It's great to pop up a batch on a day when there are no other snack foods in the house.

I did look up Tandoori Popcorn on the web, and only found it here among some Scottish folks who like to write in a brogue. This laddie does not add powdered buttermilk,just a wee bit o' butter.

A Farewell to Crockpot Cooking; Or, How to Break Up Ethically with a Kitchen Appliance

2011-01-07T11:21:00.000-05:00

It finally happened, the old gal had just been stuffed with one too many stews, briskets, chickens, and chilis. She started smelling like burned plastic and not heating enough, so I transferred her last meal, a White Chicken Chili with Root Vegetables (from The Food Matters Cookbook), to my big pasta pot. A pasta pot isn't quite the thing, because it's too tall to heat the food evenly, but it was the only one big enough to hold everything. (And yes, I know I should use the term "slow cooker" but I just like "crockpot" for its succinct cuteness.)

Since I'd been contemplating breaking up with the whole crockpot idea for a while, anyway, I was less than heartbroken. Callously, and without a proper mourning period, I Amazoned (sure, it can be verb) a nice big red 6-quart ceramic-lined cast iron Dutch oven. It's Lodge, not Le Creuset--what with college tuition approaching in eight years, and all that. Crockpots, while they're handy, aren't quite my style. For one thing, I don't like to smell food all day. Plus meat is much better seared first, and if you're going to do that you may as well use the same pan and braise everything in the oven. In the end, though, I just can't stand leaving that much food in a pot and then not being allowed to peek or fuss with it until almost the end. Just can't do it. Plus my new Dutch oven is much prettier than that big old ugly crockpot. See, I have no loyalty.

Even bigger and uglier than a crockpot is a bread machine. A couple years ago I broke up with the idea of a bread machine as a worthwhile investment, mainly because annoying little parts would break, and replacing them was mind-numbingly complicated. I'm sure I could give it a go again, but why? It's not hard to make bread without one.

Now I'm stuck with a bread machine that technically might work if anyone bothered to contact the company again about the basket problem, and how they sent the wrong replacement basket, and also a crockpot that has a little electrical problem. There's nothing wrong with the ceramic crock or lid. I refuse to throw this stuff away but I can't in good conscience drop them blithely off at Goodwill.

How do you liked being dragged into my mundane, banal ethical dilemma? Want to give me advice? Of course you do.

Grandpa Jack and Aunt Julie are Coming! And Here's What's Cooking.

2010-12-24T11:01:00.001-05:00

The boys are at Christmas pageant rehearsal. One of my sons is Herod. I guess someone has to have that role . . . be assured, they're casting against type. Mr. Dream Kitchen is installing The Big Electronic Present (to avoid unpleasantness tomorrow). I've got cranberries bubbling on the stove, scenting the kitchen.

This is just a quick post to tell you what our Mediterranean-inflected Christmas menu is.

Slow Roasted Leg of Lamb with Pomegranate Glaze and Red-Onion Parsley Relish, From Paula Wolfert's The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen. My sister in law is bringing sumac for this from Penzey's. She lives near the Pittsburgh store. Have never made this, but I trust Paula. She even autographed my book, back when Philadelphia did The Book and the Cook. Back in the day.

Minted Baby Peas (frozen, from Trader Joe's--no need to get fancy with everything)

Smashed Red Bliss Potatoes with Garlic--again with the easy

Spinach Salad with Broiled Preserved Lemon (sounds harder than it is

Mixed Olives from DiBruno's

Down East Cranberry-Apple Pie, from Richard Sax's Classic Home Desserts (the first edition! Half the pages are stained by now). We'll serve with vanilla ice cream.

Peace to you, dear readers.

What Do Cheese Straws Have to Do with Sylvia Plath? How to Have a Holiday Book Exchange

2010-12-13T11:06:00.001-05:00

Warning: James' Joyce's no-quotation-marks trick is used here, for no good reason. Please don't be confused.

If you've never experienced a white elephant book exchange, I'm truly sorry for you. Because they're insanely fun if you're comfortable with the other partygoers. Everyone wraps up a book that they don't want any more and then you just pick one out of the basket. The tricky part comes when everyone has donated books by David Sedaris or Nicole Krause and you've donated Shopping the North Carolina Furniture Outlets. (No, that wasn't me!) Or Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon. (No, not me, either!) Then again, no need to admit your donation if no one saw you furtively sneak your gift in the basket. My donation, this year, was Crossing to Avalon: A Woman's Midlife Quest for the Sacred Feminine. (I'm sorry but I hate the humorlessness and grandiosity of archetypes). Anyhoo, here's the quick rundown, because I know you have a lot of things to do (note that this is the Liberal Overeducated Suburban Moms' version of a white elephant exchange):

Once the chitchat about music lessons, college applications, and the latest divorces abates, and you are well into the cranberry martinis, you can really get down to it.

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom: What about it? Is it really worth reading? Completely, ventures the hostess. It's a great doorstop, suggests another. She adds, it's about us--I don't want to read about us. Says your friend the radio producer, Patti Smith's memoir isn't that great; it's too precious. You say I know what you mean, but I sort of liked that she can be that way. She says, you should read Keith Richards' memoir--it's great. He's a smart guy. Smarter than you think. The books are all opened and then haggled over. Someone gives away Nicole Krause's A History of Love to the only person in the room who hasn't read it yet. But the receiver of David Sedaris' Holiday on Ice is not going to give it up. Ever. You are all jealous of her. The book you get, An Irish Country Christmas, sounds awful, and you manage to trade it for Her Husband: Hughes and Plath, A Marriage, by Diane Middlebrook. Rather different, eh? You're really looking forward to reading it, but it sounds more like an after-Christmas January blues kind of book. What with the affair, the divorce, the suicide, and all.

The last book picked, that truly no one wants? Glenn Beck's novel The Christmas Sweater. Each page has a curlicue border around it, which is enough to turn you away if not for all the other things about it that turn you away.

You bring Cheese Straws to the party, from where else but The Essential New York Times Cookbook. You should have doubled the recipe, because they are scarfed down and your dear family cannot partake of any leftovers. Says one one of the ladies, Where I come from you are judged on the quality of your cheese straws.

The Future is Here: Remote Oven Repair!

2010-12-10T11:31:00.000-05:00

Our oven's brain is back. Its control board blew a couple days before Thanksgiving. (But of course!) We called our local appliance guys, an amiable father-son team. They pronounced gloomily, "Thermador stopped making these control boards. You'll have to get a new oven."

New oven . . . new oven . . . new oven . . . the words rang ominously in our heads. Our oven has a downdraft venting system, because it's in our island and we need openness. The only other brand we could get besides a Thermador is a Jenn-Air. They're about $2,000, and we've only had the Thermador for seven years. We were hoping there were at least thirteen more years to go!

So my super smart Mr. Dream Kitchen looked up the model number on the web and found this amazing company, Fixyourboard.com, in Austin, Texas. For $180 they fixed our control board, and if it hadn't worked, they wouldn't have charged us. This involved shipping it and hoping like heck we'd actually get it back. But we did, in just a few days.

We then had the local father-son team install it, but the dad really balked because he feared we would blame them and not pay them if it didn't work. I bullied him into it, in my charming way, and our gamble worked out beautifully. The proof is in the pudding, or in this case, the Chocolate Dump-it Cake that is cooling on the counter.

The Pimento Cheese Incident; Or, The Essential New York Times Book Party Comes to Philadelphia

2010-12-09T11:25:00.004-05:00

I'm an Amanda Hesser fan from way back. I've read The Cook and the Gardener and Cooking for Mr. Latte. I've also read her husband Tad Friend's memoir, Cheerful Money.

So when I received an invitation to a food bloggers' potluck/book party for The Essential New York Times Cookbook,I shoved my other obligations aside to attend. We were asked to make something from the cookbook, or the old version, or the NYT itself. I decided to make Pimento Cheese, thinking that no one else would bring it. Too regional, and not an impressive culinary feat. I was introduced to this Southern dip/sandwich spread in Virginia, and have had a hankering for it ever since. North of the Mason-Dixon line, it seems the stuff is contraband.

The party was held at Audra Wolfe's house in West Philadelphia, where we were welcomed warmly. Audra and her sister write Doris and Jilly Cook. Victory Brewing Company sponsored the event, very nice. We started at the nametag table, where we tagged not only ourselves, but also the dishes we had brought.

I gazed hungrily at the table, where, packed tidily into a souffle dish, there already lay a nice wodge of Pimento Cheese. Derek Lee, of The Best Food Blog Ever, had figured no one else would make it, because it's Southern. We laughed (bitterly?) and someone took our picture. Since several other people had wandered into the party, friendless and alone, nervously clutching their beers, it was easy to bond with them over the food. "What did you bring?" and "Tell me about your blog" are simple, safe conversation starters, and we quickly loosened up. I met Ray and Melissa of Bathtub Brewery, and took home, with their blessing, a bottle of Bee Sting for Mr. Dream Kitchen. Got talking to Christine Burns Rudalevige, a food journalist who can be found here, Sarah of Sarahdares, "Livia" of no counter space, and met, briefly, the beet-carpaccio-wielding Albert Yee of Messy and Picky. I also met the organizer of the Philadelphia food bloggers' potlucks, Marisa McLellan, of Food in Jars, who's publishing a book soon. I'm going to guess it's about canning. Oh, and the excellent Tenaya Darlington of Madame Fromage.

What else was on the table? A cheese ball, cheese straws, mushrooms stuffed with duxelles, a spinach salad with preserved lemon slices, baked sweet potatoes with chipotle cream, and venison stew. And did I mention pimento cheese? Desserts included cranberry-pistachio biscotti, chocolate cupcakes with chocolate ganache frosting, brandied peaches with cream, cranberry upside down cake.

Amanda Hesser was there all the while, padding about in her Converse sneakers and looking rail-thin. Really, how does she do that? She demonstrated making Heavenly Hots, tangy light pancakes made with sour cream and cake flour. It was like eating clouds.

Another pimento cheese appeared on the table and I tried not to look at it.

Book signing time! I bought one, from a nice young man named Matthew, who works for Joseph P. Fox booksellers, my favorite bookshop in the city. Amanda had relocated to the living room sofa, and as I gave her the book to sign, I babbled on about the recipe for Country Captain and how my friend Oonie knew her husband Tad when he was a boy, bla bla bla. She smiled and laughed indulgently. And, in black pen, all lower case, she wrote: "lauren--hope this becomes a beloved kitchen companion--enjoy! all best, amanda hesser"

I suspect that this book party will be covered in the "Culture Diary" she is writing for the Paris Review. Will she mention the Pimento Cheese Glut?

I gathered my things, including the leftover pimento cheese (well--yeah!), Bee Sting, a few business cards, and the huge red beloved kitchen companion, said my goodbyes, and drove back home.

Tonight's dinner: Grilled Pimento Cheese Sandwiches.

Bone China

2010-12-01T12:59:00.001-05:00

At Thanksgiving I like to use my grandmother's china with the green and gold design, even though the plates need to be hand-washed. They remind me of her. She would be pleased that I am using them.

We drink water out of my mother's cranberry-glass goblets. How she loved her cranberry glass. We use my Great-Uncle Fred's silver, which was given to him by a neighbor many decades ago. He and his wife Arline never used it because they already had a set. Fred said that he mowed this neighbor's lawn for many years, and that the silverware was a thank-you! This time of year, we also think of my late brother David and his November birthday. Next Thanksgiving, I want to put out a carved wooden box he gave me once.

My sons have birthdays the week of Thanksgiving; Will is nine and Jack is eleven. They never met my mother, Uncle Fred, or my brother David. They attended my grandmother's funeral when Jack was three and Will was one. If Jack remembers her at all, it's as a tiny frail lady with a vague but beautiful smile. I think of her as a strong, opinionated matriarch whose smile you had to earn. Sometimes it was worth it.

For Thanksgiving, we invited friends from the Shenandoah Valley, which is where we lived for eight years and had our children. Kathy and Scott are a conservationist and a photography/ design professor, respectively, both ardent lovers of their adopted landscape. Scott takes pictures of rivers, and Kathy protects the rivers and the land.

They and their children stayed for two days. My father drove down from Montgomery County for the meal. It was a busy place, with four kids running around. Legos everywhere. The fact that our oven was broken didn't ruin the day at all, thanks to generous neighbors. (Thanks, Marcia, Lori, and families!) The oven had died a couple of days earlier, so there was time to beg and plead.

Here is our menu:

--Cocktail: one part Campari, one part pink grapefruit juice, one part cranberry juice cocktail. Adapted from a Nigella Lawson recipe.

--White wine with dinner

--Green salad with homemade Roquefort dressing

--Fresh organic turkey, "dry brined" this year. Success!

--Buttermilk mashed potatoes

--Bread stuffing with herbs

--Giblet gravy

--Sauerkraut cooked in a cup and half of gin. Really. I got the idea from Molly Wizenberg. The kids liked it better than brussel sprouts. Don't worry, the alcohol is cooked away, leaving a junipery contrast to the sourness.

--"Eunice's Cranberry Chutney" provided by my friend Kathy

--"Myrna's Pecan Bars," also courtesy of Kathy. Don't you love the names Eunice and Myrna?

--Butternut Squash Spice Pie, instead of the traditional Pumpkin Spice Pie, because we have a huge backlog of squash. It was delicious but the color was drab. No one minded. I whipped some cream to put over top.

After everyone left on Friday, Mr. Dream Kitchen called his parents, Mervin and Marilyn, who have often come for Thankgiving in the past. His mother has had two strokes by now, and it's hard for her to travel. They came when each baby was born; cooking, cleaning, changing diapers, and nurturing all of us so well. We miss their warm presence.

Now the silver and china have been washed and put away. Just now, in the quiet of the empty house, I looked at the bottom of one of the green and gold plates. "Tyndale et Mitchell Co., Philadelphia, Pa.", it reads. Another mark reads "France." I learn that Hector Tyndale, in addition to running the china importing business, was a Union General in the 48th Pennsylvania Infantry. Just before the war, he had personally comforted John Brown's widow upon her husband's hanging. As an officer, he led his regiment in none other than the devastating Shenandoah Valley campaign, for which Grant had commanded, "Make all the Valley a desert."

Tyndale died in Philadelphia in 1880, as an indirect result of battle injuries. And six of his green and gold plates are here, in our cupboard. So beautiful, so old, so resilient, so fragile.

In Praise of the Rose Geranium

2010-11-05T09:46:00.000-04:00

Rose geraniums were the most successful plant in the garden this year, and they are still going strong. No pests wanted to eat them and they survived dry spells and rain. They grew huge, but they're woody enough to not trail on the ground. They didn't bloom, but the best thing about them is their delirious scent, both floral and peppery at the same time. Just walking by and catching a whiff is such a calming moment.

My Nana made rose geranium jelly with hers. I haven't done much other than rub a leaf and take a good whiff whenever I've had the notion. Last week, though, I realized that I was running out of time this season, so I took off fifteen leaves, washed and dried them, and layered them with sugar in one of my Nana's blue and white striped ceramic cannisters. The cannister that says "FLOUR" on it, as a matter of fact.

In a few days I will take out the leaves, I supposed by dumping the sugar mixture into a colander over a big bowl and picking them out. Then the oils from the leaves should have flavored the sugar. Geranium sugar is good in cakes or cookies, I have read, but I would only put it in plain buttermilk cakes or sugar cookies, possibly shortbread. Here is a recipe for Victorian Rose Geranium Cake. I wonder if it has too many geraniums in it, though. I suspect it's like lavender; you only want a hint. A simple pound cake made with the geranium sugar, with a light glaze also made with the sugar, might be lovely, an occasion worthy of one's china tea cups. Nan's tea cups. Come to think of it, my Nana was a lot like a rose geranium: strong, long-lived, tenacious in adversity, and very feminine.

***

So I want to hear how Martha's dinner went last night! If you all still have a lot of green tomatoes, you might want to try this cake recipe I just found. I'd make it today if I weren't going out of town. Here is Green Tomato Cake with Brown Butter Icing.

Green Tomatoes, Butternut Squash, and Sausage

2010-11-04T09:33:00.001-04:00

OMG!!!! Let me collect myself. Here's what happened. We had several green tomatoes from the CSA, and much as I love fried green tomatoes (and I mean pan-fried because I never deep-fry), they are labor-intensive. We also had a backlog of butternut squash. And we had just received a "breakfast box" as a special order from the CSA, which is just different types of ham, sausage, and bacon.

I like to roast a whole bunch of fall veggies together, so I thought, hmmm. Here's what I did. The tartness of the tomatoes balanced the sweetness of the squash, and the sausage just melds perfectly.

Roasted Green Tomatoes, Butternut Squash, and Onions, with Sausage

green tomatoes
butternut squash
onions
fresh sage
olive oil
sea salt
fresh ground pepper
uncooked sausage

Preheat oven to 400. Line one or two cookie sheets with aluminum foil.

Cut some green tomatoes into quarters or eighths, depending on size. Put in a large bowl.

Repress any desire to peel the squash, as the skin is just fine to eat. Cut the squash into flat chunks and add to bowl.

Quarter the onions or cut into eighths. Add to bowl.

Drizzle olive oil over the vegetables, and add a little salt and pepper to taste. You want a light coating of the oil over all.

Spread in one layer on cookie sheet,vegetables touching each other. Leave a good inch on the sides.

Roast for a while. Check after twenty minutes and then every ten to see if they've gotten a bit soft and browned. The onion will char a little, and that's OK, but you might want to take them out then.

While the veggies are roasting, cook the sausage. Squeeze it out of its casing into a preheated skillet and cook until there's no pink.

Chop the fresh sage. My sage out there in the garden seems strong, so I just put in a teaspoon, chopped super fine.

Mix the vegetables and sausage and serve over pasta, quinoa, couscous, something like that. I cooked this ahead of time, since my boys had a bass lesson from 5:00 to 6:00. I texted Mr. Dream Kitchen to cook the pasta and voila, a lovely autumn supper.

P.S. Anyone can comment now--you don't need a blog or a Google account. That's an invitation, dear readers.

Supper in Brooklyn: Alchemy of New York, Part Two

2010-11-03T10:15:00.001-04:00

After the High Line that Saturday (see previous post), we stopped in a wine bar in the West Village called Gottino. We had wandered a long way, and were thirsty. Very thirsty. But Gottino's water glasses were truly the tiniest water glasses we'd ever laid eyes upon. The bartender took mercy on us and gave us carafes. Then we needed a flashlight to see the menu. I hate having to use a flashlight! It puts me into a snit, it does. But when we got our little bowl of artichoke slices,charcuterie, pecorino, and fennel, and the wine of course, we were snit-free.

Waiting for the bill, we admitted to being a bit knackered at that point, so we returned to Brooklyn to rest in the room, and catch the beginning of the Phillies game. (Won't mention the game again. Promise.) One really wonderful thing about walking for miles in a city, is how fabulous it feels to get back to your room, take your shoes off, and lie on the bed for ten minutes.

In Brooklyn, the modern and the vintage live together in a poignant harmony. Years ago, I remember hearing a itinerant knife sharpener making his rounds in the neighborhood I was visiting. And here's a recent picture of one. At the same time, you have your hip coffee places, bike and skateboard shops, minimalist restaurants, and funky dress shops, but tucked modestly into the streetscape, not blaring their newness, just waiting patiently to be discovered. And on this trip, two doors away from our guest house, was a bookbinder, with an ivy-covered sign admonishing "Appointment Only," and no phone number. According to Google Maps, it's called the Park Slope Book Bindery, but it seems to have no web presence. Indeed, why would it have one? But I feel sorry for any hapless writers schlepping by with their thick sheaves of vellum covered with polished prose or poetry, only to read on the sign that they needed to make an appointment.

Rested just enough, we went for dinner at a homey but stylish little pub called Alchemy. The owner of our guest house had recommended it after I mentioned to her that it was in my Zagat's. Alchemy was crowded with people all younger than 40. One otherwise normal-looking young man was wearing a scarlet fedora, which in the dim light and amongst all the black and gray garb, shone like a beacon.I'm not sure what to do with that observation of the red fedora, so I'm just sticking it in here all smooth-like.

Mr. Dream Kitchen ordered a Captain Lawrence Pale Ale on draft, an aromatic beer with notes of citrus, pine, a noticeable bitterness, and a touch of malty backbone to help balance it out. And you know I got that sentence from the Captain Lawrence website, correct? Do real people talk about beer that way?

