ben and birdy

"is catherine newman and expet on marriage?"

2012-01-27T12:48:00.000-05:00

Ah, Search Terms, how you beguile me. Some days it's all "best-ever cream cheese frosting" and "ben and birdy" and "yoni crack martini glass" and "nursing until your boobs fall off."

And then some days it's this. Let's see. Am I and my expet on marriage? Do you mean like *on* marriage--like, we're *on* it, marriage? Me and my expet. Expet, like exparrot in Mony Python? That might be our cat Tiny, I suppose. So are you wondering if I've been betrothed to the groomish ghost of my dead cat? All I can say is, if I were, it would only be for the health insurance.

But if you're asking if I'm an expert on marriage because you've been assigned a response paper to my essay, "I Do. Not."--well, all I can say, my poor Comp 101 friend, is: you'd better proof-read it.

xoxo

Buffalo Shrimp

2012-01-23T17:30:00.000-05:00

I had a kind of a flash situation occurring--but these still look good, right?

I was so close to throwing it all away. Frank’s Red Hot and I were on a bus for Vegas, his glassy red-hot self beside me, promising me the world (of tailgate-style food), but I couldn’t go through with it. The thought of Michael raising the kids blandly without me, while I frolicked with my spicy love? I knew it was wrong. So deliciously wrong. But we’re still friends! Friends with benefits even, the benefits being vinegar and heat and chicken wings and quesadillas and Corn Chex nachos, and fantastic, if slightly damp, popcorn. Oh Frank’s, I don't just "like" you on facebook. I love you. (Speaking of, did you read this? It’s really good.)

Frank's has moved on, I see.

I love all things buffalo. I am the person who orders the Buffalo Chicken Salad, and you’re like, “What the? That’s not a salad! That’s fried chicken with blue cheese dressing and some lettuce shreds that by accident got underneath it!” And I’m like, “I don’t care.” I order buffalo chicken pizza from Bruno’s; I order buffalo chicken wraps when I see them. I would do my bedroom in buffalo chicken wallpaper.

But I don’t make buffalo chicken wings. Because we live a half mile from a bar that serves them, and even though Ben and Birdy are always the youngest people there by six years, and Michael and I are always the oldest people there by twenty years (are you getting a sense of the demographic?) we eat there at least once a month. Once a week, if we are flush or feeling flush. Because they have the best buffalo chicken wings in the world. Also glasses of beer so huge that, to lift one, you need two hands and the core strength of a college student who does either varsity hockey or pilates. (I just kind of lean over and slurp until I can pick it up.) We get the wings extra-spicy and extra-crispy, with an extra side of celery—and they are the wings of your wingiest wing fantasies: crunchy and juicy and pulling kind of stringily-but-cleanly off their bones, and drenched in enough vinegary, buttery, lip-tingling sauce to fill your daydreams for days. Sigh. (Note: the children eat Boneless Honey-Barbeque Wings because they are only children and Can’t Be Expected to Know Better.)

But I don’t even want to try to make buffalo wings, because you need to deep fry for them to be good, and I don’t deep fry at home. That’s one of my own personal rules: for bar or diner food, we go to bars or diners. Happily. So. What to do with the buffalo craving? Buffalo shrimp! Granted, I’ve never actually eaten buffalo shrimp except these that I make. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to dredge each shrimp in flour, egg wash, and bread crumbs before frying, like all the online recipes recommend. So this is my alternate method: rub them with cornmeal, and pan-fry them before soaking them in the usual Frank’s/butter magic. They are very easy, truly, and nothing short of wildly delicious. I just wish shrimp were cheaper. Buffalo tofu! I’m on it.

Buffalo Shrimp

Serves 4, as long as one person eats bread and goat cheese instead

Active time: 10 minutes; total time: 25 minutes

The cornmeal keeps a certain crispness alive, even after the saucing. Be prepared to crave this constantly.

1 pound medium shrimp, peeled and deveined (thaw frozen shrimp by running cold water over them in a colander for five or so minutes; I use frozen "Whole Catch" peeled, tail-on raw shrimp)

2 teaspoons kosher salt (or half as much table salt)

½ teaspoon Old Bay seasoning (this is optional, but I like the way the flavor cues me to the fact that I’m eating seafood, if you know what I mean)

1/3 cup cornmeal

1/4-1/3 cup vegetable oil (enough to coat the pan generously)

¼ cup Frank’s Original Red Hot

½ stick butter

Rub the shrimp with the salt and the Old Bay, then set it aside for 10 or 15 minutes. Drain it, then blot it well with paper towels. I always think about putting it in the salad spinner with a wad of paper towels, but then it seems like all our salad would be shrimpy forever after.

Sprinkle the cornmeal over the shrimp and rub it all together with your hands so that the shrimp are more or less coated.

Heat the Frank’s and butter together, in a small pot or the microwave, until the butter is melted.

In a wide nonstick skillet over medium heat, heat the oil until it is very hot but not smoking. Add all the shrimp to the pan in a single layer, and cook around three minutes, until the bottoms are golden and crusted. Flip the shrimp (I do each one individually, with tongs, and it is not as laborious as it sounds), then cook until golden, around 3 minutes more.

In a large bowl, toss the shrimp with the sauce (or keep some plain for kids who might like to dip in the sauce but not be smothered), then serve with celery sticks and blue cheese dressing.

Die, it's so good.

Shrimp tossed with salt and Old Bay. Don't skip the salting, okay? It makes them so meaty and good.

Shrimp tossed with cornmeal.

Frying the first side.

And the second.

Saucing.

Served in the classic style. Except that, sadly, many are already eaten.

"pea shape lump in eye"

2012-01-23T16:09:00.000-05:00

Oh dear. I can't imagine you found what you were searching for when Google sent you here. I hope it gets better soon, though!

Stay tuned for buffalo shrimp. (I salivated just from writing that.)

Not-as-cheap Thrills: 5 Recommendations for a Winter Weekend

2012-01-20T12:06:00.000-05:00

This game. As long as you don't mind a vague haze of inappropriateness (e.g. the card "Chainsaw of Bloody Dismemberment") But be prepared to start adopting the game's language: "I'm eating cereal of great crunchiness," "Can you please take out the garbage of extraordinary grossness?"
This band. If you like dark, muscular, strangely beautiful folk music.
This novel for grown-ups. But it's sad.
This book for kids who love to draw. Birdy uses it constantly.
This book for families who like to sit and look at beautiful, funny, tender, melancholy images. We've already given it many times as a gift.

Have a lovely weekend.

xo

DIY English Muffins

2012-01-17T12:22:00.002-05:00

I thought about calling these "crack muffins," just so they would go viral, like the broccoli. Nobody can resist the word "crack." Will you be surprised if I tell you that my kids thought the broccoli name had to do with butt crack?

I know that Thomas’ kind of has the whole English muffin thing down—and that making them from scratch will sound as sensible to some of you as Homemade Marshmallow Fluff! Homemade Rainbow Sprinkles! Homemade Super-Plus Tampax!

Spread peach jam on it, and Michael will eat a beach towel.

I understand. I’m like that about some things too. But we are kind of English muffin fanatics around here.

And the problem for me is that the more bread I bake from scratch, the more strange store-bought (or “boughten,” as we like to say on the prairie) bread and bread products start to taste to me. Sometimes they taste like laundry detergent, which I take to be a simple issue of mechanical proximity in the storeroom. And sometimes they taste like dust, which I take to be a complex issue with the age of the flour. These, however, are simply incredible: so deeply flavored and exquisite, and nooked-and-crannied with the best of them. And if you use all whole-grain flour, they’re also chock-full of nutrients.

Plus—and don’t hate me for saying this—they are really pretty easy, and they don’t take very long. I think you should think of it as cake mix that you, you know, kind of assemble yourself. There’s yeast in it, and I know you're like "Yeast! Kill me!" and you've already got your hands over your ears, blah blah blah blah blah. But you don’t need to do anything about the yeast! Pretend it’s not even there. Besides, the batter is thick and gooey, and you don’t need to knead it or add just the right amount of anything. Just follow the directions! And give the batter a warm place to rise.

I should have left a magazine in there for it.

You might also wonder about the rings, which you do need.

It's like an English muffin ring--but one that comes with bonus preserved fish!

You can order some quite inexpensively. Or you can start saving your tuna cans: just remove both the top and the bottom, and you’ve got a perfect English muffin ring.
**Edited to add: I just saw on-line that somebody uses regular old wide-mouth canning rings! Please let me know if you try this.

Once you get your muffin rings, they will be so easy to find when you need them!

DIY English Muffins

Makes 8

Active time: 30 minutes; total time: 1 hour

If you use all white flour, cut the baking soda down to ¼ or ½ teaspoon: on the one hand, your batter won’t need as much help rising, and on the other hand, they will be milder flavored, making the baking soda taste more pronounced. Not that anyone has mentioned the baking soda taste, by the way. I just not it can be an issue. I am wondering if cornmeal would work on the griddle, instead of oil, to keep them from sticking without giving them that slight oily inclination to burn. Let me know if you try it—I keep meaning to, but then forget.

Ingredients

1 1/3 cups very warm (but not hot) milk (I microwaved mine)

1 tablespoon sugar

2 teaspoons kosher salt

1 tablespoon shortening or vegetable oil

1 envelope dry yeast (2 ½ teaspoons)

2 cups whole-wheat flour (delicious), or a mix of whole-wheat and spelt flour (shown here), or some mix of whole-grain and white flour, or all white flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

Vegetable-oil spray

In a bowl combine the milk, sugar, salt, and shortening, and stir until the sugar and salt are dissolved, then add the yeast and stir again. Add the flour and beat thoroughly with wooden spoon. Cover the bowl and let it rest in a warm spot for 30 minutes.

Spray the griddle with oil and heat over a low flame.

Add the baking soda to the mixture and beat thoroughly. Place metal rings onto the griddle and coat lightly with vegetable spray. Fill the rings half full (I use a third of a cup for each, and measure it in an oiled measuring cup), cover with an oiled baking sheet, cook for 4 to 5 minutes. Remove the baking sheet and flip rings using tongs. Cover with the sheet and cook for another 3 to 4 minutes or until golden brown. Place on a cooling rack, remove rings, and cool. (I only have 4 rings, so I bake these in 2 batches).

Split with a fork (just stick the fork in and out all the way around the edge, until the muffin comes apart into two halves) and toast before eating. Store leftovers air-tight at room temperature for a couple of days, or in the refrigerator for longer.

These make very good pizza toast.

Tip: if yours got to dark on the bottom, as mine often do, you can put your toaster oven on broil so that the bottoms won’t get any darker.

Your batter will be lighter if you use some or all white flour. Oh, but don't! I mean, some is fine. But you'll be so happy and healthy if you add some whole-grain!

I spray the rings on top of the upside-down baking sheet, which also needs to be sprayed. Smart, right?

The batter in the rings. These don't come out perfect, by the way. They are often misshapen.

Plus, even after spraying, the baking sheet sometimes pulls some of the batter off when you lift it up. No matter! Just try not to burn the bottoms: keep the heat low, and keep your nose awake to the possibility of burning.

Still, pretty nice, right? The uglier side is hidden from you.

Fork-split and ready to toast.

Birdy.

Google Translate: Update

2012-01-17T11:15:00.000-05:00

Now we're just typing in sentences to hear them spoken aloud by the voice in English. The wrong emphasis is what's pushing it over the edge for us.

Excuse me. I seem to have dropped my wallet into *your* butt *crack*.

Your scrotum smells *like* a zoo.

Sigh. So happy.

New recipe coming later today.

xo

Cheap Thrills: the free edition

2012-01-13T16:55:00.000-05:00

Boordsht.

How it started was with Ben telling me that you could actually listen to different languages being spoken on Google Translate. He’s working on a school report about Russian immigrants, which delights me no end, given that my grandmother was one.

First we simply listened to the voice on the site saying “borscht” (which sounds deliciously like “boordsht” in Russian and, in English, uptightly like “bo-arsht”). Then we listened to some other Russian basics: hello, good-bye, thank you, the pierogi are a little dry, that kind of thing.

Then Ben, recalling one of my gorier Youth Humiliation Stories, said, “Let’s type in What? Still no bosoms?” This is what my grandmother announced throughout my teenagerhood, upon my weekly arrival at her apartment. It was accompanied by the rubbing of her gnarled Russian hand over my miserable flat chest. We typed it in. “Oh,” I said, disappointed. “I can see the problem here. What I want is not the actual Russian, but for it to get translated into English with a heavy Russian accent. Vat? Steel no boozums?” But we settled for the actual Russian of that delightfully shaming line, along with her other: Did you move your bowels?

Then Ben showed me a game he and Ava had been playing, where you translate a line from English through a series of other languages and then back to English. It’s like linguistic telephone, and it’s hilarious. Especially if you share a fifth- or sixth-grade sense of humor with your children.

Your stinky pants are on fire became, via Russian, Vietnamese, Latin, and Portuguese Fire some smelly.

The goat drowned in a vat of cheese sauce became, via a different series, And she drowned goat cheese in the lake here.

I can smell your crack from here became Please log in your odor.

