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December 10 10 Dec 2015 11:16 AM (9 years ago)

I come to you today for three reasons: 1) it is so windy outside this morning that my entire house will shortly be carried away (to Oz, I hope) and I want to leave you something to remember me by; 2) there is a fat, freshly baked loaf of banana bread on my kitchen counter that is not for me, and we all know how this will end if I don't occupy myself; and 3) though no one needs encouragement to buy more stuff, I enjoy a nice holiday gift guide. What follows is a quick, and possibly too late to be useful, tour of some of my favorite things to give and receive, accompanied by a selection of photographs of Christmases past. (Including, by not limited to, a shot of our cold-weather "auxiliary fridge," an milk crate on the deck that we trot out when the refrigerator gets too full with boozed-up egg nog, homemade toffee for gifts, the annual delivery of smoked salmon from our CPA, and other holiday delicacies. 'Tis the season!)

We begin with books. How about the new Carrie Brownstein memoir, which Brandon and I both swallowed in one gulp, for the Sleater-Kinney fan in your world?  Or, for lovers of Patti Smith - and we should all be lovers of Patti Smith - maybe her new book M Train, or her now-classic Just Kids, winner of a National Book Award. For appreciators of poetry: I recently revisited my copy of Field Guide, Robert Hass's first book, and I still love it as much as I did at sixteen, when I was first introduced to it. And Anne Sexton's ecstatic, wildly sexy Love Poems, yeooooow! And for those who like a good craft project, I highly recommend The Modern Natural Dyer, which has put me on something of a dyeing-and-sewing tear. I had never dyed my own fabrics before, and now I'm dyeing tea towels, tote bags, flannel yardage to make a duvet for my kid - in other words, this book has given me a lot of ways to avoid real, income-generating work, la la la. (All book links are Amazon affiliate links, FYI. If you'd rather support an independent bookstore, and by all means, please do: Seattle's excellent University Book Store offers FREE shipping on all book orders over $20.)


Speaking of my new sewing habit, I learned everything I know from the ladies at Drygoods Design. A gift certificate to the shop - which is based in Seattle but sells online as well - or for one of their classes, would make a killer gift.

Also in the textile vein: napkins designed by artist Jen Garrido, also known as Jenny Pennywood. We've used cloth napkins at home since a friend gave us some as a wedding gift, and while I've lately taken to sewing the occasional addition to the pile - perhaps you sense a theme here - I hope to someday own a few Jenny Pennywood napkins, too.

Also in the handmade gifts category: wooden spoons and other utensils, hand-carved by Maggie Kirkpatrick of Apple Doesn't Fall. I met Maggie a few months ago, when she was in Seattle and dropped by Essex with some of her wares, and I came home with two spoons, cherry and maple, and a butter knife. They're gorgeously shaped, soft as your grandmother's cheek, and - win win win! - more affordable than most other hand-carved utensils I've seen.



Also, hey, did you know that Bennington mugs are pretty reasonably priced? I didn't, until I bought a couple this fall. I have two "trigger" mugs: "elements gold" (which feels wonderfully silky in your hand) and "black on green" (which Brandon says is "very '80s," but I don't care), and I love them. Spendier, but so handsome, is the Heath "tall tumbler," which I've had my eye on in black. Or this foxy Eric Bonnin tumbler.

And for kids, this: a year or so ago, my sister-in-law Courtney gave June two small stuffed mice, each with their own matchbox for sleeping, à la Stuart Little, complete with tiny mattress, tiny woven blanket, and tiny pillow. June loves them almost as much as I do, and I can't imagine any toddler, or human being, who would not want one. Or two.


The best slippers on the planet, in women's sizes and men's!

And for those who have absolutely everything, I like to make a donation to a worthy cause. The thirteenth anniversary of my dad's death was this past Monday, but if he were still around, I would give a donation to NPR, or Medecins Sans Frontieres, in his name. Heck, I'll do it anyway.


Last but not least, we at Delancey and Essex finally got our act together and made it possible to purchase gift certificates online!  We are the slowest! We also, just this fall, made our own tote bag, with our logo on one side and a hand-drawn slice of pepperoni pizza on the other.  It's sturdy, roomy, and, when full, stands up on its own. I use my tote for everything, from groceries to lugging files to and from the restaurant. When you purchase one online, I'm the person who packs it up and ships it for you, and I will put extra love - awwwwwwwwwww - into each order placed by a reader of this blog.

Happy weekend.

Doop dee doo 4 Dec 2015 9:53 AM (9 years ago)

A couple of years ago, late one winter morning, we were out running errands in the neighborhood, and we stopped into La Carta de Oaxaca, on Ballard Avenue, for an early lunch. June was still in a high chair and not yet fully proficient at chewing anything with crunch, so we ordered their sopa de pollo for her, a rich, brothy chicken soup served in a bowl big enough for mixing cake batter, with the meat still on the bone and big hunks of zucchini, carrot, and chayote. I shredded the meat onto a plate and chopped up the vegetables with the side of my spoon. She ate with her hands, the juices running fast down her forearms, which were then still as soft and plump as water balloons, and we drank the salty broth straight from the bowl, as though it were hot tea. Then we brought home the leftovers, because the serving size had been approximately one quart, and got to do it all over again the next day.

It feels like a strange leap of faith - leap of amnesia? Leap of denial, though denial doesn't seem like a leaping activity? - to write a blog post about food when there's a lot of cheerless stuff going on out in the world. It feels weird, even wrong, to sort of doop dee doo my way into a post on soup - here in the comfort of my heated home, where the fridge contains eight pounds of leftover mashed potatoes from Thanksgiving and my kid mumbles peaceably in her sleep - without acknowledging that we live in the midst of wildly sad events, and that many people are hurting. I don't know how to make sense of it, and in a way, I hope I never do. I will resort to chanting under my breath (creepily, if you watch from the wrong angle) my own personal, agnostic, pseudo-version of the Serenity Prayer. I will try various leaps of various things. I will make more soup.

I have known for a while how to make chicken soup. It's good. It's fine. I wrote about it somewhere around here, in late 2004 or maybe early 2005. But La Carta de Oaxaca makes a better chicken soup. And it happened that, the same winter that we first ate their version, we had a cook at Delancey who was related to the family behind La Carta, and he talked me through their method. Now it's "my," -ish, chicken soup, with the my accompanied always by a nod in the direction of a certain awning on Ballard Avenue.

I imagine there are as many Mexican sopas de pollo as there are American chicken soups. This one is, really, just a variation on any other version, but its details are important. For one, you use skin-on, bone-in chicken pieces, for the flavorful fat in the skin and the gelatin in the bones. Then, and here's the kicker, into the pot go fresh mint leaves and a large handful of fresh cilantro, stems and all. You add the herbs right in the beginning, so they cook along with the soup, going limp and slippery, yes, but also giving the broth brightness and a mellow depth that's hard to pinpoint. If you don't want to eat the cilantro stems in the finished soup, you can fish them out before serving. (To make it easy, bundle the cilantro with twine before you chuck it in, and then you can just pluck out the bundle.) But Brandon loves the flavor of the long-cooked herbs, cilantro especially, so try it first.

To serve the soup, I lift out the chicken pieces, pull the meat, and add it back to the pot. (The skin and bones are pretty much compost at this point.) What you have now is more stew than soup, really, more meat and vegetables than broth, and it wouldn't be out of place ladled over a slice of garlic toast. I think you'll find it infinitely - to borrow a term from Fergus Henderson - steadying.

Happy Friday.

P.S. BIG, LONG OVERDUE NEWS: I've been working with my homies at Neversink on a Wordpress migration and redesign of ole Orangette, complete with a proper recipe index (by course! by season! by ingredient!) and other good stuff.  Hoping to launch next week! Stay tuned! Many exclamation points!


Sopa de pollo
Inspired by La Carta de Oaxaca, and with help from Pedro Perez-Zamudio

I've made this with homemade chicken broth, and it was great, but it's also great with a good not-homemade chicken broth, like Better Than Bouillon.  No shame in that. (I use Better Than Bouillon's organic line.)  Also, all quantities here are approximate.  If you want more carrots or zucchini, go for it, and feel free to try other vegetables, too. Maybe fennel? Onion?

Roughly 3 pounds (1.4 kg) chicken parts
2 quarts (roughly 2 liters) chicken broth, or enough to cover the chicken in the pot
4 whole garlic cloves, smashed under the side of a knife
4 carrots, peeled and cut into 2-inch chunks
4 small or 2 medium zucchini, cut into 2-inch batons
1 chayote, peeled and cut into 2-inch chunks (optional; I leave this out for convenience reasons)
½ bunch cilantro sprigs, bundled with twine if you want
Leaves from a few mint sprigs
Kosher salt, to taste

Put the chicken and broth in a Dutch oven or other 5-quart pot. Bring to a boil over high heat. Skim away any foam that rises to the surface. Adjust heat to a very gentle simmer, and then add garlic, carrots, zucchini, chayote (if using), herbs, and a good pinch of salt. Cook for about 40 minutes, or until the chicken is cooked through and vegetables are meltingly tender. Remove the chicken pieces, allow to cool as needed, and then coarsely shred the meat.  Return the meat to the pot, taste for salt, and serve.

Yield: 6 servings

November 6 6 Nov 2015 2:22 PM (9 years ago)

This one goes out to my friend Natalie. One night early last month, she and hers were over for dinner, and I made an applesauce cake with caramel glaze for dessert. As they left, she asked about the recipe, and she's been patiently waiting for me to post it ever since. In the intervening weeks, our kitchen faucet sprung a leak - a leak that must have actually sprung a month or two before that, because by the time we noticed it, it had thoroughly saturated all the wooden surfaces below and around it, making them buckle and curl like waves on an ocean, a special ocean that smells like rot. We called Natalie and Michael, because they are handy people, and this past Sunday, they came over with their three-year-old son and gave their day to helping Brandon do a quick, cheap fix of the kitchen, ripping out approximately fifty percent of the counters and the sink (and heaving them, wheeeeeeee, out the window into the yard), patching the floor and drywall, and installing a stainless steel restaurant-supply sink and work table. I now really, really owe Natalie this cake recipe. I now owe Natalie a small-scale kitchen remodel.

I cannot take any credit for this cake.  I cannot even take credit for finding the recipe.  It comes from the great Merrill Stubbs of Food52, and I found it because the great Youngna Park, an artist / generally creative person / someone I admire, recommended it on Twitter. It was late September, and we were going apple-picking that weekend. We came home with enough apples to fill not only most of our fridge but also most of my mother's, and over the weekend that followed, Mom and I turned them into Judy Rodgers's roasted applesauce. And then I turned most of the applesauce into cake.

The original recipe uses a Bundt pan, and that's how I made it the first time. I did not take a picture of it, because we were too busy eating it. A few days later, I made the cake again, but this time, I used one standard-size loaf pan and one mini loaf pan, with the intention of delivering the smaller one to my mom. I did not, because we were too busy eating it. I did, however, give her half. (Of the smaller one.) (With apologies.)

There are a lot of recipes for applesauce cake. But what makes this one so good is not only that it's very moist - thanks to a generous amount of applesauce and to vegetable oil, rather than butter - but also that it's spiced just enough. It calls for cinnamon, ginger, black pepper, and allspice, though I had no allspice, so I used grated nutmeg. (Never liked allspice much, anyway.) I also replaced the light brown sugar with dark brown sugar, because that was all we had, and because I hoped its deeper caramel flavor might sit well with the apples and warm spice. In any case, all of that made for a very, very good cake, plenty good as it was. But what made it a standout is this: once the cake is baked and cool, Merrill instructs us to make a quickly boiled glaze, cream and butter and brown sugar, and while the glaze is warm, to pour it over the top.


Taste the glaze on its own, and it's sweet sweet sweet: you can almost hear the sugar crystals between your teeth. But against the dark, fragrant cake, it's exactly right. Merrill calls it a caramel glaze. But even more than caramel, it tastes like a soft, thin layer of brown sugar fudge, or penuche - or Aunt Bill's Candy, for any Oklahomans in the crowd. Fudge! On top of cake!  Have a great weekend.


Applesauce Cake with Caramel Glaze
Adapted from Merrill Stubbs and Food52

If you have only light brown sugar in the house, by all means, use it.  But having made the cake both ways, with light brown sugar and with dark brown sugar, I prefer it with dark. The flavor is fuller, with a different depth.

For the cake:
2 cups (280 grams) all-purpose flour
1 ½ teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon kosher salt
¼ teaspoon finely ground black pepper
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
¼ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
2 large eggs
1 cup (200 grams) sugar
½ cup (90 grams) dark brown sugar or muscovado sugar
1 ½ cups (360 grams) unsweetened applesauce (though the tiny amount of sweetener in this applesauce is fine)
2/3 cup (160 ml) vegetable oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

For the glaze:
4 tablespoons (55 grams) unsalted butter, cut into chunks
½ cup (90 grams) light or dark brown sugar
1/3 cup (80 ml) heavy cream
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
About ¾ cup (90 grams) confectioner’s sugar, sifted

Position a rack in the middle of the oven, and preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter and flour a standard-size (12-cup) Bundt pan.

In a medium bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, salt, pepper, and spices, and whisk to mix well.

In a large mixing bowl or the bowl of a standing mixer, beat the eggs with both sugars until light. Beat in the applesauce, oil, and vanilla until smooth. With the mixer on the lowest speed, add the flour mixture, and beat briefly, just to combine. Use a rubber spatula to fold gently, making sure that all the dry ingredients are incorporated. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan. Bake for about 45 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the thickest part of the cake comes out clean. Cool the cake for 10 minutes in the pan on a rack before turning it out and allowing to cool completely. Make sure the cake is not at all warm when you make the glaze.

When you’re ready to glaze, set the cooling rack (with the cake on it) on top of a rimmed sheet pan. This will catch drips.