I had always wanted to try a dirty martini. I'm in the generation between gin martinis and vodka martinis and am siding with the gin. The server, of course, asked what kind of vodka I wanted. Gin tastes like juniper and vodka doesn't taste like anything, and that decides it for me. The "dirty" just refers to a nip of olive juice. It was a sassy savory cocktail that took me all evening to drink. As for water, the server put a decorative glass bottle of plain cool filtered water at our table for our refills. (On this trip we decided not to lug around water bottles, hence all the tedious references to water in restaurants. It's like when you don't have a timepiece and you start to notice all the wall clocks.)

Then we split every course that we ordered:

Roasted mushroom salad with shaved parmesan and fennel. We don't get mushrooms from the CSA and were experiencing a severe mushroom deprivation.

Cassoulet with a tart cherry sauce. This is a classic French dish with duck, sausage and beans. The beans were a little mashed with the sausage, which was unusual but worked very well. The cherry sauce was not too sweet and a good complement for the duck, although it's not normally found in cassoulet. Although it's not as strange as a red fedora. Indoors. On a young man.

Guinness pudding w/ vanilla ice cream and candied hazelnuts. Unbelievably, pinch-myself, why-am-I-sharing-this-anyway good. It was more like a little cake right out of the oven, nothing sticky or glutinous about it. And the candied hazelnuts--brilliant. There was also some kind of butterscotch-y sauce. I don't know. It's hard to be terribly observant when you're in a swoon. After a martini.

Next installment: a vegan breakfast and a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.

Question for my readers: Can you explain the red fedora?

Walking The High Line: The Alchemy of New York, Part One

2010-10-27T07:43:00.000-04:00

Twenty-four hours in New York without the children

Bathed in golden light, the High Line on a fall afternoon sings of endings and rebirth. It's an abandoned train line that has not operated since 1980, part of which has been turned into a park, and the rest will be redeemed from the weeds some day. To walk a couple stories above street level, on train tracks, amongst mounding grasses and masses of asters, is a revelation. You look around to see Chelsea's understory. A giant yellow billboard looms over the path. A decrepit factory invites you not to look in. The parking lot of a wholesale butcher shop, full of gleaming white trucks, lies below.

You're just above the hustle but way below the sky. The buildings and billboards are startlingly close but inaccessible, like strangers wearing sunglasses on the subway. You gaze at the factory's broken windows without knowing why. You admire the sheer size and brashness of the yellow billboard. As you watch, a bride steps out from behind it. The entire bridal party appears; they are having their picture taken.

Everyone walking the High Line looks beautiful: the giggling toddler trying to run away, the elderly woman in a wheelchair being escorted by her son, the film student with his parents, the young African couple taking iPhone pictures. This is their moment, New York's moment, our moment, in the golden sun.

You take a picture of your husband next to the asters, the Hudson River in the background. The picture is a tiny rectangle of versimilitude, a vain attempt to capture the light on his face, the silver in his hair.

You link hands as the shadows fall. It's time for dinner.

Homemade Feta: The Verdict

2010-10-19T13:42:00.000-04:00

All that work, and it's gone already.

The homemade feta ripened in the fridge for five days in a vintage yellow Pyrex container, and yesterday it was deemed ready. I took four cubes of it to my sons' bass teacher and her chef husband. The rest I crumbled over roast eggplant, peppers, and sweet potatoes, and served over farro penne. I had roasted the veggies earlier and just warmed them in the oven with a little balsamic vinegar. My sons loved the feta and couldn't stay away from it before dinner. Unfortunately, a good number of the vegetables just got moved around on the plates instead of eaten. Mr. Dream Kitchen did a much better job of eating his veggies.

The cheese is very white and firm. It tastes so fresh. It's not brine-logged and half-dissolving like storebought can be. In fact, the instructions said not to brine this. Instead, I sprinkled it with Kosher salt when I first put it in the fridge. The verdict is: an unequivocable thumbs up.

In other news, three issues of Martha Stewart LIVING have inexplicably arrived at our house in the last week, bearing my name. Is someone trying to tell me something, and if so, what?

Cicchetteria 19: Warm Mixed Olives and a Negroni

2010-10-18T10:29:00.000-04:00

You will recall that last year the Dream Kitchen family tried something new on my birthday, going out to eat as a family at an interesting city restaurant with great food instead of getting a sitter. We had a great time at Distrito, sitting in a pink car. Everyone loved it. It didn't hurt that a Phillies game was showing on a huge screen, either.

It's such a satisfying moment, when you realize that the kids are big enough to behave themselves and enjoy real food. No coloring books needed! And a restaurant with small plates is perfect for tasting new dishes. This year I had bought a Groupon for a new restaurant called Cicchetteria 19, on 19th St. just south of Rittenhouse Square, right across from Metropolitan Bakery. No pink car, here. Just a small neighborhood restaurant, exactly the right size. We were led to a bar-height table with stools. We had a good view of--yes--the Phillies game. I love when the Phils are still playing when my birthday rolls around.

Cicchetteria 19 is Venetian, so I ordered an Italian cocktail called a Negroni, which is gin, vermouth, and Campari. I tried Campari in Rome once, which I thought too bitter for human consumption. So much for my dream to be the kind of person who can order a Campari and soda in a breezy, confident way. In this case, the sweetness of the vermouth and juniper of the gin counteracted the bitterness nicely, the aftertaste reminding me a little of liquorice. The first sip went down nice and warm. Mr. Dream Kitchen got a decent mojito, another traditional Italian drink, no doubt. Mojitio? Mojitonio? It wasn't as strong as the Negroni, sorry dear.

We decided to get one appetizer, one pizza, and five small plates.

Appetizer: Calamari, thinly sliced and quickly sauteed, a delicate texture.

Pizza Alice (ALL-EECH-AY): Pizza with French fries on top. Really. Very thin-crusted with meltingly perfect cheese. I've looked it up, and the name doesn't seem to be used anywhere else as far as I can tell.

Five small plates:

Artichoke/tuna pate on toast (will explain the Artichoke-Tuna Incident shortly)
Meatballs made w/ aged beef
Warm mixed olives in olive oil and lemon juice
Carpacchio of the day: Octopus, sliced super thin, with peppery greens
Crocque Monsieur

Also, they brought us two baskets of warm toasted bread brushed with olive oil.

We were all in a happy place, for sure. The boys have a new understanding of what a meatball can be, and I've resolved to make some soon. For some reason I never have. The olives were heavenly. Eating warm mixed olives and drinking a Negroni, with my family, in Philly with a postseason game on the tube, created quite a frisson, the perfect union between local and cosmopolitan, coziness and adventure, old and new.

And like any perfect evening, it wan't perfect. We ordered artichoke pate on toast. "This tastes like tunafish!" each of us said upon the first bite. The server looked highly skeptical and after a very long time, long after we had consumed the tunafish, she offhandedly explained, "It was just a kitchen error." No apology or assurance that the correct dish was forthcoming. After another eternity, the artichoke pate arrived, again without apology. It's not in good form for a server to blame the kitchen. But oh, well. More food for us!

Plates clean, it was time to make a decision. I also had a Groupon for Scoop DeVille, and the boys wanted to go there instead of ordering a Nutella Pizza with Strawberries.

Mistake.

Ice cream has evolved way past Scoop DeVille since I last went there (which was probably in the 1980s), and with Capogiro in the neighborhood, it's criminal to go anywhere else, let alone to a place that serves just okay ice cream blended with a bunch of stuff, in a styrofoam cup. Then again, Capogiro is not offering Groupons.

We got to walk through Rittenhouse Square on the way to and from Cicchetteria. The usual collection of pampered small dogs were walking their well-dressed owners. A young man held a big pet rabbit like a baby, garnering a guaranteed "aw-w-w" from passersby.

And as a special bonus, we got a free ride in on the train. Our conductor was terribly confused by our family pass arrangement, which I now suspect SEPTA has abolished in their recent misconceived fare adjustments. Mr. Dream Kitchen's Trailpass is (was?) supposed to give the rest of our family half off train fare on the weekends. The conductor turned pink trying to do the math, said he'd come back and never did. Disembarking at Suburban Station, we could hear him explaining our situation to another conductor. We just kept walking, therefore getting a free ride. If you ever see our pictures on a WANTED poster put out by the SEPTA Police, just give me a shout-out, okay?

Whey Bread: An Old Tradition that You Never Knew About

2010-10-15T11:11:00.000-04:00

Cheesemaking results in lots of whey. I made ricotta from the Gouda whey, you'll recall. Whey helps to regulate insulin and is a great source of proteins, minerals, vitamins, and lactose. One hates to waste a single thing in this cheesemaking process.

What follows is my digression-laced recipe for Whey Bread. It evolved from my ever-handy foolproof One-a-Day Baguette recipe. It has evolved so far that it bears about as much resemblance to the baguette as we bear a resemblance to Neanderthals, and I mean no insult to either baguettes or Neanderthals.

In this case I used goat's milk whey, which has a fuller flavor than cow's milk whey. I hesitate to use the adjective "goaty," which seems a lot like "stinky" or "yucky." In this case, you can taste the goat's milk flavor, but only if you think about it, and it adds a warm depth to the bread. Baking whey into bread is an old tradition in Spain and no doubt in many other places where they harvest grain and herd cows and goats.

This is a nice sturdy loaf, good for sandwiches. Mr. Picky ate a big slice of it, toasted and buttered, for breakfast.

Lauren's Whey Bread (makes two loaves)

3 cups whey
2 teaspoons yeast
2 teaspoons sugar
4 cups unbleached regular flour
4 cups whole wheat flour
2 tablespoons salt

Lightly oil two loaf pans.

Warm up the whey in a medium bowl in the microwave for about a minute and half. Sprinkle the yeast and sugar over the top and let it proof for 4 or 5 minutes. Here's where I was flummoxed: the yeast did not foam like it always does. It kind of sank but I soldiered on because The Internet had no answers for me. But I know the yeast is good. It never fails to proof.

While this is proofing, or whatever it's doing, go ahead and put four cups of flour, doesn't matter which type, in your largest bowl. Put the other four cups in a medium bowl and mix it with the salt. This way you are ready to mix everything together and you needed something to do, anyway, in those four or five minutes. Getting everything ready is called mise en place, which, when I do it, makes me feel extremely good, bordering on smug.

Turn on some music now, if you want, because your hands will be busy and floury for a few minutes. I like Radio Paradise.

Okay, pour the whey mixture into the 4 cups of flour in the large bowl. Mix it with a wooden spoon,without overmixing. Add the flour and salt mixture and either mix with your hands (what I always do) or mix with the wooden spoon. You may need to add a little water because you need for it to be a big shaggy ball. I doubt you'll need to add flour.

Put the dough on a lightly floured counter or board and knead it for about 10 minutes. If the phone rings or you don't like the song you're listening to, tough.

Lightly oil yet another large bowl. Roll the dough in the oil and cover with a wet dishtowel. You may have to let the dough rise up to three hours. It may not exactly double, but don't worry about it. Cut it in half with a bench knife or just a big old hefty knife, and place the dough in the loaf pans. Let them rise again, maybe an hour or even two. Until they've risen a bit.

Bake them in a 375 degree oven for about 40 minutes. They should be golden brown. Cool on racks. Freeze one for later.

On Making Feta

2010-10-13T12:42:00.008-04:00

Yesterday was Feta Cheese Day at the Dream Kitchen. Roxane returned, bringing her mesophilic starter and cheese curd knife (really just a long offset spatula), and a special surprise. Tucked inside a canvas tote, swathed in a dishcloth, resting pretty in a salad spinner basket, was our little Blanche. "Blanche" is what we named last week's Gouda. She is now a lovely buttery yellow wheel of actual cheese. She needs to be waxed in a few weeks and then aged a couple of months. Blanche hibernates in Roxane's coldest kitchen cupboard. No doubt she overhears a lot of conversations,and maybe she'll be talking one day herself. Watch what you say, Roxane and family.

The feta was simpler to make than the Gouda, no changes in temperature, just about 86 degrees the whole time, with less messing about with the curds and whey. As with all cheesemaking, we had to maintain the right temperature and wait around in a semi-vigilant state. That's why it's good to make cheese with a friend so you have plenty of time to critique the child-rearing strategies of your acquaintances, or deconstruct the public school system's latest pedagogy du jour. We were more relaxed, this being the second cheese and all, and actually sat down for a few minutes.

After a couple hours of warming, mixing, cutting curds, and waiting some more, we hung the curds in cheesecloth over the sink. Roxane went home, and five hours later I took out the cheese, which was recognizably feta--firm and white with those tiny holes in it. I cut it into one-inch cubes and liberally Kosher-salted it. It will be ready after four to five days of refrigeration. By the way, it's against Dream Kitchen policy to name feta.

P.S. You will note that the human=cheese metaphor kind of stopped when it came to waxing and aging. Thought you'd appreciate that.

Blessed Are the Cheesemakers

2010-10-08T07:21:00.001-04:00

--For they shall be the very first to buy rennet at their local health food store, and hence be followed to the cash register by the manager, who pondereth the reason in his heart.

--For they shall dirty many more pans and bowls than they thought possible.

--For they shall run out into the yard like madwomen, wash bricks, and bring them inside to press the cheese, because the book says so. All the while, the flashing neon "Thou shouldst get a job, girl!" sign doth flash in their minds.

--For after hours of heating, temperature-taking, separating, and draining, they shall see how small, nay, how very dinky, said cheese will actually be.

Lo, the cheesemakers hath removed the bricks, lifted the cheese gently out of the strainer, and gazed upon this small white disc wrapped in muslin. They hath named it "Blanche," of the tribe of Gouda. Anything that taketh so long, and shall not be mature for, yea, many months, must be worth naming.

And--hark, the time of feta was not yet. 'Tis actually now going to be next Wednesday, because one of the cheesemaker's daughters forgot her hockey uniform and needed it right away. But the health food store manager, truly a righteous man of cheese, had kindly brought out the freshest goat milk, so the time of expiration is not yet nigh, glory be.

________________________________

Are you ready for me to stop talking like this? Me too. Let's just say there is a reason those little cheeses at the farmers markets cost so much. But my friend Roxane and I had a great time catching up with each other, and it's really kind of fun in an I-don't-know-what-I'm-doing kind of way. We did have Home Cheesemaking by Ricki Carroll as our guidebook. She'a apparently the doyenne, the maven, the master of cheesemaking in the U.S. I even made ricotta with the leftover whey and it was delicious on penne mixed with a little garlic, salt, and fresh grated Pecorino.

Lo, on Wednesday, there shall be feta . . . .

Oatmeal Two Ways

2010-10-01T13:16:00.004-04:00

Check out this way to make oatmeal . . . it's even better than the usual way. I got this recipe from Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions, an eye-opening book that I started reading two days ago. I'm not prepared to comment much about the book as a whole just yet, but try this oatmeal and get back to me, OK? Apparently fermenting grains is an ancient tradition that we should get back to, for nutritional reasons. I changed some of the wording for clarity.

Breakfast Porridge (adapted from Nourishing Traditions, p. 455)

Serves 4 [in my family, serves 2]

1 cup oats, rolled or cracked [not quick oats]
1 cup warm filtered water
2 tablespoons yogurt, kefir, or buttermilk
1/2 teaspoon sea salt {I will use half this next time]

next day:

1 cup filtered water
1 tablespoon flax seeds (optional) [I didn't use]

Mix the oats, yogurt, and 1 cup of warm water the night before and leave out on the counter, covered. In the morning, bring another cup of water to a boil with the sea salt. Add the soaked oats and simmer four minutes or so. Let sit off heat for a little. Now listen to what Sally Fallon says. Are you sitting down? "Serve with plenty of butter or cream and a natural sweetener." I love this woman!

Speaking of butter, today four sticks of butter were harmed in the making of my version of Vanishing Cookies, from the Quaker Oatmeal boxtop. These cookies will be sold tomorrow at the Swarthmore Presbyterian Fall Fair, along with my rendering of Nigella Lawson's Chocolate Gingerbread, which I'm obsessed with. I've written about this before.

Here is the original recipe. Again, I always use half the salt. I have also learned that the recipe can handle twice the amount of raisins. Today instead of raisins I added one cup each of toasted walnuts, Ghirardelli semisweet chocolate chips, a cup of their white chocolate chips, and one cup dried cranberries. I'm going to make sure we charge a bundle for these cookies! We tier the pricing based on what we think (or know) the ingredients and level of sophistication to be. It's a quirky process, full of conjecture.

They're all baked and I'm tired. Flour is all over my kitchen and I need to make the icing for the chocolate gingerbread.

You Can Stop Asking Me if I've Read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

2010-09-29T09:36:00.006-04:00

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had started to read this book a couple of years ago but my attention flagged. This time around, I'm much more interested in the idea of homesteading and so my own piqued interest pushed me through it. You probably know that this is an account of Kingsolver and her family raising as much of their own food as possible and eating locally for one year.

The memoir market has been crammed with first-person accounts of a year doing (fill in the blank), a genre which Ben Yagoda calls "schtick lit." But in the case of gardening or farming, it makes all the sense in the world. Barbara Kingsolver is the perfect person to write this book, with her deep attachment to the natural world, rural upbringing, and years of experience vegetable gardening. A family that's completely on board doesn't hurt either. It is a very inspiring book, although you have to be half-inspired as you start, because the drama in farming is of the subtle sort.

As for the literary quality, it's uneven. Her husband and daughter Camille chime in, which adds to "we're all in this together" feeling, but the juxtapositions are awkward at times. Seasonal recipes are included. Sometimes Kingsolver gets all science-y and Michael Pollanesque. Much of her information on the poultry industry and genetically modified vegetables I already knew, plus the informational tone was a bit tiresome when you knew there were stories around the next bend.

The last chapter includes the actual size of the plot (a little over 3500 square feet) and the financial information. (According to her they saved a lot of money.) I wish this was presented earlier to give the readers a clear sense from the beginning of the scope of their project. Even a map of the garden would have been helpful.

But these are quibbles. It's really an immersion in an old/new way of thinking about food and our world. Maybe in three hundred years, if global warming hasn't starved us all, we will look back at the 20th and early 21st centuries as a Dark Age when corporatism reigned, parting us from our food sources, our health, our spiritual connection to the earth, and the wisdom of our traditions. I hope we will see it that way, because if we don't, then it means corporatism will have won.

The awkwardness of this mixed-genre book is also its gift. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is the Psalms, Jeremiah, the Gospels, the Farmer's Almanac, and Joy of Cooking all in one, and maybe that's the best way to preach it, sister.

Please note that although the book does not have an index, the website includes one, as well as all the recipes from the book and inspiring pictures and stories from gardeners and homesteaders around the world: http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/

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Flavor--Depth--Heat--Blast Off! A Hot Sauce Adventure

2010-09-28T14:04:00.001-04:00

My brother Dan can make anything--soap, curtains, dog food, a basement. And culinary delights, too. My favorite Thanksgiving is when he brings a fully cooked and stuffed Heritage turkey. In a past life he was a bartender, and in another, a tofu maker. He also makes music. He played keyboard for the Original Sins and he still does a lot of musical stuff.

Dan's lovely wife Elaine brought me a bottle of his hot sauce last week and we tried it on Saturday night. Everyone in the Dream Kitchen family likes hot sauce, and we put Brother Dan's on some quesadillas I made using Amish pepper jack cheese, CSA tomatoes, and yellow peppers.

Right away you could taste that deep habanero pepper flavor and a vinegar tartness. A few bites later---"GET ME SOME BREAD!!! RIGHT NOW!!!!" from one of my sons. (He has this kind of taste adventure every week with hot sauce. Either there's no learning curve, or he likes drama. I'm going to go with the latter explanation.) So we learned to take it easy, but it's a great hot sauce with depth and flavor in addition to the heat.

Brother Dan is not a recipe kind of guy. So when I asked him how made the sauce, I knew I wouldn't get a precise list of ingredients and procedures. Here's how to make it, in the words of Brother Dan:

It's all home-grown peppers. I just threw in what was ripe - about six habanero peppers. Just cut them in half - carefully! You want to avoid touching anything but the skin. Some people choose to use gloves when working with the habaneros, but I just avoid touching the innards. It's the insides, the seeds and the whitish pulpy stuff, that's the hottest.