If you need more of a reason reason to devote an hour of your life to this pastime, beyond lying on the carpet laughing, there is surely a lesson here about translation and the power of language, a lesson about the importance of understanding what you’re trying to say and to whom. I’m thinking of that ad campaign, “Come Alive with the Pepsi Generation," which became, in Taiwanese, "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead." Or that Parker Pen ad, where the slogan in English, about sparing yourself embarrassment, became, in Spanish, “It won't leak in your pocket and make you pregnant.” Although, I’m pretty sure that stuff has leaked into my pocket and made me pregnant. I’m just saying.

Homemade Dip Cones (coneless version)

2012-01-10T10:52:00.001-05:00

Is it hard to trust a person who, one weeks, talks about broccoli like it's the new sour cream-and-bacon Ruffles, and the next talks about dip-cone ice-cream topping like it's the new flaxseed-crusted spelt? Maybe. But I need to make a case for making your own dip-cone topping. Not because how else are you going to get your kids to eat their ice cream? But because you will be a hero for the night, recreating the melty, crunchy, delightful experience that the kids associate only with summertime and clam shacks. We had this for dessert last night, after a glorious dinner of bean bowls with mmm sauce. Perfect.

But you should also make it because--and here's where you need to stretch with me--it's sort of oddly healthy. Coconut oil is the new darling of nutrition folks because it turns out to be, as my jar boasts, full of MCTs. 62% MCTs, no less! Enough said.

No? Well, according to my 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth, of which coconut oil is a proud member, MCTs are medium-chain triglycerides, which your body prefers to use for energy, rather than storing as fat. (This is unfortunate if, like me, you were hoping to store more fat on your way towards the Guinness-Book Trunk-Junk title.) Not only that, but the MCTs in coconut oil are half made up of lauric acid, which is a massive virus and bacteria KILLA. Also, MCTs fight STDs which is A.O.K. if you are a S-L-U-T!

I'm just dessert, and am in no way implicated in the discussion above. Or below.

Plus, my brand is called EfaGold, which sounds like "effing gold," which makes me laugh. Get the extra virgin kind, and store it in the fridge, and expect it to make things taste a bit coconutty when you use it. As I have mentioned before, we pop popcorn in it, and it is utterly fantastic.

Unrelated cat-in-a-bag shot.

The single other ingredient of homemade dip-cone topping is dark chocolate, and we do believe, because they tell us it's true, that dark chocolate is full of antioxidants and antidepressants and antiunhappinesses of all sorts.

I arranged the chocolate so that you can't see the big orange discount label on the coconut oil. Coconut oil is expensive, so I like to buy mine at the local Scratch-and-Dent. I do make sure that it's only there because of some labeling error (EffingGold!) or cosmetic situation, rather than because it is past is expiration date.

Ready? Here's what you do. Put 1/4 cup of coconut oil (I dig it out with a butter knife and estimate the amount) and 1/3 cup of dark chocolate chips in a heat-proof bowl or a mason jar. Microwave for a minute or two (you could, obviously, do this in a small pot on the stovetop), until the chocolate is almost melted, then stir until smooth. Drizzle over ice cream, where it will chill almost immediately into a delicious, crackable shell. Store the extras in the fridge and heat as needed.

I haven't tried flavoring it, but would like to: orange, I'm thinking, or peppermint. Yum!

I wish I'd taken pictures, last night, of Ben and Birdy's ecstatic faces.

Can you see that it makes a shell? I can't tell if the photos show the shell well. Hell.

The kindness of strangers

2012-01-05T10:59:00.001-05:00

Were you wondering about my gorgeous new blog design? I figured you might be. My friend Mary Arteche sent it to me for no reason. Even though I don't actually know her. Do you see what I'm saying? The kindness of strangers. Who somehow aren't actually strangers. You might want to check out her lovely blog. Mary, thank you so much.

And do you see what this means? It means that the name-this-blog contest from June has an official winner: it's Jennifer LB, who wrote, "don't know why it can't still be Ben and Birdy" (azure suggested this too, just a bit later). I need to mention that Nikosha suggested "Catherine Newman," which I almost kept. And that sunygrrl suggested my all-time favorite, which I would have used if it hadn't made it sound like a high-blood-pressure recipe archive: "Half as Much Table Salt." Jennifer LB, Nikosha, and sunygrrl: write me with your address and the book you would like from amazon, and I'll get the prizes out in the mail!

But I really do have to mention the runners up as well:

Catherine Newman and the Whirly Poppers
Just Catherine
These Boobs Are Really a Heart
Bringing Up Catherine Newman
Crazy Delicious
Feeding Ben and Birdy
Mmm Sauce
Twilight Testicles
Raw Chicken, *Shudder*
Umami, Umama
Cooking in Catherine's Socialist Kitchen
What the Focaccia?
Ben and Birdy, Only Bigger
catherine newman: this huge and heavy-hearted happiness
Salted Nutgate
the hairy martini glass
Lucky
Kitchen Couch

Reading them was like seeing a little slideshow of my own weirdness and our long history together. I loved it. Thank you, as always.

xo

Crack Broccoli, part II

2012-01-04T15:43:00.000-05:00

Crack Broccoli

2012-01-04T14:40:00.000-05:00

Picture a lemon wedge off to the side. Right?

Only my friend Maddie could make a vegetable that would get nicknamed “Crack Broccoli”—and that would be the first thing to disappear at a party where it was placed among such delights as chips and dip, oozing triple-cream cheese, and ginger-prosecco cocktails. Children literally shoved aside bowls of candy to grab at the vanishing broccoli, and you know I don’t use the word “literally” figuratively. So I asked for the recipe.

And I am sharing it here, now, because I am not a juice-fast-January kind of person. But I am a vegetable-January kind of person. In the past two weeks, I have eaten chocolate-caramel walnuts, gravlax, and cider-glazed ham. I have eaten pickled shrimp, pork meatballs, and all the Good-and-Plenty roof tiles from my children’s gingerbread houses. And I am full in a bad way. I feel like the “before” photo for a spa or the "after" photo for some kind of human inflating device: creased and puffy and so tired that all I can say is, “I’m so tired.” And now I’m sitting here, with my tired pink face squashed into my hand, trying to think of something funny to add. I’m so tired?

I'm tired too!

Probably I should just eat the whole head of broccoli raw. But that’s not really my style. This, however, is exactly my style: broccoli perfectly tender, perfectly browned, a little bit sweet and just this side of too salty, and utterly addictive. It’s the first recipe that has allowed me to make roasted broccoli that was neither burnt nor underdone nor simultaneously burnt and underdone. We’re going to eat it at room temperature with fresh whole-grain bread and a nice big piece of cheddar cheese, and we’re going to call it dinner.

Oven-Roasted Broccoli

Serves 4

Active time: 10 minutes; total time: 20 minutes

Maddie, who is very “Pish-posh, a baby could make it,” when you ask her for any of her recipes, directed me to America’s Test Kitchen for this, and sure enough I googled and found it. And I wouldn’t let a baby make it, but it is definitely easy. And there won’t be any left.

1 large head broccoli

3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

1 teaspoon kosher salt (or half as much table salt)

1/2 teaspoon sugar

Lemon wedges, for serving (I keep forgetting this, but I’m sure it would be good)

Peel the broccoli with a sharp paring knife as best as you’re able. The thick peel will keep the broccoli from going fully tender, so you really do want to remove it.

Adjust an oven rack to the lowest position, place a large rimmed baking sheet on the rack, and heat the oven to 500 degrees. Cut the stem off of the broccoli, and cut it into long, ½-inch thick pieces. Cut the rest of the broccoli into long, fairly narrow florets, then put it in a bowl, drizzle it with the oil and toss well until evenly coated. Sprinkle with the salt and sugar, and toss to combine. (The sugar helps it brown, so please don’t omit it.)

Working quickly, remove the baking sheet from the oven. Carefully transfer the broccoli to the baking sheet and spread it in an even layer, placing it flat sides down wherever possible.

Return the baking sheet to the oven and roast until the stalks are well browned and tender and the florets are lightly browned, 9 to 11 minutes. Transfer to a serving dish and serve immediately with lemon wedges (if you remember).

This was very wilty-seeming broccoli. Which I actually prefer to that dry, yellow broccoli--the kind where you put the parings in the compost bucket and then all day everybody wonders aloud who farted.

Peeled, trimmed, and floretted.

We're not talking about a lot of ingredients here.

Did I mention that you really have to use your hands to coat it with the oil, salt, and sugar? You really do. You even have to kind of massage it a little so that it all looks oily.

The top side looks fine. But when you start looking underneath, you'll really understand how gorgeous it has become.

Magazine Give-Away

2012-01-01T15:33:00.000-05:00

Cathy, the one who corrected my Red Hot Chili Peppers reference, is the winner of the magazine give-away! By random-number generator, although I do love to be lovingly corrected about pretty much anything. Seriously.

Thank you all so much for entering, and I hope you'll consider subscribing. Cathy, please do email me your address.

Happy New Year, my friends! I hope you are resolving to burst with love.

xoxo Catherine

We Are the 1%

2011-12-28T11:37:00.001-05:00

Last year, I wrote this piece for Whole Living about charitable giving, and although they'd asking me to focus on a particular "charitable hero," and she was great, it was the research that changed my life. Especially talking to Peter Singer.

The piece starts like this:

"Imagine you're walking past a shallow pond where a tiny child has fallen in and appears to be drowning. Do you rush in and rescue the child? Of course. What if it means ruining your new shoes? Of course -- even if they're really, really nice shoes. You don't think twice.

Philosopher Peter Singer, ethics specialist and author of "The Life You Can Save," who is famous for his thinking on the topic, argues that we are, ethically, in just such a position all the time: 1.4 billion people are living below the international poverty line of $1.25 a day, and 30,000 children die daily of diseases and malnutrition that our money (the cost of, say, a pair of shoes) could prevent.

Couldn't we be doing more? Shouldn't we?"

We stretch to give, and I hope you do too. There are some good resources at the end of that piece about how to find organizations to give to, although we give everything we give to Partners in Health, and I feel good about that choice. And every year, it comes down to the same question: build a mud room, or give it away. And every year I think that people need to not be holding dying children in their arms more than we need a better place to keep our boots.

I'm all about "tax the rich," "eat the rich," and occupy everything. You know my politics. But with respect to the developing world, upon whose backs we have amassed much of our nation's wealth, we are the 1%. Even if, yes, you trip over a lot of shoes and coats and backpacks when you walk directly into our dirty kitchen from the muddy outdoors.

Sending you love and gratitude in anticipation of the new year.

xo Catherine

Give it away, give it away, give it away, give it away now.

2011-12-21T08:51:00.001-05:00

Hello, friends!

I am writing to tell you about FamilyFun's new kids' magazine, the aptly titled FamilyFun Kids, and to invite you to enter here for a free subscription.

This is a magazine for kids and by "kids" (okay, it's mostly the wildly child-like staff of FamilyFun, but still--lots of actual kids, including my own, have tested and retested all of the ideas), that is also blissfully ad-free. That's right: no ads. Which gives me a heavenly, let-freedom-ring, "Down with Poptarts and cold medicine!" feeling about the kind of copy we could write. Not that we would. But still. Look carefully in the first issue to see what I might have written for them. (Give up? It's the fortune-teller fortunes. I know.) You kind of cut the magazine up as you go, since it's full of little mustaches and other stuff you'll actually want to snip and use. And it's just fresh and funny and full of fun stuff to do, in the way that I like. "Optimistic" is what I want to say: kids aren't jaded capitalist brats! They're goofy fun-lovers who just want to use scissors. I love that.

Does it make a difference that the editor of FamilyFun is my best friend from college? No, but I can see why you'd ask. Or rather: yes, but only because she is, like, the warmest, funniest person on earth and she makes great magazines.

There's a really cute video for it here. And subscription info here, on the off-chance you don't win one.

Just comment here by Midnight on New Year's eve to enter the subscription give-away--though you have to be from the U.S. to do it for some reason (sorry, all you beloved Maple Leafs).

xo

Golden Walnut

2011-12-15T12:44:00.001-05:00

Hi guys, and thank you, as always, for your loyalty and love. But now you're back. Because you want to make a golden walnut. And I totally understand! I did too.

These make lovely little gifts.

I believe this is what they call a tutorial, but it is so easy, it hardly needs any explaining. In truth, if you buy a little gold-leafing kit, like this one here at Dick Blick, it will come with instructions, and you'll be like, "Thanks for nothing, Catherine." Fair enough. I think they have that kit at Michael's too, by the way, and if you have a 40% off coupon, well, so much the better. The kit costs around $10.

You'll start with your gold leaf, your gold leaf adhesive, a small screw eye (from the hardware store), a paint brush, a walnut, some thread for hanging, and a piece of wax paper.

First you'll screw in the screw eye. Like this.

Then you will hold the walnut by the screw eye and paint it with an even coat of the gold-leaf adhesive, which you shook before opening. Lay it on the wax paper to dry for 1/2 an hour or up to 24 hours, as per the instructions on the bottle. I left mine for half an hour.