Put the butter in a medium (2- to 3-quart) saucepan with the brown sugar, cream, and salt, and set over medium heat. Bring to a full rolling boil, stirring constantly. Boil for one minute exactly, and then pull the pan off the heat. Leave to cool for a couple of minutes, and then gradually whisk in the confectioner’s sugar until you have a thick but pourable consistency – and note that you may not need all the sugar! I don’t use the full ¾ cup (90 grams). Really, eyeball it, and go with your gut. If you’ve added too much sugar and the mixture seems too thick, add a splash of cream to thin it slightly. And do not worry if the glaze seems to have little flecks of powdered sugar in it at first; just keep whisking, and they will dissolve. Then immediately pour the glaze over the cake, evenly covering as much surface area as possible. Let the glaze set before serving the cake.

Yield: a good 10 servings

October 23 23 Oct 2015 10:24 AM (9 years ago)

Last night I got to spend some time with my friend Sam. We hadn't hung out, just the two of us, for a while - maybe not since June was born, if I really think about it. Sometime in the next month, Sam will become a dad. We've somehow been friends for nearly a decade. When I got into his car last night, he had R.E.M.'s Out of Time in the CD player. "Texarkana" was on. We got stuck in traffic, because it was rush hour in Seattle, but it was okay, because we were talking about being kids listening to R.E.M., Automatic for the People especially, and all the Big Feelings we were just starting to know then, feelings set to the soundtrack of Michael Stipe's voice. I remember being thirteen, or maybe fourteen, dancing alone in my bathroom to "Sitting Still," in the rental house we lived in that year, between the house on Westchester and the house on Elmhurst. I was once fifteen years old, lying on my bedroom floor in a black t-shirt and a pair of too-big men's pants that I bought at a thrift store for fifty cents, listening to "Find the River" and sobbing without knowing why. I didn't like "Everybody Hurts," but for the most part, when I listen to Automatic for the People, I get a sense that I'm witnessing a person at the height of his power, the height of his art, the same feeling I get when I watch Stevie Nicks sing the demo version of "Wild Heart." I'd never really thought of R.E.M. as a band I particularly loved, but I've now spent all morning now listening to them, Murmur to "Oh My Heart," and it's been the best morning I can remember.

Earlier this morning, before my private R.E.M. listening party, I was helping June to put on her socks and shoes, and she asked me what the word "weird" means. I bumbled through an explanation that I hoped would be appropriately calibrated to her three-year-old brain, trying to explain why it's okay - more than okay; good - to be weird. I hope that, as she gets older, she finds people who can help her to understand it on her own terms, the way that Michael Stipe, and David Byrne, and poetry, and novels, and my spouse, and our friends, the way they've done for me.

Wow, this music is really doing things to me.


It's been a good week. Last night, we went to hear Alison Bechdel speak at Town Hall. I was first introduced to her work when I was writing A Homemade Life and my friend Kristen loaned me her copy of Fun Home. I didn't know why she gave it to me, and I'd never read a book in cartoon format, but I quickly understood that, as much as it's about Bechdel's coming out, it's also about the relationship between a father and a daughter, which is what I was attempting to write myself. And Fun Home is spectacular: honest, direct, funny, raw, and also deeply loving. Bechdel seems to be much the same in person, and I grinned like an idiot through her entire talk last night about writing, art, and creativity, and the complexities of family. Also! She mentioned Richard Scarry as an early influence, and HELLO, WOW, is my life right now ever full of Richard Scarry. I hope June is paying attention.

Speaking of formative influences, please go read this piece by George Saunders immediately.

Also terrific, thought-provoking, and only tangentially related to anything else in this post: an old episode of On Being, "What We Nurture," with Sylvia Boorstein. (I subscribe to the podcast of On Being and highly recommend it.)

And I don't always listen to my own podcast, Spilled Milk, because nobody likes hearing her own voice, but I listened to the grapes episode yesterday and was still thinking about it, and laughing about it, when I woke up today.

Happy Friday, everybody. I hope you and yours are well.

On short notice 20 Oct 2015 12:38 PM (9 years ago)

It's hard to start a post when I'm bored with the photograph(s) I have for it. The alternate title for this post is "A Life Fraught with Difficulty, by Molly Wizenberg."

But I am never bored with beans.

I don't remember how I first learned of Molly Stevens and her classic All About Braising: The Art of Uncomplicated Cooking, but if you've been around here for any length of time, you will know that it is a longtime favorite. I bought it shortly after it came out, sometime in 2004. I was in graduate school then, planning to become Michel Foucault, albeit with more hair, fewer turtlenecks, and a vastly inferior command of the French language. Like anyone who has tried to read the borderline unreadable, I had a ton of Post-It flag things in my desk drawer, and I intended to use every last one when I read Discipline and Punish. But then All About Braising came along, and it was so good that I put down my schoolbooks and plastered my Post-It flags all over Molly Stevens's recipes instead. By the time I was done with it, the book looked like a hastily plucked chicken, sprouting feathery flag things from every third page. And though I cannot say the sequence of events was purely causal, I quit grad school the following year. In the decade since, I've cooked more from All About Braising than from any other book.

When I wrote about dried beans a week or so ago, I mentioned a particular Molly Stevens recipe, promising to write about it soon. Here I am. For the past few years, during the colder months, I've made this recipe every other week, and occasionally more often than that. Molly, if I may use her first name, calls the recipe Escarole Braised with Cannellini Beans, though I've made it with every kind of white, or white-ish, bean I can think of: cannellini, corona, marrow, garbanzo, great northern, navy, and flageolet, cooked from dried, or out of a can. I call it Braised Escarole with Beans. It's one of my best back-pocket meals, one I can make on short notice, assuming that I can get my hands on a head of escarole, which is a pretty fair assumption to make in the fall and winter. In the crackling heat of the pan, the escarole goes slack and silky, olive green, curling around the plump, creamy beans. This is honest food, old-lady-with-crepey-elbows-in-a-house-dress food, soft and stewy and fragrant with garlic. Everyone in my house likes it, including June, though she thinks the escarole is bok choy and I am not about to correct her, because the child is crazy for bok choy. I know when to leave a good thing alone.


Braised Escarole with Beans
Adapted from All About Braising, by Molly Stevens

The original version of this recipe calls for cannellini beans, but any light-colored bean works. I wouldn’t recommend pinto beans or any other brown or red bean, though; the flavor is too dark and muddy here. And you’ll note that, if you use canned beans rather than beans cooked from dried, you’ll need to add some stock. I like chicken stock - though you could use vegetable, I’m sure – and in a pinch, Better Than Bouillon is more than adequate.

Be sure to have some bread on hand when you serve this, and be sure to toast that bread and rub it with garlic. We usually keep the bread on the side, but you can also ladle the escarole and beans over it and let it get all nice and juicy and sogged.

1 medium head escarole (about 1 pound; 450 grams)
¼ cup (60 ml) olive oil
3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
Pinch of red pepper flakes
Kosher salt
1 batch of white beans cooked according to these directions, OR about 2 ½ cups canned beans (a little less than two 15-ounce cans), drained and rinsed, plus 1 cup chicken stock
½ of a lemon
Great-tasting olive oil, for finishing
Grated Grana Padano or Parmesan, for finishing

Cut the head of escarole in half from root end to leaf tips. Working with one half at a time, starting at the leaf tips and working toward the root end, slice the escarole crosswise into roughly 1 ½-inch strips. (Discard the little nub of root end when you get to it; it’s usually a little browned and dry.) Scoop the escarole into a salad spinner or large bowl, and add cold water to cover generously. Use your hands to swish the leaves around, rubbing with your thumb to loosen any stubborn dirt. Then let the escarole sit in the water undisturbed for a few minutes, to allow the dirt to fall to the bottom of the bowl. Lift the basket from the salad spinner (or lift handfuls of escarole from the bowl into a colander), and drain the water left in the bowl. Replace the basket (or put the escarole from the colander back into the bowl), and repeat the washing, swishing, and soaking. Escarole can be quite dirty, so I find it’s important to wash it twice. Then drain it, but don’t worry if they leaves are still a little wet; that will actually help with the braise. 

Combine the oil, garlic, and red pepper flakes in a Dutch oven or large (12-inch) skillet with a lid. Place over medium heat. Warm just until the garlic becomes fragrant and barely golden around the edges, about 2 minutes. Do not allow the garlic to brown, or you’ll have to start over. Add the escarole a handful at a time, stirring and allowing it to wilt before adding the next handful. Add a pinch of salt with each handful. When all the escarole has wilted, spoon the beans and about 1 cup of their cooking liquid (or 1 cup chicken stock, if using canned beans) into the pot, season with a little more salt, and stir to incorporate. Bring to a gentle simmer. Cover, adjusting the heat to maintain a slow simmer, and cook until the greens are very tender and the cooking liquid has thickened somewhat from the starch in the beans, about 20 minutes.

At this point, the dish will be quite soupy. You can either serve it as-is, or, if you’d like it less soupy, remove the lid and boil for about 5 minutes to reduce the liquid. Season with a generous squeeze of fresh lemon juice and more salt and pepper to taste. Serve warm or at room temperature, with good olive oil and grated Grana Padano or Parmesan on top.

Yield: about 4 main-dish servings

While you're not looking 9 Oct 2015 8:59 AM (9 years ago)

I went through a period a few years ago when I couldn't cook a pot of dried beans worth a damn. Every bean came out waterlogged and falling apart, like a rained-on newspaper, and on the rare occasion when every bean wasn't waterlogged and falling apart, it was only because a few holdouts had a mouthfeel closer to gravel. I did everything I was supposed to do: I soaked them, brined them, cooked them without salt, cooked them with salt, cooked them at a simmer, cooked them so a bubble only rarely broke the surface. Every way, the window of time in which they were just right, tender but not yet reduced to mush, was narrow at best. Occasionally I hit it, but often not. So I gave up on dried beans for a while, which is fine, actually, because canned beans are great. I can think of worse fates than going to my grave a crappy bean cooker - for instance, living an entire life without doing "Islands in the Stream" at karaoke. (Crossed that off the list.) But dried beans are cheaper than canned, much cheaper, and I wanted to get it right.

My friend Winnie Yang helped me, though she has no idea that she did. In 2007, she left a comment on a Serious Eats post about cooking beans, and in her comment, she described her favorite method, which comes from the great John Thorne and his great book Pot on the Fire. Thorne cooks beans in their soaking water, and in a very low oven, not on the stovetop. As Winnie put it, "His method produces peerless beans . . . the tenderest, most velvety beans just barely held together by the skins. There's not too much danger of overcooking, and you get optimum flavor." I bookmarked it in my browser, calling it "Winnie's Pot Beans," and then I completely forgot about it.  But I found it again recently, after a long stretch of dried bean avoidance, and I am now a believer. It is How I Do Dried Beans. Incidentally, here is Winnie, looking as sprightly and triumphant as I now feel every time I eat my own cooked-from-dried beans, only she's not in a kitchen but instead walking in the woods on a vacation we took with a couple of friends five years ago this month, to pick apples and watch the leaves fall and generally cook our brains out in a rental house in upstate New York.

Now that I've dug up that photograph, here are a few others from that trip, because it feels good to see them again, and because the trees outside my window look almost identical today.





My kitchen's Formica is a sad, wonky shadow of the Italian tile in that upstate kitchen, but it serves its purpose. It is a flat surface. I can put a bowl on it, upend a bag of beans into the bowl, cover them with cold water, and, in the reflection on the water, watch the trees outside knock around in the wind.

I try to soak my beans for a full 24 hours. But I don't know how much that matters. John Thorne soaks his for eight to twelve hours. However long you soak them, soak them. It makes a difference. But do not throw out the soaking water; it is not, how should I say it, infected with future "digestive distress." As Thorne puts it, and he in turn paraphrases Russ Parsons: "Neither cook nor eater can do much to reduce the problem of flatulence, except to eat more beans. (The more you eat, the better your digestive flora can handle them.)"

Here's what you do instead: you put a strainer over a medium saucepan, and you drain the beans into the strainer, catching their soaking water in the pan. You bring the soaking water to a boil. Meanwhile, you dump the beans into a Dutch oven, season them with salt and olive oil and other things, if you'd like, and then pour the boiling soaking water over the beans, clamp on the lid, and put it into a 200-degree oven for four to five hours. After four hours, you check the beans for doneness, and if they're not done, you keep cooking them until they are. While they cook, you need only stir them once an hour, or less, or whenever you think of it, and make sure they are covered with liquid. The rest of the time is yours.


It occurs to me that this might sound like a long, slow, possibly tedious process. But because it is long and slow, I feel comfortable leaving the house, even for a couple of hours at a go. I live for danger! Large beans, like corona beans, can take up to eight hours, meaning that I can very literally cook while I sleep. And because the oven temperature is so low, and gentler than most stoves, it's almost impossible for the beans to, poof, dissolve into mush while you're not looking. They're silky, plump, and most of all, consistent, each bean cooked properly through. By which I mean, happy Friday.


John Thorne’s Tuscan Beans
Adapted from Pot on the Fire

This is more method than recipe. I’ve used this method with all kinds of beans – cannellini, pinto, corona, flageolet, little heirloom beans whose names I don’t know – and it works with all of them. I don’t even measure my beans anymore, or any of the seasonings. You can wing it. [Updated to add: a couple of readers have called to my attention an important fact of which I was unaware: red kidney beans must be boiled briskly before consuming, because they contain a toxin. Thus I cannot advise this gentle oven method for red kidney beans. Go here for more information.) A few notes:

1. I’m writing the recipe below mostly as John Thorne intended, but you should know that I generally only season my beans with olive oil, salt, and sometimes red pepper flakes. That’s all. Do as you wish.
2. When you cook the beans, they should be barely covered with water, so that the water and bean juices reduce to a delicious, thick broth. (In the photo above, I used a little too much water, actually, and they were soupier than I intended. No real harm done, though.)
3. Also, even though I just went on and on about the sadness of an overcooked bean, well… when I cook them this low, slow, gentle way, I actually like to cook them a little past done. My friend Olaiya taught me to do that, because by the time they cool down, they will have firmed up ever so slightly, and they’ll be perfect. So when I think the beans are done, I don’t immediately take them out of the oven; I leave them for an extra 15 minutes or so, to take them just a tiny bit further.