Threw them in with some Bragg's apple cider vinegar (which is REALLY good), a few bulbs of raw peeled garlic, a fair amount of salt (the stuff can be salty, since it's a condiment), and some carrots, and enough water to cover it all. The carrots give it some body and sweetness, and the vinegar adds flavor and helps preserve the sauce (as does the salt).

I cooked it in a pressure cooker for a while - at the very least, you want it simmering in a covered saucepan. The steam can be very irritating to the lungs and eyes. And, after it's all cooked, I use a hand-held blender to puree it well.There you go!! It's good stuff - easy to make, too.

We at The Dream Kitchen will have to peek into Brother Dan's larder more often, where there is always somethin' good.

Book Review: Urban Homestead

2010-09-05T17:49:00.001-04:00

Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City by Kelly Coyne

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book opened my eyes to the possibilities inherent in my yard and my kitchen, the vegetables, fruits and nuts I could grow, the chickens I could have, the cheese I could make, you name it. It's all written in a non-self-righteous and quite good-humored way. There is much knowledge here, and it's inspiring and realistic at the same time. Erik and Kelly live in Los Angeles and farm a small yard, even the median strip. Like another reviewer said, after reading this book I look at all the lawns everywhere and I can only think of what could be growing there!

I always thought that self-sufficiency was for right-wing survivalists. But now I see this whole new bent, a sustainable and interdependent way of life that creates a different kind of economy. It's an economy where you make and grow things yourself, and shrink the role of money in your life. Hence you shrink its power over you and derive great pleasure from the making of things, not the buying of things. This resonates deeply with me. This isn't a how-to manual for every single thing you could do to create a homestead. It does list resources for where to turn with more specifics.

They're publishing another book called Radical Home Economics in the spring.

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Hannah Likes Eggplant; Or Playing with Calzone

2010-08-17T06:16:00.005-04:00

Do you know the difference between calzone and stromboli? I don't either, except calzone is more likely to contain ricotta, and tends to be half-moon shaped instead of oblong.

Whatever it is, it's good. On Saturday I was looking for something celebratory to make for dinner. We had not had our Friday pizza so I made a batch of dough and thought I could feed more people with the same amount of dough if I made calzone.I looked at a calzone recipe in Biba Caggiano's Trattoria Cooking to get some ideas, and fancied an eggplant and radiccio recipe. Our local co-op had no radiccio so instead I got spring onions, and substituted ricotta for mozzarella (Are you sick of mozzarella or is it just me?) The filling was eggplant, green onion, quartered Calamata olives, capers, and garlic, along with some parmesan. I had made pizza dough a couple hours ahead of time and cut it with my bench knife into five pieces, one for each person. Our summer houseguest Hannah helped me spread some ricotta onto each circle and then heap the eggplant mixture on top,then sealing each calzone carefully closed.

They all fit on the pizza stone just dandy. We baked them at 450 for 20 minutes and they turned out golden. And no leakage! High praise. The ricotta and eggplant complemented each other and the calzones were light and not greasy like they can be. And no sodden wodge of mozzarella!

Because this was Hannah's last official dinner at our house (I explained Hannah earlier but I'll do so again), John made another of his mindblowing ice creams from David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop. This time he made plum ice cream, because we had plums from the CSA. It turned out satisfyingly plummy in taste and color, light and creamy. Last month John made Lebovitz's fresh mint ice cream and it made us want to see all other "mint" ice creams as impostors.

So. Hannah. She lived with our family for the summer while she served as our church's youth intern. This job seemed to involve lack of sleep and pizza, also four road trips with middle schoolers and high schoolers. They did service projects in Atlanta and Appalachia and went on retreats and other mysterious outings. Through it all, Hannah bonded really well with the youth and also with our family.That is, when she wasn't on a road trip. I'm not sure she enjoyed the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Episode she was forced to watch, but we loved hanging out with her. She introduced us to her native North Carolina's cherry soda Cheerwine, and Atlanta's Sweetwater beer. We introduced her to Washington Square, Elfreth's Alley, Franklin Fountain, beets, dandelion greens, and radishes.

And in June she was my kitchen assistant when another food blogger, Amy Leis of Amiable Life, had dinner with us and interviewed me about my family recipes. (It will be published next week and I'll include the link.) I miss you already, Hannah. You are the only household member who ever wanted to go to Target with me.

In Which We Open Our Home to A Food Blogger We've Never Met

2010-06-03T10:54:00.000-04:00

What's the term for the internet equivalent of theater's "fourth wall"? Amy Leis from the blog Amiable Life will crash through that wall tomorrow to interview me and have dinner at the Dream Kitchen with us tomorrow. Amy found me by way of First Person Arts. Hooray, First Person Arts. I could rave on and on about FPA for a while, but let's focus here.

I will make a chicken dish I remember from childhood called "Country Captain," which came from Cecily Brownstone of the Times. Originally the dish is said to have come from a Sepoy officer in India, and then some British officer (hence "Captain") adapted it. Then it sailed across the world to Savannah, Georgia--some say. Then it became very popular, especially in the South. My mother and grandparents lived at Ft. Benning and Ft. Gordon during World War II; maybe that's where they originally ate it. Nana had several copies of this recipe, some handwritten, and dating before Cecily Brownstone's. I think. But I don't really know.

A full blown blog entry about Country Captain will come along later, and various speculations about its colonial history, but in the meantime, cleaning and shopping must proceed. Hannah (see previous entry) will be my prep assistant and all-around helper. We need to have everything prepped before Amy comes at 6:00 because there's no way I can answer questions and measure things at the same time. I'm also going to make one of my Nana's many rhubarb desserts--A crumble? A pie? A crisp? and a salad with CSA lettuce and dandelion greens. So fair readers, you will hear more about this here, and even more in a couple weeks on Amiable Life. Stay amiably tuned.

Homework. Baseball. Dinner. Pick Any Two.

2010-06-01T10:57:00.000-04:00

Memorial Day weekend was very cooperative this year. It brought summer sun and warm temperatures. Even the water at the local swim club was warm enough not to turn lips blue. Nice! But weird. In fact, it was so summery that it was hard to remember that school schedules and homework drama still lay ahead.

You don't know what homework drama is? It involves secret procrastination and then wailing demands for perfect silence and cooperation from everyone else in the fifteen minutes before it's time to leave for school. Oh, and baseball playoffs start today, which will only exacerbate the homework situation. Let's check the math. If baseball is from 5:15-8:00, including practice and driving to two separate ballfields, and kids get home from school at 3:55, then that leaves one hour and twenty minutes for homework, "dinner" (frozen veggie burgers), and changing into elaborate baseball uniforms and accessories. Slider pants, athletic cup, baseball socks, baseball pants with their special belt that takes much effort to slide through the loops, and the shirt that we hope can be located. Then there's the cap in the cap bin and the bla bla bla in the I-don't-know-I-thought-you-had-it-last mystery location. Which leaves zero time for computer use, daydreaming, or drawing funny cartoons.

Baseball, summer, and even homework are all good. It's just that the conflict between all three may not bring out the best in us.

Speaking of crunches, were not lazing at the pool all weekend. We here in the Dream Kitchen family were getting ready to host Hannah, our church's youth intern, for most of the summer. This involved frantically clearing out the "guest room" and turning it into an actual guest room. And, gimme five, we succeeded! She arrived yesterday, in her light blue VW bug with a big peace sign on the back. It's one of those newer neo-bugs, and a it's a magnetic peace sign, not a bumper sticker, so wipe that Woodstock-y image from your mind. Hannah is very cool and we like her! Plus, yesterday she let Will look at videos on her iPad. Her! iPad! Hannah also brought chocolate chip cookies, but we agreed that the two things should not be handled at the same time, especially in this heat.

The Chocolate Chip Cookie iPad Goddess will probably be around later this afternoon, no doubt trying to take a nap, meditate, or write in her journal. Think she'll mind me yelling threats and ultimatums for an hour and twenty minutes? Perhaps this summer will put her off the idea of having children any time soon. Probably a good idea anyway, since she's only 22. Glad to be of service.

Bridget Foy's + First Person Arts = Home Away from Home

2010-04-15T14:20:00.001-04:00

I'm still thinking about Sunday night at Bridget Foy's, the food writers I met, the homey dinner we had, the stories.

In the beginning of April, I had submitted a super short 250-word essay along with a recipe to First Person Arts for a competition. When I was in Denver at the AWP convention (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) I got email saying I was invited to read it at Sunday night's Edible World dinner. The timing was such that I ended up taking a cab directly from the airport to the dinner. Having deprived myself of overpriced soggy airplane sandwiches, I was ready to eat and relax.

I had the pleasure of getting my reading over with first, which makes sense since it was about cocktails and appetizers. Juliet Whelan followed with a childhood story about whipping cream with an egg beater for the first time. When Juliet isn't regaling people with stories about whipping, she is an architect of spare modern spaces. I myself live in cluttered old cramped spaces, but admire that clean aesthetic nevertheless. Anyway, the three of us perched on barstools at a head table like bridesmaids who had lost their groomsmen. Instead of identical dresses, we wore (almost) identical eyeglasses.

Dinner, based on recipes from Suzan Colon's Cherries in Winter, was luscious. We started with split pea soup, then moved on to meat loaf (with bacon, do you even have to ask?), mashed potatoes, asparagus, and finally apple cake. Why haven't I been here before? Bridget Foy's has been at Second and South Streets for thirty years, even longer than Hats in the Belfry across the street, which is saying something, but what? I've never bought a hat there, either. The real Bridget Foy herself, who was only a tot when her parents named the place named after her, came in to say hello. It had never occurred to me that Bridget Foy is a real person, although why wouldn't she be? Why assume fictionality? She is now a mother, so I wonder if she's fixing to open another restaurant soon for her baby, to continue the tradition.

Round about apple cake time, Suzan Colon gave a reading from Cherries in Winter. When she was laid off from her job as editor at O, she had to save money by cooking in her Nana's frugal style instead of shopping at "Whole Paycheck Foods." From what Suzan read that evening, it sounds like a good-humored little memoir that affirms the nurturing instinct. I like when she includes a real recipe from her Nana and then her own semi-botched but-basically-OK version. Apparently her friends scoffed at her newfound domesticity. Making muffins for the husband? I can see the gimlet-eyed stares now. I've noticed that women seem to make these comments more often than they used to. Some kind of anti-foodie feminist backlash? But I digress. Cherries in Winter. It might be a nice Mother's Day gift. At the very least it may inspire you to test your own grandmother's or mother's recipes.

The other diners were a very receptive mixed-age crowd, not without their own stories. What was that about making pork sausage matzo balls? And one lady volunteered to read--cold-- the essay of a missing presenter from Houston (yes, Houston). One thing I love about First Person Arts is that it attracts people from their early twenties on up, especially at the Story Slams because they don't cost much. It is easy to talk in front of this diverse and always warm audience. Whether you are a hipster, oldster, or in-betweenster, or someone who eschews the suffix "ster" altogether, you should give their Story Slam, Salon, or Edible World a try some day. Of course, you need not speak a word. Oh--pictures here, courtesy of Erika Vonie.

The Tiny World of Cocktails

2010-04-15T13:40:00.005-04:00

As a little girl, I loved cocktail paraphernalia; especially the vessels shaped precisely for the drink: lowball, highball, martini, old-fashioned, sour, and the rarely used liqueur glasses, each one tinted a different color. I used to read our tallest tumbler, where, on the side, in red letters like Jesus' words in my New Testament, were directions for making a "Tom Collins." For the parties that my parents gave or attended, we children were scrubbed clean and made presentable, me in my pink smocked dress and Mary Janes, and David and Dan in their gray flannel shorts, white shirts, and clip-on ties.

In compensation for such torture we got to use the Lilliputian props of the cocktail ritual: jaunty little napkins and swizzle sticks with teeny tiny umbrellas. We used the swizzle sticks as weapons, to spear the great juicy prey floating in our Shirley Temples, the maraschino cherries. Swizzle sticks were also deployed to vanquish Olives in Blankets, and Small Objects Wrapped in Bacon.

Decades later, I began to realize how much work those cocktail parties must have been--all those little things to assemble and serve hot, all those drinks to refresh, egos to soothe, and names to remember. And glasses upon glasses to wash afterwards, and you hadn't even had dinner yet. Here is a simple recipe from my grandmother that must have been a godsend--she wrote “Delicious” beneath the title. I have turned it into a found poem. The text is from my grandmother but the line breaks are mine. (Loyal blog readers, you've seen this recipe before.)

Cheese Bites, Broiled

Cut tiny rounds of

Pepperidge Farm bread. Place

paper-thin small white onions on top of

each round.

Mix equal parts of

mayonnaise and grated Parmesan,

spread on top, and

broil until brown.

Clam Tavern: Retro in Delco

2010-03-26T16:05:00.004-04:00

Last Saturday, my older son Jack was at a sleepover, and the rest of us went out to dinner. My friend Lori said she was going retro, to Towne House in Media. which gave me the idea. We couldn't blatantly copy her and show up at Towne House as well. I remembered that Jackie in my book group had mentioned Clam Tavern, so we popped over there, to Clifton Heights. It's actually more than 20 minutes away, where Baltimore Pike narrows to one lane in each direction.

Clam Tavern is a little brick building on a corner, a modest little place. Clean as a whistle and filled with cops and firefighters and guys who want to be cops and firefighters, and guys who were cops or firefighters in the past, and the big-haired gals of cops and firefighters. They had Hop Devil in bottles, so Mr. Dream Kitchen was happy, but not as happy as if the taps had been working. That's right, the taps were not working.

Apparently, you have to make reservations here on a Saturday night to get a decent table. We didn't have them, so we settled for a bar table right by the door, where we got to see plenty of action. Someone was having a birthday party, and all the revelers were collecting at the bar, filling up the place with well-scrubbed white people.

So we studied the menu, which included Clams Casino. Is that retro, or what? So John and I split an order of that, and then split an entree of fried oysters. I have always loved fried oysters ever since I ate them at Walt's King of Crabs at 2nd and Catherine, in Philadelphia. That was back before Queen Village had parking meters in Queen Village, in the age when Acme Piano Company was just that and not a condo named after it. Walt's King of Crabs served fried oysters, and buckets of mussels. They served pitchers of beer, creamy cole slaw, and decent fries with the seafood. When you were done putting all that away, you were expected to get the hell out of there and allow room for more hungry hordes.

The Clams Casino were very spicy, rich little concoctions of clams, bacon, and chopped jalapenos, mixed with breading and baked in clamshells. The oysters were fresh and perfect. (Am I using enough adjectives for you?) Will had chicken fingers (sigh) and fries, but he liked our fries (that we were splitting; remember how I technically "don't eat fries"?) better because they had Old Bay Seasoning.

So afterward I talked to my friend Lori, who was pleased with Towne House--where, interestingly enough, she had clams casino as well! Strange. Well, no, not so strange, maybe. Lori reminded me that it was she who told me about Clam Tavern in the first place, last year, from a secretary at her work. Jackie had merely cemented the impression in my unreliable brain. So it's not coincidence, exactly, more like a sphere of influence imploding.

Next time at Clam Tavern: A martini (with gin and an olive) instead of beer, and crabcakes. And also? Reservations.

A Found Poem from Nana's Files

2010-03-24T22:10:00.007-04:00

This is exactly how my Nana's recipe reads; I only added line breaks. It must be read in that pretentious poet voice; you know the one I mean. A hint of resentment and aggression in the consonants, especially when pronoucing "broiled," would help.

Cheese Bits, Broiled

Cut tiny rounds of

Pepperidge Farm bread. Place

paper-thin small white onions on top of

each round.

Mix equal parts of

mayonnaise and grated Parmesan,

spread on top, and

broil until brown.

Mortar & Pestle: A Quick Sketch

2010-03-19T17:44:00.005-04:00

Oh, no.

My town paper, The Swarthmorean, has listed several local blogs today, so I had to hurriedly post something fresh!! So----hi. Don't mind me, as I straighten my hair and shove the cat off the table. We're ready. Really. I post whenever I've a mind to, and I never apologize or explain.

I'm about to use my mortar and pestle. Unlike a bread machine or a food processor and their obscure parts that break, a mortar and pestle is reliable. Also, it's beautiful, with its cool stony curves. I truly do love looking at it. I am going to crush garlic and fresh ground pepper into a couple tablespoons of olive oil, and schmear (I love Yiddish) it over my pizza dough. It's a ritual I made up. I figure it makes the oil more garlicky and peppery . . . right?

Without this weekly use of the mortar and pestle I would be a lost, depressed, soul in the kitchen, a culinary Eeyore, complaining darkly about the hairline cracks in the food processor and the wrong parts that we got for the bread machine. Don't get me started about that piece of the oven that falls off about four times a year.

My boys are out back playing catch. The windows are open and I can hear the thwack of the baseball hitting the glove. They'll be hungry. So I'll be going.

But tell me: what simple kitchen tools please you?

A Snowy Pilgrimage to Pub & Kitchen

2010-01-31T20:35:00.003-05:00

Yesterday afternoon the Dream Kitchen family drove in to First Presbyterian Church at 21st and Walnut to a Musicopia Concert. It's a youth orchestra. The concert was beautiful and the acoustics of the big old stone church were resonant. Afterwards, we walked just a few frigid minutes, through a lightly falling snow, to Pub & Kitchen at 1946 Lombard, to meet friends. It was about 17 degrees, and there was not a small amount of complaining performed by both boys, but we made it. Our friends were running late, but the host let us sit down with just the four of us. There is an up side to eating dinner at 5:00: an almost completely empty restaurant. And thank goodness for that silly hockey game on my iPhone.

The other family came, and we all decided on what we would eat. These days I'm always thrilled when there's no kids' menu and they have to spend more time figuring out what to take a chance on. They split a luscious cheeseburger with great-looking fries. (I don't eat French fries so I can only comment on their appearance.) I ordered a creamy artichoke-leek soup, steamed mussels with tomato and chorizo, and an IPA. John got meat loaf and mashed potatoes. It was all just heavenly. A beloved neighborhood pub called Chaucer's used to be at the site. It had famously wonderful cheeseburgers and a reliably folksy, comfy atmosphere. The other couple and I had lived in Center City Phila. in a previous life (not together), and we recalled Chaucer's fondly. Pub & Kitchen is trendy, with a much more sophisticated menu. Which is totally OK, really. The server was great. Everything was copacetic. A child--who shall remain unnamed--fell down the stairs to the loo but was fine. Not even embarrassed. It was that good a place. I don't know why there's a pig with rabbit ears on the building and the website. Some kind of joke,I don't know.

Anyway, we all proceeded to walk to our friends' condo.

And.

Now we know where we shall live when our kids have graduated from high school. A condo in the Fitler Square neighborhood. With 12-foot ceilings. With its own parking lot. With a ton of architectural integrity. Near so many cozy little restaurants. General fabulousness all around. It will take us nine years to get rid of enough stuff to fit into it. I've already started, though; yesterday I gave away some baby blankets.

Pub & Kitchen, we'll be back. Save us our regular table.

The Loaf and The Fish

2010-01-26T11:48:00.001-05:00

“A relationship, I think, is like a shark, you know? It has to constantly move ... And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.” --Woody Allen's character, Alvy Singer, in Annie Hall, 1977.

Ha ha. Has Alvy's comment been quoted knowingly to you as many times as it has to me? Maybe I should worry. Actually no one has ever quoted the last sentence to me, just the first part. It was back when my friends and I were mostly single and someone was trying to break up with someone else for no specific reason other than boredom. I have spent many hours of my life, if you add up all the idle moments, wondering just what moving forward means. For Woody Allen perhaps it meant expanding the stepdaughter relationship in creepy ways. Maybe for him the shark metaphor is apt. As for me, I prefer a metaphor that doesn't involve flesh-eating predators.

So here's the new metaphor: sourdough. "A relationship, I think, is like sourdough starter, you know? It has to be fed constantly. And I think what we've got on our hands is a smelly blob of rotten flour and water."