Now tear a sheet of gold leaf from the little booklet and begin gently wrapping it around the walnut, pressing and rubbing into all the little crevices as you go. Eventually you will get yourself into a bad situation with overlapping gold leaf heading the wrong way, and so you will tear the sheet there and start again in a blank place, tearing and pressing and rubbing until the whole walnut is covered. None of the seams will show, amazingly--the gold leaf will kind of seal up around itself in a lovely way, and it will look perfect, no matter how many little patches you needed to add. I even needed to dab a little more adhesive on a bald patch, wait another half hour, and then leaf just that tiny patch--and this, too, was no big deal.

There's also a sealant in the kit that you can use or not. We've done it both ways. It dulls the finish a little, so we stopped using it--given that these ornaments aren't getting a lot of rigorous use or anything. Tie a thread through the screw eye, and you're done. Or thread a chain through for a totally original necklace that would be what they call "a conversation piece." It is lovely, no? I want to do an acorn too. And a silver nutmeg. I'm not so sure about the pear, though. I can see how Midas got himself into so much trouble. Ben and Birdy would look so cute gold.

Uncanny resemblance?

2011-12-14T12:55:00.000-05:00

I'm just wondering. Because maybe my Hollywood Squares career is about to take off?

Also, I got named one of Babble's "Zillion Weirdest Mom Bloggers of November/December 2011." Or something like that. But I am in such good company over there that I am secretly thrilled.

xoxo

Kitchen Gifts

2011-12-09T11:02:00.000-05:00

Okay, so this is gifts for the kitchen, as opposed to gifts from it--and the idea here is to 1) get perfect gifts for people who love to cook, 2) get perfect gifts for people who don't love to cook but share a kitchen with you, who does, or 3) leave this list accidentally taped to the bathroom mirror. These links will take you to Love to Cook in Utah, who will give you 15% off if you type in the code dalaimama at check-out. Also, they are not actively trying to run any small businesses out of town, being a small business themselves.

The big-ticketest item I'm going to mention is this: a Nutrimill grain grinder.

I am the big, big grinder! I live in the basement and crave daylight.

This falls into the category of "major lifestyle purchase": it's expensive, it takes up a lot of space, and when you use it, clouds of finely milled flour float around your kitchen dustily. Sold? No? Well, it's if what you're doing is committing to baking your own whole-grain bread, and you want some motivation for it.

Then you get to buy whole spelt at the store! And you can smile beatifically when you notice someone noticing it in your cart. "What, this old spelt? I'm just milling my own flour, is all."

But don't argue with the loaf, because it is a beautiful thing.

Freshly milled whole-grain flour is so fragrant and gorgeous that you cannot make something bad from it. You can make something that doesn't rise appropriately, but it will still be delicious. It's kind of like grinding coffee at home: you feel connected to the process, excited, and invested in the outcome. In the long run, you will still spend less money than you would if you bought bread from a store. And in the short run, you will have fun making your own flour from grain you buy either in bulk from a place like Whole Foods, or locally, if anyone nearby is growing grain. (We actually have a grain CSA near us! I know. Local kamut. Enough said.)

Now, that said, if you have a Kitchen-Aid, I would recommend the Kitchen-Aid grain-mill attachment, which cannot produce flour as fine as the Nutrimill, but which is more economical an investment, and also smaller. I really, really like it, and if I'm not grinding tons of flour, it's still my go-to grinder. I've had this one for a while, and it is a friend to me.

If those seem like kind of severe, Russian-work-camp gifts--and they're not--you might consider a seltzer maker. This one. Of all of the many wonderful things that the Utah friends have sent us, this is the one that has most thrilled the children. We do, like good Jews everywhere, drink tons of seltzer, and this gadget has revolutionized our beverage consumption. Plus, and you knew I would say this, even with the cost of the cartridges, it costs a third of what store-bought seltzer costs. I'm just saying. Superfun to use, and you can even get flavors and syrups to go in it.

Ben is the house bartender, when it comes to making seltzer. If you are sick, he will make you cola to settle your stomach, and if you come for dinner and don't want to drink alcohol, he will make you a beautiful fizzy something while the grown-ups are busy trying to figure out if you're mentally insane or pregnant or what.

I would guess that making seltzer is one of his top-ten home activities.

Next up: pasta roller. We use ours for pasta and also for crackers. Older children can be taught to use it, and then you can leave them with a blob of pasta dough (eggs and flour, that's all it is), and you will come back a half an our later to skeins and skeins of fresh, tender noodles. Russian work camp and fun! Yay! The one you see here I have been using for over twenty years. It is as well-made as any tool I own, and it cuts two widths of noodles.

Finally, a stocking stuffer: the perfect rubber spatula. It is beautiful. It is heat-proof. And it is one piece.

If the "one piece" detail doesn't move you, then you have not shared our typical spatula experience.

It's a good thing I have never accidentally baked the head of this spatula into a sour-cream bundt cake.

Two last things: a subscription to ChopChop, the cooking magazine for kids that I do a lot of work with, makes a fantastic gift for families or children who like to cook, and it's a non-profit with a healthy-kids mission, so you can feel good about supporting it. Plus, sometimes Birdy and Ben are in it!

And a reader recommended the recipe-studded cooking memoir An Everlasting Meal to me, and I am halfway through and loving it. Tamar Adler the kind of bossy I love, with lots of unfussy opinions about food and feeding people that really speak to me, including her imperative that you put lots of parsley in everything and that, when in doubt, eggs. I am also intrigued by her suggestion that you cook all the vegetables you have at once, and then keep them in the fridge to eat and add to dishes you're cooking throughout the week. I will report back. (Thanks again, Janet Lee!)

Enjoy your weekend.

Red Lentil Soup (and other thoughts)

2011-12-05T12:51:00.000-05:00

Ben at the Quabbin Reservoir.

And Birdy. The reservoir is nearby, and is my favorite place to go at this time of year.

Hi! Are you here looking for a tutorial on how to make an origami creche? Well, you won't find it! That's right. I am sparing you my holiday craft enthusiasm today. Sort of. And I say sort of because I am posting a few links for recipes you might find handy as the holiday food-gift season rolls around. Lots of treats here (including my now-famous-at-least-at-home Salted Caramel Popcorn), Peppermint Patties here, and Maple Rosemary Popcorn, which I made last night and which we devoured. I mean, we were in a frenzy of devouring--everybody in the room a noming blur. Ben's friend Ava was so sad to wander in and find it all gone that I almost had to make more. Almost.

Okay, one more holiday thing. It's that there's another games post here, where I discuss Carcassonne Wheel of Fortune and Dominion, both of which continue to be oft-played favorites around here (we even have the Dominion Prosperity expansion now. I know. Maybe alert me if the Dungeons and Dragons fair is coming to your town, and I'll meet you there!) And the other two games I wanted to mention were Agricola,

which is like somebody's acid-trip dream of Settlers of Catan on crack, and which we love immoderately, despite the fact that during a start-to-finish game you will complete 10 or 11 menstrual cycles. And, on a completely different note, Make Me a Cake,

which is like Settlers of Catan only if Settlers of Catan morphed into a puddle of melted vanilla ice cream. This game goes down smooth and easy, even with the littlest players, and the kids love it not because it challenges their strategic thinking (it doesn't) but because it's cake.

Okay. But the red lentil soup. I kind of forgot about this soup for a while, but then remembered it when we traveled to Montreal recently with some friends and had to get 13 people fed on a very tight budget. This soup, with some lovely garnishes of basmati rice and cilantro, was a hit with everyone. It's creamy from the coconut milk and bright with lime, and the texture is comfortingly porridgy. Lovely.

Red Lentil Soup with Carrots and Coconut

Serves 4-6

Active time: 20 minutes; total time 1 hour

This soup is a version of dal, which is a classic Indian lentil stew. It is deliciously fragrant, thanks to the coconut and spices, and the bright yellow turmeric and orange lentils give it a gorgeous color. Serve the lentils over rice, like a stew, or in bowls as soup.

3 tablespoons butter, divided use

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

1 onion, finely chopped

3 garlic cloves, finely chopped

1 tablespoon finely chopped ginger

1 jalapeno chile, seeded and finely chopped (optional)

2 large carrots, peeled and diced

1 teaspoon turmeric

2 cups red lentils, rinsed (you really do need red lentils for this, but they're quite readily available!)

2 bay leaves

6 cups water or chicken broth

1 15-ounce can unsweetened coconut milk

2 teaspoons kosher salt (or half as much table salt; less if you're using broth)

Juice and zest of half a lime

1 teaspoon mustard seeds (optional—don’t worry about this part if it’s a pain)

Plain yogurt and cilantro leaves for serving.

Heat 2 tablespoons of the butter and the vegetable oil in a soup pot over medium heat and sauté the onion, garlic, ginger, chile, and carrots until the onions are just coloring, around 5 minutes. Stir in the turmeric, lentils, bay leaves, and water or broth, and bring to a simmer. Lower the heat and simmer, partially covered and stirring occasionally, until the lentils are soft--around 30 minutes.

Add the coconut milk, salt, and lime juice and zest, and simmer another five minutes. Heat the remaining butter in a small skillet and fry the mustard seeds until they are just popping, around 1 minute. Stir them into the soup, taste for salt and lime juice, and serve topped with plain yogurt and cilantro leaves.

Okay, technically this is not a picture of lentil soup. It's a picture of a smoked meat sandwich from Schwartz's, where I made everyone accompany me on my Jewy pilgrimage. It may or may not be apocryphal that my grandfather asked for this sandwich on his deathbed.

yoj + trofmoc

2011-12-03T08:36:00.000-05:00

Okay, one more Christmas craft. Before I go back to, you know, polishing my menorah and studying The Talmud.

It's these little decorate-able felt trees. This is easy to make, I swear. Cut a quarter-circle of green felt (I used a washed-and-dried thrift-store wool sweater), stitch up the seam to make a cone, trace the bottom circle onto green felt and cut out. Now stuff the cone with stuffing, add a nice heavy something to the bottom ("What did I weight these with?" I asked Birdy, because I'd forgotten. And she said, "Rocks from the yard. Nice, dirty rocks.") then stitch the bottom to the cone. Voy-la! We decorate and redecorate them every year with pins and sequins.

Don't feel like sewing? As you can see, a cone of yarn works perfectly well. That's mine, there in the back. But I see I could actually do better:

Christmas tree impersonator.

Happy December, my darlings.

xo

comfort and joy

2011-11-30T16:51:00.000-05:00

Because I was procrastinating and avoiding a different holiday (in the magazine world, right now, there are easter eggs to be dyed and bunny burritos to be developed) I made a new holiday garland. My friend Emily has the tutorial here that got me started, but if you have a good sewing machine, boy is this an easy project. Many of you knew me back when I did not have a good sewing machine--back when every sewing project ended in cursing and tears and the drinking of wine from the bottle and the sewing of my hand to the snake costume and the subsequent trip to the ER and/or the Betty Ford Clinic. But now I have a good machine. Which I got because I went on Craigslist and posted a wanted ad for "An Excellent, Heavy, Old (but not antique) Sewing Machine," and then named a few brands, countries of origin, models, and years. And I was rewarded with a beautiful Bernina from the 80s that does a few things and does them well. I really recommend asking for what you want, in the most literal way.

This banner is just letters cut from brown grocery-bag paper that I'd painted gold with acrylic paint. Also some stars and circles cut from various scraps of vellum and shiny paper. It is hung in the doorway of our living room--with the added advantage that if you're inside the living room, it spells "yoj + trofmoc," because I'm meticulous like that.

Comfort and joy to you. xo

Pink Slaw

2011-11-28T14:15:00.000-05:00

This is an unretouched photo, seriously. Is that not gorgeous?

Because I was not actually awake, it was difficult for me to understand what was happening. Birdy, who had gone to bed with a stomachache, had woken up screaming and crying, and so I feared the worst. But wait—it was an even worse worst. What was she saying? She’d pooped in the bed? I couldn’t really hear, on account of the crying and the yelling, only now Ben was in on it too, in his room next door, horrified by the fact that Birdy appeared to have wandered in and barfed on his carpet. Wait, wait, what? No. Birdy appeared to have coughed up an enormous hairball on his carpet, which didn’t make sense. And the poop in her bed was an intact string of small turds, despite the fact of her still-clean pajamas. I may never accustom myself to the requirement of parenting that you make sense of the world while you’re brain is still giving you the “I’m sorry, that number is no longer in service” message.

When we went downstairs, there was more of everything, in a bad way, plus a gigantic, lounging cat, who rolled onto his back and thrust all four paws in the air in his classic love-me posture. Poor, gluttonous Craney Crow. He had stolen and eaten various holiday delicacies during the evening (turkey leg, smoked trout mousse, brie, pecan pie) and then spent the night shuffling from room to room, it seemed, in a kind of fit of evacuation.

Who me?

Ah, as always, a classy recipe lead-in. All I’m trying to say is that I’m offering you something bright and fresh and vegetal because perhaps you also could use a break from the richness of the holidays. This slaw is that break. It is, first of all, ridiculously gorgeous. The mottled purple-and-white of the cabbage is transformed, via pickling, into a brilliant, glowing fuchsia. The prettiest color in the world. Plus, the slaw (and, by the way, it is technically a pickle) gets this incredible kind of squeaky-crisp texture, and a deliciously light sweetness and sourness that makes it a versatile accompaniment to anything from tacos and scrambled eggs to turkey sandwiches and roast pork or a bowlful of beans. If you add the ginger, it will be less versatile but more brightly flavored—you can decide what you think about that.