½ pound dried beans (not red kidney beans; see headnote above), picked over, washed, and soaked for 12 to 24 hours in water to cover amply
¼ cup olive oil
2 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed under the side of a knife
3 or 4 sage leaves
½ teaspoon black pepper
½ teaspoon red pepper flakes
½ teaspoon kosher salt, or to taste

Preheat the oven to 200°F. Drain the beans, reserving the soaking liquid. Remove and discard any beans that have failed to rehydrate. (They will be wrinkled and ornery-looking.) Put the beans and seasonings, everything but the soaking liquid, in a Dutch oven or similar vessel. Pour the bean soaking liquid into a saucepan and heat to boiling. Add enough of this liquid to the bean pot to barely cover its contents, reserving any remaining liquid. Cover the pot, and put the beans in the oven. Cook at this very low heat – they should never come to a boil – until they are nicely done, about 4 to 5 hours. Check the water level periodically over the first four hours, adding the remaining bean liquid (and then plain boiling water) if needed to keep the beans covered.

Serve the beans hot, warm, or at room temperature, or use them in another dish. June likes hers plain, and she drinks the bean broth that’s left in the bowl after the beans are gone. We like to eat pinto or other brown beans with grated sharp cheddar and hot sauce. If I’m cooking cannellinis, I often use them in the Ed Fretwell Soup from A Homemade Life. And this week I used some flageolets in a Molly Stevens recipe that I’ll write about very soon.

Yield: Enough beans to make a side dish for 4 or a meal for 2 or 3

As ever 1 Oct 2015 6:47 PM (9 years ago)

A couple of weeks ago, I got up earlier than usual, while the light was still blue, and baked a cake.

We are having a very adult fall - not adult in the sense of, I don't know, the adult film industry, but in the sense that we now have a child who is enrolled in a real school. I remember only bits and pieces of my own first year of school, but I do remember operating under the happy illusion that my parents were bonafide adults who had things figured out. Having now crossed over to the other side of that illusion, I can report that, whoa, hey, it's an illusion! June is no fool, but she's content to play along as necessary. Yesterday, in the car on the way home, she informed me, apropos of nothing, that she has no blood. When I asked what's inside her body instead, she paused and stared out the window - Moms, man! Totally clueless! - and then replied, "Pee and poop, silly." (She gets it from me.)

In any case, we are now firmly into fall. My child, who has no blood, is now a child who goes to school. I am, as ever, a person who will bake a cake before the sun is up, after the sun is down, and anywhere in between, because I like to.

This is Alison Roman's Coconut-Lemon Tea Cake, from her Short Stack mini-book Lemons. I picked up a copy of Lemons on a whim one day at Book Larder, and I immediately wanted to make everything in it, starting with a Campari/lemon/rosé drink called "Rosé All Day," or maybe "Meyer Lemon Moonshine" (which, as Roman explains, "is one of the easiest things you can do with lemons, and of course the most fun (because it will get you very drunk)."). But I went for cake.

There are a certain few cooks whose recipes I trust instinctively and always. It's not to say that I trust only those few, but theirs are the recipes that most consistently appeal to me, make me feel confident, and in the end, make me proud. The late Judy Rodgers, for instance, is one of those cooks. Another is Alison Roman. I don't know her, and she doesn't know me, but she was a senior food editor at Bon Appétit, and I first saw her name in the magazine, attached to a lot of good recipes. That raspberry-ricotta cake I wrote about last March, that was hers. She's now moved over to BuzzFeed Food, but in any case, wherever she is, she knows her way around a lemon.

This cake uses lemon in two forms: the grated zest, which you rub into sugar to infuse and perfume the batter, and the juice, which you make into a syrup to pour over the finished cake.  There's also coconut in two forms, though its flavor is more subtle: there's coconut oil in the cake itself, and coconut flakes on top, which get toasted and sticky with the lemon syrup. What you wind up with is a texture and heft a lot like pound cake, but with a heady whack of lemon and the satisfying chew of coconut. June and I ate it for breakfast, and I took another slice after lunch. My mother, who loves a lemon dessert, came over a couple of days later and stumbled upon what was left of the loaf, still moist, when she went to put away an upturned aluminum mixing bowl on the counter and found that I'd co-opted it as a cake dome. She raved about it. This one's for her.


Coconut-Lemon Tea Cake
Lemons, by Alison Roman (Short Stack Editions, Volume 13)

Three notes before we get started: I tend to have regular whole-milk yogurt on hand, not Greek yogurt, and I used what I had. I haven’t had this cake when made with Greek yogurt, but I can imagine that it could only be better. It was plenty moist and tender with regular yogurt. Also, re: the mildly fiddly step of rubbing the sugar and lemon zest together with your fingers, I know I know I know, but do it. It infuses the sugar with lemon flavor, and lemon flavor is what this cake is all about. Lastly, because coconut oil is very hard and crumbly at room temperature, I find it difficult to measure by volume. So I measure it by weight, scraping and chipping it from the jar onto the scale, and then I melt it.

1 ½ cups (210 grams) all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
¾ teaspoon kosher salt
1 ¼ cup (250 grams) sugar, divided
2 tablespoons finely grated lemon zest
¾ cup (210 grams) whole-milk Greek yogurt (see note above)
½ cup (80 grams) coconut oil, melted
2 large eggs
½ cup (35 grams) unsweetened coconut flakes
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease a (9”x5”-ish) loaf pan lightly with cooking spray or butter, and line it with parchment paper. Grease that too, while you're at it. (Though trying to grease paper with butter can be an infuriating, wrinkle-filled endeavor, so I won't blame you if you skip it.)

In a medium bowl, whisk the flour, baking powder, and kosher salt.

In a large bowl, rub 1 cup of the sugar with the lemon zest until the sugar is fragrant and yellow and smells, well, like you just rubbed a lemon in there. Whisk in the yogurt, coconut oil, and eggs. Add the flour mixture, and stir just to blend.

Scrape the batter into your prepared pan, and smooth the top. Sprinkle coconut flakes over the surface, and bake until the top of the cake is golden brown, the edges pull away from the side of the pan, and a tester inserted in the center comes out clean, 50 to 55 minutes. (I found that the coconut flakes were browning before the cake was done, so I tented the cake loosely with foil after about 45 minutes.)

While the cake bakes, combine the lemon juice and remaining ¼ cup of sugar in a small saucepan, and bring it to a simmer. Cook, stirring occasionally, just until the sugar has dissolved. Turn off the heat, and keep the mixture warm. When the cake is done, brush the top with the syrup; then return the cake to the oven and bake for 5 minutes more to re-crisp the coconut. Remove the cake from the oven, and cool completely before serving.

Yield: 1 standard-size loaf cake

September 6 6 Sep 2015 2:56 PM (9 years ago)

I've never been to Chez Panisse, the restaurant itself, the part with the nightly prix fixe menu. But I first went to the Cafe at Chez Panisse the summer that I was twenty, working at Whole Foods in Mill Valley, California, and living nearby at my aunt's Tina's house. I went with my cousin Katie, who was also at Tina's that summer, and her saintly then-boyfriend Rob, an un-date-y third-wheel kind of date. We made a reservation, got (too) dressed up, and ordered the Menu du Jour, a three-course meal for the current steal of $30 - though it must have been $25 then, at most. We threw down.

I remember the first course with a clarity that surprises me. It was Little Gem lettuces, which I'd never heard of before, dressed in Green Goddess dressing, which I'd also never heard of before, with slivers of cucumber, beet, and avocado. It was understated, careful, perfectly spare, but not precious. Sixteen years later, we serve a Green Goddess salad at Delancey every spring because of that night at the Cafe at Chez Panisse, and because of that salad. The second course was a pasta, and then tiny profiteroles, both of which were quietly terrific, though I remember neither as vividly as the salad. In any case, what I remember most clearly was the way we felt afterward. We felt like we'd accomplished something. We'd crossed a threshold. We'd taken ourselves to Chez Panisse! The Cafe, anyway! We'd paid for it ourselves! We'd eaten Alice Waters' food! We'd had experiences.

I've been back a few times, and it's always felt like that. Brandon and I went for lunch at the Cafe the first time I took him to California to meet my family there. We had pizza with nettles on it, the first time either of us had eaten them. Chez Panisse was on our minds when we drafted the first sample menus for Delancey. It was also on our minds we started to reach out to the farmers and ranchers who supply us with most of the fruit, vegetables, and meat we use at Delancey. We wanted to feed our customers food that we could be proud of.

It's become a cliche, this farm-to-table ideal, a benevolent cliche. In this country, access to good food is a complicated, unequal thing: how nice that some of us can afford to feed our families fresh, organic food, while the rest of the country scrapes by on cheap, GMO crops! I feel as cynical about it as the next guy. But I will never forget a morning at the farmers' market three years ago, when I was out of my mind with the insomnia and anxiety that I would soon understand as postpartum depression, when Wynne of Jerzy Boyz, who grows our apples and pears and dries oregano for our tomato sauce, put her arm around me and let me cry all over her coat. And I cannot say how happy it makes me that June is on a first-name basis with Eiko and George of Skagit River Ranch, who raise the pigs for Delancey's sausage - we break down, season, and grind 100 pounds of their pork every two weeks - and the cows for Essex's burgers. It feels right. It feels right to support people who are doing good work, and to be supported by them in return. I learned that - or a lot of that, at least - from the influence of Alice Waters and the restaurant she started on a hope and a whim almost 45 years ago.

All of this to say that I was beside myself with glee when, about three weeks ago, I was asked to interview Alice Waters and write a profile of her for the National Endowment of the Humanities, to accompany the announcement that she has been chosen as one of this year's National Humanities Medalists. We spoke by phone a couple of Fridays ago - I now have a soft-spoken voicemail from her on my phone: "Hello, Molly. It's Alice." (!) - and I still feel electrified by it. I'd read a lot about Alice Waters. You have too, I'm sure. None of it had read prepared me for how gracious she was. We had some phone glitches that meant I had to call her six times, dying a little more with each attempt, and then she had to call me a few more times, before we got a proper connection. But her patience never flagged. And under her quiet grace, she is radical. That's the word I keep coming back to: radical. She made me want to pump my fist through the phone. She goes for it. Talking about school lunch reform, she said,

All the ways we’re addressing the serious issues of the day are band-aids for something that needs to be addressed systemically. We keep talking about poverty and equality, but we don’t address it in the place where we can impact every child, in the public schools. We’re not making sure every child has access to a real lunch, for free. They can do it in India! They can do it in Brazil! We can do it here. What you’re hearing is my shock. Brilliant people I know are not able to see the truth: whether we're dealing with the problems in our prison system or anything else, it begins with the care of the child in school right at the beginning. We need to invest in the teachers and schools and the farmers that can feed them.

But what really stuck with me was a point in the conversation when she was telling me about the beginning of Chez Panisse, about her search for the kind of eating experience she'd had in France, the experience of eating what's in season, the food that tastes best at a given moment, and sharing it with family and friends. She wasn't thinking about who would come to Chez Panisse; she knew only that she wanted a community restaurant, and that her friends in the counterculture of 1960s and '70s Berkeley would help support it. "If it wasn't vital to me, I would have done something else," she said.

I read somewhere a while ago - maybe on Chocolate & Zucchini, back when Clotilde was writing her very first book - this piece of advice: "Write what you want to read." It's pithy, and it sounds obvious, but it meant something to me, and it still does. I think it applies to everything, not just writing. It's why Brandon had the idea to open Delancey: because he wanted to eat really great pizza in Seattle, and he wanted it badly enough to learn how to make it himself. I've witnessed it over and over among friends in the food industry and other creative fields: the projects that catch fire, the projects that really go somewhere, come out of a genuine desire to do something that you want to see done.

I've seen her criticized, Alice Waters, for her idealism and her privilege. But the story of how she got to where she is could belong to a lot of us, in ways large and small, and it does. "We didn't make money in the beginning," she said. "We lost money. But then it got better. Making money comes from doing something right."

I changed my mind 16 Aug 2015 1:14 PM (9 years ago)

Two Mondays ago, the night before the moving truck was due to arrive at my mother's new (Seattle!) house with everything she owns, Brandon suggested making a celebratory dinner. My mother, it was agreed, would choose the menu. After a moment's hesitation, she requested steak and Caesar salad. We headed out for groceries.

I'm not going to go into great depth about the steak. I don't know. I feel bored just thinking about writing it. You know how to cook steak. Right? You don't need me. If you don't know how, or if you want to try another method, I can tell you that we use Renee Erickson's instructions (for indoor cooking, not grilling) on page 195-196 of her dreamy A Boat, a Whale & A Walrus, though we test for doneness by temperature (135°F for medium-rare; all hail the extremely not-cheap but worth-it Thermapen!), rather than by time. Thus concludes my discussion of the steak. Let's talk romaine.

Nobody talks about romaine. I too used to dismiss it, in as much as one might bother to formulate dismissive feelings toward a type of lettuce. But a few years ago, I changed my mind. Of the lettuces available at an ordinary grocery store, I now almost always choose it. It's not fancy, but it is consistently good, with its mild but unmistakable flavor and that juicy, resilient, water-chestnut crunch. I am not bored by romaine. I usually slice it cross-wise from tip to stem for salads, but sometimes I halve it lengthwise and roast it instead - thank you, Yolanda Edwards! - and sometimes, especially in the case of a Caesar, I just whack off the stem end, dress the leaves, and serve them whole, and we eat them with our fingers.