OK, work with me here. My friend Julie--of Fertile Plots but also fellow basketball-soccer-baseball mom of two boys in my little town --gave me some sourdough starter last month and I'm amazed at this miraculous stinky-delicious, messy-wonderful, sour-forgiving viscous goo. Something primordially human lives in this stuff. My neighbor gave me some starter a couple of years ago but between my sister in law and me both making separate mistakes in proportions, the sourness diminished and then I put it in the back of the fridge and it died from neglect. But so far Julie's sourdough starter is still vital, because I have been faithfully feeding it. It didn't hurt that Julie gave me her simple recipe that she perfected after much trial and error. The recipe follows shortly. I rarely ever have to refrigerate it, because I make the bread almost every day. I keep it in my grandmother's blue and white striped Cornishware canister, already helpfully labeled FLOUR. If there is a backlog I just give a loaf away and whoever receives it is very surprised and grateful.

When I make bread, it is always Julie's and my bread. And if you live nearby I can give you some starter, and then it will be your bread, my bread, and Julie's bread. Sourdough. It lives, but only if it's fed. It multiplies. It takes time. I've often thought that love is like that, not a zero sum game, but bountiful and endless. We just need the starter, the patience to let it grow while we attend to other things, daily commitment, and a little generosity. And if we have some bread left over, we can cast it upon the waters. Do sharks eat bread?

Julie's Sourdough Bread (The "I" in the recipe is Julie.)

1 1/2 c starter*
1 c whole wheat flour
1 2/3 c white bread flour
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 c. to 2/3 c. water

Put all ingredients in bread machine on the dough cycle. When the cycle is finished, shape the dough into a rough ball and place in bread rising basket. Allow to rise until about double in size (anywhere from an hour to five hours, depending on the weather). Preheat oven to 420 degrees, placing a pan of water in the bottom of the oven to create a steamy environment. Invert basket over a baking stone; slash top two or three times diagonally with a razor blade. Bake for 33-35 minutes on baking stone.

After removing the starter to make bread, feed the starter with 2/3 c. bread flour and 1/2 c. water. (I sometimes need to adjust the water – if the starter seems really soupy, use a little less water.) Cover and let sit on the counter for a day or so. Then feed again and put in refrigerator until ready to use again. I’ve read that you should allow your starter to come to room temperature before using it, and also that you should use room-temperature water that has been sitting for an hour or more to let various things evaporate out of it. I try to do both these things, but if I’m in a hurry, I’ve skipped these steps and the bread and starter have been fine.

*Julie bought her starter from King Arthur Flour. There are recipes for starter out there. Or I will be glad to give you some if you live near me.

Cracking the Black Walnut

2010-01-21T15:09:00.000-05:00

We like nuts. So my inlaws sent us some at Christmas--five bags. One bag contains black walnuts, a real treat. They have a deep winey, earthy flavor--"truffly" as a friend says--stronger than English walnuts. They tend to cost more, but maybe that's because harvesting them is difficult. A neighbor boy where we used to live in Virginia would collect all the neighbors' black walnuts, shell them himself using equipment loaned by a farmer, and sell them back to us for $5.00 a bag.

There is no such enterprising youth up here, so the nuts falling on our heads and littering the autumn lawn in the years since we moved up to Pennsylania tend to be a nuisance more than a blessing, big hard green balls raining down. We have a pile in the back corner of the yard that grows bigger every year. Ignoring the nuts seems sad and wasteful. We did see a black walnut crusher at an Amish store in Indiana, but buying one would be a grander back-to-the-land gesture than we want to make.

So. What to do with these beautiful nuts? John's birthday was coming up, so I decided to make Walnut Spice Cake with Lemon Glaze. I toasted the nuts before adding them to the batter. It's a lovely use for black walnuts; their strength is tempered by the spices and lemon. We still have a lot left. Any other ideas?

Sandwiches, Part Two: Jewish Deli Love

2009-12-11T13:55:00.000-05:00

When I read Jill's comment below, that I'd hate Jewish deli sandwiches, I realized I had to respond. What I don't like is a WAD of meat. The correct way to make a sandwich, and they do this in a proper Jewish deli, is to slice the meat very thinly and carelessly throw it in the sandwich partly crumpled, which creates a very important ingredient: air.

So, yes, I love Jewish deli sandwiches. In particular, I love Koch's Deli. Years ago, I lived in University City and had to walk six blocks to wash my clothes. One frigid day as I dragged my cart along the icy sidewalks with my tri-weekly laundry load, wondering if I was ever going to finish my dissertation, find true love, get a job, or convince my landlady to let me use her washer, I realized I was hungry. After dropping off my laundry, I wandered next door, where I had seen a deli sign. I opened the door and a blast of home-cured pastrami aroma almost knocked me over. A huge line of happy expectant people--black, white, Asian, young and old--waited for sandwiches from two guys telling jokes while they passed around plates of fresh-cut meats and cheeses. This is it, I thought, this is the happy place. Koch's Deli has been sucking in all the local warmth, good will and optimism. So whenever I did my laundry I would get some artery-clogging sandwich with pastrami, cole slaw, and rye bread. That's also where I learned to crave black and white cookies.

Please click on that link up there, it's just like I remember. Must. Return. To Koch's.

Sandwich City, and I Don't Mean New York: Argan and Arbol Cafe

2009-12-10T14:27:00.001-05:00

You know what Liz Lemon says about Americans, that we are all the same, all of us searching for a great sandwich. She would like Philly, and not just for its cheese steaks. If she ever finds herself walking along 17th St. at lunchtime, she would discover, just a couple of doors south of Bonte with it's insanely delicious sugar waffles, Argan. I got a very fresh,delicious veggie sandwich there last week. The bread had semolina flour and reminded me a little of cornbread. You order your own custom sandwich, and mine had an eggplant spread, roasted green peppers, onions, white beans, and lettuce.

Then two days ago I was walking through Northern Liberties and spotted Arbol Cafe, where I got a Paraguayan sandwich or "lomito" with a fried egg, one slice of ham, one of beef, one of cheese, lettuce, mayo, and tomato on brioche. Juicy and fabulous. I don't like sandwiches with a big old wad of meat. The proportion of meat should be modest. Arbol is run by a married couple, and the husband/sandwichmaker is from Paraguay. It has a corner garden with a grill ("parilla") and it would be a lovely place to linger on a summer evening with a bottle of Chilean wine, watching the neighborhood action. It's on Poplar, very close to North Bowl and Standard Tap.

I don't usually spend my days wandering about the city in search of international sandwiches, but it does seem like it, doesn't it? I'm working on a new writing project that has nothing to do with food, and for inspiration I went to hear Amy Goodman at the Free Library. That was the Moroccan Sandwich Day. Then I interviewed someone about my next project. That was Paraguayan Sandwich Day. Today is the day I realize I should get a job to support the sandwich habit, let alone the writing habit and the April AWP Conference in Denver. Maybe one of today's batch of five query letters will result in a jackpot. Then again, perhaps Liz is hiring a sandwich lady?

Chocolate and Zucchini (not the blog but the actual foodstuffs)

2009-12-02T10:42:00.000-05:00

Pant, pant, pant. Just came in from an hour-long walk in the woods with Zane. That's him panting, not me.

I'm trying to work off some Thanksgiving pounds, due my own rich cooking, for which I abandoned all my principles. I made mashed potatoes with a stick of butter--according to Will, "the best mashed potatoes ever." And stuffing with another stick of butter and chicken livers in addition to the cornbread, sage, and celery. Then I had leftover chicken livers so of course I had to go and make some chicken liver pate. And what do you know, there was a LOT of everything left over since we had only five people for Thanksgiving. I repurposed the pate using a dainty little sorbet scoop and a few sprightly sprigs of Italian parsley for another dinner we had for some friends. There was still quite a bit left. Lordy. Oh and the pumpkin pie, well that had cream and maple syrup and please tell me why I am going on and on?

So anyway for Will's birthday, which always falls on a day, Nov. 30, when one is bursting at the seams and feeling quite penitent, wanted brownies for the in-school treat. Naturally, I had to sample two of the inside brownies when they were still warm and any miscellaneous "crumbs." Then I made him a Chocolate Zucchini Cake for his birthday dinner that I had made in the summer for the town potluck. I never got to actually have any of my own cake that day because it was demolished by all the people who decided to put dessert on their plates before they'd eaten the main course. You know who you are. This time, I didn't make the glaze, just couldn't bring myself to do it. One must draw the line somewhere. The cake recipe is from King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking. This cake has only whole wheat flour and Will loves it as much as he loved the brownies, with their white flour and ungodly amounts of butter and sugar. You just never know. These kids. His other request for his birthday was mac and cheese. I used Amish smoked cheddar. Insanely delicious.

Gotta go. Lots to do. As you can tell from my syntax. This blog is sporadic. I know. Deal.

Book Review: 200 Fast and Easy Artisan Breads: No-Knead, One Bowl

2009-11-18T14:12:00.001-05:00

I asked for a cookbook to review, received it in the mail the next day, and then I had to review the thing! That means shopping, cooking and then writing. Hence the mysterious gap in my blog posts.

I chose 200 Fast and Easy Artisan Breads, by Judith Fertig. Remember when Mark Bittman published a no-knead bread recipe in the New York Times? It created a sensation, and since then everyone has been falling all over themselves to produce and publish recipes for such a bread, including Jim Lahey, the baker Bittman wrote about.I made his bread, but I gave it to a family who had just had a baby, and never heard how they liked it. Plus I burned my hand because I baked the bread in a Dutch oven and grabbed the handle right after I took it out. Which I totally knew I would do. Anyway, Judith Fertig doesn't have you using a Dutch oven. She has you use a hot pizza stone, onto which you slide the dough via a peel or a cookie sheet.

The basic principle of no-knead bread is that it uses more water in the dough, and needs a longer time to rise. "Fast and easy" is a bit of a misnomer here. Just because you don't have to knead this bread doesn't mean it's particularly easy, but it is fairly simple, and the best part is you can make a dough and bake it later, in two separate batches, even. You just need room in your refrigerator for a big old 16-cup bowl of dough. Get ready to clear most of one shelf.

The part that I find a little nerve-wracking is the moment when the dough goes in the oven. Because the pizza stone is preheated in the oven, you need to transfer the dough quickly. A half cup of cornmeal acts like little ball-bearings, as she says, for this very wet dough. You sort of jerk it onto the pizza stone and it skootches right over onto it. I'm sure you can imagine this confident gesture. I can, too. I just haven't actually summoned up the nerve to do it because, in my pessimism, I imagine it flopping onto the rack and sagging down to the bottom of the stove. O me of little faith! For me, this is the culinary equivalent of skydiving, but it isn't Judith Fertig's fault. Nevertheless, my timidly pushing the blob onto the stone worked fine. And the bread was great. Nice air pockets and blistered crisp crust.

I made the most basic recipe as well as the extra slow version using a "biga." I think she needs about a half cup more water in the biga and a half cup less in the rest of the dough, as I couldn't possibly mix the biga with the amount of water she gave..

She has many more versions, mainly variations on a few simple master recipes. Her recipe format is very consistent and easy to follow. Please don't skip the initial explanations in the beginning of the book. I wish there were pictures of a biga that's ready to use, as her verbal description left a lot to the imagination, and mine deflated and I had to throw out my first one. Fast and easy? Hmmm. After some trial and error. I don't mind, really. That happens when you learn something new, right? It's that objectionable title. And fast? Hmmph. Given that "slow" is a word with some cachet now in the food world, she could just as well have said "Slow, Easy Breads." I'm sure Orwell would be laughing, if he ever bothered with such important domestic topics instead of fretting about little old totalitarianism.

I'm happy to have this resource and will explore the other variations later. I don't object horribly to kneading, either, and will do that when the mood strikes me. It's always helpful to have another trick up one's sleeve, though. This offers a completely different time frame and that's what's helpful. Remember, it's slow. Not fast. Dang these tricky words.

Disclaimer: My payment for this review was the copy of the book.

The Life and Death of a Seattle House: 700 West Kinnear Place

2009-11-02T12:47:00.000-05:00

A woman, a man, and a teenage girl are eating homemade vegan burgers, sitting on floor pillows. The man and the girl,who are guests, pretend to like the burgers. He forces one down, but she hides hers in a napkin, asks to be excused, and flushes it down the toilet. The girl is enraptured by the house; she had murmured "sweet," as she and the man had climbed the steps to the porch, where they could see the Space Needle, most of Seattle's downtown, and even Mt. Rainier. The woman had loved the man in a previous life, and the man is feeling sad about several things. The girl has been recently traumatized by violence and betrayal. The subtext of the scene is rich.

But it's all artifice: The three people are the actors Lili Taylor, Peter Krause, and Lauren Ambrose. And those are the first and possibly last vegan burgers to ever be served in that house, 700 West Kinnear Place. My Uncle Fred was the real homeowner, and his idea of dinner was a steak with pat of butter melted on top.

Uncle Fred had told me back in 2000 that the house had been filmed for an episode of Six Feet Under. Finally, last year I started sporadically watching the series. Because it's the best TV drama I have ever seen, I had almost forgotten about 700 West Kinnear's role. But there it was, turrets looming into Season 2, "Driving Mr. Mossback", its fading yellow paint and brown-trimmed windows a tribute to the last of Queen Anne Hill's shabby gentility, the already lavish Seattle view pumped up needlessly with a telephoto lens.

This was no passing shot of a house in order to establish a sense of place, it was the place itself. It was the house that Nate, Peter Krause's character, had lived in before his father died and he had to help with the family funeral home in Los Angeles. Lili Taylor plays an old flame, Lisa, who remains deeply in love with him. She still keeps his shirt in the closet.

My grandmother's family moved to this house in 1906 from Syracuse, months before Uncle Fred's birth in the only bedroom without a view. The family attended Plymouth Congregational Church, often walking all the way down the hill and back every week. My great grandfather was a banker, full of Protestant rectitude, back in the days when thrift and modesty were virtues. The house was big, but with four children, three of them boys, and maiden Aunt Laura and my great grandmother's mother also living there, it was full. The children walked every day to Queen Anne "grammar school" and then Queen Anne High School, and all of them attended either Oregon Agricultural College or University of Washington, or some combination thereof. Fred grew up to become a lawyer. A stint in the Army during World War II was the only time in his life he did not live at 700 W. Kinnear Place.

The house served as a refuge for my grandmother after she divorced during the Depression and was taking care of my mother, born in 1929. I have many old faded pictures of my mother as a baby in a wicker baby carriage on that airy porch, as a toddler playing with a dog, as a gawky young girl under the apple trees. I visited with my mother and grandmother when I was in high school, then on my own in the mid 1980s, with a friend in 1990, and with my husband in 1998, when we were newly married.

To me, 700 W. Kinnear held the past together, and served as proof of my family's rootedness despite two later generations of military life. The house still ran on the knob and tube electricity rigged up by Uncle Fred and his brothers in the 1920s. Fred didn't drink much or clean out his liquor cabinet often; I found a bottle of some kind of hard liquor that dated from 1918. Quilts my great grandmother made, old radios that had names of Pacific Northwest radio stations on the dial, books owned by three generations shelved companionably together in barrister bookcases; whenever I visited, I inhabited the place, breathed its memories, and made it mine.

In 1998 my husband and I made a special dinner for Fred. It was more gourmet than his buttered steak, involving fresh pasta and gorgonzola. We bought everything, including the wine, at Pike Place Market. At some point during this dinner we offered to renovate the third floor and live there. We would help Fred maintain the place--he was 93 by then and still fixing the roof himself--and John would get a tech job easily in Seattle. I told Fred how much we loved the house and what it meant to me. He wrote me a sweet letter later, saying he thought not. He lived in the house until 2001, when he sold it and moved to a retirement community. The last time I saw Uncle Fred was that year, when he flew East to attend my grandmother's 101st birthday party. At the party he said to me, "I should have agreed to get that house historically certified. Because I sure do hate what this guy is doing to it."

My grandmother died in the spring of 2002, and then Uncle Fred on July 4 of that year. He was an all-American, self-effacing, pragmatic guy, dispensing painfully firm handshakes and bear hugs into his nineties. He was a trial lawyer and a gentleman, a dying breed. When my friend Karen and I were browsing his bookshelves we found a book turned backwards with the spine inside. It was The Joy of Sex. He had been long widowed by that point.

My brother Dan and I flew out for his memorial service, but I stayed longer to get a sense of Seattle as a place that had meant home to me. I wandered up Queen Anne hill to see the house. The windows were boarded up, and a huge semi was parked in Fred's rose garden, which had been unkempt for a year. This was not a house. It was a corpse. I walked under the old apple trees, and saw that his blackberries were ripening on the vine. A clawing grief took hold of me. I pulled myself together and rang the doorbell of a neighbor, who gave me old pictures of the house that she had saved. She said the next owner was moving the house several feet so he could subdivide the part of the yard with the apple trees. She gave me tea and we commiserated together, and celebrated Fred's life.

The house is for sale again, a house made so luxurious that no one can afford it, a house made so huge that no one can fill it. After moving the house, renovating down to the studs and finishing all the raw spaces, then adding a gluttonous new porch and a kitchen no one will cook in, the owner is moving on, perhaps going broke. The attic, with its dusty books and old family things, is now a vast beige space covered in carpet. The once-utilitarian basement, with all Fred's ancient tools, is also covered in this viral beige carpet and "finished." I don't recognize the house any more, its soul surgically removed. Its austerity and restraint are gone, which is what made the view so full of grace.

No one living here will tinker with tools in the basement, fix their own roof, or mow their own lawn. No film companies will impute Bohemianism to this new place. But one thing makes me take heart. Nobody can stop blackberries from growing like weeds in Seattle.

In Which the Whole Family goes to Distrito in Order to Save on Babysitting

2009-10-20T14:41:00.001-04:00

Distrito has been on our list for a while. The "cheapest" (really?) of superstar Jose Garces' restaurants, and the only one with a pink VW convertible you can eat in. So when it looked like yet another birthday was staring me down, we, and by that I mean I, made a reservation for all four of us.

For our birthdays in the past, Mr. Dream Kitchen and I would get a sitter. This time we thought, maybe the boys are ready to appreciate some decent food, and maybe we'll save some bucks? I don't think we did the latter, but the boys loved it, and we all tried a lot of different dishes. My new discovery was pork belly in green mole, the unctuousness of the belly undercut by the sharp green sauce. We ordered a lot of small plates, and our table was also small, so something was bound to end up on the floor. Fortunately it was only a basket of tortillas wrapped in a cloth napkin, and not my perfect grapefruit margarita.

There was a huge TV screen above the landing on the stairs to the second floor, and the boys kept running up to check the Phillies' progress against the Dodgers, which was not so good that one game. We were in our own little area close to the restrooms, which I never like, but it was basically the kids' table, so our isolation was no doubt warranted. The restrooms are disconcerting in that everyone shares the same troughlike sink in the corridor. So no primping with just the gals at Distrito. It seems a shame. Don't women deserve their sanctuary?

We had great soft tacos with marinated skirt steak, and tamales with pulled pork, and flatbreads with forest mushrooms. Everything was wonderful, except I thought the mushroom flatbread had too fungal a taste in about ten percent of the bites I took. The guacamole and the regular fresh salsa were amazing--so complex and warmly spiced. Next time: no pink car and maybe the tasting menu.

Popcorn, The One True Mennonite Way

2009-10-12T11:13:00.000-04:00

Mr. Dream Kitchen's family of origin is Swiss-German Mennonite, going way way back, on both sides. You know those three-way mirrors they have in dressing rooms, and how if you angle the sides close in, and stand a few inches from the center, you can see yourself multiplied an almost infinite number of times? It's like that. There were some Amish too, way back when, and maybe some Amish Mennonite just to add yet more diversity. Thank goodness Mr. Dream Kitchen married Ms. Dream Kitchen to invigorate the gene pool by adding Irish, Scotch-Irish, English, and French. Maybe the next generation will mingle with Italians and Greeks! That would just be crazy.

Anyway, Mr. Dream Kitchen grew up eating popcorn and playing games every Sunday night, as a nice counterpoint to the church ritual in the morning. Occasionally they would watch Disney on TV instead of playing games. I believe that his family is genetically predisposed to not be hungry enough for real food on Sunday nights. And probably that pot roast or ham with scalloped potatoes served after church, along with Jell-O salad and pie, kind of helped as well.

We have carried on this popcorn tradition, without the big Sunday meal earlier in the day. We have waffles, from scratch (of course), sausage, and fruit every Sunday after church. In the evening we augment the popcorn with a big bowl of apple slices. This is the only time we eat in the living room, which is where we watch our Sunday night family movie. So it's a continuation of the (insert 14-letter Swiss-German name here) tradition but revamped.