And will your kids like it? They will like the color enough to taste it, I predict. Mine will not pick it out of a quesadilla, and they ate a couple forkfuls last night when I served it with our Smorgasbord of Leftovers (including the last of the stuffing, the last of the gravy, and the last of the nutmeg-scented sweet potatoes). They neither loved nor hated it, and they did appreciate the tangle of color on their plates. The brightness of vitamins and antioxidants that is wafting off of it nearly visibly, and this alone is reason for thanks.

Pink Slaw

Makes less than you think, but enough, and it keeps well.

Active time: 15 minutes; total time: 4 hours

You can use green cabbage for this, and it will be delicious, but guess what? It won't be pink. You could still call it "Pink Slaw," just to be weird and confusing.

½ medium head of cabbage, red or green

½ cup water

1/3 cup white vinegar

2 tablespoons sugar

3 teaspoons kosher salt

a couple of slices of ginger, smashed, or 1 dried chile (optional)

Shred the cabbage fine. I use this Japanese mandoline, which you can get here, in Utah! Not here, really, but there. If you use the coupon code dalaimama, you will get 15% off your entire order. It is the perfect tool for all those things you need to slice very thin, like potatoes for something fancy with the word "saint" in its title. Plus, there are other blades that come with it so that you can julienne things. I love it and use it for everything, especially during pickle season.

Now put the shredded cabbage in a deep bowl and bring the remaining ingredients just to a boil in a small pot, stirring to dissolve the sugar and salt. Pour the hot brine over the cabbage. Put a small plate on top of the cabbage, and then something heavy on top it, such as a tea kettle or a large can. Leave it for 3 or 4 hours, at which point the cabbage will be smaller and the volume of liquid in the bowl much greater. Wring out the cabbage by the handful (discard the leftover brine), and store it in the fridge in a covered container.

The battle-scarred exterior of the storage cabbage belies its beautiful insides.

As far as I'm concerned, that's right up there with the greater wonders of the world.

Did you want to see who was back there? That's Socky. He was visiting for the afternoon.

You could do this with a knife, but it will take much longer and be less fun and less thrillingly treacherous.

I love, love, love this very sharp slicer. It's light and easy to use, and the color is fantastic.

Take heed!

Moldy ginger that I did not even bother to peel. Nice.

Ready to be brined and weighted.

The longer you leave it, the picklier it will be--though I never get into the multi-day fermenting kind of situation with this, though you probably could.

Tell me that's not gorgeous.

Right?

Lunch yesterday.

Breakfast this morning. Corn tortilla with melted dill havarti, scrambled farm egg, and pink slaw. My parsley's motto seems to be "keep on truckin.'" I can't believe it's still thriving out there, in the untended wilds of our yard.

Ornament Tree Advent Calendar

2011-11-23T15:06:00.000-05:00

2006.

Dear Ones,

Oh, I just could not pull off a pie, and I'm so grateful to Tea for Two for posting her recipe here! Thank you for having my back. Luckily, my mom is in the house, and so the pecan pies will now be made effortlessly, and with her customary grace and amazingness. (Thanks, Mum.)

Instead, I wanted to make sure you had enough time, in case you wanted to make a new advent calendar for your kids this year. I am going to add "Jews and their Advent Calendars" to my roster of coffee table books I want to make, which include "Jews Go Cross-Country Skiing," and also "Jews Making Bacon." So be it. First of all, if you don't have time, here's the idea I pitched years ago to Wondertime magazine (RIP), and which is just a visual cue:

Yes, it looks a little like a fraction--but only because I'm bad at rubber stamping.

I think Wondertime actually ran that idea--24 numbered bags on a clothesline--albeit a little tarted up.

But 5 or 6 years ago I became obsessed with matchboxes and made this:

If I had put gorgeous berry-colored paper behind my tree, I would not have made myself saw around the poster board with a bread knife. Alas. That's the color of one wall of my dining/craft room. Nice, right?

It's been a favorite part of our Christmas ever since, and it's not hard to make--just a little fiddly and time consuming.

Start with 25 matchboxes (you can buy packages of 12 at the supermarket, and luckily you had one extra lying around), and dump the matches into a large mason jar, where you will keep them hopefully and in the spirit of resourcefulness for one year, after which you will throw them away.

Use a piece of white paper and a pencil and scissors to find the perfect size paper for wrapping around the box, then use this as your template and cut 23 pieces of decorative paper, then use rubber cement or another glue of your choosing (not white glue or you will cry) and wrap 23 of the boxes with paper. If the paper seems inclined to pop off or peel, use a clothespin to hold it while it dries. Now make a template for lining the drawer, cut out 23 drawer liners, and glue them inside. Mine are all mixed and matched. The 24th box is two boxes opened on the side and glued together, then wrapped. I don't remember how I accomplished this, and it's not strictly necessary--it's just that I wanted the star to be bigger than the other ornaments. Decorate the boxes with ribbon, if you like, and number them somehow: I glued on tiny tags that I had stamped numbers onto.

Now make your ornaments: A 1-inch circle punch would make this easy; I think I traced around a quarter. If you want to fancy it up, you can add a little rectangle of silver paper for the top, and a little loop of silver thread for the hanger--and you can stick them both on with the self-adhesive Velcro dot you're going to add to the back of each dot anyway.

Are you with me so far? Then make the tree and background. I did this by covering the bottom half of a standard piece of poster board with decorative paper (it's white with white dots, and, thus, not really that decorative) and then I glued on a large tree shape cut from construction paper. Only after I had glued it on did I wish I'd put something beautiful behind it, and, in fact, so regretful was I about this that I decided to cut around the outline of the tree, which was the only truly difficult part of this whole advent-ure. I don't recommend it. Get yourself a nice piece of paper, glue it down before you add the tree, and call it a day.

Now space the 24 velcro dots all over the tree, including one at the top for the star or whatever else you make for the top. The other half of each dot, as you'll recall, is already on the back of each ornament. Then glue the gift-boxes to the box (I think glue dots would be a good way to do this), pop an ornament in each one, saving the star or whatever for the final box, and voila!

I know this is not a tutorial in the strict sense, but if you have any questions, please feel free to ask in the comments. Questions such as "How does this look with a menorah burning nearby" (nice) or "What does the word advent even mean?" (I don't know).

Happy Thanksgiving, friends. I am now, and always, grateful for your company.

xo

Holiday Stuff

2011-11-18T10:38:00.000-05:00

Hello, dear friends!

Car Heart. I really came out to this one recent frosty morning. Lucky girl, right?

I thought I'd share some holiday ideas and recipes today. Which is very uncharacteristically useful of me, I know.

First off, if you wanted to give homemade vanilla for the holidays, and I really recommend this, now is the time to start making it. For bottles, do a search for "flint glass bottles" on ebay--unless you have a nice collection of small recycled bottles at your disposal. Likewise, search "vanilla beans" on ebay to buy them in bulk. And do this right now, so you can get a move on, okay? It needs to steep for a month or so. Also, I should warn you, now that it's been 3 years since I've been making it, that every time somebody runs out of vanilla, they will bring you their empty bottle with the pleasant-faced expectation that you will refill it. It is, more or less, like giving a magazine subscription, and you'd better be willing to stay on top of it. Forever.

Relatedly, I often make a little boozey something at the holidays that needs to sit around for a while before it gets really good. Limoncello, for example, is very beautiful and elegant (I use vodka instead of Everclear, just by the by). But this year I am making this warm, fragrant, utterly delicious Honey Citrus Liqueur:

Because I am meticulous, I taste it every day to make sure it's good. So far, a week in, it is really, really good. I think I'll borrow bottles from Birdy's dollhouse when it comes time to decant it for gifts. I made up the recipe, in consultation with various versions online because we had some gorgeous honey to use, and here's what it is: In a small pot, bring 1 1/2 cups of honey to a boil with 2/3 cup water, 3 cloves, and 2 cut-up vanilla beans. Simmer for 5 minutes, cool to warm, then pour it into a bottle into which you've already put the peeled zest of one large, clean orange. Fill the bottle up with Jim Beam or something similar (around 3 1/2 cups), then let it sit in the dark for a month, shaking it as often as you think to, and tasting it constantly. Strain through a fine sieve, decant into smaller bottles, and give it away, weeping. If you want to call it by its Lithuanian name, write "Grietai Pagamintas Krupnikas" in festive script on the labels.

That's all you need to deal with for now, although if you wanted to get a jump on ordering games for your kids, these are my posts on the subject from years past: last year's big-kid games; last-year's little-kid games. And this stray one. There is not a dud in the bunch. Oh, and this holiday book round-up, which I still stand by as well. I'll be posting a few new thoughts in the coming weeks too.

And, finally: Thanksgiving? Are you in? I mean, really. What choice do you have. Here are a few recipes from years past that might come in handy:

Sparkling Cranberry Centerpiece
Wonderful Cranberry Sauce
Beautiful Cranberry Upside Down Cake
Fantastic Crudite Platter with the World's Best Dip
Caramelized Brussels Sprouts

I am really going to try to keep track of all my traditional dishes this year--stuffing, mashed potatoes, and the Bird Himself--so that I can offer some basics next year. But it's hard to remember, what with my dad's forceful taking over of the mashing of the potatoes, and the turkey's uncertain doneness, and the holiday caving in on itself in a puddle of food and drink, as I know you know. I might try to post pecan pie on Monday. Which would give me an excuse to make it over the weekend!

Speaking of: have a great one. xo

Roasted Cabbage

2011-11-14T11:40:00.000-05:00

Remember how nobody used to like Brussels sprouts? We all shuddered to think of them from childhood, the way they’d been boiled to a noxious mush that filled the house with the smell of old shoes that someone had filled with egg salad. “Ugh!” everybody said. “Brussels sprouts! Why would anybody?” And then I had the brilliant idea to roast them. Okay, so did, like, a bazillion other people. But remember? How it turned out that everybody loved Brussels sprouts after all? We just hadn’t realized that they could be sweet and caramelized, tender but still green-tasting and a bit crunchy, salty and a little greasy and totally addictive. And now we know. Now they’re on every hip bar menu and every Thanksgiving table, and everybody’s happy.

I want to make the same case for cabbage, and for roasting it. But first, to be clear, I love cabbage every which way, and we eat tons of it. I buy these enormous heads, locally grown and the size of basket balls and 99 cents apiece, and then we saw away at them for weeks. I steam cabbage and serve it with lots of melting butter and salt and a sprinkle of cider vinegar; I sliver it and make various coleslaws stirred up with sweet-and-sour vinaigrette or spicy lime-scented mayonnaise; I fry it with onions and apples, then I add a big splash of cider and a hefty pinch of sugar and let it finish cooking; I braise it in the oven, with chicken broth and lots of olive oil, according to Molly Stevens’ justly famous recipe; I sliver it and add it to every kind of soup and stew, and (this does not overjoy the children) to everybody’s quesadillas and tacos; I make fresh-pickled cabbage with vinegar and, one time, I made true fermented sauerkraut that bubbled furiously in its jar and stank to high heaven and tasted fantastic, flavored delicately with caraway and juniper.

But roasting it is new to me and, as with Brussels sprouts, it is a revelation—which is not that surprising, given that cabbage is pretty much just a big, mild Brussels sprout. You have to be patient, though: what you want is to cook it for a long time so that it gets deeply browned and sweet and that perfect kind of toothsome-but-tender, and this takes close to an hour. But that makes it the perfect side for something else that’s hanging out in a hot oven for an hour or two: a roasting chicken, say, or baked potatoes, or a brisket. Try it, please, and report back.

Roasted Cabbage

Serves: some number of people

Total time: 1 hour

Green or white cabbage

Olive oil

Salt

Heat the oven to 425 and oil a rimmed baking sheet with plenty of olive oil.

Cut the cabbage across in big, thick (about ¾-inch) slices. My cabbage was so big that I used one single slice out of the middle of it, and this fed all four of us well! Crazy. But you will likely need a few slices. Now cut these in half, or in quarters, so that the pieces are manageable but stay intact. (Alternately, you could cut it into wedges, but I find this trickier, since they don’t cook very evenly.)

Put the cabbage in the pan and drizzle it generously with olive oil (another few tablespoonfuls) and use your fingers or a brush to get it evenly distributed over the vegetable. Sprinkle the pieces generously with salt, then pop the pan in the oven.

After about twenty minutes, check the cabbage by lifting up a piece of it and seeing if the bottom is brown (this might take more like half an hour). If and when it is, then take the pan out of the oven and carefully flip the pieces, which will fall apart a little, which is fine. Roast the cabbage until the second underside (hunh?) is brown, another twenty minutes or half an hour or so. Taste a piece to make sure it’s tender and salted enough, and serve.

For a variation, add a very small splash of balsamic vinegar about 10 minutes before the cabbage is done roasting.

There's a penny here for scale--but you can't even see it! Okay, there's not. But this was a big-ass cabbage.

"I do like cabbage. Or something. Maybe I just like to stick my paw on the oily pan and then walk around the kitchen."

This would be a lovely Thanksgiving side dish. In fact, if you're planning to come to my house for that holiday, this might not be the last you see of it.