A couple of months ago, on a quick work trip to California, I was asked to make dressing for a Caesar salad, and I realized with a start that I didn’t know how. It’s not that I consider this a particularly glaring omission in the experience of being alive; there are a lot of things more important, starting with access to affordable housing and clean drinking water and the right to vote and believe me, I could go on, could I ever, but there I was in California, and it was dinnertime. I was at my cousin Katie’s house. Her husband Andre was grilling burgers, and Katie was getting their son ready for bed. My assignment was Caesar salad. Katie is a confident, no-recipes-needed kind of cook, and by the way she mentioned it, I knew she could make a Caesar dressing without much thought. So I did the part that I knew how to do, prepping the greens and putting them in a bowl, while I waited for Katie to finish the job.



As I expected, she had an easy way with Caesar dressing. She assembled it in a half-pint Mason jar, entirely by eye: the juice of a lemon, maybe a couple tablespoons of mayonnaise, maybe a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, maybe a quarter cup of olive oil, a little vinegar, and black pepper, shaken to mix. We tossed it that night with torn-up kale and some farro that she had cooked earlier and stashed in the fridge. (Katie is full of good ideas like that - fleshing out salads with a handful of toasty cooked grains in lieu of croutons, putting a seven-minute egg on top, etc.) But when I came home, I was faced with that regrettable cosmic phenomenon familiar to all cooks, the phenomenon that makes the same dish taste better when someone else makes it than it does when you make it yourself. I decided to forge my own way.

I took down The Zuni Café Cookbook, my own personal Southern Oracle of cooking, and asked Judy Rodgers, RIP, to teach me. What follows is her recipe. It's not much more complicated than Katie's, except the chopping of garlic and anchovies, which I guess is a little complicated. Instead of mayonnaise, it uses egg, which is more traditional but just as easy. Judy Rodgers's version is what we made for my mother that Monday night, and we all pawed at the salad bowl. But if you're turned off by using a raw egg, or if you'd just rather use mayonnaise, I'm also including a second recipe, a tweak on Katie's recipe, a version that Brandon and I have worked up over the past couple of weeks. I happen to like both, and much to my surprise, the mayonnaise-based version has even made a salad-eater out of June, an avowed lettuce-dismisser. We've been on a Caesar bender, and I see no reason to stop.

P.S. Re: the Southern Oracle, here we go again...
P.P.S. A particularly great This American Life: "The Problem We All Live With."
P.P.P.S. Interesting - and, in my experience, accurate.


Zuni Café Caesar Dressing
Adapted from The Zuni Café Cookbook, by Judy Rodgers

Rodgers calls for salt-packed anchovies, but I use Scalia brand oil-packed, which I steal from Delancey. They’re not cheap, but they keep in the fridge for a long, long time, and they have wonderful flavor. Before using, I rinse them well and dry them on paper towels. And about the quantity of kosher salt: a three-finger pinch is the amount you pick up when you pinch with your thumb, index finger, and middle finger.

Oh, and a tip for applying thick dressings, and for applying any dressing to whole leaves of romaine: keep a box of powder-free latex gloves in your kitchen. Spoon some dressing into the bowl of lettuce, slide on a pair of gloves, and use your hands to gently rub the dressing onto each leaf. You could also do it without gloves, if you don't mind smelling garlicky for a bit.

1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
2/3 cup mild-tasting olive oil
About 1 ½ tablespoons minced and mashed anchovy fillets (from about 6 to 9 fillets)
About 2 teaspoons minced garlic
2 large cold eggs
About ½ ounce (15 grams) grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
Freshly ground black pepper
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
Kosher salt

For serving:
Romaine or other greens of your choice
Croutons or cooked farro, optional
Parmigiano-Reggiano
Freshly ground black pepper

In a small mixing bowl, whisk together the vinegar, olive oil, anchovies, and garlic. Add the eggs, the cheese, and lots of black pepper. Whisk to emulsify. Add the lemon juice, and whisk again, just to emulsify. Taste, first by itself and then on a leaf of lettuce, and adjust the seasonings to taste. I add a three-finger pinch of kosher salt, if not a little more than that.

Spoon as desired onto romaine or other greens, and fold and toss carefully to coat. Add croutons or cooked farro, if you want, and more grated cheese. Serve with a final dusting of cheese on top and some freshly ground black pepper.

Yield: about 1 ½ cups of dressing

***

A Caesar Dressing Sans Raw Egg

Unless I’m going to make my own mayonnaise, which I don’t do in most everyday instances, I use Best Foods (which is also sold as Hellmann’s).

½ cup (105 grams) Best Foods / Hellmann’s mayonnaise
2 ½ tablespoons fresh lemon juice
2 tablespoons olive oil
4 to 5 oil-packed anchovy fillets (see note in top recipe), minced and mashed to a paste
2 cloves garlic, pressed or minced
½ teaspoon Dijon mustard
½ teaspoon Worchestershire sauce
Three-finger pinch of kosher salt

For serving:
Romaine or other greens of your choice
Croutons or cooked farro, optional
Parmigiano-Reggiano
Freshly ground black pepper

Combine all ingredients in a small mixing bowl. Whisk to blend well.

Spoon as desired onto romaine or other greens, and fold and toss carefully to coat. Add croutons or cooked farro, if you want, and more grated cheese. Serve with a final dusting of cheese on top and some freshly ground black pepper.

Yield: about 3/4 cup of dressing

July 29 29 Jul 2015 11:38 AM (9 years ago)

Today is our eighth wedding anniversary. It's also the 11th birthday of this blog, the first day of our first-ever corporate tax audit, and the day that my mother officially moves to Seattle. It's a lot of Big Adult Stuff, and I have lots of feelings, including immense gratitude for our accountant. But most of all, I'm glad that these two wide-eyed pups, the ones in this shot circa 2007, decided to take the great leap that is marriage, that they've kept at it, showing up, cooking, eating, building, building some more, figuring it out, duking it out, and loving, loving, for eight whole years. And I'm glad that this blog made it all happen. Thanks for being along for the ride, everybody.

And now, for a properly celebratory cocktail:




Campari Granita
from Bitter, by Jennifer McLagan

The world does not need Campari Granita. It is enough, I think, that Campari exists, and that we can mix it with soda water and drink it. But the instant I saw this recipe in Jennifer McLagan's excellent book Bitter, I knew I had to make it, because the only thing better than straight-up Campari and soda (or a Negroni, or an Americano, or a shandy), is Campari and orange or grapefruit juice and the smallest splash of lemon juice, frozen and forked to the texture of a snow cone and eaten with a spoon on a sticky July evening, while you make dinner. Or more succinctly, in the words of our friend Michael Riha: this stuff is great. Cheers.

For the orange version:
1 cup (250 ml) freshly squeezed orange juice
½ cup (125 ml) Campari
½ teaspoon freshly squeezed lemon juice

OR

For the grapefruit version, which is more bitter, and which I prefer:
1 cup (250 ml) freshly squeezed grapefruit juice
½ cup (125 ml) Campari
2 tablespoons (25 grams) superfine or caster sugar
½ teaspoon freshly squeezed lemon juice

Stir the juice, Campari, and lemon juice (and sugar, if using grapefruit juice) together. Pour into an 8-inch square metal pan (or another pan of similar volume). Place in the freezer. Stir the mixture with a spoon every hour or so, to break it up into large ice crystals. I used a fork for the last stirring, to make the ice crystals finer and fluffier. It took about three hours for my granita to be fully frozen and to the right texture. If you forget to stir the mixture and it freezes solid, don’t panic: just break it into chunks and pulse briefly in the food processor. To serve, spoon the granita into chilled glasses.

Yield: 4 to 6 servings

P.S. A wonderful, and relevant, episode of On Being.
P.P.S. Pavement's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain in the car on a hot, sunny day, with the windows down!

We'll go from left to right 22 Jul 2015 6:33 PM (9 years ago)

I promised cookbooks, and I shall deliver cookbooks. No more nostalgia! No more old photographs! No more zoning out with Danzig videos on YouTube because a man in a Danzig t-shirt just walked into the coffee shop where I am writing and reminded me of the song "Mother '93"! I will be useful.

Four years ago, when we moved into the house where we now live, I started keeping a small collection of cookbooks on top of the refrigerator. Most of our books live in June's room, on the wall of shelves there, but that's down the hall from the kitchen, and I wanted to have my most-used, best-loved, most-consulted books within reach.  I rotate them as new books come out and others fall out of use, but a few never leave.  I wrote about last summer's collection on Serious Eats, but the fridge looks decidedly different now, so here I am, not watching Danzig videos and recoiling in horror from Glenn Danzig's pectorals, nope nope nope.

We'll go from left to right, and I'll try to point out recipes that I particularly like or make often.

- Seven Spoons, by Tara O'Brady. I hope you know about Tara's wonderful site. Her book is even better, if that's possible. The first time I picked it up, I thought, This book is going BIG. It's full of food I want to eat, food that feels doable but also thoroughly inspired, and the whole package is lit from within by Tara's writing.  Hummus with White Miso (page 112), Za'atar Chicken and Roasted Vegetable Salad (page 170), Coconut Kheer (page 230), and with the kheer, Pickled Strawberry Preserves (page 111)

- My own books! So embarrassing! I keep them up there because I am suuuuch a jerk because the best part of having your recipes printed and bound is being able to dog-ear them, write notes in the margins, and muck them up with butter smears. From A Homemade Life: Buckwheat Pancakes (page 68), Banana Bread with Chocolate and Crystallized Ginger (page 26), Ed Fretwell Soup (page 156), and Scottish Scones (page 174); and from Delancey: My Kate's Brownies (page 183) and Sriracha-and-Butter Shrimp (page 88)

- River Cafe Pocket Books Pasta & Ravioli, by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers. I have three River Cafe books, and I've come to believe that their recipes aren't meant to be followed to the letter; they're best used as treasuries of good, simple ideas. I've been meaning to make the Penne with Zucchini and Mint, which I think my friend Gemma once recommended, and in which the zucchini gets cooked until mashable and enriched with an amount of butter that might best be described as swashbuckling. Also, Penne with Sausage and Ricotta.


- Every Grain of Rice, by Fuchsia Dunlop. I LOVE THIS BOOK. Luisa does too, and I'll just let her speak for me, because she gets it so right. I requested the Sichuanese chopped celery with ground beef (pictured above) for my birthday dinner last year, and I may well request it again this year. Red-Braised Beef with Tofu "Bamboo" (page 108), Bok Choy with Fresh Shiitake (page 180), Sichuanese "Send-the-Rice-Down" Chopped Celery with Ground Beef (page 194), and Fish-Fragrant Eggplant (page 210)

- Parisian Home Cooking, by Michael Roberts. I bought this book on a whim when I was 22, living alone for the first time, and at the height of my Francophilia. (When I opened the front cover just now, a flier fell out from an anti-Front National rally on May 1, 2002, with a headline reading, "Nous Sommes Tous des Immigrés." Ouaaaaais!) Michael Roberts taught me a lot about French home cooking, and though I don't use this book as much as I used to, I like to keep it around. Perfect Mustard Vinaigrette (page 69), from which I took the proportions for "my" everyday vinaigrette; Scrambled Eggs the French Way (page 50); Whole Roasted Cauliflower with Vinaigrette (page 92); Glazed Brussels Sprouts and Shallots (page 96); Green Beans and Morels (page 110); and hey, whoa, I just noticed Plums Baked with Marzipan (page 344), and now I want to eat it.

- The Grand Central Baking Book, by Piper Davis and Ellen Jackson. I put this one on top of the fridge a couple of months ago, after eating a piece of Irish soda bread at the Grand Central on Eastlake. It was incredible, and I really need to hurry up and make the recipe, because I want to hurry up and eat it. Irish Soda Bread (page 25)


- Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, by Marcella Hazan, as pictured above. A classic. Marcella makes me a better cook. Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter (page 152); Pesto by the Food Processor Method (page 176); Bolognese Meat Sauce (page 203), though I can't decide whether I prefer Marcella's or Luisa's; Smothered Cabbage, Venetian Style (page 479); and Rice and Smothered Cabbage Soup (page 94)


- Chez Panisse Vegetables, by Alice Waters. My sister gave me this book for my birthday in 2002 - just found her tiny gift card wedged inside the book, aww - and I've consulted it often. Like Nigel Slater's Tender, it's organized alphabetically by vegetable, though the dishes are more spare, more basic, more Chez Panisse-y, than Slater's. Honestly, I'm torn on which I prefer. But this book taught me how to make lots of staples, and how to make them well: braised chard, roasted potatoes, and the simplest Tomato Salad (page 290), which, in the summer of 2004, moved me to write the word "Heaven" in the margin.