Now. About the popcorn itself; let's get down to it. It is from Yoder Popcorn in Topeka, Indiana. We either go there ourselves because my inlaws live near there, or we order it. (For the woefully ignorant I must explain that the Yoders are Mennonite. Almost anyone named Yoder has some Mennonite back there in the three-way mirror.) Anyway, Mr. Dream Kitchen prefers Tiny Tender, but the boys like Yoder Yellow. I could go either way. We use Yoder's flavored coconut oil, too. Gasp. Yes, it's fat fat fat, but coconut oil is actually good for you, in small quantities. So you ingest a tablespoon a week, no big deal. And it tastes fabulous. We cook it in a Stir-Crazy, but when it busts, and it will, we're going to return to the old hand-cranked on the stove.

Careful that you don't let the fabulousness of this popcorn tradition blind you to the spiritual message I have for you, my wayward brothers and sisters! Mennonites choose the narrow way when it comes to popcorn, and everyone else should follow and do likewise. When the end times arrive, you don't want to found to be in any of the following compromising positions regarding popcorn:

-Microwaving it (Yes, Yoder sells microwave popcorn, but only to the damned)
-Microwaving it at the office and stinking up the entire floor. It is a noxious stench.
-Using that soulless invention, the air popper. What is the point?
-Buying your popcorn already popped. Please. I'm praying for you.

Biba on Fire: A Pizza Story

2009-10-09T11:11:00.005-04:00

Friday is pizza day at the Dream Kitchen.

Ever since Biba Caggiano's Trattoria Cooking came out in 1992, I have been making my own pizza crust from her recipe. My book got scorched on the gas stove the day I first made pizza for my husband, who was then a nervous date pretending to like zucchini, and I was a nervous hostess setting my cookbook on fire. I think the book got soaked one other time, but maybe that was just Chris Schlesinger's Thrill of the Grill. Strangely, that one hasn't been scorched. And now, apparently, my Trattoria Cooking has been misplaced. I rarely look for these things--it will show up someday and I'll be so happy.

The reason I got this book is I went to "study" aesthetics in Rome for four weeks with the Temple University Rome Program in 1991. I remember sleepily reading Kant on a train for ten minutes, and attending lectures on Bernini while daydreaming about, you guessed it, the next trattoria.

The best pizza I ever had in Italy was on a hasty stop at a respected pizza mecca in Naples, on our way to Capri. We had a train to catch and were bordering on frantic. We got off the train from Rome with our overnight bags, dashed over to this pizza place that started with an M, sat down and ordered. Of course they only had two kinds, margherita and marinara, and the only beverage was a bottle of Coca-Cola. We sat at long tables with lots of loud men, some with gorgeous clothes and others with workers' uniforms.

The walls were blank, except for two things, a recessed shrine to Mary, and a soft-porn picture of some starlet. The pizza margherita was light, crisp, ethereal, with the purest, freshest tomato sauce adorned with basil. Even the cheese was levitating. The Coca-Cola, I'll not call it "Coke," in its wondrous bottle, was bracingly cold and sweet. Then we split for the station, practically running. We made our train.

Now back to my homemade pizza, a completely different genus than the Neopolitan because it's thick and I use a rolling pin and put a whole bunch of stuff on it and five other reasons. Because that was there and then, and this is here and now.

Biba Caggiano's Basic Pizza Dough Recipe (Doubled), Filtered Through Memory Because I Can't Find the Book

I usually put the following ingredients in the bread machine, but you could always knead the dough for about six minutes until the it's soft and pliant. It will take about the same amount of time to rise. But you should proof the yeast in the water for four or five minutes if you're kneading by hand.

3 cups flour
2 tablespoons olive oil
heaping teaspoon salt
1 2/3 tablespoons yeast (actually it would be 2 tablespoons but seems like too much)
1 1/4 cups lukewarm water (I nuke for 30 seconds)

After I push the start button, I set a timer for 7 minutes so I can check it later and make sure it's forming a ball. I often need to add more flour and scrape the sides with a spatula.

When it's ready (about 1 hour and 40 mins. later), I punch it down and take it out. I flatten it by hand at first and then use an oiled French rolling pin. That's the kind that's thick in the middle and narrow on the ends. Then I crush 2 cloves of garlic and put it in my mortar and pestle with a little olive oil and fresh ground pepper. Love to crush stuff in my mortar and pestle. Have no idea whether this is the right thing to do, don't care. It's immensely satisfying. Then I schmear that over the crust with my hands.

Oh, I've preheated my oven to 450 by now. I look in the fridge for provolone, or even cheddar or pepper jack . . . work with me, here, because pizza night is also use-up-the-fresh-veggies and cheese night. Tonight there's quite a bit of sliced provolone in the lunch supplies, also some broccoli rabe from the CSA. I like to caramelize a couple onions ahead of time. Today it will probably be the broccoli rabe, lightly steamed and wrung dry (no soggy pizza!), a finely chopped jalapeno, raw onion in thin rings, and I guess some pepperoni to appease the guys.

I bake it for 14 or 15 minutes.

It's kind of a thick pizza but I need this much to feed us all, and I'm too lazy to make two thinner pizzas. So it's kinda Chicago. I don't preheat the stone, either. Again with the laziness, along with an unwillingness to deal with a peal, or sear my flesh. Plus, it's just great as it is.

From James Beard's American Cookery: Macaroni and Cheese

2009-10-08T10:27:00.001-04:00

"There is absolutely no substitute for the best. Good food cannot be made of inferior ingredients masked with high flavor. It is true thrift to use the best ingredients available and to waste nothing."--James Beard,The Fireside Cookbook, 1949

__________________________

Oddly enough, my mother never made macaroni and cheese. Once, when I was about twelve, I was over at the Gallaghers' house, another Army family near where we lived, in Worms, Germany. Mrs. Gallagher was cubing orange cheddar to make mac and cheese and I felt the sharpest longing for it. Perhaps, like beer, it was deemed too lowbrow by my mother. So I guess it makes sense that when I salvaged James Beard's American Cookery from her library, I made the macaroni and cheese right away.

This cookbook, published in 1972 by Little, Brown, was bought by my mother when we returned from our three years in Germany. Beard loved food, period, but especially American. He traveled the country in search of its regional foodways. So this book, written before the food renaissance, is a treasure. "American" doesn't mean non-ethnic; he champions Italian-American and other melting-pot "cookery" as well. One quirky thing about the book is that he spells "pasta" with an "e" at the end: "paste." In the "Grains and Pastes" chapter, on page 588, is the quintessential macaroni and cheese. It's the baked kind, with a white sauce. I used this recipe back when I was first pregnant, when I craved cheese in all forms, and I've never looked back. I soon memorized it, which makes cooking it so much easier.

Soon I made it my default go-to recipe for families with new babies. And we have it about once a month, with extra sharp white cheese from the local warehouse store. I always, always double the recipe. I may have even quadrupled it once! It's rich and creamy in the inside, crusty and golden on top. There is no other macaroni and cheese.

Here is the recipe, doubled, with my annotations:

American Cookery's Macaroni and Cheese

1 lb. macaroni (cavatappi is fun here, too, but not classic)
6 tablespoons butter
1/3 cup flour
3 cups milk
2 teaspoons salt (you may not need this much)
1 teaspoon dried mustard
Dash Tabasco (I don't do this, I forgot this was here! Guess I didn't memorize all.)
2 to 3 cups grated Cheddar cheese (don't buy pre-grated, the sharper the better)
Buttered crumbs (I rarely bother)

Boil the macaroni in salted water until just tender. Drain well. Prepare a white sauce--melt the butter in a heavy saucepan, blend with the flour, and cook several minutes over medium heat. (Two minutes maybe; don't let it get past golden) Heat the milk to the boiling point, stir in the flour-butter mixture, and continue stirring till it thickens. add the seasonings and simmer 4 to 5 minutes. Butter a baking dish or casserole (13 x 9). In it arrange alternate layers of macaroni, sauce, and cheese, ending with cheese. Cover the top with buttered crumbs. bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes, or until the top is nicely browned and the sauce is bubbly. Serve at once.

Now that I'm reading the actual recipe, I see that what I memorized is really my own adapted version, which is: Blend the grated cheese in with the thickened white sauce, off the heat (instead of layering). Cover until the macaroni is ready. Drain the macaroni well, return to pot, and add cheese sauce. Mix well and pour into baking dish.

In Search of the Perfect Cannelloni: A Tribute to Gourmet Magazine

2009-10-06T11:48:00.003-04:00

My mother was always a good cook. As for any harried mother of her era, the pressure of having to present dinner every night meant the occasional Spam, canned franks and beans, even TV dinners. (We loved our Swanson's TV dinners and their foil compartments.) Her inner gourmand was latent, ready to spring into action, as she meticulously copied recipes from Gourmet for dishes like Osso Bucco, complex time-consuming labors of love. She had lived in Rome soon after college in the early 1950s, working for a cooking show at a TV station. My mother and the rest of the production staff ate the food after the show was done. After six months she got sick and had to come home, but even the food in the Rome hospital, served by kindly nuns, was a revelation to her.

So my mother, as an Army wife trundling about here and there with her recipe boxes and issues of Gourmet, sought to call forth la dolce vita with her Italian recipes. In restaurants she would often order cannelloni. After a few bites, she would mourn the gap between her memory of feather-light, delicate cannelloni in Italy, and their leaden, soggy American counterparts, which were inevitably drowning in a sea of thick sauce. Not to be daunted, my mother spread her wings beyond Italian to French, inspired by Julia like everyone else. When she became an empty nester, she ventured on to Spanish and Portuguese dishes. She and my father began traveling to both countries, and they would order adventurously off the menu at some small family restaurant or inn wherever they happened to be.

Throughout all of it was Gourmet, its thoughtful, intelligent writing a constant source of inspiration and instruction, its photography celebrating the sensuousness of food and capturing the atmospherics of its rituals. When I was in my twenties, living in Philadelphia with a tiny bit of disposable income ($12,000 to $15,000 before taxes), I borrowed my mother's old issues and copied recipes from them. By hand, of course. Finally my mother gave me a subscription in 1989. I was a graduate student in English at Temple, with even less money than before, but a houseful of roommates and a taste for dinner parties on the cheap. At the time Gourmet ran a feature called Gastronomie sans Argent, French for "cooking without money." That was where I learned about the quiet glory and dignity of beans. Gourmet discontinued the feature, perhaps implying that almost all readers want to hold back on the caviar and truffles.

Every year at Christmas, my mother renewed my subscription. We would compare notes and point out recipes to each other. In 1996, my husband asked me to marry him. (I said "OK" instead of "Yes" and I'll never live that down.) The September issue had a recipe for Dark Chocolate Wedding Cake with Chocolate Orange Ganache and Orange Buttercream, which we found irresistible, and we had our caterer's pastry chef make it. Naturally, the groom and I forgot to eat the cake until it was only a devastated mess of crumbs and icing. And delicious crumbs they were. Someday I will make it myself.

By that time, Epicurious was up, which helped me find and collect even more Gourmet recipes. I started recycling my old "hard" copies, because I could save the recipes in my virtual recipe box. I'm not sentimental about the actual paper, except the September 1996 issue. Gourmet has been there for me no matter whether I needed an eggplant fix, an unusual vegetarian lasagna, or a wildly popular apple cake.

For my mother and me, Gourmet opened up a space for us to celebrate the bounty of this world and to share that with others. Beyond the recipes and travel stories, amazing writers like the late Laurie Colwin and the late David Foster Wallace, and the living Jhumpa Lahiri, to just think of three. And of course the indefatigable Ruth Reichl. She embraces food as memory, but also charts new directions. Under her watch, Gourmet has become political in the best way, covering plant genetics, fair food, and the locavore movement.

More than anything, Gourmet showed us how to live la dolce vita, whether we are rich or poor. With the advent of celebrity chefs, interactive websites and food blogs (ahem), food porn TV, and the professionalization of cooking, real food writing recedes to the background, unable to compete with its flashy new stepsisters.

My mother died suddenly at the age of sixty-nine, a week after learning she had her first grandchild on the way. My father has faithfully renewed my Gourmet subscription for the past ten years. Although my mother never found that perfect cannelloni, she certainly relished the search. May we seek la dolce vita the best we can, with wine and food, laughter and friends, and generosity of spirit. Here's to Gourmet, and life beyond.

One Day, One Cook, and a Bake Sale

2009-10-05T09:18:00.003-04:00

I agreed several weeks ago to bake a few things for my church's Fall Fair, a huge endeavor that attracts hundreds of people and also takes a hundred people to set it up and make it happen. I had never baked for a whole day. Would it be exhausting? Would it be energizing? I had no idea. An intense one-day project seemed appealing. Usually I flit between one and the other activity, trying to keep everyone happy and lots of plates in the air. Except I usually end up keeping everyone up in the air and getting lots of plates dirty.

Here is the list of what I made:
Spiced Sweet Potato Cake with Brown Sugar Icing, cut into quarters. This is one of my favorite autumnal cakes. Sometimes I add toasted pecans but I held off this time, for the sake of nut allergies. I thought it would sell more quickly than a whole cake, especially since sweet potato cake wouldn't seem familiar to many people. Two of my friends bought two of the quarters, having asked me what I made, but I wonder how the other two liked theirs.

One-A-Day Baguette, twice the recipe but made into four loaves. This is an old warhorse of a recipe, very reliable and delicious. They call it a baguette but it's a more chewy texture than that; it also has a longer shelf life. You mustn't stint on the salt. I've been baking this for years and it has never failed. I plan to make a lot more next year, since there was no other bread.

Fresh Gingerbread with Lemon Icing, from Nigella Lawson's How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking. I made this for a Labor Day party and it was a big hit, deeply flavorful gingerbread contrasting with the bright lemon. My grandmother always made a hot lemon sauce for her gingerbread, not possible for a bake sale. Please note Lawson's words of wisdom on bake sales: Brown things don't sell, unless they're chocolate. That's reason #2 for the lemon icing.

Fudgies, which I called "Peanut Butter Fudgies." These are very sweet no-bake cookies, easy to make. Kids love them. I used to have a recipe for bars with a layer of oats and butter on the bottom, and the chocolate-peanut butter layer on top, but I lost it. So I just looked for anything with oats, peanut butter, and chocolate.

Possibly,I thought I'd make Maine Maple Sugar Pie from Richard Sax's Classic Home Desserts, but no. I needed my remaining energy to clean the kitchen, with its counters covered in flour and towers of dirty dishes.

I felt very accomplished at the end, quite satisfied as I wrapped everything in plastic and put it in the car to deliver in the morning. Until I saw, the next day, one baker's tarts, cakes and cookies presented in adorable patterned cartons, tied with ribbons. Until I saw the dozen pies baked by an 81-year-old lady. Until I spied the three dozen small carrot cakes and cranberry orange cupcakes made by a pastry chef with an out-of-commission left arm. Ahem. Humility crept in. As Hillary Clinton used to say in the early nineties, "It takes a village to make a bake sale." Well, something like that. The village came through, with the baking and the buying, and that's a good thing.

Mushrooms and Cream, The Musical

2009-09-29T23:18:00.007-04:00

Ever since the early 1980s I have relished every moment spent in Kitchen Kapers, on 17th St. in Philly. Yesterday I was in the city to catch dinner and a show with my friend Liz (pseudonym), and so I wandered in there before our 5:30 dinner at Branzino. (Dream Kitchen has been prancing about the city a lot lately!) I like coffee paraphernalia, and they have everything imaginable. I admired some beautiful retro/funky aprons (my birthday's coming up, ahem!), bamboo cutting boards, and glorious displays of Creuset in every size and color.

Just as I was getting into the stride of my lascivious 15-minute intensive browsing expedition, a store employee asked me if I needed help, where I was from, and whether I missed living in the city. Then he proceeded to opine about the state of the Philadelphia schools, and moved on to the problems with the teachers' union in New Jersey and then PANIC set in, as I realized I had not looked at any baking equipment or cookbooks and my time was running out. I hate to be mean or even standoffish to anyone in that mecca. It's like mouthing off to a minister--can't do it. Finally I said, "Well, I need to meet my friend at Branzino, got to go!" Clever of me, wasn't it? In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn't have told the man I was "killing time."

Then, on to Branzino. Dramatic pause. . . .Hello, everyone. I have discovered a quiet restaurant. That serves classic but not tired Italian food. I'm going to take my Dad here someday because he will actually be able to hear me. And I will get to hear his hearing aid hearing me, oh well. If he remembers to wear it. It's not one of the new minimal-chic places. It has ornate frescoes on the walls, but very tasteful, exquisite in fact. We had real waiters wearing those adorable waiter costumes, too. They were very attentive without being obtrusive. The guy clearing dishes was even a real Italian, from Italy, not South Philly.

We sat down and sipped our water and Liz Pseudonym showed me her engagement ring. Wait. WHAT? Her fiance is is in his late fifties and has never been married! She's been married but her husband turned magically into a jerk in his early forties! They're both in for a ride! So we hugged, I teared up, and all that girl stuff. I'm still not convinced they're actually going to do this, but . . . nice ring.

Here's what we ordered, splitting everything. I have copied and pasted this from the menu, leaving their charmingly idiosyncratic capitalization intact.

Carpaccio di Filetto

Thinly sliced raw Filet Mignon topped with capers, Sun Dried Tomatoes,Red Onions, Lemon,Arugula and shaved Parmigiano Reggiano

I love each of these things by themselves and together it was a party in my mouth. Footnote: I borrowed that expression from Ruth Reichl. I think.

Insalata Rraci

Belgian Endive salad with Apples,Toasted Walnuts & crumbled Gorgonzola cheese in a Honey and Red Wine Vinaigrette

Pale, but tasty. The bitter endive was a great foil for the sweet apples and rich gorgonzola. We had actually ordered a different salad, but were too apathetic/easy to please/caught up in the complicated subject of middle-aged love to send it back.

Gnocchi al Funghi

Potato dumplings sauteed with Porcini Mushrooms, fresh Peas in a light Mushroom and cream sauce

Oh my word! Rich and full of flavor. I forgot how amazing porcini and cream can be. And the gnocchi--so light and pillowy.

Since it was a BYO, and we hadn't BYOd, we only had water, so our meal was under fifty bucks total, slightly over including tip. Not bad. Branzino. Take an old person there today. Remember, it's not hip or minimal. It's plush and hushed and classic, but without being stale or fussy. For some reason--I don't know how--we managed to pass on the fig gelato. Next time.

Then we went to see Menopause, The Musical. It was funny, not exactly a work of genius, but funny. Not that witty, either, but funny. Lots of physical humor. Much funnier than menopause itself, which I believe was the point. Now someone has come up with Assisted Living: The Musical. Next? Suicide: The Musical? I'm sorry but I don't think those work so well. The first word needs to start with "M." We in the word biz call that "alliteration." Murder, The Musical. There you go.

Village Whiskey on a Rainy Evening

2009-09-28T15:48:00.004-04:00

It had been months since Mr. Dream Kitchen and I had ventured into Center City, just the two of us. He goes there every weekday for work and so the pull is less for him than for me. Plus we have been cutting corners, and paying babysitters is one of the corners. But the boys really miss their babysitter, and I was needing my city fix, so we went on Saturday night.

We visited Village Whiskey, an American bar owned by the prolific (is that the adjective?) Jose Garces (Amada, Tinto, Distrito,Chifa, Mercat a la Planxa). It's next door to Tinto. VW is just a small bar with expertly crafted cocktails and well-made, fresh bar food.

We had to wait a while to get in. We wandered along the 2000 block of Sansom St., one of my favorite blocks in the city. The Rosin Box, a tiny shop selling ballet paraphernalia, has been there for decades, as has Home Sweet Homebrew, with its brewing supplies. And of course there's the Roxy Screening Room, a small independent movie theater that has been showing indie films way before the term indie came about. The feisty little shops on this block, selling their one thing that they believe in, always make me feel optimistic about Philadelphia. But it was also delightful to discover new places like Noble, an eat-local shrine with simple, clean aesthetics. Or the Adrienne Theater, home of Interact Theatre Company. As we walked past the theater, a young hipster (I hate the word "hipster;" I can't believe I used it) remarked to his young hipster (dang!) friends, "You know what I could really go for right now? Nutmeg. About a teaspoonful." I'm still trying to figure that one out.