Brown-Sugar Oat Scones

2011-11-07T11:25:00.001-05:00

After a five-day power outage, it still feels so utterly decadent to do things like run water, flip on lights, open the cold fridge, and heat the oven—so I couldn’t resist baking a weekend breakfast treat. That said, though, earlier in the week I baked on our wood stove for the first time ever, and it was a fantastic experience. I made my regular biscuits, but first I preheated our heavy, lidded Dutch oven over the very hot stove for a long, long time—an hour or so. Then I opened it, popped in a piece of parchment and half the biscuits, and lidded it up again. I cooked the biscuits for 12 or so minutes (I’d rolled them thinner than usual), flipping them halfway through. And they were, um, perfect. I will certainly make a habit of baking on the stove. I love the rough beauty of it, and the conservation of energy, and the pioneering satisfaction.

We are trying to hold onto the best that life without power had to offer us: long, candlelit evenings and an absence of internet distraction in particular. Also, though, something else. Something like a kind of courage—to be imperfect, maybe. “Come for dinner,” we said. “Come for lunch. We’ll just wing it.” I have never felt so free simply to put honest, humble meals on the table. Even though, and I know you know this, that’s pretty much all I do anyway. But somehow, with the obvious limiting context of the power outage, I just felt so open and improvisational. I will have to think more about this and try to explain it better—but I think it’s a feeling for me to hold onto.

We are as delicious as we look, we promise! We are not secretly made of oat-scented cardboard like those other scones that broke your heart!

Okay, but these scones: Michael hates scones, so I almost never make them. He feels like they’re this kind of false promise of deliciousness that turns out to be dry and tasteless, and I know what he means. But these are simultaneously rugged and delicate: coarse and grainy, but then really quite buttery and moist and sweet. The kids and I love them, and Michael likes them okay. “But seriously,” he said, when I pressed him. “I don’t really think that generating great love for another baked good is high on my to-do list.” Fair enough.

Brown-Sugar Oat Scones

Makes 8

Active time: 10 minutes; total time: 30 minutes

This is an adaptation of Deborah Madison’s Oat Scones from her wonderful bible, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. I use all whole-wheat flour, half-and-half (she suggests either milk or cream), and a good deal more sugar and salt. But, then, that’s just what I’m like.

1 cup rolled oats, plus more for the counter

1 ½ cups whole-wheat flour

1/3 cup brown sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 ¼ teaspoons kosher salt (or half as much table salt)

7 tablespoons cold butter, cut into small pieces

1 egg

2/3 cup half and half (or a mix of milk and cream, or, if you must, milk)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Heat the oven to 425, and get out a non-stick baking pan. If it’s not reliably non-stick, grease it or line it with parchment.

Mix the dry ingredients together in a large bowl, then add the butter pieces and toss with your hands to coat them with flour. Now use your fingertips to rub the butter into the dry ingredients, lifting handfuls of the mixture up out of the bowl, then gently letting it fall through your fingertips as you rub it lightly together. Eventually, you'll have a bowl full of lumpy sandy crumbs, which is what you're going for—don’t try mixing it until it’s all nice and even.

Whisk together the egg, half and half, and vanilla, then pour this mixture over the dry ingredients and stir with a wooden spoon until just barely combined.

Scatter some oats on your clean counter, dump the dough out onto it, and pat it into a circle that’s a half an inch (or so) thick. Use a knife to cut it into 8 wedges, put them on the baking sheet, and bake for 15 to 18 minutes until nicely browned. Serve warm, plain or with butter and/or honey and/or jam.

Really? Just leave that one little peasley old tablespoon of butter behind? Yup. Though I'm tempted just to toss it in.

The pebbly mixture. I don't do this in a food processor because I don't want to grind the oats up.

The dough is pretty wet, which is fine--you're not actually interacting with it for very long.

Just a quick pat and cut.

And they're ready to bake. This is Craney's "You didn't know about scones and how they're my favorite?" face.

Baked. I love their rustic look.

The grabbing of the scones.

Ben played with the honey the whole time the scones were baking.

And then put plenty on his plate.

Along with plenty of other stuff too. I love this picture, where the scone is dwarfed by honey and jam.

Chile-Lime Squash Fries

2011-11-01T14:35:00.001-04:00

squash "fries"

Even as I write this, I’m looking out the window at the new blue November sky, against which Michael is silhouetted. Michael, who is cutting dead wood out of the dogwood, which is almost, at this point, entirely dead wood, and which is—from my very narrow, personal perspective—the only bad thing about the wild storm that has kept us without power for nearly 3 days now. Well, that and the tick-tick-ticking of a freezer full of produce and meat that may or may not be thawing because I’ve resisted the urge to open it and check.

Maple, October 30, 2011

Oh, but mostly it has been heaps and heaps of brilliant snow, the steaming glow of the woodstove, the sizzle of sausages cooking on it, board games by candlelight, a full and happy heart without the pesky distractions of computers, the internet, phones, school, work, or showers. Seriously. I have been in total powerless heaven. The neighbors congregate outside for updates and gossip and supply-trading, and to scheme about whether somebody’s generator can be rigged for the watching of the Patriots game (it cannot). The kids sit by the fire to sew themselves new fleece hats. I nap and read and do crossword puzzles saved up during busier times. The oaks break my heart a little, with their leathery leaves still clinging to the fallen branches that line every street in our neighborhood. We let the cat out, and he steps gingerly through the snow, shakes each paw after every step, and then meows to be let back in.

I might write a collection of love poems called "Wood Stove."

Birdy, by the woodstove, looking at a picture of the woodstove. Do you know this book? The Midnight Farm. Don't spend $89 on it, but do consider buying it used for 1 cent if you still have small children. It is one of the most relaxing and beautiful kids' books I know.

I try to figure out how to post my column—this column. Will I go to Nicole’s, where their power is restored and there’s the promise of macaroni and cheese and cider? Probably.

But were you maybe here for the recipe, and enough about my fake pioneering life, complete with running water, flush toilets, and digital cameras? I understand. Onward and upward to the squash fries. I have to mention, though, that they’re not really fries, or even anything like fries. But there is chile and lime! And squash!!! But Chile-Lime Squash sounded like a recipe I’d need to apologize for—without the requisite marketing pizzaz! you need for warty old winter produce.

Now you don’t trust me, and I understand. But still, this is a lovely recipe. I, for one, require something spicy or funky to cut through the relentless sweetness of winter squash, and given that not everyone shares my great passion for blue cheese and/or anchovies, lime and chile work perfectly. (Oooh—would a few drops of fish sauce add a little je ne sais quoi? Je ne sais pas.) They stick to your teeth just the right amount, with a little crunch from the frizzled skin and a little softness from the tender flesh. Perfect.

Chile-Lime Squash Fries

Serves 4-6

Active time: 25 minutes; total time: 1-1 ¼ hours

Winter squash: 3 delicata, 2 acorn, 1 smallish butternut, or some other kind and amount

4 tablespoons olive oil

¾ teaspoon chipotle puree (more or less, depending on how spicy you like it)

1 teaspoon kosher salt (or half as much table salt)

1 tablespoon honey or maple syrup

Juice and grated zest of half a lime

Heat the oven to 450.

Scrub the squash well, then halve them and scoop out the seeds*. I no longer peel squash like acorn or delicata, but for some reason I do still peel butternut. Do what you like in this regard, bearing in mind that the skin is edible and wholesome and a pain in the ass to peel, and that it keeps the squash slices from disintegrating, but also that it might be the final straw for someone who’s already teetering on the back of the liking-squash camel. Michael, for example, at this very meal, said, “Didn’t you used to peel the squash?” the way you might say, “Didn’t you used to bring me flowers on our anniversary?” and it gave me a slight sinking feeling.

Trim the ends off the squash halves, then slice them into half-inch pieces, and toss the pieces in a large bowl with the oil, chipotle puree, salt, and honey or maple syrup. Arrange the pieces on a large, rimmed, greased non-stick baking sheet (or two), and put them in the oven. (If your sheets are not reliably non-stick, then I would line them with parchment paper).

Bake for 20-45 minutes, which I know is a big range, but your goal is to get them simultaneously tender, crisped, browned, and unburned. If turning them over seems like it would help, then do, but I find that to be sort of a diminishing-returns situation and don’t tend to bother. (“Didn’t you used to turn the squash over?” Next thing you know, I’ll give everyone a whole, raw squash and a spork. Enjoy!)

When the squash is done, grate the lime zest over it. Can I talk about my new grater? The Love To Cook folks (aka The Utah Friends) sent it to me, and I am in love with it. I like it even more than my microplane zester, which had perhaps gotten dull? I’m not sure. Either way, this new one is razor-sharp, and you feel like you could leave a block of parmesan near it and walk away, and the cheese would turn into a flurry of shreds just from the proximity. Please, if you’re considering a new grater, try it out here. (The dalaimama code will get you 15% off, as always.)

Now squeeze on the lime juice, taste for salt, and serve. To really gild the lily, a little chipotle-lime-mayo wouldn’t kill anyone, now, would it? But I confess to serving ours with tiny dishes of honey for dipping, which is totally not like me, I know, but I never promised to be consistent.

* You saved the seeds, right? Rinse them in a bowl of water and try to separate them from the stringy stuff, not that it matters that much since once that stuff bakes and crisps it will just be a wholesome little addition of flavor. Now shake the seeds in a colander, then spread them on a rimmed baking sheet, toss them with oil and salt, and roast at 325 until they’re crisped and toasty, about a half an hour. At this point I tend to put something else on them—Worcestershire Sauce or Frank’s Red Hot or Lime Juice or Bragg’s Liquid Aminos—and toss them again before putting them back in the oven to crisp up again. Yum. Better than pumpkin seeds, even, thanks to the more favorable shell-to-seed ratio.

I put Bragg's and jalapeno-spiked vinegar on these before they finished baking, and then I ate way too many of them. But I like the way it feels like they're scraping out your insides--like a Master Cleanse diet, but without all the pesky fasting, etc.

Delicata. Though they're hardly, like, spun glass or anything. Really quite sturdy, actually.

Squash.

And again, squash.

Some of the stuff you need for it, plus my afternoon mug of tea.

Which segues nearly seamlessly into a glass of beer. Note the lovely grater.

Ready to bake.

BEN DOES THE ZESTING. IN ACCIDENTAL BLOCK CAPS.

Ben honey-dipping his squash, at a more normal volume. "Hey, honey," I said. "The people are asking about your hair. In a nice way. What do you want to say?" And he said, just a little bit sassy, "Um, that it's long? Because I like it long?"

Burger and "fries." Go heavy on the air quotes, and everyone will be happy.

Sweet (Potato) Sundaes

2011-10-24T12:14:00.001-04:00

In case I forget to mention it later: this perfect and crazy-nutritious dinner is a tremendous hit with everyone in the family.

Have I mentioned before that I’m actually an incredibly gifted fortune teller? I know. You might not have thought. But I do it every year at the school carnival, and even though I usually start out kind of groggy and wishing I didn’t have to get up and get into multiple scarves and hoop earrings and eye shadow, wishing I didn’t have to unscrew our kitchen globe light (hello, crystal ball!) and find the Tarot cards, wishing there were more coffee and fewer kids—well, before you know it, I’m Totally Involved. For one thing, I have a killer accent that is half Yiddish, half Transylvanian, and half Brooklyn, and for another, I can’t help feeling like the kids draw these cards that end up fully revealing their personalities to me. Or maybe it’s just their faces that do all the revealing, I’m not sure. Mostly it’s preschoolers with strange and wonderful questions: “Will I get a hundred horses?” one asks, while her mother shakes her head vehemently in the background, mouthing the word no to me, in case I’m about to make vast equine promises. “I see great kheppiness,” I say, studying wands and cups. “I see many things you vant, you get,” I say. “But not khundred khorses iggzectly.” “Will I be a duck when I grow up?” another tiny girl wonders, and the cards suggest, truly, that she will not. “You still could be,” I say, “but eez unlikely.” What the cards show, in fact, is a great and consistent tendency towards helping other people, and when I tell her this, she says, “But ducks help people!” and I acknowledge that this is true.

Some grown-ups come, and older kids too—Ben and Birdy and their friends—and they usually start off with the protective armor of irony, and they usually give it up by the end of the fortune. But mostly it’s the very small kids, with the parents waiting with a baby in a little front pack. And what I’m getting to is this: that’s so not me anymore. I’m one of the parents of the big kids who are running the face paint booth themselves; I am not one of the parents with a baby and a preschooler falling into the rubber-duck pool and weeping about cotton candy, and I don’t understand how it happened, and sometimes I’m sad about it. But mostly I’m not. Because this is the face of 12:

And, not to brag, but we got to watch both Raising Arizona (“Son, you got a panty on your head.”) and Spinal Tap (“These go to eleven.”) with Ben. And when we watched the newborn videos on his birthday, I thought: everything I love most about him has changed not at all. His incredible sweetness and his smile and his sense of humor—even though back then, what made him laugh was sticking his foot into the poopy diaper. But still. I would sometimes like him to be the size of a football the better to tuck him under my arm and keep him close, sure. I would like to rock in a chair while he napped in my lap, of course. But his head smells like a baby’s head to me, like his own baby head, and his smile still inflates me with gladness, and, um, he makes us dinner.