- Beyond Nose to Tail, by Fergus Henderson and Justin Piers Gellatly, pictured above and below. I've cooked very little from this book, and I cannot speak to the reliability of its recipes. I love this book instead because it is the most irreverent, beautiful, ugly, unnerving, and personality-filled cookbook I know. From its elegant white cover with tidy type to a black-and-white shot of a cook face-down in a bowl of what appears to be Apple and Calvados Trifle and a full-color centerfold of a Pot-Roast Half Pig's Head, it is stunning.  Plus: Henderson's writing, of which a favorite passage, from the recipe for Pressed Pig's Ear, is below. Campari and White Wine (page 3); Bacon, Egg, and Bean Salad (page 20), Orbs of Joy (page 74), What a Baked Potato (page 76), Quince and Prunes (page 153), and You Fool (page 156)


- Hungry Monkey, by Matthew Amster-Burton. Matthew is one of my closest friends, so bias bias bias, but: this book is a funny, smart, and very very useful account of feeding a young kid. I credit Matthew with the fact that I really enjoy cooking with and eating with June, mostly because I refuse to get worked up about it. Also, his recipes are great. Sour Cherry Shake (page 103), Chicken and Spinach Meatballs (page 140), Potstickers (page 239), Cumin-Ginger Carrot Coins (page 90), Gingerbread Cupcakes with Lemon Glaze (page 101), Larb Gai (page 53)

- Super Natural Every Day, by Heidi Swanson. I love Heidi. We all love Heidi. This is my favorite of her books, though I have a feeling that her newest, Near & Far, is also going to join the fridge-top collection shortly.  Baked Oatmeal (page 44), White Beans & Cabbage, which I finish with a squeeze of lemon and more olive oil (page 86), Hard-Cooked Eggs with Dukkah (page 106), and Macaroon Tart (page 192)



- Bitter, by Jennifer McLagan. This book has the sexiest cover in the history of the written word. I may, or may not, have sat around stroking it for fifteen minutes before taking the above photograph. It also happens to pay tribute to several things that I love: chicories, Campari, beer, grapefruit, rutabaga. And Campari Granita, ding ding ding!  Will be posting about that shortly. Belgian Endive Salad with Anchovy Dressing (page 19), Sugarloaf Chicory Sautéed in Duck Fat (page 34), Tea Custard with Poached Fruit (page 67), and Campari Granita (page 86)

- Good to the Grain, by Kim Boyce. I have loved, currently love, and will probably always love this book. I'll even call it a classic. I wish it had measurements by weight, but now I'm just being grouchy. Chocolate Chip Cookies (page 41), Oatmeal Sandwich Bread (page 130), Crumble Bars (page 156), Banana Cereal Muffins (page 157), and I've been meaning forever to make the Figgy Buckwheat Scones (page 80)

- Plenty More, by Yotam Ottolenghi. Of course. Saffron, Date, and Almond Rice (page 49), which I like to eat with harissa and with a salad of cukes and feta; Thai Red Lentil Soup with Aromatic Chile Oil (page 89), Green Beans with Freekeh and Tahini (page 110), Honey-Roasted Carrots with Tahini Yogurt (page 163), Curry-Roasted Root Vegetables with Lime Leaves and Juice (page 177), Baked Rhubarb with Sweet Labneh (page 291), Bitter Frozen Berries with White Chocolate Cream (page 295), Stewed Blackberries with Bay Custard and Gin (page 305), Walnut and Halvah Cake (page 315), and Meringue Roulade with Rose Petals and Fresh Raspberries (page 332)

- Genius Recipes, by Kristen Miglore. I'm going to let this Instagram shot speak for me. From Shirley Corriher's Touch-of-Grace Biscuits (page 6) to Judy Rodger's Roasted Applesauce (page 12), Marion Cunningham's Raised Waffles (page 29), Moro's Warm Squash and Chickpea Salad with Tahini (page 70), Marie-Hélène's Apple Cake (page 221), and Marion Burros's Purple Plum Torte (page 217), this book compiles and houses a substantial fraction of my cooking repertoire. Next I want to try Diana Kennedy's hunky, dead-simple Carnitas (page 120).

- The Kitchen Diaries, by Nigel Slater. This is my favorite of his books, because the format is so inviting, so functional. I love being able to flip open to a date close to today's - July 24th, let's say - and imagine him hustling together a dinner for six: French beans and goat cheese, cold wild salmon with mayonnaise, boiled new potatoes, a green salad with warm peas, and a trifle so good, he writes, "that I wish I had made two, the last one to eat alone, in my bathrobe, at breakfast." I get the sense that Slater's recipes, like those of the River Cafe ladies, are meant to be used as springboards, not as hard-and-fast recipe-recipes, and I've been meaning for a while now to play around with the Pork Burgers with Lime Leaves and Cilantro (page 79), Thai Fish Cakes (page 113), Mustard Chops (page 127), An Almond and Greengage Crumble (page 280), A Quick Ham and Mushroom Supper (page 305), and Baked Onions with Parmesan and Cream (page 336).

And there is one more book that isn't in the photo up top, a book that I added to the fridge only last week, and that is Rachel Roddy's Five Quarters: Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome, which will soon be released in the US under the title My Kitchen in Rome: Recipes and Notes on Italian Cooking. I have long been a fan of Rachel's writing, and let me just say: Rachel, THIS BOOK! You nailed it!  This is one I'll have forever.

Well, that was fun.  Happy week, everybody.

P.S.  Most of the book links in this post are Amazon Affiliate links - you know, FYI and so on.

July 10 10 Jul 2015 8:23 PM (9 years ago)

My mother tells me that she had always loved the house. She used to drive by and admire it. When I was thirteen, it came on the market, and she and my dad snatched it up. The house was built in 1948, old for Oklahoma, painted brick with wrought iron and ivy. It needed a lot of work, and they tore out walls and opened it up, changed everything. It was their biggest, finest collaboration, and they made it exactly what they wanted. It was weird in ways, or maybe quirky is the better word, with a mirror on the ceiling of the downstairs bathroom and Pepto-Bismol pink wallpaper in the dining room. But mostly it was beautiful, obscenely beautiful, full of books and art and small fragile things that my dad collected at estate sales and antique malls. He got to live there for less than ten years before he died, but my mother is still there, or will be for another two weeks, when she moves to Seattle.

This move has been a long time coming, and I've been waiting impatiently for the house to sell. When she called me up in mid-June to tell me that she'd gotten an offer, I nearly shrieked. But then a different thought came, and I stopped nearly-shrieking, because that thought was, I will never see that house again. So on Wednesday, I got on a plane and flew here to do just that, and to help my mother clear twenty-plus years of living from the various cabinets, closets, and shelves. If you had asked me fifteen years ago, even ten years ago, if I'm a sentimental person, I would have denied it. Now there is no doubt. Between loads of books - 295 donated to the library thus far - and trips to Goodwill, Mom and I get lost in piles of photographs; her old jewelry box, with its collection of scarabs and giant costume earrings from the '80s; the box of poems my dad wrote to her before they were married.

We moved into the house when I was a freshman in high school, and I lived there for barely four years, plus a couple of summers in between other places. It wasn't long. But I can still hear the creak of the stairs when my dad went down to make coffee in the morning, and the shhhh of his hand sliding along the banister. I know the smell when you walk into the front hall, and the smell of the living room, and the smell of the kitchen, all of which are different. I know the hiss of the air conditioner. I can find all the light switches and lamps in the dark. I dyed burgundy streaks into my hair in my bathroom there, put on the long black net skirt that was my favorite article of clothing at age sixteen, and listened to Minor Threat on vinyl that I mail-ordered from Washington, DC. I had the hots for Guy Picciotto in that house. I sat on the floor of my bedroom and typed out college applications on an electric typewriter. In the laundry room, my first dog had her last seizure. My mother and I carried her to the car on a beach-towel-turned-stretcher, and not long after, she was gone.

I made my first pie with my mother in that kitchen, a blueberry pie from some Martha Stewart book. High on our victory, we attempted a towering lemon meringue pie that wept uncontrollably onto the counter. Later that same summer, on that same counter, my dad and I rolled out fresh pasta. He liked to grill burgers out back, the burgers that I ate all through my so-called vegetarianism. He sat by the window in the kitchen to enjoy his Saturday egg salad and beer. Upstairs, in my bedroom with the stereo cranked up, I daydreamed (for years, years) about what it would be like to make out with someone but never actually did - until, VICTORY, shortly after high school graduation, I had my first kiss in the front hall and, hopped up on elation and pure cold terror, grabbed the doorknob to keep from passing out.

It was to that house that I returned the summer after college. It was in that house that I woke up on September 11, 2001 and, along with everyone else alive that day, watched as the World Trade Center fell. I read a lot of Frank O'Hara in that house, and I wrote a lot of poetry that I do not plan to ever read again. I attempted and abandoned Henry Miller. I once folded myself into the biggest chair in the living room and spent an entire weekend reading The Fountainhead. It's the house where my dad spent the last weeks of his life, on a hospital bed in the den. It's where, Brandon likes to say, he first knew that he wanted to marry me. It's where we found out, over dinner in the dining room, that my cousin Sarah's first daughter had been born, my "niece" Mia. Five years later, in the living room across the hall, Mia's grandmother, my aunt Tina, spent her last night on this earth. And the following night, at 26 weeks pregnant, I hid with my mother and three cousins in a closet as a hailstorm knocked out more than half of the windows in the house and sent shards of glass flying into the remains of our Thai beef with chiles and basil, still in a wok on the stove. We lived a lot in that house, and I probably don't even know the half of it.

Brandon sometimes tells me that he misses places, physical spaces like rooms and sites and buildings, after he leaves them. I've felt the same way occasionally, about a house where I often played as a kid, the amphitheater at Quartz Mountain, or apartments where friends have lived. But I never really missed this house until now. I'm glad I do.

June 26 26 Jun 2015 12:47 PM (9 years ago)

I am feeling profoundly (or, as my fingers tried to put it, "feely profounding") inarticulate today in the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling on same-sex marriage. I keep thinking of my uncle Jerry, the first gay person I ever knew, whose death to AIDS in 1988 spurred me to activism as a young kid with moussed bangs and a Silence=Death sweatshirt, and in whose memory June carries one of her middle names. I wonder what he would say today. I'm grateful, relieved, elated, and beyond, that June will grow up in a world that's very different from what I knew in 1980s Oklahoma.

It also feels like a fitting time to reread John Birdsall's whip-smart Lucky Peach piece, "America, Your Food Is So Gay," which was originally published a couple of years ago, I think.

And given that it's a Friday in late June, it would also be a fitting time to make watermelon popsicles.

June would eat popsicles, also known within our house as "popsissles," for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and in truth, I can't argue with that, especially if I exercise my parental privilege to decide what goes into said popsissles.


In this case, I used David Lebovitz's simple and brilliant watermelon sorbetto recipe as a template. It starts with watermelon juice - just watermelon, zizzed in a food processor until liquefies - and then you take a little of that juice and warm it with sugar to make a watermelon simple syrup. [So smart, David! So smart.] That syrup then gets stirred into the remaining watermelon juice, along with lime juice and, if you want, a tiny splash of vodka, to help make the popsicles less ice-y. (I skipped the vodka, because I didn't have any, and if you don't want to use it, don't.) In any case, the mixture was bright and big-flavored, and I was halfway inclined to pour it over a glass of ice and down it. But June's breakfast, lunch, and dinner needs prevailed. We made popsicles.

Happy weekend.


Watermelon Pops
Adapted from David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop

These popsicles will only taste as good as the watermelon you start with, so start with a sweet, flavorful one. Oh, and you can omit the vodka, if you want.

A roughly 3-pound (1.5-kg) chunk of watermelon
½ cup (100 grams) sugar
Big pinch of kosher salt
1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lime juice, or to taste
1 to 2 tablespoons vodka (optional)

Cut away and discard the rind of the watermelon, and cut the flesh into cubes. Chuck the cubes into a blender or food processor, and process until liquefied. Pour through a strainer (to remove seeds) into a large measuring cup. You should have about 3 cups (750 ml) of watermelon juice. (If you have more, well, drink up! Or freeze for future use.)

In a small, nonreactive saucepan, warm about ½ cup (125 ml) of the watermelon juice with the sugar and then salt, stirring until the sugar is dissolved. Remove from the heat, and stir this syrup into the remaining 2 ½ cups (625 ml) watermelon juice. Mix in the lime juice and vodka, if using. Taste, and add more lime juice, if you want, or more salt. You shouldn’t taste the salt; it’s just there to intensify the watermelon flavor.

Chill the mixture thoroughly - if the watermelon was refrigerator-cold when you started the process, this won't take long - and then pour it into your popsicle mold of choice. (I used this.) If you have more mixture than will fit in your popsicle molds, drink it, or for mini-pops(!) and other fun stuff, freeze it in ice-cube trays.

Yield: about 10 pops

One Tuesday, late-morning 13 Jun 2015 12:30 PM (9 years ago)

I come to you today, June 13th, a fine summer’s day on which you probably have no desire to turn on the oven, to talk about roasted chicken. More specifically, I want to talk about Thomas Keller’s Favorite Simple Roast Chicken, which I prefer to call TK’s Hot Buttered Chicken.

I have long been a devotee of the Zuni Cafe recipe for roasted chicken. I imagine many of you feel the same way. Zuni’s recipe, which Judy Rodgers wrote with a rare and reverential thoroughness - may she rest in peace, and may more cookbooks be written like hers - relies on three things: using a small-ish bird, salting it a day ahead, and cooking in a crackling hot oven, first breast-up and then flipped breast-down and then breast-up again. It was the first roasted chicken I ever made, and when I get all the elements right, it is the best roasted chicken I will ever make. However. I forget to salt the bird ahead. Or I put it off, because getting involved with raw chicken takes resolve. Or I don’t plan dinner until the afternoon of, and then it’s too late for advance salting. Or maybe I manage the advance salting, but then I don’t feel like messing with the beast once it’s in the oven - remembering to flip it and flip it again, dodging splatters of hot fat, etc. Roasting a chicken the Zuni way is not hard, but sometimes I want to make easy things easier.

Thomas Keller’s chicken recipe has been floating around for more than a decade, but I first tried it only last month, after two different friends in two different cities happened to mention it to me within a week of one another. Both are energetic cooks, not likely to balk at a complicated recipe, so when they recommended something so straightforward, so lazy, even, I went out and bought a chicken.

Like Rodgers, Keller calls for a small-ish bird, two to three pounds, and he too cranks up the oven. But he salts the chicken just before cooking, and once it’s cooking, he leaves it alone. And when it’s done, he slathers the meat with butter and serves it forth, with Dijon mustard* on the side. Slathers it with butter and serves it with mustard! SLATHERS IT WITH BUTTER! SERVES IT WITH MUSTARD! I will make TK’s Hot Buttered Chicken.


I’m rarely at home for lunch, and if I am, I’m a sandwich-or-leftovers-lunch cook. I am not a hot-lunch cook. But one Tuesday, late-morning - because Tuesday is my Sunday - I salted a chicken, TK-style, and put it in the oven. While it quietly roasted - so independent, this chicken! - I managed to yank up a bunch of weeds in the yard-slash-jungle out front, and June played in the car, her favorite activity, flicking switches and turning nobs and stealing the emergency animal crackers I keep in the glove compartment, eating half of three of them, and hiding the remains in the console. When the timer went off, we went inside, and I carved and buttered the chicken. I steamed some broccoli and squeezed a lemon over it, and we sat down to lunch.