Next door to Tinto is a shop of crafts and jewelry made from recycled and salvaged goods. My favorite item was a silvery mannequin with a four-bulb light fixture sprouting athletically out of her head. We started to get really hungry and it began to rain lightly so we returned to Village Whiskey and sat at the bar. The bar of the bar, that is, until they found us a little table by the side window.

John had cask-conditioned Victory Hop Devil and I chose an "Aviation"-- which had gin, crème de violette, maraschino, and lemon. Yes, creme de violette. It was a little like drinking perfume and was even slightly lavender in hue, but I knew I had to try it. How can a girl resist purple liqueur? It was a lovely drink although I may never order it again. Just think, if I had ordered an Old Fashioned, with a plate of Cheese Puffs, it would be like a cocktail party at my Nana's house! (And I mention those cocktail parties, along with recipes, in the amazingly funny, poignant memoir I just wrote!! There's my marketing for the day. Know any agents?) The Maraschino cherry at the bottom of my glass was like no other I've ever had. It was dark red not neon red, and tasted divine. I wonder if it was an actual marasca cherry, but then maybe I was in a swoon at that point. All oddness aside, it was a dreamy drink.

I decided to cut a deal with myself: I would get a veggie burger if I could have gelato afterwards at Capogiro. John ordered the hamburger with smoked blue cheese and Oh! My! Was it ever good! I had several bites of it. I generously offered my veggie burger to him but he was less appreciative. What an ingrate. My veggie burger was great, topped with guacamole and pickled cabbage, but I'm a terrible vegetarian if I'm anywhere near a decent hamburger.

We also shared an order of duck fat fries, very decadent. We also ordered a magnificent little bar snack, pickled cipollino onions with white anchovies, along with a little side cup of olive spread. Thin slices of sourdough accompanied this. Such a bright contrast with the burgers, cool and refreshing, even the anchovies. White anchovies are bigger, more like small herring, and they weren't that salty. Really a great complement to the onions.

Mr. Dream Kitchen and I were very cozy in our little corner, especially as it started to rain harder outside. We decided not to look at the dessert menu, since we had planned to hit Capogiro all along, but now we regret that. It's not on the website so now we have no idea what they have. We ambled across the street to Capogiro, where we split a dish with four scoops of gelato:

Bitter Salted Almond
Mexican Coffee
Tahini
Dulce de Leche

The Bitter Salted Almond was our favorite. We had a while before the train, so we sat there while several groups of teenage girls came and went. (Do they appreciate gelato adequately? I hope so. I ate at Friendly's when I was that age.) I regaled Mr. Dream Kitchen with plots of the short stories in Olive Kitteridge until he begged for mercy. Which you may be doing now, dear reader. Plus, I need to reheat some meatloaf for dinner. Back to reality. Thud.

Complex is Good

2009-09-22T14:46:00.005-04:00

I finished Lorrie Moore's new novel, The Gate at the Stairs. All of yesterday I spent basking in post-novel bliss. No calories! It is a tragicomic work that will take you to a territory you won't regret visiting. It includes an expose of the hollowest sort of political correctness, a admiring sendup of haute cuisine, a poignant view of young love and the disillusionment that follows, a complicated portrait of motherhood, a celebration of female friendship, and an anatomy of grief.

Somehow, like a really good chili that asks you to use chipotles, cocoa, and beer, along with a dozen other ingredients, these disparate elements create something complex, mysterious, and wonderful.

BURP.

On Our Table Next Week Fresh from Lancaster County

2009-09-18T10:41:00.007-04:00

Every week we get a "shopping list" from our CSA, Lancaster Farm Fresh. Here is what we'll be eating next week, with my comments.

1 bag red beets – certified organic - Farmdale Organics – 3 lb.
OK, this time I'm making Oonie's grated beet salad. She's told me about this before, but I keep forgetting. The recipe is Mark Bittman's. I'm sure I have it somewhere.

1 bunch lacinato kale – certified organic – Farmdale Organics.
This cooks down a lot and is good on pizza with sausage.

1 head napa cabbage – certified organic – Bellview Organics.
Hmmm. Stir fry?

1 bunch white beets – certified organic – Windy Hollow Organics.
MORE beets? Sheesh. All food is a gift. Gift. Gift. Must remember that.

1 red bell pepper – certified organic – Meadow Valley Organics.
Easiest thing to use. Salad, pizza, anything. Wish it was four and not one.

1 bunch tatsoi – certified organic – Hillside Organics.
An Asian green that I used this past week with rice, red peppers, sausage (beef, grass-fed). What can I say, I counteract bitter greens with sausage. It's a political compromise and a great combo.

2 heads red romaine – certified organic – Life Enhancing Acres.
The tips of the leaves are dark red. Pleasantly assertive. Salad, best used right away, although romaine lasts longer than other lettuces.

1 winter squash (mixed variety) – certified organic – Green Acres Organics.
Risotto with sage and parmesan. That's one of my favorite risottos. Or baked with a little maple syrup? Squash bread? This can sit awhile in my onion/potato/squash basket while I cogitate upon its highest purpose.

1 head green broccoli – certified organic – Pleasant Valley Organics.
Finally! Everyone knows what to do with this. I like to steam it in big stalks for the boys and then call it "trees." They boys are getting so they don't need these games anymore, though. But maybe I do.

2 bunches baby bok choy – certified organic – Scarecrow Hill Organics.
Tatsoi and bok choy? These Asian greens do like to stick together. All greens cook down fast and they're all great with a little garlic and tamari. I'm supposed to write an article about Scarecrow Hill, bok choy folks, for the Summer issue of Edible Chesapeake.

1 bag sweet potatoes – certified organic – Busy Bee Acres – 3 lb.
I love sweet potatoes, while others in this household do not share the sentiment. If I want to go decadent, there's an amazing Spiced Sweet Potato Cake with Brown Sugar Icing that is a rich crowd-pleasing way to celebrate the harvest. No one turns that down. I confess I even add a cup of toasted pecans.

1 bag onions – transitional* – Taste of Nature Farm – 2 lb.
Onions are under-appreciated, the Cinderella of the vegetable world. But you can caramelize them, bake them, roast, or grill them. They can be dressed up and taken out, and make you proud.

Fruit Share

12 gala apples – organically grown – Eden Valley Orchard.
We go through four apples a day, so these won't last long.

And tonight? I'm making Cold Sesame Egg Noodles, with with un-CSA scallions and cilantro, just because we're going to a potluck and Sesame Noodles are a fabulously popular, easy dish.

*"Transitional" means the farm is in the process of going organic, but hasn't met the official standards yet.

Beaten Up Bread

2009-09-16T08:54:00.005-04:00

I made Beet Nut Bread, really. But Will thought I said "Beaten Up Bread." I used sunflower seeds instead of nuts because he doesn't appreciate nuts quite yet. (Next I'm going to try grinding them, but he'll probably still notice.) A very good recipe, and the red beet color makes the batter pink, but not the bread once it is baked. Like those glorious purple beans that end up normal green once you cook them. Only not like purple potatoes, which stay purple.

Beets, beets, beets. What are we to do with beets? They are so stubbornly beet-y and if you need to disguise them, the best way indeed is to "beat them up," to bake them into cakes and breads. I've made a very tasty chocolate beet cake called "Secret Chocolate Cake" in Simply in Season. Disguise is simply the best recourse in our family, as the inherent personality of a beet is not appreciated, even by me, I confess. It took decades for me to admit that they repel me in a mild but persistent way, sort of like the color mauve. I've roasted them and all sorts of things, but they're still beets.

Chocolate Chips and Lorrie Moore

2009-09-10T06:53:00.003-04:00

Some people like to throw chocolate chips into everything. Pumpkin bread? Sure. Banana bread? Well, yeah. Pancakes? Shudder. My boys were at a sleepover this past weekend where the dad made pancakes with chocolate chips in the pattern of a smiley face. At a certain point one thinks that one should put the chips away.

And so it is with the fiction of Lorrie Moore, not with chocolate chips, but with jokes and puns. Many of her female characters make puns and crack jokes, really clever ones. I find it a bit tiresome, although I usually like these neurotic women. I've read Self Help, Birds of America, and People Like That Are the Only People Here. (The title story is amazing.) She has a comic genius, rare for a critically acclaimed woman writer.

But her work isn't comic through and through, just studded with bits of it, so you can be lulled into not expecting the darkness that is coming. One day eight years ago, I was lounging about on my easy chair, seven or eight months pregnant, with my toddler playing at my feet, as I read the short story collection Birds of America. The main character in one of the short stories is at an outdoor party, and she picks up a baby to cuddle. She trips over something and the baby lands on a stone wall and dies. I slammed the book shut, sentenced it to rot next to my old college copy of Joseph Fielding, and didn't look at it again for five years.

Now I've started her new book, A Gate at the Stairs, with more than a little intrepidation. I'm less hormonal--well, no, just differently hormonal. But what intrigues me is that she goes really easy on the chocolate chips and engages life more directly, or at least her characters do. The comic edge is definitely still there, but more deeply embedded in the narrator's sensibility. However, according to reviews in Slate and Harper's, something really bad goes down, in the last third of the book. To a small child.

Meanwhile, I have a bag of chocolate chips in the freezer, ready and waiting.

The Incredible Shrinking Zucchini

2009-09-08T11:54:00.000-04:00

The weirdest thing happened. For Labor Day festivities, I made Steve Raichlin's Grilled Zucchini Salad from The Barbecue! Bible. (Yes, the exclamation mark is in the title.) I doubled the recipe, which meant it was supposed to serve eight. Yet, after I had cut up the slabs of zucchini which I had grilled so patiently in two batches, it made a measly little heap in my red serving bowl. You know that nesting Pyrex bowl set from the 1950s that goes blue red green yellow? Yellow being the biggest? The Grilled Zucchini Salad filled up about two thirds of that small red bowl. Not only does it shrink with cooking, but then again with chopping the long slices into quarter-inch strips.

At least the salad was zesty, with lemon juice, cumin, paprika, garlic, and mint that Will picked from the garden. A tiny, spunky salad, like Rhea Perlman, only not funny.

Good thing I had another dish to make,the opposite of small and green. Fresh Gingerbread with Lemon Icing, from Nigella Lawson's How to Be a Domestic Goddess, is luscious and large. I was too lazy to grate fresh ginger, having just slaved away grilling a mountain of zucchini that had so sadly shrunken to a little molehill, so I used two tablespoons of ground ginger and no harm done. Her icing amount is way off, though. I had to make another batch just to cover the gingerbread, let alone give it the nice blanket of icing in the picture. Fie on those food stylists and their manipulations!

I was beginning to feel like Alice in Through the Looking Glass, what with everything shrinking. Fortunately I am not growing mysteriously huger myself, like Alice did. Wait, that's not true. My fallen arches have just in the last couple of months caused my feet to "grow" a bit past what I consider to be an acceptable woman's shoe size. Would that I still wore a dainty size 9. I laugh to think of when I was in high school and coveted a size 6. Now I'm into the dreaded two digits, which is just weird.

You know what else is weird? Even though the zucchini salad was so small, I still have half of it left over. And even though the gingerbread was so big, it's all gone.

Black Olives, Anchovies, Tomatoes and Wine

2009-09-04T08:02:00.001-04:00

The other day I was browsing through chicken recipes in Epicurious, when I realized with a start that I had every ingredient for William Sertl's Chicken Provencal. Brine-cured black olives? Yes. Anchovies? Yes, and not an unopened can but recent leftover ones from a sauce I had made the other day for pork--yes!! What a rim shot this recipe was.

I doubled the recipe, which led to a lot of sauce, but I rummaged around in my cupboard and found some Israeli couscous, which I have a bit of a thing for. So I browned it in a little olive oil and cooked it in water, and voila, there it was in all its glorious chewy-eyeball texture. Everyone liked it. We had leftovers for lunch yesterday, and I boiled up some orzo because the Israeli couscous was gone (because, ahem, I had eaten it). "Hey, this isn't Israeli couscous!" exclaimed Sherlock.

Speaking of Provence, which I was, because Provencal means "of Provence," did you know I spent spring vacations there in eighth and ninth grades? My father was stationed in Germany and we traveled whenever we could. I don't remember olives, anchovies, tomatoes, or wine but I remember sweets, because that's the wavelength I was on at the time. Fragrant, grainy lavender honey and marrons glaces, and creme de marrons. Marrons is French for chestnuts. I never knew, before that vacation, anything about eating chestnuts, except for that Christmas song about roasting them over an open fire. Ever since the American Chestnut blight in late 19th and early twentieth centuries, we don't really have any chestnut trees to speak of. Not a good time for American Chestnuts or Indians.

About the Israeli couscous, it's not that hard to find. It takes longer to cook than the more usual couscous (Gentile couscous?) because there's that browning step and then a twelve-minute cooking time. But worth it.

The boys and I will make the most of this last gasp of summer by taking the train to the city (That would be Philadelphia.) We'll go to the Reading Terminal Market to eat at the Down Home Diner, and make our ritual pilgrimage to Franklin Square for miniature golf among small replicas of Philadelphia landmarks. And the highlight of the day for Jack and Will? A visit to Daddy's cubicle. We think someone has been reading too much Dilbert.

On Selling Space and Finding It

2009-09-03T10:26:00.007-04:00

Hyperbole Alert Status If You Live in Swarthmore: ORANGE. If You Live Elsewhere: YELLOW

It started out innocently enough. My friend asked me to help her publish the elementary school's student directory. I like my friend, in fact that's why she's my friend, and I said, "OK." We agreed that I would sell advertising space, because I don't mind calling strangers and asking them for things. It's a skill I developed long ago in my college summers, when I did telephone surveys about toothpaste, soap, and the Yellow Pages. The Yellow Pages survey was on the computer, ooooh. We all loved that one. Except when I asked someone if they had used the Yellow Pages to find a funeral home in the past 30 days, and she started crying.

So I pictured myself knocking on the doors of the businesses in my little town for a couple of days. Everyone would be so glad of the opportunity to support the community that they would whip out their checkbooks with a smile. Even the little shop that sells stale nuts and coffee, the one that gets like one customer a day. Gee, maybe they should advertise locally! She would love me for presenting such a great idea. I assumed that the local business folk would know what kind of ad they wanted and be perfectly capable of emailing me a PDF, which I would forward to the printer with no problems. My boys would love perambulating about the town with me and would be ever so cute, proof that the local elementary school is stellar, producing fine young civic-minded children! I even thought that people would return my phone calls. But--not necessarily, forget it, occasionally, sometimes, and not so much.

So. I wanted to find a place where I could take out some frustration. And the best place I could think of was Dream Kitchen, a musty old place where no one ever goes any more. Here I am standing in a dark dusty corner of it, and I'm going to scream right here, where no one can hear or see me. Right now. "AAAAAAAAUUUUUGGGGGHHHHH!"

That felt good. Really good. Hmmm, now that I think about it, the advertising job actually isn't that bad after all. It's kind of fun. The realtors are really nice and take out full page ads. One is not afraid to gossip a little! Love them! And the guys who run that solar energy place are cute as hell. Go suck an egg, little nut shop!

Well, thank you Dream Kitchen, this has been great. I'll have to come back. Don't change the locks.

Night at the Improv: Vegetarian Chili

2008-12-13T22:00:00.002-05:00

I could have called this post "Night at the Improv: Chili," because almost all our meals are vegetarian any more, but I love the sanctimonious ring of "Vegetarian." However, the word "flexitarian," like the word "webinar," does not attract me. Even though "flexitarian" describes me, I eschew it.

Here is what you do. In the morning at breakfast, think, "Tonight will be a good chili night!" Retrieve about a pound of dried beans, red or black would be best, from your cupboard. Possibly they are in a bag slumped behind the oatmeal container. Soak them all day in a whole bunch of water; it should cover the beans at all times and the beans will swell.

About an hour and a half before dinner, drain the beans and cover them again with water, and cook them until they seem done. This will be at least 40 minutes. Meanwhile, heat up your cast-iron Dutch oven. You don't have one? Ask for one for Christmas. I use mine three times a week, at least. In the mean time, a big pot will do just fine. Put a little olive oil in. Dice an onion and add it to the hot oil. Celery or carrot is nice if you have it. If only I had had one fresh jalapeno (take out the seeds if you're going for moderate heat) and a fresh green pepper last time I made it, alas. Add a couple tablespoons chili powder, a teaspoon of cumin if you like that. I do. Coriander? Another possibility. A little cocoa powder adds depth, and a blob of jarred mole will add depth as well as a more complex heat. That would probably already have a touch of chocolate. And if you don't demand depth or complexity from your chili, I can only say--how sad for you. Saute the vegetables and spices until soft, 5-7 minutes.

Drain the beans when they're done and add them along with a can or two of diced tomatoes, tomato paste if you love that tomato flavor, which my husband doesn't, and some corn, perhaps, especially if you're cooking black beans. Corn is controversial in my family. A chipotle in adobo sauce would be daring, wouldn't it? Now might be a good chance to get rid of one of those cans of dull beer that lurk unwanted in your fridge, something like that Shiner Bock from your friends who developed a taste for it at Rice University (Hi, Bob and Nikkola!). So just open the can and pour some in. Let the chili simmer gently for 30 minutes or more. Cornbread and a salad top off this simple meal. It is frighteningly easy to make cornbread, please don't even tell me that you buy it.

Chili is even better the next day and just marvelous for the rest of the week.

Third Grade International Food Meltdown

2008-10-15T20:55:00.004-04:00

Help me. Please.

On Oct. 25 the third grade will have an International Lunch. That's all very well and good. But then they put us hapless parents into culinary straitjackets that we just cannot wiggle out of. Here are the restrictions primly listed on the memo, in which the lunch sounds less and less fun the farther down the list you get.

Our contribution must be . . . Asian. You know, like the wontons my Irish ancestors always fried up in a pot with the kelp, or hmmm, how about that pretty mean Pad Thai that John's Swiss German Mennonites made . . . a little melted Emmenthaler on the top. Yum.)

No refrigeration is available. Forget the vegetarian sushi from Trader Joe's.

No oven or microwave is available. Forget any main dish that isn't sushi.

Bring enough for two to four children. OK, nothing large, not a big problem.

Nothing can be packed up and brought home with the children. Nothing large. Again.

We're supposed to list the ingredients. That may not be possible if I get it from Shere-e-Punjab.

Nothing can be cooked or prepared with peanuts. Fair enough. We're pretty used to that one. But I don't want to inspect Shere-e-Punjab's kitchen.

At least we get to pick which course. Hmmm. Asian desserts don't do a lot for me. So not that. Jack likes gulab jamun, there's a thought. But that sticky syrup might spill . . . I think I'm going to pick up four samosas at Shere-e-Punjab. Usually I like to cook something for special meals like this, but all these stipulations have whittled down the universe of delectable dishes down to almost nothing but fortune cookies. And no one makes those.

Any suggestions?

A Visit to Brasserie Perrier, Special Bourgeois Version

2008-09-22T21:24:00.001-04:00

This is what passes for a restaurant review on my blog, my first ever, really.

Last Friday, John, otherwise known as the resident husband in the Dream Kitchen, met me at the 17th and JFK entrance to Suburban Station. We walked on over to Brasserie Perrier, where we had reservations. It was Restaurant Week, which meant that many Phila. restaurants offered economical fixed-price meals. Regional rail was free after 6:30, too. We decided to go to Brasserie Perrier because we can't afford its pricy sibling restaurant, Le Bec Fin, and wanted to go French. Plus I love the word "brasserie," which I imagine describes a small restaurant, a little noisier than one would like, intimate and friendly. Low warm lighting with a lot of brass. I don't know, it's just a cool word, and the word "brass" is already in it.

So we go in, and it's hopping by the bar area and beyond to the small tables in just the atmosphere described above, pretty much. We had early reservations, for six o'clock, just because we are creatures of habit from Stepford, and we always eat then. But the place is, as I said, really hopping. The hostess suddenly whisks us--where?--upstairs. Hmm. To a banquet room. A banquet room! What kind of brasserie is that? It had no windows and wall to wall carpet and bizarrely high ceilings and the kind of chairs you sit on at conventions. My heart sank. Perhaps we had been relegated to sit with all the other second-class Restaurant Week people, the chubby tourists and oldsters. Ew, I said "oldsters." I was feeling that what we were going to get was going to be a not very convincing simulacrum of a "normal" BP meal, away from the thin well-dressed, sparkling crowd below. Oh, and the dull department-store wattage lighting didn't make anyone look any more glamorous than we actually were.