Sweet (Potato) Sundaes

Serves: however many potatoes you make

Active time: 30 minutes; total time: 2 hours

Obviously, this is a use-what-you-like-best or use-what-you-have situation. Any kind of cheese or nuts or herbs would be great. Skip the bacon (if you’re crazy and/or a vegetarian). Other veggies would be nice too: we had roasted cabbage as a side dish, but you could add roasted veggies to your sweet potatoes, or top each one with a small handful of arugula. What if you topped them with black beans and salsa and sour cream and a crumble of tortilla chips? That would be good too, wouldn’t it?

Large, clean sweet potatoes (I like jewel yams or garnet yams best)

Butter

Crumbled feta

Diced bacon, cooked until crisp

Sliced onions, sautéed in olive oil until very browned and sweet

Snipped chives

Dried cherries

Toasted pecans

Heat the oven to 425. Prick the sweet potatoes all over with a fork, then place them on a baking sheet (I lined mine with foil in case they were going to ooze messily), and bake them until they feel very soft when you press them—1-1 ½ hours.

Meanwhile, place all the toppings in little bowls and put them on the table.

Give each person a split sweet potato for topping. Don’t forget to eat the skin, which is delicious and full of nutrients!

"Do you know why you poke them?" I asked Ben, and he said, "So they don't phhht Farmer-Boy explode right into your eye." Exactly.

Ben, paying close attention.

Ben, paying no attention at all. Um, hello? Hot pan! Stove! Grrr.

The toppings. We had some beautiful bacon ends from a friendly ex-pig, and they were perfect to cut up for this meal.

Like I always say, any meal that involves personalized composition is bound to be a hit around here.

And for Birdy, any meal that involves feta and chives is going to be a good thing.

Michael's potato is what you might call loaded.

Ocular proof of a good dinner.

Apricot-braised Pot Roast

2011-10-17T14:05:00.000-04:00

The string makes it look like a real roast, doesn't it?

Ben said, on Saturday, “This is the kind of day, if you could bite it, it would be crunchy.” And it really was. True fall: crisp air, dazzling sun, blue skies, rolling banks of grey, sheeting rain, rolling banks of grey, blue skies, dazzling sun, pink stripes, moon. It was amazing. We spent the day with friends in that kind of wonderful one-thing-leads-to-another drifting togetherness that is the hallmark of a really good date: a child’s birthday party that turned into a post-storm bonfire that turned into hot dogs roasted on sticks that turned into mugs of hot and boozy cider under the stars. I only realized how late it had gotten when Birdy finally leaned against me and sighed, “I think I’m ready to go home.”

I am in full fall cooking mode, which may be my very favorite: roasts and stews and soups, but with fresh herbs still. It’s the best of all possible worlds for me, especially right now, when the romance between me and root vegetables is still young. I’d still pick them up at the airport, if you know what I mean. “Turnip!” I’d cry. “I missed you so much!” Not, “Oh, can't you just catch the shuttle when you get in?”

I’m re-posting a favorite fall recipe that ran on family.com, but kind of buried (it wasn’t part of my column). I’m going to be trying to move some of that lost content over to this blog in the next few months. This is just a take on my standard pot roast (lamely, my own photo captions over there just made me laugh), but the apricots make the gravy so succulently tangy—it’s the perfect foil for the rich, falling-apart meat. Yes, it’s a long haul in the oven, but mostly you’re ignoring it while it exhales its divine aromas into your house. Plus, I know that some of you will be doing this in a Crock Pot and will thus be entirely ignoring it. Until its flight gets in, at which point you will run towards it while the swelling music plays.

Apricot-braised Pot Roast

Serves 8

Active time: 35 minutes; total time: 5 hours

This luxuriously tender sweet-and-sour roast doesn't need a lot of attention during its long braise in the oven. The dried apricots dissolve into a luscious velvety sauce that makes you want to lick your plate (and then lick it).

Ingredients:

a 4-pound beef roast (chuck is perfect for this)

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

2 yellow onions, sliced

2 garlic cloves, finely chopped

1 teaspoon kosher salt

Freshly ground pepper

1 cup red wine

2 cups chicken broth

2 cups water

2 tablespoons tomato paste

1 cup dried California apricots (Turkish are too bland for this)

1 tablespoon sugar

Heat the oven to 375.

In a Dutch oven or another heavy, lidded, ovenproof pot, heat a tablespoon of the oil for 10 minutes in the oven. Pat the meat dry with paper towels and season it well with salt and pepper, then roast it in the pot, uncovered, for half an hour.

Meanwhile, heat the remaining oil in a large frying pan over medium heat and cook the onions, stirring, until they’re turning soft and gold, then reduce the heat and cook, stirring occasionally, for another 20 minutes, at which point they should be deeply golden. Add the garlic, salt, and pepper, and stir for a minute or so, then add the broth, water, wine, tomato paste, apricots, and sugar, and bring to a boil.

Pour the panful of onions and and liquid over the roasted meat, then return it to the oven and cook, with its lid just barely ajar, for 4-5 hours--flipping the roast after 2--until a fork can easily pull it apart. Check it now and then to make sure the liquid hasn’t all cooked off; if it has, then stir in another cup of water every now and again.

Let the roast rest in the pan for half an hour or so, then slice it (it will fall apart) and serve it with the apricot gravy from the pan (skim off any visible fat). Or chill the roast overnight, slice it the next day, and arrange the slices in a large, shallow baking dish, then pour the gravy over it, and heat it in a 350 oven for half an hour. Serve with noodles or mashed potatoes or, shown here, kugel.

This looks so good to me, even now, when I'm full of weird Trader Joe's wasabi seaweed snacks.

Hard as it is for me to concede, it's really high time for the flash.

If there were ever any leftovers, they would doubtless be great.

Popovers (redux) and Ben's Birthday (shhh)

2011-10-14T12:12:00.000-04:00

I am so happy you're having such good luck with the popovers! And if you haven't tried yet, well guess what? You guessed it. The Utah friends have a popover pan here, and you can enter the dalaimama code for 15% off. I rarely recommend single-task bakeware, but this I'm recommending. I love ours.

In other news, almost-12-year-old Ben wants, and is getting from us and his grandparents, an iPod. But we're balancing out high-tech with low-tech, and also giving him this:

It's a mechanical music box set, like a mini player piano, with blank papers that you can punch out yourself for whatever song you want it to play. I seriously cannot wait to give it to him. Have I mentioned before that he is some sort of musical prodigy? Maybe I was too modest to. Ben's piano playing, right here in the house where I live, is one of the best things that has ever happened to me.

Speaking of best things, I am about to finish this book

and boy has it been fantastic. One of those novels that so perfectly captures this moment of my life: the long relationship, the school-age kids, love, and loss, and the mystery that continues to be the people living under your own roof. Sigh.

Any book news? Weekend news? Gift ideas to share? I will be posting a list of kitchen gifts for the holidays, but not yet. Not just yet, no.

Enjoy your weekend!

My Birthday

2011-10-05T10:32:00.001-04:00

Was yesterday. I turned 100 years old, and it was grand. Actually, it really was grand. Can I share?

From Michael. Because I love flowers. And the color orange. And, also from Michael, this. Does he get me or what?

It's open like that because I was reading it cover to cover. Like a true mycological dork.

Birdys' card. Each cake layer is topped by whipped cream and a cherry in two different places. Also, I am wearing a pink shirt as Birdy and I float aloft on our bunches of balloons, because I love pink.

Only if you play Agricola will you understand how brilliantly hilarious "Party even without room in your house" is. But anybody can appreciate the fact, because I'm telling you it, that Ben's drawing of our house is almost uncannily accurate. (Note: Even though it takes the better part of four years to learn, and then around 11 months to play, I cannot recommend that game highly enough.)

And this pink-hooded hoodie, from my insanely talented friend Nicole. You think I'm just taunting you with my good luck, but I'm not. Because look! She has put up a tutorial on how to make one your very own self! You might like to check out her new blog too, which she started with her co-author to support their forthcoming book, Improv Sewing. Storey Publishing asked me for a blurb on the book, and after I was all, "heartbreaking work of staggering genius" and "you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll die from the beauty and the wonder" they backed slowly away. But it is simply the most beautiful craft book I've ever seen. I'll mention it again when it comes out in the spring.

There was more, even, but I'll stop, because decorum requires it. But now, as Ben once cried the night after his, I have to wait 11 whole months for it to be my birthday again. Alas.

p.s. I forgot the whole reason I was posting today! Duh. It was to share this Kay Ryan poem with you.

THE NIAGARA RIVER

As though
the river were
a floor, we position
our table and chairs
upon it, eat, and
have conversation.
As it moves along,
we notice — as
calmly as though
dining room paintings
were being replaced —
the changing scenes
along the shore. We
do know, we do
know this is the
Niagara River, but
it is hard to remember
what that means.

Popovers

2011-10-03T13:18:00.001-04:00

Does a little gnome live inside there? Maybe.

Yay for chilly weather! Yay for rain and woodstove fires and soup, soup, soup, soup! Yay for fall, except for how the leaves are more just dropping and brownly rotting than doing their glamorous flaming-colors thing! We spent the weekend hiding out under lots of blankets and eating lots of popcorn and drinking lots of tea and playing lots of board games. At least the children and I did. Michael was reuning with his youth, back in St. Louis. Also, seeing his ex not-girlfriend, the one on whom he had a crush through all of junior high, and I was very jealous. She probably still looks great in her blond braids and field hockey skirt, while I have turned into a kind of solo version of Planet of the Apes. Sigh.

It is hard to take a picture of the weather, I find. It reminds me of that great book Painting the Wind.

But the kids, the cat, and I, despite missing Michael, which we did extremely much, were in what Birdy calls “cozy heaven.” It was all we could do to leave the house, but finally, just before dinner last night, we bundled up and headed out into the soggy world to see what was going on out there. And what was going on out there was mushrooms. I have a field guide from the library, and let me tell you how different poisonous mushrooms look from edible mushrooms: not at all different. I could not successfully identify one single mushroom, and it was not for lack of squatting in the sodden pine needles and flipping confusedly through my book. We saw lots of the mushrooms that Birdy calls “fairy umbrellas” (“They must be so glad to have them in all this rain!” she says with absolute seriousness.) We saw mushrooms that looked like piles of white dog poo, mushrooms that looked like coral, like a little orange turkey wattle, like a yellow penis, like decorative wood-grain shelves scaling the trunk of a tree. We saw mushrooms no bigger than dots, on stems the width of a hair, and Birdy called these “Baby fairy parasols.” Still, I could figure out nothing.

Fear not (Mom): I wasn’t actually going to eat anything. While it’s true that I do eat puffballs and morels, it’s only because they are the mushrooms that nothing else looks anything like, and because the puffballs in our back yard grow to the size of basketballs and I simply cannot say no to so much free food. But what I really want to do is go walking with a some kind of a fungal mentor who can show me the ropes. “Oooh,” I kept saying, squatting over this or that specimen. “This is probably edible. Oh, wait, unless it’s this. . . Avenging Angel. Hm.” Birdy was very nervous, despite my reassurances that we weren’t going to have any special Omelets of Death or Straight-to-Heaven Stirfrys for dinner.

Of course not. Because it’s soup weather! Soup and popovers, a meal that I love. From the time the popover-shaped light bulb goes off over your head to the time you are pulling the pan from the oven a single half an hour will pass, which works well for me. Popovers are eggy and delicious, custardy-soft inside and buttery-crisp outside, and very, very cheap to make. They also make great scoopers for soup (for the hoop-soup-snoop group), although they’re great with jam for breakfast. The only possible tricky thing is the issue of the pan. My dear old friend Ali gave me this popover pan years ago, and much as I dislike single-function kitchen gear, I do love it. They rise up high and glorious, and they never stick. That said, I used to make them in a muffin tin, and it went okay, though they stuck sometimes. I have heard of using well-buttered custard cups, and I’m interested in that as well. Oh wait—the only other problem is that they very, very occasionally don’t puff up. “Perhaps there’s a draft in your oven,” my mother would say, Britishly, and that would seem to explain it.

A note: The enthusiasm over the last post makes me a) love you, and b) think I should call this blog “Pizza Toast.” And every week I publish the recipe for pizza toast.

Popovers

Makes "12"

Active time: 5 minutes

Total time: 20 minutes (plus 10 minutes to heat the oven)

These are easy and good, and if I weren’t outvoted on this issue, I would snip fresh chives and marjoram into the batter, which is how I love them best. Annoyingly, the recipe actually usually makes only 11 popovers, no matter how stingy I think I’m being as I pour the batter.

2 eggs

1 cup milk

¾ cup flour

½ teaspoon kosher salt (or half as much table salt)

3 tablespoons salted butter

Begin by preheating the oven to 450, then place a nonstick 12-well muffin tin on a middle rack to heat for five or so minutes while you mix the batter. Whisk together the eggs, milk, flour, and salt until it’s all mostly mixed (a few lumps are fine). Now cut the butter into 12 slivers, pop one piece into each well of the hot muffin tin, and return the tin to the oven until the butter is melted and foamy. Fill each cup half full with batter (use all the batter), then bake for 15-20 minutes (don’t open the oven door to peek before then) until the popovers are puffed and brown. Serve immediately.