The chicken was golden and taut-skinned, juicy and glistening. June picked at it, because that’s what she's doing this week - toddlers! Always doing toddler things! I scooped mustard onto my plate, and we sat and talked, eating and not eating**, and one of us sang, because when you’re not eating, you sing. I wiped up the last smear of butter with a fingertip, cleared our plates, and then Tuesday was already halfway over, easy, and there were leftovers for tomorrow.

* Any mention of mustard always reminds me of this. And while we’re on the topic of Karl Lagerfeld, this this THIS.

** Talking, and not talking...


TK's Hot Buttered Chicken
Adapted from Thomas Keller, Bouchon, and Epicurious

One 2- to 3-pound chicken, at room temperature for an hour or so, if possible
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper (optional)
2 teaspoons minced thyme (optional)
Unsalted butter
Dijon mustard

Preheat the oven to 450°F.

Dry the chicken very well with paper towels, inside and out. Salt and pepper the cavity, then truss the bird with twine. Trussing is not hard, and you really can wing it - or you can watch the videos here, or elsewhere on the Web. In any case, the idea is that the wings and legs stay close to the body, and the meaty part of the drumsticks cover the top of the breast and keep it from drying out. I am not a pro trusser, but as long as I tie the legs together and keep them tucked up tight, I figure I’m fine.

Now, salt the chicken. Thomas Keller likes to "rain" the salt over the bird, so that it has a nice uniform coating that will result in a crisp, salty, flavorful skin. He uses about 1 tablespoon of kosher salt. I didn’t measure mine. You should use enough that, when it’s cooked, you should still be able to make out the salt baked onto the crisp skin. Season to taste with pepper, if you want. I don’t usually pepper my roasted chickens.

Place the chicken breast-up in a sauté pan or roasting pan. Slide it into the oven. Keller says to leave it alone — no basting, no added fat. Roast it until a thermometer stuck in the meatiest part of the thigh registers 165°F, 40 to 60 minutes. (I use a Thermapen: not cheap, but a little bit life-changing.) Remove it from the oven, and add the thyme, if using, to the pan. Spoon the juices and thyme over the chicken, and let it rest for 15 minutes on a cutting board.

Remove the twine. Carve or cut into pieces, however you like. The preparation is not meant to be fancy. Slather the still-hot meat with butter. Serve with mustard on the side.

Yield: enough for 2 to 4 people

Here was an opportunity 2 Jun 2015 9:30 AM (9 years ago)

One evening last week, my friend Sarah sent me a sudden text that said only, "Yotam Ottolenghi. Carrot and Mung Bean Salad from Plenty More. Just do it!" These kinds of vital communications are why humans need one another: so that we know what to eat next.

I was skeptical about the mung beans: I know they’re used to great effect in many cuisines, I know, I know, but a certain aura of patchouli and tie dye hangs over them. Still, I was willing to reconsider. I took down my copy of Plenty More from the top of the refrigerator, where my favorite and most-used cookbooks live. (Hey: another time when I mentioned this fridge-top collection, one of you asked if I would consider writing a post about the books I keep there. Does that still interest you? I’d forgotten about that request until now, but really, I’d be very happy to do it. Update: I am an idiot. I forgot about this post on Serious Eats! That said, the top of the fridge looks quite different today, with new books coming out, and I would be happy to tell you about it.) I turned the book over and flipped to the index, looked up the page number (169) for the recipe, and proceeded to thumb backward toward it, but I overshot the mark and found myself on page 163 instead, looking at a recipe for Honey-Roasted Carrots with Tahini Yogurt.

I paused long enough to skim through the ingredients. I had everything, as it happened, including a fresh bag of carrots and a newly opened container of tahini left over from another recipe and now waiting to be finished. I am famous within the four walls of my house for buying tahini, using approximately two tablespoons, and then entombing the remainder at the back of the fridge for a couple of years. Here was an opportunity to do something different. The mung beans could wait. (They’re still waiting, and waiting, and waaaaaaaaiting...)


You do not need me to tell you how smart, how good, and how necessary Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty More is. Plenty was seminal, and I think Plenty More is even more important. This particular recipe reminds me a lot of Casa Moro’s Warm Butternut and Chickpea Salad with Tahini, but maybe better. Ottolenghi uses carrots instead of squash and, instead of allspice, freshly toasted coriander and cumin seeds. His spicing feels more special as a result, more fragrant and beguiling, and the carrots get sticky-slick with honey, and the yogurt in the tahini sauce gives it both lightness and heft. To be totally honest, Ottolenghi did call for a little too much coriander for me - coriander seed, like marjoram, can start to taste the way potpourri smells - so I scaled it back when I typed up the recipe below, and I think it’s just right. Next time, I might add chickpeas and red onion, à la Casa Moro, and make a great thing greater.


In any case, I made it for lunch on a day when I had the house all to myself - and had celebrated having the house all to myself by eating a gigantic slice of cinnamon-custard twist from Larsen's for breakfast - and it was exactly what I wanted. It’s more than the sum of its parts, by far: one of those things that you can zap together without a trip to the grocery store and, afterward, makes you feel like putting on the Chariots of Fire theme and taking a victory lap around the table. That night, Brandon and I ate the leftover carrots and sauce with hot Italian sausages and a cucumber salad, and he liked the tahini-yogurt sauce so much that, after we’d eaten all the carrots, he went to the cupboard, took down a box of Triscuits, and used the crackers to scoop up the last of the sauce from his plate and then the jar I’d made it in.


Honey-and-Spice Roasted Carrots with Tahini Yogurt
Adapted from Plenty More

This recipe halves easily, and I’ll bet it also doubles well. And if you use a scale to measure the ingredients by weight, it comes together very, very fast. Oh, and though the original version calls for Greek yogurt, I prefer regular plain yogurt, so that’s what I keep around, and it worked just fine.

To toast the coriander and cumin seeds, put a small skillet over medium heat, add the seeds (only one type at a time; they’ll probably toast at different rates), and stay nearby, shaking the pan occasionally. They’re ready when they smell fragrant. Remove them from the heat immediately, and crush them coarsely in a mortar and pestle or under the side of a knife. Repeat with the other type of seeds.

For yogurt sauce:
Scant 3 tablespoons (40 grams) tahini, such as Joyva brand
2/3 cup (130 grams) plain whole-milk yogurt or Greek yogurt
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 garlic clove, crushed
Generous pinch of kosher salt, such as Diamond Crystal brand

For carrots:
Scant 3 tablespoons (60 grams) honey
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 ½ teaspoons coriander seeds, toasted and lightly crushed
1 ½ teaspoons cumin seeds, toasted and lightly crushed
Leaves from 2 sprigs fresh thyme, or a generous pinch of dried thyme
3 pounds (1.3 kilograms) carrots, peeled and cut into index-finger-sized batons
1 ½ tablespoons cilantro leaves, chopped or not
Kosher salt
Black pepper

Preheat the oven to 425°F, and line a large rimmed sheet pan with parchment paper.

Combine the sauce ingredients in a small bowl, and whisk well. Set aside while you roast the carrots.

Combine the honey, oil, coriander and cumin seeds, and thyme in a large bowl. Add 1 teaspoon kosher salt and a few grinds of black pepper. Whisk as well as you can; the honey might make it pretty goopy. Add the carrots, and mix until well coated. (I found it easiest to do this with my hands, since the honey wanted to clump instead of coat the carrots.) Dump the carrots onto the prepared sheet pan, and arrange them evenly in a single layer. Roast, stirring gently once or twice, until they are cooked through and glazed, 30 to 40 minutes.

Serve the carrots warm or at room temperature, with a good spoonful of sauce on top or smeared on the plate underneath them. Scatter with cilantro.

Yield: 4 servings

May 22 22 May 2015 2:55 PM (9 years ago)

About eight months after we opened Delancey, a customer named Eric Peterson sent an e-mail to Brandon, and the subject line read, I want to make pizza at Delancey!

Eric was working at a local pizza place, but he wanted to learn another approach - to learn the chemistry behind good dough, how to make sauce from scratch, how to manage a wood-burning oven. His five-year plan was to open a small wood-fired pizza restaurant in Leavenworth, a mountain town roughly two hours east of Seattle, and he was ready to put in the time to learn what he needed to know.

I called his references and wound up talking to an older guy with whom Eric had once worked at a ski shop, I think, and mostly what I remember is that this guy all but yelled into the phone, SNATCH HIM UP. So we did. We hired Eric, and he cooked next to Brandon for a year and a half, making dough and stretching pizzas and finding his way around the fire, until late 2011, when he headed east over the pass, as he had always planned, to open his Idlewild Pizza. And it is killer.


And this coming Monday, Memorial Day, I get the great pleasure of doing a talk and signing for Delancey - which comes out in paperback on Tuesday! - there, at Idlewild. If you're going to be in the area, or even remotely in the area, please come visit. I'll be there from 3 to 5 pm, and there will be wine and, of course, pizza.

Or, if you can't make that, maybe you can stop by A Book for All Seasons between 1 and 2 pm, because I'll be doing a little signing there first.

I love Leavenworth and the mountains around it, in the summertime especially, and I'm thrilled to have the book as an excuse to get back over there.  Hope to see you - and either way, happy almost-Memorial Day.




P.S. I should note that the above photos were taken at Delancey, not at Idlewild. I don't have any pictures from Idlewild, though, hey, I could fix that this weekend.

P.P.S. San Francisco! I'll be in your town next week, on Saturday, May 30. See you at Omnivore Books at 3 pm?

P.P.P.S. This week's This American Life is so smart, so heavy, and so important.

Yes yes yes 14 May 2015 10:24 PM (9 years ago)

Last November, I got an e-mail from a fourth grade public school teacher in Sitka, Alaska, inviting me and Brandon to be part of a classroom project he was planning. The project would be called the Perfect Pizza, and it would go like this: the students would spend some time studying pizza and writing about pizza, and along the way, we’d chat with them once or twice via Skype about what makes great pizza great. As the culminating event of the project, Brandon and I would come to Sitka in the flesh, ta daaaa, where we would make pizza with the students (Brandon), talk writing with the students (me), and give a reading at the local library (me). We of course said yes right away, yes yes YES.

We went to Sitka a couple of weeks ago, at the end of April. We were there from a Sunday evening to a Wednesday evening, hardly enough time to get a feel for a new place - neither of us had been to Sitka, or anywhere else in Alaska - but our hosts and the organizers of our trip, Chris and Tiffany Bryner, were such generous guides that I came away with a real affection for the town, and with a few tips for those of you who are considering a trip up that way.



Sitka is an island near the southeastern tip of Alaska, just north of British Columbia. The topography of Sitka felt familiar to me, because like Seattle, there’s a lot of water, and beyond the water there are mountains, although the mountains near Sitka are much nearer, seemingly arm’s reach away. Sitka also feels immediately more rugged, wetter and palpably wilder. In our first twenty-four hours, we spotted eight bald eagles and walked past some fresh-ish bear droppings on a trail, and I saw my first raven and then about three dozen more after that. Because of Sitka, I get to use the word droppings for the first time on this blog. Ring the bells!



Sitka has a population of only 9,000 or so, which makes it roughly one-quarter the size of our neighborhood in Seattle. But it has a terrific bookstore in Old Harbor Books, complete with a kids’ reading nook where June and I could have spent all day. Behind the bookstore is the Backdoor Cafe, where we warmed up with some curried pea soup. I’m still thinking about the raspberry crumble bar I bought there, and I probably will be for a while. A few doors up the street, I bought handmade soap scented with Sitka spruce at WinterSong Soap Company. At the Larkspur Cafe, we had our first black cod tips, a small, rich, silky strip of fish taken from between the jaw and the collar. June isn’t usually into fish, but she wound up stealing most of mine. It was cute, and also not at all cute. But then a friend of Tiffany’s saved the day by showing up with a frozen package of black cod tips for us to take back to Seattle. (!)




We took a walk one cloudy morning along the seawalk to Sitka National Historical Park, where I took the more wooded photos in this post. In the woods, the deerheart were coming in so thickly that, in some areas, you could hardly see the soil, and the trees had so many layers of lichen and moss and more moss that they seemed to be turning slowly into Muppets.



We didn’t have time to get out on a boat, though we wanted to. I had hoped to see a humpback whale, but it was the wrong time of year. But at dusk on the evening of my reading, we went out onto the seawalk across from the library, and every few seconds a tiny fish would leap out of the water of the harbor, snatch a bug in mid-air, and plink back under the surface. We also visited the Alaska Raptor Center, where I met this very small owl and had a moment of spiritual communion with this other owl and realized that I, having also nursed a low-grade obsession with great blue herons for several years, have finally become a real, full-on Bird Person. I surrender.


In Sitka, everything seems to happen at or around the library. On our first night in town, Tiffany took me to a poetry reading there in celebration of National Poetry Month. The poets ranged in age from maybe 8 to maybe 75, and their work was so good. It’s been a long time since I read poetry regularly, or even felt connected to the idea of poetry, but the morning after the reading, I found myself thinking about three poems that I loved as a teenager. There’s something about poetry that reverberates differently from prose. Just thinking back to those poems, even remembering only a line or two, I felt for that instant like the exact same person I was when I first read them, twenty years ago, sitting on the floor of my bedroom in my parents’ house in Oklahoma. Surely somebody must be able to explain how poetry does that. Or maybe it’s better if no one can.



On our last afternoon, the sun came out - in Sitka, as in Seattle, when the sun comes out, everyone throws down everything and rushes outside - so before heading to the airport, we drove to the south parking area of Halibut Point State Park and walked down to the beach behind it. At low tide, the island there, called Magic Island by locals, is connected to the beach, and you can walk out onto it. If it’s clear enough, you might be able to see Mount Edgecumbe, a dormant volcano, in the distance. In any case, Magic Island lives up to its name.