All right, well, let's soldier on, we thought. I ordered a Caesar salad, a dish appropriately boring to the atmosphere, but in my defense, I wanted to get a vegetable appetizer if I was going to have fish for the main dish, and they didn't have any vegetarian entrees, how overly French of them. They don't have to be that French. But it wasn't French enough to have organ meat. Anyway, the Caesar salad. It was good, not enough anchovy flavor, just good in an ordinary way. But it did come with a delectable round crisp made of Parmesan, similar to something we had at Tinto in May. John ordered escargots because he had them once in his youth and fancies himself an escargots man. They were quite tasty in their buttery sauce.

John had scallops for his main course and I had salmon with brussel sprouts and bacon. The waiter asked me how I wanted my salmon cooked, and maybe I don't get out much, but I've never been asked that about fish. It was perfect, just barely done. Really a great dish; the brussel sprouts were "baby" and balanced out perfectly with the bacon and a littl mustard in the sauce. John's scallops were fabulous.

A word about the waiter. I found him a tad robotic. They bring out the robots for Restaurant Week? I had a question for him, "What is that lemony herb on my husband's scallops?" He said, "I don't know, but maybe it's chizzo." Now I've looked up "chizzo" and can't find it, so maybe he said something else. John suspects that the server got confused with an earlier version of the Restaurant Week menu, in which the scallops were served with "chorizo orzo." That would be a heinous error. So the hapless server goes on to say, "Or, it could just be something the chef threw in." Now this is the moment when Mr. Robot should have said, "Let me find out what it is," returning in a minute with an answer. But no. Not for the Restaurant Week people. We are left to wonder in perpetuity.

Dessert? We both got apple galette with caramel ice cream. It was a flat perfectly circular disk of pastry with razor-thin apple slices overlapping perfectly, topped with amazingly caramel-y ice cream. Real caramel has that addictive burnt taste. When I was child I used to make caramel by melting sugar in a spoon over a gas flame, and pouring it into a glass of cold water. This ice cream tasted like that. I may not be making it sound good, but it was. The galette itself was quite tasty, but you should know that I like desserts to be voluptuous, not thin disks. A galette, especially, should be free form.Leave it to the pies and tarts to be circular.

Finally, and I see that I'm sounding cranky, we were rushed along by the server, each course being brought promptly after we had finished the previous. We even had to order the dessert when we ordered everything else. We finished dessert at 6:55, which is pathetic on a Friday night. I think the moral of this is: Restaurant Week is Restaurant Week.

The Beauty of the Bean

2008-09-19T10:48:00.003-04:00

With with all this talk of financial troubles, contaminated meat, an obesity epidemic, and the need to eat sustainably, it's time to consider the lowly bean.

It's beans and more beans here in the Dream Kitchen these days. They're cheap, very good for us, have no packaging if bought dry, and are generally liked by the whole family. I recently made Black Bean Chili with Butternut Squash and Swiss Chard. I used delicata squash and kale, and it worked very well. It was better the second day, as the spices "married" the other ingredients, as my mother used to say. Even Mr. Picky had seconds.

This weekend I'm making a double batch of Chipotle Pinto Beans from Simply in Season; we'll take it to a brunch for Swarthmore College students that my church has every month, hosted by members of the church. I'm hoping there will some left over for our family. Next on my bean agenda? I want to feed the organizers and volunteers at the Obama campaign office in Chester one of these days. Vegetarian chili sounds like a good idea for them. I can just send the crockpot along with my boarder, one of the Chester organizers. He works extremely hard but I fear he exists on a diet of pizza and Coke.

So, beans. What else? Every so often I use chickpeas to make hummus, zesty with fresh garlic and lemon juice. I will say that when I go through the trouble of soaking and boiling up a bunch of beans, I always make extra to have on hand. They're fine on a salad, or you can whip up a bean dip or make soup with them.

It's actually quite difficult to overpraise the humble bean. Have I succeeded?

Manayunk, at Last

2008-08-28T17:30:00.000-04:00

I finally went to Manayunk.

How many years have I known about Manayunk's renaissance? Twenty years? Sad. Anyhow, John and I needed an excuse, and so we found one. We need a doorknocker. And a new mailbox. So we thought we'd check out Restoration Hardware, which happens to be located in Manayunk. Our babysitter was available on Saturday so we tooled on over.

Manayunk is fairly funky if you ignore the Pottery Barn. And the Restoration Hardware, which did have predictably acceptable door hardware. I fell in love with Artesano Iron Works, just under the big bridge on the west side of Main St. In fact, I have a terrible crush on a copper-topped table and chairs there. Their furniture is made of reclaimed lumber from Colombia. It's very heavy and square but has ornate ironwork on some of it, so some of the pieces look like treasure chests. The big old bridge, resplendent with arches, looms over the shop.

The best thing about Manayunk isn't the shops or the restaurants but the edginess of it, real edginess, not manufactured by a "loft" condo developer. The Manayunk Canal drifts dankly by, as you sip your California Dreamin' IPA at Manayunk Brewery and Restaurant. You can see people walking up on the railroad trestle high above the Schuylkill River next to the canal. A couple of kids jump into the river from that height, which surprises you.

After supper you walk along the Schuylkill River Trail, narrowly avoiding getting slammed by bicyclists. Across the canal, young men play a pickup game in a weedy city basketball court. Beyond the river, cars rush by on the Schuylkill Expressway. The sky turns pink and gray as you walk along. It's a Saturday night in late August. You walk in towards Main St. , where two tired women sit on a bench. There are more "For Rent" signs at this end of town than there should be. You see a sign for the SEPTA station and so you look for it. The tracks are elevated, and rise above the length of Cresson St., dwarfing and dominating the shops. Under the tracks you find The Cresson Inn, "Where the Real Yunkers Drink." All two of them. Edward Hopper, where are you now?

You could be "down the shore," but no, you're in Manayunk. It's hard to think of a more bittersweet place to be at summer's end.

Did You Know Vincent Price Wrote a Cookbook?

2008-08-24T14:12:00.000-04:00

Why yes, he did. Of course he did, or I wouldn't have asked you if you knew that he wrote one. Silly!

Here is a lovely review of it. I don't know why we should be surprised that a scary person wrote a cookbook. I mean, look at Rachael Ray--she has written several, much to the dismay of these people. I know I've put that link on this blog before, but I just can't help myself. Whenever I'm a little down in the dumps, I like to get my fix from the "Rachael Ray Sucks Community." Seriously, there are some fine epithet-hurlers on that site.

You ask, "What's been happening in the Dream Kitchen lately?" Right now we are awash in peaches. I made Peach Crumb Cake the other day for a playdate, the kind of playdate where you want the mom to come over too, not the Please Drop Your Kid Off and Go Away kind of playdate. Everyone liked it. Then we've been just slicing the rest and eating them with waffles or mixed with melon. Will eats them whole with the fuzzy skin, which he doesn't mind. He's very fussy about food, with certain notable exceptions, peach fuzz and now ants. Yesterday he squashed an ant, washed it, and ate it.

I've been saving watermelon rind in the freezer with vague plans of making watermelon pickle, but now I'm wondering if freezing the rinds first will be disadvantageous in some way . . . I don't want to sweat over a hot stove making a condiment that has the texture of leather. Any thoughts out there?

And the answer to my last blog post's stumper is "sregoob ergo."

Okra Alert

2008-08-20T09:18:00.002-04:00

Hello dear faithful readers and those just stumbling upon the Dream Kitchen accidentally in the middle of the night in your far-flung Scandinavian countries and rural Asian outposts. I've been soooo busy with my MFA, laundry, kids, and compulsive Facebook status checking, that I've neglected this blog for months.

BUT it looks like I'll be advertising on here, details of which I can't reveal right now, due to a confidentiality agreement I just signed, so I'm trying to revive my readership before that starts. I was approached by (NAME OF ONLINE ENTITY HERE) just as I was thinking of throwing in the towel. I can always use a little cash to pay my tuition, after all.

So. We got okra in the CSA last week, which is historic. Never before in the history of our various CSA memberships, have we been graced with this quirky veggie. Should I make gumbo or fry it, I asked myself? That's all I could think of, but neither seemed satisfactory. I don't make much soup in the summer, and I don't really fry anything, ever. After consulting the vegetable goddess, Deborah Madison, I learned that it's very tasty grilled, which is exactly the permission I needed.

I grilled them whole on skewers, and also grilled some mild onions and green peppers. I cooked some basmati to go with the veggies, and added a little lemon juice and sesame oil to the rice. My boys always like to put some tamari on rice, so we had that on the table as well. You're wondering, "Come on. Did the children actually eat okra?"

Not really. I wanted to put as attractive a spin on the okra concept as possible, and for boys their age it's paradoxically best to make it sound as gross as possible. The soup my sister in law made two weeks ago had "pond scum" on it (pesto) which they loved. I'm not even going to tell you what I called these slimy treats, but maybe you can guess.

Politics and Dessert Mix Just Fine

2008-03-27T15:22:00.004-04:00

I like the words Nigella Lawson makes up, or perhaps they're just English slang, like "whinge." Whatever they are, "wodge" is a fine example. It so perfectly describes the dark damp slab of her Chocolate Gingerbread. In fact, I'd be lost without the word "wodge" to describe it. I cut several wodges to take to a meeting at my friend R's house, where, apparently, CBS will be interviewing "Delaware County Moms" about the election. (How I hate the word "moms." Oh well.) I am going to get a word in for my candidate, and call my dessert Chocobama Gingerbread, just for the evening. See, I can make up words too. Except I've seen the word "chocobama" before, now that I think of it. Somewhere.

Even Hillary fans and--shudder--Republicans will love this unity (get it?) of gingerbread and chocolate.

French Connection: Our Daily Habit

2008-03-25T21:36:00.000-04:00

My bread machine is in semi-retirement lately, only being hauled out once a week to make pizza dough. The paddle kept getting stuck in the bread and I had to help it too much with the initial mixing. It sulks most of the week in the garage next to the recycling.

My latest bread obsession is the baguette, not a fancy just-like-the-French kind, but a good-enough-for-us kind. I make it every couple of days. I found the recipe in Gourmet about ten years ago, and here it is. It's so easy and delicious, great for sandwiches. I bake it on a pizza stone. Use a serrated break knife to make the three slashes; otherwise you will squish the dough. If you want it extra crusty, brush the top with ice water just before baking. You can put the kneaded dough in the fridge overnight, if you wish; just let it get to room temperature before shaping into the loaf. I slice the bread parallel to the slashes, to get bigger pieces for sandwiches. The other thing is I use 2 teaspoons salt, not 2 1/2.

I buy ten-pound bags of flour at BJ's for $4.99, so we're saving some money, too. Of course, my family is totally spoiled now, and I must remind them frequently how good they have it. Sigh.

Happy baking.

Best Chocolate Cake Recipe is . . .

2008-03-22T21:04:00.002-04:00

the one on the Hersey's Cocoa container. Apologies to Richard Sax and Nigella Lawson. I did add a rounded teaspoon of espresso powder to the frosting, which always adds a nice kick. Next time I will sift the cocoa and confectioner's sugar, too.

It was for my father-in-law's 80th birthday. I made Corned Beef and Cabbage, and the cake was accompanied by Maple Walnut Ice Cream, total overkill, you don't even have to tell me. We used the last of the Grade B syrup we got in Vermont in June. This year we'll get two jugs of the stuff.

Urf, I'm full and tired. Time to walk the neglected dog. Fortunately, I knew I'd be tired of cooking for the inlaws for a week and so we are going to Roux 3 for brunch tomorrow. Aaaah. Then on to Longwood Gardens to walk it off.

Oh, why are my inlaws here for nine days, you ask? It could be because we sent them Amtrak tickets for Christmas? Yeah, that's it. And because life is short and we want to spend it with people we love? My mom kicked the bucket a bit early and surprised the heck out of us, when I was pregnant with Jack. It gives me a little perspective.

___________________-

Thought for the Day: This from my mentor in my MFA program who was an editor at the Atlantic for a few decades. I asked him if he had ever read any blogs. He said, "One." So I said, "And?" And he replied, "They're either a waste of effort, or not enough effort, I'm not sure which."

I'm Wearing Green Plastic Beer Mug Earrings, What About You?

2008-03-17T21:40:00.002-04:00

Whenever St. Patrick's Day rolls around, I always realize how sartorially challenged I am when it comes to green clothes. But I did unearth the abovementioned ugly earrings and wore them, the good sport that I am. Jack and Will wrote in green gel pen all over their forearms. Did you know that gel pens rinse off with only water?

Since my inlaws are here, as you all know, we didn't drink any St. Patty's Day beer. They're teetotallers. Right now I'm writing this in the sunroom and drinking a very tannic red wine, but they are elsewhere. Not that they would mind all that much, but it just feels weird to drink beer in front of them. It's not as fun as usual. Oh, and Holy Week puts a bit of a damper on a drinking holiday and all that. I heard that St. Patty's Day only occurs during Holy Week once in a lifetime so it's good to have gotten this unfortunate coincidence out of the way.

Anyways, I did make a jolly brilliant attempt at a St. Patty's Day Dinner. No meat, in keeping with the Lenten spirit. Also because I ran out of time; you need hours for corned beef and cabbage. We had the patriotically named "Pride of Erin" Soup, spinach salad with bits of bleu cheese, bagels (a desparate last-minute add-on) and Parsnip Spice Cake with Ginger Cream Cheese Frosting (only with a teaspoon lemon juice instead of ginger in the frosting, and no vanilla).

I got to use my immersion blender to make the soup. You must understand that I LOVE my immersion blender. I should have a job selling only immersion blenders. The Immersion Blender Lady. It makes me sad, though, to think of the years I spent schlepping scalding hot cups of soup into and out of a blender, spilling it and burning myself. The soup was mainly cabbage and a little potato, some chicken stock, milk and mace. Not the medieval weapon or the modern spray used to deter attackers, merely the spice.

The cake, which I made last March for the first time, was assertive in spice and parsnipness, but not in a bad way. Will didn't touch it because he "hates parsnips," even though he has never tasted one. My mother in law frosted it and I drew a huge sloppy shamrock in green frosting and voila, a St. Patrick's Day Cake. Then we grownups were treated to a special dance show, in which the boys danced wildly to "The Mesopotamians" by our family's favorite band, They Might Be Giants.

So all in all it was the most pleasant Mesopotamian Irish Mennonite St. Patty's in recent memory.

If I Were a Huge Fat Alien Falling from the Sky over Philadelphia . . .

2008-03-14T10:43:00.001-04:00

. . . I would hope to avoid landing on this.

What's Hot, What's Not

2008-03-13T09:36:00.002-04:00

What's hot and what's not, in the mind of Lauren. Here's the top twelve. I don't have time to write complete sentences today. My very clean inlaws are coming tomorrow and staying here. For nine days.

Giving things away/shopping
CSA and local market/supermarket
Using the library/buying books
Making bread/buying bread
Gray hair/colored hair
Glasses/contacts
Working out/ making excuses
Reading classics/reading chick lit
Barack/Hillary
Sidewalks/streets
Train/car
50/40
Collies/golden labs, retrievers, doodles

I sound disgustingly self-righteous. Better rectify that--
Beer/seltzer
Anxiety/sleep
Dust bunnies/the floor

About Last Night

2008-03-12T14:18:00.000-04:00

Hello long lost readers,

Last night I went bowling with various bloggers noted here (thanks for doing all the work, Domestic Goddess), so I thought, better write a blog entry so they have something to read should they ever wander into the Dream Kitchen. We are all fans of Bossy, who is going on a road trip soon to meet many of her blogging fans. (Saturn, can you send me $10 for that?) Bossy got the highest score, an amazing 113, so no wonder she wanted to go bowling. What a show-off.

I got the low score of 40, but at least I didn't get my thumb stuck in the ball or throw the ball up in the air several feet and have it land with a huge thud. But I did need a ringer to bring my score up from zero (see last link, thanks, R!). Whenever anyone got a gutter ball, huge white letters spelling GUTTER would drift across the screen at the speed of a tortoise. I hate that screen. And whenever you ate a tater tot, it would say HAVING ANOTHER,FATSO? But heck, we were there for the people, and what a great bunch of gals. All women who bowl are gals, you know that? Just for the evening, as long as you're wearing the shoes. Even if you're at the hipster North Bowl in hipster North Liberties, serving its hipster irony-drenched tater tots, it's still a bowling alley, with gals. Gals and fellas.

Before I go, because I promised myself I wouldn't obsess about this entry and edit it a zillion times and write too much and fiddle with the paragraphing when I should really be writing my manuscript (or cleaning my house, or something) I just want to present an award. Nothing to do with bowling bloggers.

It's the award for Best Headline Ever Written About a Politician's Disgrace. This entry received the highest scores ever for brevity, economy, humor, and, for extra credit, rhyme. Please join me in congratulating the New York Post for yesterday's headline, "Ho No!"

Raggedy Grace

2007-12-06T09:46:00.000-05:00

We had our first snowfall of the year yesterday, and this is Zane's first snow ever. He licks it up very fast, as if someone is going to snatch it away from him any second. Here is in a rare moment of repose last evening.

You know the Raggedy Ann in the pictures from yesterday? She was such a good sport about that. Well, I was going to give her to a little girl I know, but Will wants to teach her to fly. And he calls her Raggedy Grace. So I guess that's that.

I've got a major deadline tomorrow, so wish me inspiration and sheer doggedness. I need to stop editing myself before I've put a single word on the page, and I must not be so distractible. I'm going to put my laptop computer in the sunroom, where our wireless doesn't work, so I can't Google anything, check on Facebook, Sitemeter, or anything. It's house arrest for me today.

I promise to write about my project sometime soon.

Due to Popular Demand, Photos and Even More Description of the Toilet

2007-12-05T13:43:00.000-05:00

Oh, all RIGHT. And this is totally the last post about the toilet. Here it is, in use and solo. The tank is much smaller than the 1935 tank we had, so now we have room for towering bottles of body lotion on the top. Very sleek, no? This morning we asked
Will if he flushed it and he said, "Yes, three times!!" I'm not sure he gets it. The button on the left is for pee and the one on the right is for poop and pee, or just poop if that's your style. To spell it all out to you, geez.

Another nifty way to save water (I read somewhere that the word "nifty" is in use again, just as I was about to discard it) is to put an empty plastic bottle in your tank. How elegant is that!

I obviously have no clue how to do layout. My first blog pictures, and they are of a toilet. I'm going to cry.

We Are Now the Proud Owners of--

2007-12-04T14:14:00.000-05:00

A Toto Dual Flush toilet!

What? You know not of what I speak? Please. Let me introduce you. It has two buttons on the lid, one for a small amount of water and one for a larger amount. They're used all over the world. It should save us lots of water over the years, although the toilet cost us a little bundle, and the installation took a while, so installation probably costs more than the toilet. "Tricky" was the word Rick the plumber used. So we said farewell to our old toilet, which Rick said was dated September 11, 1935. That helps us date our house back to exactly . . . 1935!

Rick is still up there, cleaning up, I need to leave in a few minutes to get Will and Jack for swimming, so I'm gettin' a little antsy. We cannot sit on this wonder for six hours. Should I post again on how it works? If there is any demand out there, I'd be glad too. Or that may be Too Much Information.

Media, PA. It's the place to be.

2007-12-03T19:01:00.000-05:00

Every time I go to Media in the evening anymore, it is buzzing! It's the social hub of the county. Now there is a new restaurant of a higher caliber than anything else in the town. It's called Azie, and it's very sleek and sophisticated. John and I went on Saturday, and got a table by the front door. While I wouldn't normally choose that table, it was fun for our first visit, because we got to see the constant stream of diners, of all ages, who came by.