You have to admit that this is not a lot of ingredients.

And the batter is not overly attractive.

But check that out! Alchemy. Quick! Rush them to the table while they're still glorious and puffy!

Ben scoops up the 7-bean soup that I was developing for ChopChop. More on that soon. I topped it with cheese, and it was delicious, if a little bit like being a commercial for Silly String.

I haven't seen the back of her head since she got that hoodie. Birdy Wan Kenobi.

Ah, candlelight.

I'm not sure why I took this picture. Maybe just to lure Michael back from St. Louis with my man hands.

Yes, sometimes things deflate and get soft, and it's sad, but not that big a deal, and definitely nobody's fault.

Grape Jam Winner!!!

2011-10-01T11:38:00.000-04:00

Lisa! Number 49! A randomly generated integer! The Lisa who made a comment about Birdy's pea comment! Are you still out there? Please email me your address so I can send you a purple jar of jammy jam.

And thank you all so much for voting. We are getting frozen out of the stone-cold Birds Eye contest. But at least we tried! It's still going, so if the mood strikes, please do vote again.

xo Catherine

Lame Dinner #1: "Pizza Toast"

2011-09-30T11:17:00.000-04:00

"You should write about that," my friend Maddie said last night, when I was describing one of our most common lame dinners. So Maddie: this one's for you.

It's true that our very lamest dinner is popcorn and smoothies, which I serve most often in the summertime. But "pizza toast" is our second lamest dinner, and I serve it often, especially when it is suddenly 6:30 and I am standing in front of the open refrigerator with a dial tone humming in my brain. "Oooh," the kids say, because they are in a never-ending living remake of Oliver! "Pizza toast! Yay!" I could cry, seriously. Except then I remember that my mother, an excellent cook, would sometimes bake us up a carton Stouffer's French Bread Pizza, and we were nothing less than thrilled. So.

When it comes time to make pizza toast, you'll be glad you froze the extra tomato paste in lumps like I suggested. Plus, it's so appetizing when it's all covered in frost crystals. The geodes of the frozen-canned-foods world.

Pizza toast and apples. Pizza toast and whole unpeeled carrots. It doesn't matter what you serve it with, because the only important thing is that you cut up a string cheese with scissors. Mozzarella and a knife just aren't going to get the job done in the appropriately depressing way.

Toast the bread on one side, then flip it and spread thawed tomato paste on the untoasted side. Paste, not sauce: sauce is just going to sog into the bread, while paste is going to actually be strangely delicious (can you believe that I can't resist giving you actual serious advice about fucking PIZZA TOAST?). Because I am fancy about my pizza toast, I drizzle a little olive oil on the tomato paste before spreading. I really do. Now cut up your string cheese with a pair of cleanish scissors, one string cheese per bread slice, and arrange it artfully. Add toppings, if you have any, which you don't, then pop your toast back under the broiler until the cheese is melted. While you wait, you can admire the filthiest of your lesser appliances.

Are you salivating yet?

And it's done! Pizza toast. It's a perfectly balanced meal on another planet where you live to be zero years old!

You guys, thank you for your beauty and sweetness when I wrote last week. Because of you, I am now happily sitting under my SAD lamp with an estrogen mist and a B-vitamin drip, reading What Is the What. (I really am reading that book. Thank you for recommending it.) I feel better this week--like a breeze has blown through my mood and swept out all the humid debris. But it helps so much (I know you know this) to be buoyed by friendship and the friendship of strangers.

p.s. Grape jam drawing tomorrow. . . keep voting and stay tuned.

Update

2011-09-23T09:51:00.000-04:00

The melancholy is morphing into a more generalized melancholic strangeness. The sight of a toad in the woods--its small moist lumpy self hopping and hiding--makes me cry. Birdy shoves her hands preemptively into her pockets on the walk home, and I hear myself saying, "One day you'll want to hold my hand, but I'll be dead." Luckily, I hear this only in my mind, but it's unsettling that a sentence like that could form, even unuttered. I wake in the night and lie awake; I read and fret and listen to the eggs shriveling in my ovaries and try to extract more love from the pussycat than he is really interested in sharing. "Kitty!" I chastise. "You have to let me hold you like a baby." And he is too sleepy to protest further. "Oh sorry honey, did I wake you?" I say to Michael, after I turn the light on and wake him. He is good for throwing a heavy leg over me, tethering me back to bed, reuniting me with the basic comfort of gravity.

Life is good. It's just late September, I guess. I'll be away on Monday, but will check back in later in the week. Enjoy your weekend, patient friends.

xo Catherine

Cherry-Chocolate Ginger Cookies

2011-09-19T13:33:00.001-04:00

First photoshop experience: air-brushing the gross stain off the pretty turquoise oven mitt. It looks perfect again!

I just googled my own name with the words “fall” and “melancholy,” and got 4190 hits. Enough said, right? Maybe almost literally enough said.

I do love the leaf smell, the cold nights, the deeply misted mornings, corduroys, soup, fresh bread, acorns, apples, my down vest, dead mosquitoes, bright skies, and the changing light against the changing trees. But I’m tired today. The weird ChopChop voting thing makes me insecure—like I’m finally showing up for the middle school party in knickers, and everyone else has already moved on to jodhpurs. It’s an old feeling, largely unrelated to the contest, I’m sure. Mostly I just miss the kids while they’re at school. I come at the pussycat with need so frank that he scrabbles away from my empty arms—unless he’s sleeping, and then he’s too lazy to move, so I can kiss my loneliness into his fur. The weekend barely gets started, it seems, and it’s over already. Sigh.

As always, I find myself expressing my love via the children’s lunchboxes, in the form of cookies. I always bake on Sundays, and heading into the week with a tin of cookies is simply good for my soul and sanity. Plus, the kids are around to help me, or at least to dart in in their jammies and nab still-warm cookies from the racks. These are favorites: sweet, a little spicy from the ginger, tart with cherries, and striated with chocolate. They are crunchy on the outside and a tiny bit soft in the center, which I like. And they’re fragrant and wheaty and gorgeous.

Plus, I’ve been using my new non-stick, reusable Silpat silicone pan liners (thank you, Utah friends!) instead of parchment paper, and I’m converted. I love not have to throw anything away after baking--which speaks to both my thriftiness and my eco-anxiety--but without any danger of the cookies sticking or burning. Plus, the mats clean up beautifully and seem sturdy. As always, if you order them from LoveToCook, type in the dalaimama coupon code for 15 % off.

Maybe I'll start a Melancholy Salespeople firm.

Cherry-Chocolate Ginger Cookies

Makes 4 dozen

Active time: 1 hour

This recipe is adapted from one in Heidi Swanson’s gorgeous, inspiring Super Natural Every Day. I have made the recipe exactly as written by her—with the spelt flour and the apricots—and the cookies were terrific. But I like cherries best, and so I like this version even more! These are small cookies, which I love. Then you can pull one from the tin without making a huge commitment.

2 cups spelt flour or whole-wheat pastry flour (I used regular whole-wheat flour this time)

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 ½ tablespoons ground ginger

1 teaspoon kosher salt (or half as much table salt)

½ cup (1 stick) butter (I use salted), melted and cooled slightly

¼ cup molasses

2/3 cup sugar

1-2 tablespoons peeled and grated fresh ginger

1 large egg, well beaten

1 cup dried sour cherries (I love the ones from Trader Joe’s), chopped (or one cup dried California apricots, chopped)

6 ounces bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, finely chopped/shaved (or use chips)

½ cup large-grain sugar (mine is Turbinado) or even just regular sugar works fine

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, ground ginger, and salt.

In a medium bowl, stir the egg, molasses, sugar, and fresh ginger into the melted butter.

Pour the wet ingredients over the dries, add the cherries, and stir until just combined. Stir in the chocolate. At this point, you are supposed to chill the dough for half an hour. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.

Heat the oven to 350, and line two cookie sheets with Silpat liners (or parchment paper).

Scoop the dough into tablespoon-sized lumps (I really do love my dough-scooper for this), then tear each lump in two, roll each half into a ball, roll it in the coarse sugar, and place on the prepared baking sheet. Leave a little space: sometimes they bake up sort of squat and puffy, and sometimes they spread into broader, flatter cookies—I don’t know why. I get about 16 cookies to a sheet.

Bake the cookies two sheets at a time for 7-12 minutes (mine take about 11), until they puff up, darken a bit, and crack across the top. Cool on wire racks.

The cookies are good for lots of reasons.

Two kinds of ginger, for example.

Also: chocolate.

Cherries. And the fresh ginger. I kind of spaced and chopped it fine instead of grating it, but all seems well.

The recipe.

The dough, which is very stiff.

The cat, which is very lazy.

It could be that these are a pain to shape and bread in sugar, but I love it for some reason.

Unbaked cookie balls on my Silpat. I like the border color and how they look like the name is spray-painted through a stencil.

Cookies, baked. Sometimes they spread more, so I give them a bit of room.

Children, in pajamas.

I told him the funniest joke!

reading and thinking

2011-09-16T15:55:00.000-04:00

We all commemorated 9/11 in our own ways, I know, and I am grateful as always for that diversity--even in our processing of grief and disaster. You won't be surprised to hear that my marking of the event took the form of a book. This book:

It's a story about Hurricane Katrina, on the one hand, and 9/11 on the other--specifically about the experience of Muslim Americans in its aftermath. I confess that I tend to read nonfiction with a mixture of engaged righteousness (Look at me! I'm the kind of person who reads nonfiction!) and falling asleep, but this book I simply couldn't put down. I loved it and I am recommending it to you with a full heart. The title A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius has always made me a little exhausted, but now that I'm a Dave Eggers convert, maybe I'll pick that up too.

Thanks for continuing to vote for ChopChop. And if you're not on facebook, for keeping us in your thoughts!

Have a lovely weekend.

Wild Grape Jam Give-Away!!!

2011-09-14T10:33:00.001-04:00

jam pot

Where are my manners? Seriously. I knew there was something off about that request yesterday, and it was this: I forgot to bribe you! With a jar of my gorgeous, glossy, fully foraged, poetically purple, grapetastic jam. That's right. Vote at Birds Eye, then enter your name here, right here in the comments, in a drawing to win a jar of the good stuff.

The voting happens here. Vote! And then vote again tomorrow. And the day after. etc.

You cannot do it from an iPhone. Birds Eye has this advice:

1. Go to www.facebook.com/BirdsEyeVegetables
2. If you have not already, please "like" the page in order to be able to vote
3. Click on the Share the Wonder Grant tab (right under the Birds Eye Facebook profile photo)
4. The page to appear will say "Vote for your favorite organization". ChopChop is the first video on the top left corner (it says "ChopChop"). Click on that video and the click the red voting button to vote.

You can vote once a day for a month, and whichever organization gets the most votes wins $20,000. I will do the drawing here on October 1st.

Now, I understand that a few things might give you pause.

Is it unsettling that it's decided by a facebook popularity contest?
Is it disturbing that I have to click that "allow access to all my personal information and private memories" button?
Aren't all the organizations worthy? (My God, they are--I practically voted for a different one until I remembered myself.)
Didn't we already enter another contest here, about the name of the blog, and you still lamely haven't figured that out yet?

I totally understand. But watch our video. Not just because I spent the better part of a million hours helping to make it. Not just because Ben and Birdy are both quoted in it and Birdy herself is actually in it. But also because it explains what we're trying to do.

Thanks for your patience, friends. And if you voted already, thank you so much.

xo Catherine

p.s. Favorite search terms that brought people here this week: "tape face," "2.5 year old knows how to play jenga," "you were rolling your tortilla boobs into a fancy burrito," which, by the way, I know one of you searched only to make me laugh. Which I did. Thank you.

Please help ChopChop win this grant!

2011-09-13T10:15:00.000-04:00

You guys, ChopChop, the non-profit I'm working for, is a finalist for a grant from Birds Eye. Can you please help? Can you go to this facebook page, "like" it, and then vote for our video every day this week? The organization that gets the most votes will win. . . thank you so much, and I'm sorry to ask so much of you all the time!

yours gratefully,
Catherine

Smoky Minted Eggplant Dip

2011-09-12T12:04:00.000-04:00

I have already written at great length about my hate-love relationship with eggplant, and so I won’t recapitulate it here. But I just want to say, for anybody who loathes or is allergic to eggplant or peppers or tomatoes: no duh. It’s the deadly nightshade family, folks—kind of a cusp edible, if you don’t mind me saying. That’s why they might make your lips itch when you eat them, or your scalp itch when you think about them or why, if you’re Ben, the sight of somebody cutting into a raw tomato might make you practically need to pull the neck of your shirt away from your body so you can barf into it. He always shudders, then says something like, “It’s just all that, kind of, seedy jelly. Rrrkh.” I once popped the top of a jar with his grandmother’s handwriting on the lable, and when Ben asked and I told him it was green tomato marmalade, he said, “Seriously? My God.”

This dip, which is my new version of the baba ganoush recipe I ran in O, takes me through all my eggplant feelings:

Still life with zinnias and beautiful produce.

My friend Nicole grew this eggplant, and I just love how much it looks like a cartoon character--like it's about to spring up and do a dance with a cane and it's own sprightly little green hat. Plus, the color. I mean, wow.