I owe a great debt of thanks to everyone who made our visit possible: to the the half-dozen small businesses that generously donated our meals, to Kettleson Memorial Library and Keet Gooshi Heen Elementary, and to the families that loaned us their car, car seats, stroller, apartment, you name it. To Chris, Tiffany, and Shewa, who put it all together, and to Chris’s whip-smart fourth grade class: we’ll be back. x

P.S. If you find yourself in Sitka during the summer, keep an eye out for Chris and his Bunna Bike Coffee.

P.P.S. This cat’s out of the bag. YEEEEEOOOOWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

May 7 7 May 2015 10:05 AM (9 years ago)

One Tuesday evening in March, I went somewhat accidentally to the town of Edison, Washington, and bought a pack of graham crackers. Two weeks later, I drove back deliberately, 75 miles each way, just to buy more.

Thanks to Renee Bourgault and her wonderful Breadfarm, I got to tell the story, and share the recipe, on (the newly redesigned! fancy!) Saveur.com.

P.S. MAKE THOSE GRAHAM CRACKERS IMMEDIATELY.

You win 3 May 2015 8:11 PM (9 years ago)

When I moved to Seattle, I lived a gray shingled apartment building on Northeast 67th Street, a speedy bus ride to the UW, where I had just started school. My apartment had deep-pile carpet the color of weak tea and a floodlit view of a parking lot, but it was mine, mine mine mine mine mine mine mine. Even getting a utilities bill was exhilarating: it was in my name! I bought cheap produce at the stand a few blocks east, found a good Thai curry place a few blocks to the west, and got takeout from an Indian restaurant down the street. I started this blog in that apartment in 2004, and I lived there when I met Brandon in 2005. At some point around then, before he moved to Seattle in 2006 and we packed up my stuff and hauled it to the Ballard duplex we’d rented, somebody told me about a restaurant nearby called Eva. It was small, well-regarded, a polished neighborhood place with a menu closely tied to the seasons, the kind of menu that used kale before any of us knew the word, let alone dreamed of uniting it with the word chip. I was still a student, and most days, I couldn’t afford a restaurant like that. But somebody told me that Eva had a spectacular young pastry chef, a woman named Dana Cree, so I saved up, or maybe I waited until my mother came to town, and I went.

Dana was doing a series of throwback desserts, I think - if I’m getting this wrong, and I’m almost certainly getting it wrong, I hope she will tell me - and I seem to remember having a sexed-up homemade Ding Dong, and maybe a chocolate rice pudding with caramelized Rice Krispies on top, and a butterscotch pudding, dark and rightly salted. Dana’s food was playful and intelligent, irresistible, impeccable, each flavor and thing in its best possible form. We followed her to Poppy, where you can still, and should, get her Nutter-Butter Squares* (crispy! creamy! crackly!), and then she moved to Chicago, lucky Chicago, where she is now pastry chef at Blackbird. This year, for the second year in a row, she’s a nominee for Outstanding Pastry Chef in the James Beard Awards.

Also: she has a great rhubarb compote recipe.





Nine years ago, Dana had a blog**, and on that blog, she posted what she called Orange Rhubarb Compote, or what I call Dana’s Rhubarb Compote. It’s simple, and it’s perfect, and every spring, almost a decade later, it’s still the rhubarb recipe that I think of first.


I’ve already got plenty of rhubarb recipes, and you probably do, too. A lot of days, I think the best thing you can do with rhubarb is roast it, period. All the other days, though, I think of Dana’s rhubarb compote, cooked on the stovetop until it’s thick, spiked with orange liqueur and softened with butter. It comes together in twenty minutes and keeps for a week, easy. And though there’s booze in there, it’s not boozy; the orange liqueur is there to support the rhubarb flavor, to underline it, amplify it, join in the chorus. The butter, for its part, is also there to quietly support, smoothing the rough edges from the rhubarb and giving it a subtle, welcome roundness. Dana’s rhubarb compote might be my very favorite thing to stir into a morning bowl of plain yogurt, less sweet and softer than my second favorite, jam. You could also serve it with shortcakes and whipped cream, as a sauce for ice cream, spooned into pavlova, slathered on pancakes or waffles or French toast, or - my friend Matthew’s idea - on top of a toasted English muffin spread with mascarpone. In general, I like it icy cold from the fridge, though June prefers it warm from the saucepan. Any way, you win.

*Update: Tim at Lottie + Doof just changed the world by posting this recipe. HOT DAMN. Check it out.
**Another update: as a commenter pointed out, Dana still has a blog, a newer one. Thank you for catching that, Dave! Here it is.


Dana’s Rhubarb Compote
Adapted from Dana Cree

Over the years, I’ve tweaked this recipe slightly. Her version suggests halving the rhubarb stalks lengthwise before slicing, so you wind up with 1-cm cubes; I get lazy and just cut the stalks crosswise into chunks. The chunks are still small enough that some break down during cooking, while others just get soft and plump, making for a variation in texture that I like very much. As for sugar, Dana’s version uses ¾ cup sugar for 1 pound rhubarb, but I’ve come to prefer mine with slightly less, roughly a scant 2/3 cup. I know that ¾ cup, or even 2/3 cup, might sound like a lot, but the rhubarb can take it. You could use less, sure, but keep in mind that the sugar also helps thicken the rhubarb’s juices and give the compote its body, so if you cut back too much, the texture will be different. The most recent time I made it, I doubled the recipe and used 1 ¼ cups of sugar, just FYI.

1 pound (455 grams) rhubarb stalks, trimmed and sliced into ¾-inch chunks
½ to ¾ cup (100 to 150 grams) sugar
2 Tbsp. (28 grams) unsalted butter
2 Tbsp. orange liqueur, such as Cointreau, Grand Marnier, and the like

In a medium bowl, toss the rhubarb with the sugar. Set it aside while you melt the butter in a heavy medium saucepan over medium heat. When the butter has melted, add the rhubarb, the sugar, and the orange liqueur. Allow to cook, undisturbed, for about 2 minutes, until the rhubarb begins to release its juices. Then gently stir, and continue to cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the rhubarb is very juicy and those juices begin to thicken. The compote is ready when the rhubarb is tender and beginning to fall apart and the juices look thick, about 10 to 15 minutes. This is a cook-it-until-it-looks-right-to-you situation: trust your judgement.

Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator, and serve cold, cool, or warm.

Yield: maybe 1 pint? I always forget to measure.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 27 Apr 2015 3:29 PM (10 years ago)

In three months, this site will be eleven years old. Three nights ago, I got to stand on a stage in New York in front of hundreds of people I admire – including Martha, THE Martha, who looked foxier, and younger, than anyone – and accept a James Beard Award for this blog.

I was so nervous, so totally electrified with terror, that my right eyelid twitched for six days leading up to the ceremony. I hope I never forget what it felt like, after so much hoping, to hear my name called. I hadn’t planned a thank-you speech – if you take your umbrella, yadda yadda, it won’t rain – but once I was up there, everything felt oddly clear and slow, and I managed to thank my friend Chris Oakes, the person who suggested that I start a blog; and Dorie Greenspan, author of the first cookbook I ever owned, who was sitting right there, at stage left, smiling; and then Brandon, of course; and my dad – of course, my dad. I want to think he heard. Then somebody whisked me away to take a picture, and there was a party with a lot of good hair, and a late slice at Joe’s Pizza, and I finally limped to my friend Brian’s apartment in Brooklyn, where the world’s most comfortable air mattress was waiting in the living room. But when I woke up the next morning, I realized that I had forgotten to thank my mother(!!), and also you. I wouldn’t have the heart or the guts to write anything if I didn’t think a real live person, somewhere, somehow, might read it. I’m here because you’re here. Thank you for that.

(Photo by Sarah Lawer, excellent company at table 28.)

I like to imagine 17 Apr 2015 9:26 PM (10 years ago)

The only bookshelves in our house are in June’s room, one and a half walls of built-ins that bracket the space like a capital L. The previous owner had used the room as an office, as far as we can tell, and we planned to do the same. We set my desk under the window. I had just started writing Delancey then, and I pounded out the early chapters there - or, more often, avoided pounding out the early chapters by watching nuthatches flit around the giant evergreen outside. At some point, we decided that having a baby would be good idea, and to make room for her, we moved my desk to the dining room, replaced it with a crib, and hung her name on the door. And that is how it came to pass that the only bookshelves in our house are in June’s room, three people’s worth of cookbooks, fiction, grad school texts, and picture books, climbing the walls. I like to imagine that this will make some kind of lasting impression, that she’s absorbing novels and recipes by proximity as she sleeps, maybe, or that she’ll grow up to remember the books as a quiet, reassuring presence, like the old lady in the rocker in Goodnight Moon, the one whispering "hush." I like to imagine.

In any case, the fact that we have only limited space for books is frustrating, but it’s also nice, because I get a real thrill out of getting rid of books we don’t use. We could buy some bookshelves, yes - or I could just cull the herd once a year and revel in the satisfaction of that until it’s time to do it again. For now, we’ve chosen the latter, and last week, I hauled four bags of books to Half Price Books. Cheap thrills!

Anyway, as I was doing this latest round of culling, my hand paused on the spine of Breakfast, Lunch, Tea, by Rose Bakery founder Rose Carrarini. I’ve had the book since shortly after its publication in 2006, and though I’ve used it twice at most, I can’t seem to get rid of it. I like its spacious layout and the way the food looks tidy and geometric, but also clearly handmade. A loaf of polenta cake is impeccably square in cross-section, but the powdered sugar on top is uneven. One arm of a star-shaped gingerbread cookie bends slightly, gracefully, toward another arm, like a sea star on the move. A small lemon tart is clean and round as a clock face, but the lip of the crust rises gently at four o’clock, where a finger pinched it shut. This is food I want to look at. Rose Bakery also has handsome concrete-and-metal tables, which you can see in a picture on page 57, and we liked them so much that, based on that picture alone, we copied them at Delancey. All that said, I never use this book. I almost never even pick it up. It takes up shelf space. My fingers itched.

But then, then, I remembered having seen a recent mention of it online, and that this mention came from my friend Shari, she of the sweet potato pound cake and the raspberry-ricotta cake recommendations. She’d posted a shot of some date scones she’d made from a Rose Bakery recipe, and she’d raved. I decided to let the book live another round, and I added dates to the grocery list.





Now. You probably don’t need another scone recipe, and I don’t either. But I will be keeping this recipe, need it or not. The dough is made from half white flour and half whole wheat, which means that it gets the flavor of wheat without its weight. It’s sweetened only lightly, and with brown sugar, so most of its sweetness comes from the dates themselves, dark and fudgy. You could stop right there and have a great scone. But this particular specimen also includes freshly grated nutmeg, which gives it - and, in my experience, any baked good that uses nutmeg in sufficient quantity - a certain intoxicating eau de doughnut. The scones bake up sturdy but tender, biscuit-y, and between the whole wheat and the sticky dried fruit and the spicing, they double as both a weekday breakfast and a totally racy afternoon snack.

One final aside: your scones will not, and should not, look as date-y as mine do. The recipe as written in the book has both weight and volume measures, and I learned the hard way that the weight measure for the dates is incorrect. It calls for 250 grams of pitted, chopped dates, indicating that this should equal a scant ½ cup. Because I like to bake by weight, I didn’t even look at the volume measure before I cheerfully stirred in the entire 250 grams, or more than half a pound. I like dates, but there’s a limit. 250 grams, as it turns out, measures to nearly one and a half cups, or nearly three times what you actually need and want. The recipe below reflects my correction.

Oh, wait, another aside: Spilled Milk will be live, live live live! at Town Hall this Sunday night, April 19th, and though the show is sold out (?!?!?!?!), there will be a limited number of standby tickets available.

Oh, and this is really the final aside: to celebrate the paperback edition of Delancey, which will be released on May 26th, I’ll be reading and signing at Omnivore Books on Food in San Francisco on Saturday, May 30th, at 3:00 pm. I can’t wait.

Happy weekend.


Whole Wheat Date Scones
Inspired by Breakfast, Lunch, Tea, by Rose Carrarini

Carrarini says that these scones should be eaten warm, with lots of butter, and eaten slowly. Eaten slowly! Riiiiiiiiight.

As for kosher salt, I use Diamond Crystal brand, and though it might seem like a trivial detail, the brand does make a difference. If you use Morton’s, note that it’s saltier than Diamond Crystal, so use less.

125 grams (¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons) all-purpose flour
125 grams (1 cup) whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon kosher salt
¼ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
2 heaping tablespoons golden brown sugar
60 grams (4 ½ or 5 tablespoons) cold unsalted butter, diced
90 to 100 grams (½ cup) pitted, chopped dates
150 ml (2/3 cup) whole milk
1 egg, beaten well

Set a rack in the middle of the oven, and preheat to 400°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
In a large bowl, combine the flours, baking powder, salt, and nutmeg. Whisk to blend well. Add the brown sugar, whisking again, and then add the butter. Using your fingers, work the butter into the flour mixture, rubbing and pinching the butter until there are not lumps of butter bigger than a pea. Stir in the dates. Add about three-quarters of the milk, and using a fork, stir it into the dry ingredients. If it seems too dry and crumbly, add more milk as needed, but start sparingly, so that the dough doesn’t wind up sticky. Once the dough is coming together, put down the fork and finish bringing it together with your hand, pressing it and turning it to incorporate all the flour. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface, and massage it into a disk roughly 1 inch tall. Cut the dough into 10 even wedges (or squares, if you want, or you can use a cutter to make circles), and arrange them on the baking sheet. Brush lightly with egg.

Bake for about 15 minutes, or until the tops are lightly golden. Serve warm – or, if eating later, reheat gently before eating.