By the time we left, at 8:30, the bar was filled and a line was forming. They opened on October 24 to very good reviews, and we weren't disappointed either. Our waitress was a little overly enthusiastic and peppy, but once we were well into our bottle of Sauvignon Blanc she seemed kind of adorable. We shared an order of Spicy Yellowtail Sushi and a Sashimi Salad. Then John got Pan-Seared Diver Scallops and I got the Yakitori Bowl. Everything was delicious, especially the Sashimi Salad. Its vinaigrette was delicate and floral, and the crab, tuna and (one other fish) was velvety and fresh. For dessert I got green tea ice cream, which was a bit gummy, not gummy-old but just like it had too much carrageenan in it. John got a "Fruits Tart" made with a creme anglaise and fresh peaches, mangoes, blackberries, blueberries? He's not remembering it all. I blame that Sauvignon Blanc.

It's not a small restaurant by any means, but each dining room seems intimate. There's a warmly lit upstairs that we could see looking up to a balcony. We'll ask for that next time. And there's another first floor dining room that is busy and Manhattan-ish in some way I can't define.

Before dinner we browsed at Earth and State, and also at Local Home + Gifts. Earth and State (my ampersand doesn't work) has all fairly traded crafts, and Local Home + Gifts is a very hip store (for Media) with the most amazing scented fir candles burning. We were the only people in the store who weren't gay males. If you want to pay more than 20 dollars for a glorious-smelling candle, or if you are looking to pick up a smashingly groomed 30-something gay male with dreamy eyes, this is the place.

Eat your heart out, Main Line and West Chester.

Shoveling a Path to the Clothesline

2007-12-03T10:24:00.000-05:00

We're taking a big step here. We're trying not to use our clothes dryer.

We're hanging clothes either on the beautiful clothesline that John and my father in law installed right after Thanksgiving, or on a drying rack in basement. I ordered an extra large wooden drying rack that should be in any day, and I just got some eucalyptus lavender fabric softener. Three sets of solid one-piece wooden clothespins are also on their way, along with a clothespin bag. It's a strange time of year to inaugurate an outdoor clothesline, but we really must give Mervin, my father in law, a job when he comes so he doesn't hog my computer playing solitaire. Also, when I saw the clothesline with cedar posts advertised by the Verm*nt Cl*thesline C*mpany, I simply had to have it. Mervin copied the design from their picture on the web, and bought the cedar locally.

So we're a tiny bit more green. I read that a family will save 100 dollars a year not using the dryer, and a blogger somewhere says she saves 60 dollars a month. I guess it depends on your electricity costs, the size of your family and how you define dirty clothes. Some people apparently just wash everything after one wearing, and even wash bath towels after one day! These are not people who line-dry. When you have to actually hang everything up clothespin by clothespin or hanger by hanger or rack by rack, you begin to set more reasonable standards. My boys just throw everything in the hamper because it's easier, and then I cull. (Of course, a little retraining is in order too.)

Hanging laundry outside, when it isn't too cold, is pleasant, even meditative. Our back yard is very private, which helps. I'm not sure how people around here feel about seeing laundry, not that I care. I do hide certain garments behind big towels, and wonder what that says about me. I guess I do care. Oh, speaking of towels, they end up scratchy, but you can fluff them up in the dryer for 5 minutes if you must. My tactic is to use fabric softener, snap the towels before hanging, and then see if anyone complains about them being scratchy. No complaints yet . . . .

Here is something the poet and memoirist Kathleen Norris wrote about hanging laundry. She lives in North Dakota, where the winters are long and severe. I love this image.

During the unspeakably brutal winter of 1996-1997, with nearly thirty inches of snow on the ground by Thanksgiving, I had had enough by the time the spring blizzards came--another three feet of snow and high winds on the eighth of April--that I set out one morning, ablaze with the warmth of an angry determination, to shovel a path to the clothesline in order to hang something colorful there. As I began to handle the wet clothes, my hands quickly reddened, stung with cold, but it seemed worth doing nonetheless, simply to break the hold of winter on my spirit--and to disrupt the monotony of the white moonscape that our backyard had become. And even though the clothes freeze-dried stiffly and had to be thawed in the house, they had the sky-scent of summer on them. And it helped.

Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and Women's Work, p.34

High Birthday Season in the Dream Kitchen

2007-11-29T22:29:00.000-05:00

Jack turned eight, EIGHT! on the 23rd, and Will turns six, SIX! tomorrow. How did this happen so fast? I made Jack and the inlaws Spice Layer Cake with prunes simmered in brandy, out of my Mom's Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook. It was scarfed down by all except Will, who doesn't like any annoying things like fruits or nuts in his cake. Since Will's birthday is on a school day, I made banana chocolate chip muffins for him to share with his classmates. He doesn't find chocolate chips annoying.

This year we are outsourcing their joint party for the first time ever. With last year's Captain Underpants party, I felt that I was just yelling all the time and no one did anything I said. So this year it's at a local gymnastics center, with a "Survival Island," trampolines, foam pit, and climbing wall. We'll bring our own food, which is the way I prefer it. I must say, it's a relief to have a bunch of boys romping around NOT in our house. We don't have a finished basement or any indoor place appropriate for such a party. And they just won't agree to settle for a dainty afternoon tea.

Random Quote of the Day
At the dinner table today we talked about how sometimes we act our age and sometimes we don't. Will said he would act Daddy's age and he yelled in anguish, "I hate this car insurance!!! And see how my butt's sticking out!!"

Next: The Greening of the Laundry

Thanksgiving, the Latest Iteration

2007-11-21T15:46:00.000-05:00

I'm taking a break after making the Cranberry Sauce and Herbed Stuffing. Next? The brine. Then we, meaning I, pick up the fresh turkey and start the brining. Later this evening? The Spiced Pumpkin Pie and the Orleans Sweet-Potato Pecan Pie.

Tomorrow morning? Stage 1 of the gravy-making. Tablecloth-ironing and silver polishing will ensue. This stuff gets delegated to my mother in law or anyone else who will do it and is old enough. John will put the leaves in the table and be the brinemaster. The boys will play and run around. Zane will look endlessly for tasty bits on the floor. Kato the cat will torture Zane by sitting six feet beyond the pet gate and looking pleased with himself. Finally I'll be making the gravy at the very end and ordering everyone the heck out of the kitchen. We'll eat the meal in no time flat, but cleanup will take two hours.

My brother isn't coming, but he wanted to. His girlfriend wasn't granted custody of her children for this holiday and she's sad, and she thinks she would be more sad spending the holiday with us than if they spent it alone, at the Shore.

My Dad will be here, eating way more than he should and watching everyone else do the work. He has again broken up with his lady friend who I love so much. Since she moved to Seattle, it makes sense, but he didn't have to do it so harshly. It must be hard, after being married for decades in an "old-school" marriage, to negotiate the difficult terrain of courtship, or dating, or romance, whatever you call it--with someone who has grown children and who has seen enough in her two marriages to know she doesn't want another husband.

Jack has a tooth, an upper incisor, that is crooked and sticking out. Right behind it you can see the new tooth shoving the front one out. I want to pull this tooth out so bad. So bad.

Happy Thanksgiving to the world, in all its brokenness and incompleteness.

Drunken Noodles Detected in Delaware County

2007-09-30T06:10:00.000-04:00

I'm pleased to say that, yes, we can now find those big wide Thai noodles, with a spicy sauce, just about one mile from out house. On Macdade boulevard, right across the street from Macdade Nails and a defunct Halloween superstore, is Buppha Thai, with its pristine lavender and white dining room.

I took the boys there Tuesday when John was at class, thinking, how great can it be, it's on Macdade. It was lovely, though, and I wished he had been there to discover it with us. I got Drunken Noodles with Scallops, and the boys got dumplings and spring rolls. They weren't called spring rolls but that's pretty much what they were. Jack and Will thought it was great. Jack brought an A-Z Mystery to read and then he wanted to sit on my lap. He's a little big for that, but I let him anyway. Will demolished his spring rolls and made a big mess with shreds of food on the floor. I tipped well to make up for it.We were the only people in the dining room, but a couple people came in for take-out, at least.

There's an overpriced Thai restaurant on Baltimore Pike and a nice one in Media, but this is really close. Three cheers for Buppha Thai, a spot of hope on a tawdry, faded commercial strip. If you live near here, please patronize this oasis at 500 Macdade Blvd. If you don't, then think good thoughts about it . . . .

Castration Anxiety in the House

2007-09-25T06:15:00.000-04:00

Last week I signed a form agreeing to have Zane, our new dog, neutered. The form used not the bland term "neutering," but rather, "castration." Gulp. There he was, sitting next to me at the vets, panting happily and waiting for more dogs or the vet's fat marmalade cat to saunter in to play with him and admire him. Such a happy, trusting pup. I am the one who feeds him, introduces him to the neighbor dogs, brushes him, talks to him in a tone of voice that irritates my husband, and gives him belly rubs. And now I've consented to have his balls cut off.

Jack asks me why can't Zane be a daddy almost every day. "We could just give the puppies to a breeder," he routinely suggests when I say there are too many unwanted puppies in the world. I minimized his impending surgery and said he would still be he same happy dog (perhaps not on the fateful day itself, Oct. 8, his half birthday). We went on:

J: Well, you're neutered, right?

L: I had my tubes tied after Will was born. I'm not neutered! It's different. Zane is a boy, anyway. He's having his testicles cut off. It sounds bad but it isn't. Sometimes men have vasectomies but that's nothing like having testicles cut off. Centuries ago there used to be castrati who had this done. I don't know why. So they could sing with a really high voice, I guess.

J: I can scream really super high. Want to hear me?

L: No.

J: OK. What's your point?

L: I don't know. I'm just going on and on about castration for no reason.

J: Yeah.

Happy Birthday, Christopher Zero

2007-09-24T06:05:00.000-04:00

My church hosts a luncheon once a month for the local college students, and we went yesterday. My conribution was Spiced Sweet Potato Cake with Brown Sugar Icing (I doubled the spices and added a cup of toasted pecans). Will insisted on bringing candles, as it was Christopher Zero's birthday. Christopher Zero is one of his imaginary friends, you see. He used to be Jack's as well, but I think Jack, who is almost eight, wanted to distance himself from such a childish thing. So I brought a candle for Will's piece of cake, asked for a match from the hosts, and he got to blow it out. One of the students asked where Christopher lives, and Will said eastern Ukraine. Turns out it's an eastern Ukraine on another planet, and that also Christopher was with us in some special sense as well. He can "transport" himself at will. That kid has answer for everything.

Oh, by the way, Will is in kindergarten now. Lilian wondered if I was going to write about that. Since he's in the same Montessori classroom for the third year, it's not a momentous transition. First grade is the big transition for my boys, because that's when they start at the public school. We do, however, have Will take the bus in the afternoon, which he loves. That's his special kindergarten privilege. It gives me a little more time to work and it stops right where I wait for Jack. One of the other neighbor moms was a little shocked that he takes it, since it's a 45-minute ride . . . . I will do anything to avoid the school's gridlock at pickup time.

And Jack? He seems to really like second grade. We don't hear very much about it, actually. He won't tell us anything at all about the girls. I guess it's all pretty old hat after last year, sort of the elementary school equivalent of Sophomore Slump. Now that I think about it, we are all in school. Kindergarten, second grade, Master's in Technology Management, Master's in Fine Arts, and Puppy Kindergarten. All right, the cat is not in school. Maybe we can say that now that there's a dog in the house, the cat attends The School of Hard Knocks.

Welcome to the Sourdough Lifestyle

2007-09-23T05:19:00.000-04:00

It all started innocently enough on a summer's evening in July. My neighbor Hazel knocked on our back door just as I was taking a short break from our Sunday night family movie ritual. She thrust a plastic container on me, and said "Here's some sourdough starter. It's from the 17th century. Don't use bleached flour. You just add three cups of flour to it at night, then in the morning put one cup back in the fridge, add 2 cups of water, and__"

"Wait!," I said, "Let me get a pen!"

I hastily scrawled her recipe somewhere, the proverbial back of the envelope, and made the bread the next day. It was delicious. It is great for sandwiches and makes wonderful toast. And no crumbs! I've made it many times since, although more on the weekends now than on school days, when the bread machine is more convenient.

Hazel did not encumber her recipe with any extra verbiage, so I've added some basic instructions. I also added a little more salt. Here you go. If you live near me and want some starter, give me a holler. I can make some for ya.
__________________________________________

Good Neighbor Sourdough Bread

The night before:

1 cup sourdough starter
3 cups nonbleached flour (I get 10-lb. bags of King Arthur's from our local warehouse store)

Before you go to bed, mix starter and flour in a large bowl. Put a damp dish towel, wax paper, or plastic wrap over the top. Set out on your counter.

In the morning, take out one cup of this bubbly sponge and save in the refrigerator; it will last three weeks, according to Hazel.

To the sponge, add:

3 more cups of flour (I've used up to 100% whole wheat)
2 cups water
2 tablespoons sugar (honey also works)
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
3 tablespoons vegetable oil

Mix it together with a large wooden spoon. When it's a big blob of dough, turn onto lightly floured surface. Knead for ten minutes.

Turn dough into lightly oiled large bowl, covered. Let rise for a while (1 1/2 hrs. or 2 hrs., depending on your time frame) until it has doubled in size or until you're tired of waiting for it. Punch down.

Punch down again after it's risen again, and put in one large loaf pan or two small ones. Let it rise enough that it crests a little over the top of the pan, and bake in a 375 degree oven for 40 minutes. (I use convection at 350.)

Notes:

The more whole wheat flour you use, the more dense the bread will be
.
To share starter, just add the flour the night before, just like you're going to make bread, and then just split up the sponge the next morning in one-cup portions to plastic containers or bags. Be sure to also distribute the recipe! And do save a cup for yourself.

Welcome to the sourdough lifestyle. May the Sponge be with you.

Raising Zane

2007-09-16T21:22:00.000-04:00

There's nothing more boring in a blog than reading about why someone hasn't been posting. It took one email from one of my loyal fans for me to finally get AROUND to this poor abandoned blog. Instead of blathering about how I've been in some kind of fog for a few months, and probably a little depressed and menopausal, I'll just start writing. . . .

_____________________________

Poop. Pee. Teething. It's all happening again in our household. My youngest goes off to kindergarten and I get this urge to get the collie I've always wanted. Coincidence? I think not.

Anyhow, now we have a collie pup. Jack loves him. I love him. John and Will are slightly less enthused. His name is Zane and he is just lovely, a five-month-old sable and white. He is my buddy during the day, quiet mellow, and understanding. He's a great copyeditor and writing coach, but his familiarity with the Chicago Manual of Style leaves a little to be desired. So that, and trying to eat bacon frying in the pan, are his weak points.

Dog lovers, if anyone is reading this, comment away. Dog haters, not so much.

Transported

2007-08-01T16:26:00.000-04:00

Here I am, dear readers, at Goucher College for the first residency of my MFA program. We eat and breathe writing. I am making new friends right and left, being mentored by talented and committed journalists, essayists, and storytellers. I'm exhilarated, sometimes tired, and almost always glad I'm doing this.

One exercise we had to do yesterday was to find snippets of dialogue, which we will combine for a group reading near the end of next week. Here is my small contribution, from a conversation I was party to last night at dinner:

Woman: So what do you do?
Man: I’m in insurance.
Woman: Oooh! I used to be on the insurance law beat! I love insurance!
Man: (pause) Are you okay?

Here is a quote I found in today's workshop materials that made me think, "YES!":

The divide is not between the servants and the served, betwen the leisured and the workers, but between those who are interested in the world and its multiplicity of forms and forces, and those who merely subsist, worrying or yawning . . . . The world is full of light and life, and the true crime is not to be interested in it.

from Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice, by A. S. Byatt

While I'm writing snippets, here is an email from Will I got today:

i love a lot and
i mean it we
love you
mommy come back in 2 weeks
yeah and i mean it 123

This is what my time here is like, collecting treasures small and large. I'll try to share more with you as I go.

An American Vacation

2007-07-03T07:27:00.000-04:00

Vermont is so very Vermont, and I wouldn't want it any other way. We stayed at a family resort there for a week, which smelled just like the Vermont inn I stayed at as a child. Fresh air and lake water, with a topnote of woodsmoke.

Jack and Will had a camp program every day until early afternoon, while John and I spent time together, hiking, talking, eating delicious grown-up food, kayaking, bicycling. Every afternoon we spent time with the boys, trampolining, riding the zip line, trying archery, or swimming. Early evenings we'd drop them off again, and then we'd attend cocktail hour, all fresh and ready for another relaxing evening of adult conversation and great food. Then a walk down by the lake before picking up the boys. Again. And again. For a week.

We were so relaxed and happy and in a completely different zone from everyday life. Re-entry is not easy. It's to-do lists and washing dishes and "I'm bored. What can I do?" and me saying, "I told you three times to wash your hands for dinner . . . Do you want your computer time taken away?" But still there's a happy vacation glow inside us, despite the heaps of laundry and piles of mail.

It was not without a cloud. We stopped by at West Point to visit the graves of my grandparents (my family is military, but that stopped with my generation). We saw that my grandfather Marvin (1929-1974, Colonel, US Army, West Point Class of 1925, WW II, Korea) and my grandmother Margaret have two new neighbors just to the right of them, Andrew Ryan Houghton and Phillip Neel. They were young men who had been killed in Iraq. Phillip's grave sprouted new pale green grass and a temporary gravestone. Phillip's gravestone slopes too much to accumulate anything like the pile of tokens left on Andrew's solid marble one. Smooth polished stones, one saying "Thank you," commemorative coins, and river pebbles line the top of Andrew's stone. Jack and Will added small stones to Andrew's grave, and balanced small pebbles on Phillip's. Said Jack, "I'm so sad."

After winding along Stony Lonesome Road to leave West Point, we went to Storm King Art Center nearby, where John and I had taken my Dad shortly after my mother had died. I was seven months pregnant with Jack at the time. We marveled that this time we had two boys with us, running up and down the hills with us looking at the huge sculptures. One of our favorites is a tilted, elongated cube with a similar shape hanging on it along one edge. The whole structure is about 25 feet high, and the hanging part seems so precarious; you just can't see how on earth it doesn't fall. Will and I stood under it for the picture John wanted. Jack didn't want to stand under the looming rusted metal, and said "I just want to go home."

So we're here, ready for tomorrow's bike parades, the town water fight, and a day off from work for John. My father (Lieutenant Colonel, US Army, West Point Class of 1950, Viet Nam) will come and we'll go out to eat. Then the sun will set on America and fireworks will go off in the night.

Bowl of Cherries

2007-06-21T21:38:00.000-04:00

Jennifer has come and gone. The discussion and reading went very well, with a well-informed and inquisitive audience each evening. Jennifer taught Jack and Will how to play "Speed" and Jack taught her a new card trick. We all ate cherries fresh from the farm and spit the seeds out. Now Jennifer is on her train. And I'm tired.

Next adventure? Vermont. Tomorrow. To celebrate John's and my tenth wedding anniversary. . . .Talk to you in July, dear readers.

Brain, Child Editor Jennifer is Coming Next Week!

2007-06-11T21:21:00.001-04:00

I couldn't think of a more ingenious title than that, so I thought I'd throw in a exclamation mark just for the fun of it. Exclamation marks have no calories or fat! And they're free!

No, really, if you are in the Philadelphia area, please do attend the following events:

"An Evening with Jennifer Niesslein." Jennifer is a founding co-editor of Brain, Child, and writer of the newly published book Practically Perfect in Every Way: My Misadventures Through the World of Self-Help--and Back. We'll chat about her book, the magazine, her next project, motherhood, who knows.

It's at 7:30 on Wed., June 20, at Makin' Music, 5561 Pennell Rd., Media, PA. This event is sponsored by the Delaware County chapter of Mothers & More. Copies of the books are available at both events.

Also Jennifer will do a reading at Borders in Springfield at 7:00 PM, Thurs., June 21. The address is 1001 Baltimore Pike, Springfield, PA.

Brain, Child is a refreshing read, sharp and incisive and always relevant. And I'm about 2/3 of the way through the book. She maintains a delicate balance between hope and skepticism that I find engaging. You just want to sit down and have a cup of tea with her . . . no, make that an $8.00 cocktail.

Lofty Thoughts

2007-05-23T20:30:00.000-04:00

The boys are sitting quietly in the kitchen, reading and drawing.

Will: You know what my destiny is? Dunkin' Donuts.

Jack: Oh. . . . Well, my destiny is to save people from cancer.