Yield: 10 small scones

March 31 31 Mar 2015 8:26 PM (10 years ago)

Early Friday morning, I boarded an airplane to Washington, DC, and on the way there, using my Motherly Time-Management Skills, I managed not only to sleep for two hours, but also to read one New Yorker and the entire current issue of Lucky Peach. I was in DC for a conference, and to celebrate my nephew’s fifth birthday (Lego-themed party! Lego-shaped candy! BTW, IMO, the blue ones are best; avoid yellow). But this morning, back at my desk, I’m still thinking about that Lucky Peach. In particular, this Jeremy Fox story and this endive story. But really, the whole issue was great, so smart and so weird, that I even mentioned it to the nurse in my dermatologist’s office this morning. That’s a strong endorsement. Somebody should use it for a book blurb, like, "So-and-so’s Very Good Book struck me so deeply that I couldn’t stop talking about it, not even while getting my moles examined."

Speaking of being struck, I learned this weekend that this blog is a finalist in the Saveur Blog Awards, in the Best Writing category. My fellow finalists are some of the writers I admire most, online or off, and I’m elated. Elated! Whoever nominated me, whoever you are, thank you.  Voting is open through April 30, and if you feel moved, you should take a look at the finalists in all 13 categories and cast your ballot. (You must be registered at Saveur.com, yadda yadda, but it only takes a second.)



And speaking of elation, next month I’m going to Alaska, somewhere I’ve never been. We’ll be in Sitka, to talk to a class of fourth graders about the chemistry of pizza (Brandon) and writing (me). The teacher who invited us has also lined up a reading for me at the public library, so if you find yourself in, or near, or even remotely near Sitka on the evening of Monday, April 27, please come to Kettleson Memorial Library at 7:00 pm. I’ll be reading, and there will be books for sale. I will try not to talk about Lucky Peach, or moles. But I might talk about something else that you should read: "Eating Well at the End of the Road," which is wonderful - and about Homer, Alaska - and very rightly nominated in this year’s James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards.

As I type this, a fine hail is falling steadily on the roof. It sounds like television static from the next room. After just four days away, Seattle seemed impossibly green and wild this morning, like a caricature of itself. It made me think of an interview with Mary Oliver that I listened to a few weeks ago on On Being, and of her poem "The Kitten," which has always meant something to me, even before I could really understand it. It’s good to be back in my city.

The bean doctor 22 Mar 2015 7:59 PM (10 years ago)

I believe everyone should know how to doctor a can of beans. I also believe that, having said this, I have become my father. I also believe I would do anything, anything, absolutely anything to get R. Kelly’s "I Believe I Can Fly," which lodged itself in my head as I was typing those first two sentences, back out of my head again. Spread my wings and fly awaaaaaaaaaay

I come from a family of bean doctors. The beans we ate most often were baked beans - Bush’s brand, I think - to which my dad added brown sugar and Worchestershire sauce. We ate them whenever my mom was out for the evening, usually with boiled hot dogs. It felt like a secret that only he and I were in on, and it was my favorite meal as a kid. It might still be, because you can’t improve on a combination like that. Burg could also be known to crack open a can of cannellini beans, rinse them, and dress them with pesto to make a quick salad. If he was feeling frisky, he would then plate his cannellini salad by carefully piling spoonfuls of it onto individual endive leaves, as though he were making canapés for a banquet. He could throw down.

I married a bean doctor. We always have canned chickpeas and black beans in the cabinet for Brandon’s chickpea salad with lemon and Parmesan or his quick black beans with cumin and oregano. One night last week, when he needed a late dinner after work, he drained and rinsed some chickpeas and tossed them with warmed leftover sauce from a batch of penne alla vodka. As for me, if I happen to have pinto beans around, I make Luisa’s, or rather Melissa Clark’s, fake baked beans. (The. Best.)

I know that some people look down their noses at canned beans: maybe they don’t taste or feel quite the same as perfectly cooked-from-dried beans, and they can be higher in salt, and then there’s the specter of BPA in the can lining. I do keep dried beans around, and I cook them often, and sometimes I do a good job of it. But there is nothing inherently wrong with a canned bean. Being told otherwise makes me tired. Canned (or jarred in glass, if you prefer) beans can be very good - especially brands like Progresso, Bush’s, or Goya - and it doesn’t take much effort, or much time, to make them great. VIVE LE BEAN DOCTOR.

My cousin Katie makes something called Creamy Beans, and she shared her method with me a few weeks ago, when I called to pick her brain about seven-minute eggs. You upend four cans of beans - black or pinto are best - and their liquid into a saucepan, add a chunk of butter, and shake a bottle of hot sauce over the pan for ten seconds. You stir it all up, and then you let it simmer gently until the liquid is thickened and the beans are starting to break down. Katie learned about Creamy Beans from a co-worker, and now she and her husband Andre usually make a batch once a week, have it with or for dinner, and then eat the leftovers in the mornings that follow, with seven-minute eggs on top.


I’ve made Creamy Beans twice since Katie told me about them, once with pinto beans and once with black beans. Pintos don’t break down much - it’s mostly about letting the liquid thicken and get creamy - but with a long simmer, they become wonderfully tender, even more than the average canned bean. Black beans break down more easily, though I stopped cooking mine before they really did; I let them cook just until they were fudgy, gooey. In any case, the butter gives them a quiet richness and heft, while the hot sauce brings acid to offset their natural earthiness. It’s sort of a cheater’s version of refried beans, sort of. June cheerfully ate bowlfuls of Creamy Beans on their own, while I topped mine with eggs and more hot sauce - and once, feta, though it didn’t totally jibe. Next time, I’ll slice avocado on top and grate some sharp cheddar.

Have a happy week, all.


Creamy Beans
Adapted from Katie Caradec

I’m no fan of the liquid in cans of beans - it’s just so... slimy - but this is a recipe where it really is useful. Take a deep breath, and dump it in.

As for butter, Katie doesn’t measure it, but she told me that she probably uses two tablespoons for four cans of beans. I prefer mine with more butter, ideally with a tablespoon per can. Brandon also suggests adding garlic, pressed or minced, and that’s very nice, too. It adds a faint depth of flavor. But I defer to you.

Also, note that this recipe can be scaled down as needed. When I made it with black beans last week, I only had one can in the house, and it worked just fine - and in less time.

4 (16-ounce) cans or jars pinto or black beans
4 tablespoons (56 grams) unsalted butter
Hot sauce, such as Frank's Red Hot (my choice) or Yucatan Sunshine (Katie's choice)
A garlic clove, pressed or minced (optional)

Pour the beans and their liquid into a medium saucepan. Add the butter, maybe ten or fifteen shakes of hot sauce, and the garlic (if using; see above). Stir to mix. Place over medium-high heat, and bring just to a simmer. Adjust the heat to maintain a gentle simmer, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the liquid has thickened and looks creamy and the beans are very tender, maybe even falling apart. For pintos, I let mine go for about 1 hour, though Katie says hers only take about 30 minutes. You can cook it as long as you like, really. Cook it to your taste. (And keep in mind that the beans will thicken further, and get creamier, as they cool.)

Serve hot, with seven-minute eggs and any other toppings you like: hot sauce, avocado, cilantro, grated cheese, etc.

Yield: enough for dinner for two, plus three or four breakfasts, depending on how you serve it

Doing it right 13 Mar 2015 9:12 PM (10 years ago)

I believe in everyday cake.

I may have remembered to floss four times last week, up from my usual count of zero. I may have had avocado toast one sunny morning at Vif, with za'atar, aleppo pepper, preserved Meyer lemon, and celery(!). I may have even rediscovered R.E.M.'s superlative Green after forgetting about it for twenty years and then sung along loudly and with feeling to "World Leader Pretend" and got goosebumps during the bridge like I used to when I was seventeen. But nothing makes me feel like I'm really living, really doing it up right, like having a cake on my kitchen counter on a weekday.


About a week ago, my friend Shari posted a photograph of a cake on Instagram and declared, "New favorite, I think!" Instagram has more shots of cake than there are particles in the Milky Way galaxy, but then again, you may remember that Shari is the person who, six years ago, introduced me to sweet potato pound cake. Her opinion is not to be questioned. And as I studied her photo, I realized that her cake, pale gold and splotched with berries, was from a recipe that I had read and dog-eared only the night before, as I thumbed through the March issue of Bon Appétit: a simple, single-layer cake enriched with whole-milk ricotta and spiked with frozen raspberries. Ding ding ding!

So I picked up some ricotta over the weekend, and on Monday afternoon, when I found myself with a free half-hour, I made a cake. This is a cake that you can actually throw together, not just in word but in deed: there's no mixer required, just a spatula and a whisk and an arm. The batter is thick and rich, like a mousse, and bakes up light, pillowy, terrifically moist. (I know everybody hates the word moist now, but I don't mind it. British recipe writers seem to be into damp, but that usually reminds me of basements, or other people's towels, or the point in a day at the beach when your bathing suit starts to itch.) A few people on the Bon Appétit website have commented that they would reduce the sugar, but I wouldn't: it's just right, especially against the tart shock of the berries.  If anything, I'd up the amount of raspberries by a third or half - or, whoa, hey, maybe try it with frozen sour cherries instead? Ricotta and sour cherries. That's doing it right.

Happy weekend.

P.S. If you've got time to make your own ricotta, do. There's a recipe in Delancey, and what you don't use for the cake, you can use on crostini, on toast with jam, in pasta, on pizza, stirred into eggs, you name it.

P.P.S. More everyday cakes here. And this looks a little more involved, but man oh man.

P.P.P.S. Earlier this week, I wrote on Saveur.com about one of my favorite things, the seven-minute egg.

P.P.P.P.S. Luisa started a good discussion about food magazines, and I'd love to know what you think.

And this P.S. thing is getting ridiculous, but P.P.P.P.P.S. My favorite (ancient) photograph of R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe.


Raspberry-Ricotta Cake
Adapted very slightly from Bon Appétit, March 2015

1 ½ cups (210 grams) all-purpose flour
1 cup (200 grams) sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
¾ teaspoon kosher salt
3 large eggs
1 ½ cups (325 grams) whole-milk ricotta
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
1 stick (113 grams) unsalted butter, melted
1 cup (100 grams) frozen raspberries, divided

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Lightly grease a 9-inch round cake pan (I used springform), and press a round of parchment paper into the bottom.

In a large bowl, whisk the flour, sugar, baking powder, and kosher salt. In a medium bowl, whisk the eggs, ricotta, and vanilla until smooth. Gently stir ricotta mixture into the dry ingredients until just blended. Then fold in the butter, followed by ¾ cup of the raspberries, taking care not to crush them. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan, smoothing it evenly, and scatter the remaining raspberries on top.

Bake the cake until it is golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, 50 to 60 minutes. Let cool at least 20 minutes before unmolding. Cool completely before serving.

Yield: 8 servings

While the house is quiet 3 Mar 2015 2:52 PM (10 years ago)

Today is our Sunday, and everyone but me is napping, sleepy after a lunch of cheese toast and cucumber salad. While the house is quiet, I should probably be doing tax paperwork and résumé reading and other sacred rituals of small business ownership, but:

- I’ve never felt confident about picking favorites: my favorite movie, favorite song, favorite food, favorite whatever. I don’t have many favorite anything. But I do feel confident about saying this: Michael Chabon is my favorite novelist. His first novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh has been my favorite book for two decades, since I first read it at sixteen years old. He also wrote The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and plenty more since that. I finally got around to starting Wonder Boys, his second novel, and I like it so much that it’s taken me almost a month to get through only the first two hundred pages, because I want to read and reread every sentence over and over and over, just sort of roll myself around in it. For example, this: "'Is he kidding?' said Miss Sloviak, all of whose makeup seemed in the course of the ride from the airport to have been reapplied, very roughly, an inch to the left of her eyes and lips, so that her face had a blurred, double-exposed appearance." I MEAN.

- Also, This American Life is killing it. Amateur Hour!

- Also, Invisibilia. They’ve only made a handful of episodes, so you can catch up quickly, and you should. The Secret History of Thoughts is fascinating, and Fearless, too. (I particularly like the idea that fear = thinking + time, and that if you take away either one, and you can’t have fear.) Good stuff.

- Speaking of fear, ha ha HA, I’m helping to lead a class called "Varying Your Voice: A Workshop on Writing in the First, Second, and Third Person" at the IACP conference in Washington, DC, on Monday, March 30th. I’ll be co-teaching with Jess Thomson and Kathy Gunst, both longtime pros and forces of nature, and while our workshop does unfortunately require a separate day pass, it’ll be worth it.

- My friend Natalie brought over some Persian cucumbers one night last month, and I had forgotten of how good, and how versatile, they are. They’re not exactly winter food, but we’ve been eating them every day, in salads (usually with a mustard vinaigrette and feta) or on their own, as a snack. Our family of three took down six of them at lunch today.

- It’s handy that we’ve been eating so many cucumbers, because when we’re not eating cucumbers, we're eating cheeseburgers. Brandon spent the better part of last year testing and perfecting a wood-fired burger for Essex (using grass-fed beef from Skagit River Ranch, with not one but two secret sauces), and he put it on the menu last October, as a Sundays-only special. But now, as of a couple of weeks ago, it’s available five nights a week, Wednesday to Sunday. June pronounces it "booger," and she eats a full half of the thing. She’s an animal.

- I’ve mentioned before that every Tuesday is Taco-&-Tiki Night at Essex, but I haven’t told you what’s for dessert: our own choco taco. (There’s housemade ice cream in there.) It isn’t entirely in my interest to tell you about it, because any that we don’t sell on Tuesday are mine to eat for the rest of the week, but I’m trying to get better about sharing.

- Our friend Edouardo Jordan, the supremely talented chef de cuisine at Bar Sajor and a supremely nice guy, just launched a Kickstarter campaign to open his own neighborhood restaurant. Go, go, Edouardo!

- I mentioned recently on Instagram that I, Ms. Didn’t-Learn-to-Sew-Until-Age-36.5, had sewn a hexagonal patchwork pillow from a (wonderfully clear) tutorial I found online, and a couple of you asked for the link. Here you go.

Be right back.
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