Under the broiler, where it can be largely ignored. Fine.

But then, I don't know. This starts to get me into eggplant-weirdness territory.

Oh God, and this.

"Eggplant looks so untasty," Ben remarked, staring into the colander. "It looks like those whale intestines we saw on the beach." Um, exactly.

But then this? There is almost nothing better: smoky, lemony, creamy. . . I mean, it's perfect. Those are chips I made from wheat tortillas following this recipe.

Smoky Minted Eggplant Dip

Makes 1 ½ cups

This zippy, lemony, herb-flecked dip is heaven on a pita chip. Spread it on a sandwich, dollop it onto a plate, or scoop it up with crackers. Purists can omit the mint—it tastes smokier and more authentic without it—but I love its brightness against the rich eggplant. Likewise, swap in tahini for the almonds if you prefer (a couple tablespoons should do the trick), but as you may or may not know, I’m not the world’s most ardent fan of ~~dust paste~~ tahini.

1/3 cup whole almonds

1 large-ish eggplant (around 1-1 ½ pounds)

2 tablespoons olive oil

2-3 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon or lime juice

2 cloves garlic, crushed through a garlic press

2 tablespoons each fresh mint and parsley, chopped

1 teaspoon kosher salt (or half as much table salt)

In a bowl, cover the almonds with hot water and leave them to soak.

Now preheat the broiler and prick the eggplant a half dozen or so times with a fork. On a rimmed metal baking sheet (I cover mine with foil first), broil the eggplant 4 or 5 inches from the heat, flipping it over at the halfway point, for about 45 minutes; you could probably do this on the grill—let me know if you try. It will be completely collapsed and browning by this point.

Dump the eggplant into a colander, pull it apart with two forks, and allow it to drain, torn side down, until it’s cool enough to be handled. Now remove the pulp from the skin: this is most easily accomplished with a fork and fingers, and will involve some combination of peeling the skin and scraping the flesh; be sure to get at all the nice browned stuff right by the skin.

Drain the almonds. Place the almonds in the food processor with all the remaining ingredients except the eggplant and process until as finely blended as possible, stopping to scrape down the sides of the bowl as needed. Now add the eggplant and process again until smooth(ish). Taste it and add more salt, lemon, or oil if it needs a little punching or fattening up. Scoop it into a bowl, drizzle it with olive oil, and serve it with crackers, pita, or pita chips.

Birdy. Who was home sick on her third day of school. Did I get to skip work and lie around in bed with her reading When Vera Was Sick and The Sick Day? Why yes. Yes I did.

ChopChop News

2011-09-07T14:21:00.000-04:00

ChopChop's Sally Sampson is talking about kids and lunch at the Washington Post. Yay, Sally!

Wild Grape Focaccia with Rosemary

2011-09-06T11:12:00.000-04:00

It’s graping time. I can’t help it. Every year, come the first week of September, I run in the woods and am intoxicated, over and over, by the smell of the wild grapes. It’s like nothing else—except any artificial-grape-flavored thing you’ve ever loved. It smells like Nehi. Like Laffy Taffy, Grape Bazooka, Otter Pops. It makes me almost dizzy with longing. After you reach up or in to grab a handful, and then you burst the purple globes in your mouth, crush the tannic seeds under your teeth, the grapes will make your lips itch so extremely that you’ll be sure you’re about to collapse in a grape-scented anaphylaxis. But you’re not. It’s just the itch of the wild grapes! And later there might also be the itch of the poison ivy. But that’s a separate issue.

Wild grapes.

Are you still smarting, though, because I mentioned running, and you’re like, “Who are you? Last I remembered, you were rolling your tortilla boobs into a fancy burrito bosom before you lay down on the couch with two beers and a bucket of Corn Nuts”—and yes. That’s still me. I just run a couple miles here and there to compensate for the added Corn Nuts. Mostly I’m just in the woods to feel my thighs smack bracingly together. And to sniff out the grapes.

These are called Fox Grapes. They don't bake up as pretty, but they taste great.

The grapes! The grapes. There are two places where I really pick them, when I get serious. This involves the wearing of wellies and long pants and bug spray. And, ideally, the company of a helpful child or two to spot the best clusters and hold open the bag and get apologized to every time I lose my balance and fall into the shrubbery and say, “Fuck.” And then, when we get home, I boil them up into jam and the house exhales the sweet grape smell like we’re in a scene from Willy Wonka.

I’m not going to post the jam recipe here, because I’m not assuming you’re all out picking buckets of wild grapes. But for this insanely delicious foccacia, you don't need much: you can simply purchase a clamshell container of Concords from the supermarket (I think they’re coming from Michigan right now). And you should. It’s one of those dishes that makes you feel, if you show up with it at a party, like a movie star. Everyone will crowd around you fainting and crying with joy and marveling over the fact that you thought to put grapes and salt and rosemary together on bread, even as you compulsively confess that it’s not your recipe. And you’ll say, modestly, “I was too lazy to take the seeds out—I was supposed to take them out,” and everyone will smile with their blue teeth and say, “Oh it’s perfect this way! I can’t imagine eating this without the crunch of the seeds.” Except your friend Lea, who will say, “The seeds make me want to kill myself,” while she spits them into a bowl. But even she will admit that the bread is wildly, obscenely delicious.

Wild Grape Focaccia with Rosemary 

Serves 2 or 4 or 8 or 12, depending

Active time: 30 minutes; total time: 4 hours

This is my second year of making this, and there is no way to capture how good it is: the tender-hearted crunchy-crusted bread, the salt, sugar, oiliness, rosemary—all of it a backdrop to the fragrantly melting, bracingly tart grapes. The recipe is from Smitten Kitchen, and she adapted it from Claudia Fleming’s Last Course. I do a few things different: I don’t seed the grapes; I do chop the rosemary; instead of warming the milk, I compensate for its chill by using hot instead of warm water. It’s not a hard recipe, but it involves strangely ongoing odds and ends of rising, so make sure you’re not in a rush to get somewhere.

3/4 cup hot water

 2 tablespoons cold milk

1 1/2 teaspoons sugar 

1 1/4 teaspoons active dry yeast 

2 cups all-purpose flour 

1 teaspoon kosher salt (or half as much table salt)

 6 tablespoons olive oil

 1 1/2 cups halved Concord, red or black grapes (optionally seeded: Smitten uses the tip of a paring knife for this)

 1 teaspoon fresh rosemary needles, chopped 

2 tablespoons coarse (or regular) sugar

 2 teaspoons coarse sea salt (or a little less than that of kosher salt)

In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, stir together the water, milk, sugar, and yeast. Let the mixture sit until foamy, about 10 minutes. Add the flour, salt and 2 tablespoons of the olive oil to the yeast mixture and mix well on low. Attach the dough hook, raise the speed to medium-low and knead the dough for 8 minutes longer. (Okay, I did it all with the dough hook. What can I say?)

Brush a large bowl with a generous amount of olive oil. Scrape dough into the bowl (I used an oiled rubber spatula) and brush the top with additional oil (or just roll it around in the oil like I do. The dough is profoundly sticky: do not be alarmed!). Cover with plastic wrap (or a bowl cover) and let it rise in a cool place until it doubles in bulk, 1 1/2 to 2 hours.

Press the dough down with an oiled hand and divide it into two balls (Smitten has you start flouring hands and surfaces at this point, but I do better sticking with the oil, given how oily it all is). Brush a large baking sheet (or two small ones) with olive oil, place the balls of dough on it and brush the top with more oil. Set it aside for 20 minutes, lightly covered with a kitchen towel.

After 20 minutes, dip your fingers in olive oil and press and stretch each ball of dough into a 8 to 9-inch shape. It will be dimpled from your fingers. Cover again with the towel and let it rise for another 1 1/4 hours in a cool place.

Preheat the oven to 450°F. Brush tops of dough with remaining olive oil and top the sprinkle grapes, rosemary, sugar, and coarse sea salt evenly over the dough. Bake for 15 minutes, until the crust is golden brown and puffed around edges. Let cool before serving. Serve warm or at room temperature.

I couldn't resist showing you my yeast jar.

This is what the dough looks like when it's done! Seriously. It is a sticky mess.

But it's also very springy and lively, and it kind of burbles and bubbles while you're working with it, which I love. I'm so used to whole wheat bread dough, which is like the Eeyore to this dough's Tigger, if you know what I mean.

Risen, with oil blurbling up to the surface. Yum.

It is very funny and bouncy and you have to keep at it to wrestle it into flattened shapes.

Toppings. I've had the same jar of sea salt since some friends went to France years ago. I forget about it for months at a time.

I forgot to take a picture, and opened the oven door to do it! Note the pooling olive oil, which the bread will absorb spectacularly.

Beyond words.

Dilly Beans / Come on [Ir]ene

2011-08-29T15:42:00.000-04:00

On my birthday last year, a small cardboard box arrived in the mail from our friend Andrew, and it was full of small red chilis that he'd grown. No note, no card. Isn't that the best? I strung them up and dried them, and now they're showing off in many jars of things.

When the power went out last night with a sucking sound and then black silence, the kids darted in from their bedrooms, cheering. The hurricane had not gathered itself up with much oomph around here, thank goodness--a nisht geferlach, if you’re of the Yiddish persuasion. Some rain, a tree limb or two on the ground, us checking news updates somewhat obsessively, checking this and that online hurricane tracker, checking out the window, checking in with my parents in New York. We wanted our roof to stay on, sure, our basement to stay dry—but we understood that, in the scheme of things, we were likely to be fine no matter what, and, therefore, deeply lucky. “It might be a nuisance,” I reassured Birdy. “It might be a mess or a pain or even kind of expensive to deal with. But it’s not going to be catastrophic for us. The only thing worth worrying about is people who can’t stay safe where they are.” Who am I? I hardly recognize the person I’ve become—the person with perspective. But there it is. All of us together? And safe? Let the basement flood. (Of course, when the basement did flood in March, I did some no small amount of lamenting, don’t get me wrong. Every morning I stood at the top of the basement stairs with my coffee mug, looked down into the underwater gloom, and, to the children’s daily delight, sighed, “Motherfucker.”)

Disaster preparation, Ingalls-style. I picked five and a half pounds of wild concord grapes and made five and a half pints of jam. Also tomatillo salsa and bread-and-butter pickles and wild blackberry jam, which was overseen by my mother. Money in the bank, as I like to say. Or, rather, who needs money in the bank when you have canned goods?

But yesterday? I prepared for the hurricane like it was 1870, canning pickles and jam in a cloud of fragrant steam. “Should we do more stuff to get ready?” I asked Michael, but he’d already taken down the bird feeders and was now onto the important task of programming our iPod: Bob Dylan, “Hurricane”; The Beatles, “Rain”; Kris Delmhorst, “Hurricane”; Gillian Welch, “Wind and Rain.” He is a man with priorities. We played “everyone picks a board game,” which represents our family’s most luxurious kind of afternoon: four games in a row (Birdy: Make Me a Cake; Me: Rummikub; Ben: Acquire; Michael: Agricola). The projected peak of the storm came and went, and we pulled rubber boots on over our pajamas and went outside, kicked through puddles and crushed fallen apples under our heels. We wandered up to the top of the golf course as the sun was setting, pink light streaming in through rolling banks of silvery clouds, the kids chasing each other, mushrooms pushing up through the green, green grass almost, it seemed, while we watched. I was so happy. I am still.

But the kids were a little disappointed—a little bit awash in the strangely dry anticlimax, although they understood rationally how lucky we had been; they understood that the hurricane had uprooted a lot of people's homes and lives. Still, we’d planned for the romance of candlelight, of boiling tea on the camp stove and living off of pickles and jam indefinitely. (I, personally, had also planned on somehow not needing to work for days on end.) So when the wind picked up late, when doors slammed spontaneously shut all over the house and the window frames shuddered, when the darkness blinked on, they were thrilled. I lit a candle. We moved their mattresses into our bedroom, and then we lay on the big bed, all of us together with the cat, and listened to the wind. And only fifty minutes later, with a couple of stray beeps, the lights came back on. But it had been something. It was enough.

Here's hoping the same for you. Sending love and safe, dry thoughts.

Dilly Beans

Makes 6 pints

This recipe is adapted from one in the wonderful book The Joy of Pickling. I think that, if you’ve never canned anything before, you should go ahead and simply make these and plan to refrigerate them and/or give them away. That way you won’t be daunted by the stress of the canning situation, and you can just make them all together in a large bowl or jar. That said, I am not going to give you full canning directions because you really need to consult the introductory chapter of a book about it: the Joy of Pickling has a good one, as does Tart and Sweet, my new favorite preserving book, and of course your library has all the classics like Ball’s Complete Book of Home Preserving.)

I am kind of {immodesty alert} famous for these pickles. My friend Becky, who is a lawyer, once traded me doing our will for a jar of beans to put in her husband’s Christmas stocking. They are crisp and puckery and perfect. If you make them with dill, they’re classic, and if you use tarragon, they taste like French cornichons. Keep a few jars around, and you will always have something good to put out with drinks.

Of course, the Utah friends at Love to Cook are a wonderful resource for canning supplies and advice. They have a basic canning kit here, which, for $15 (even less, with the 15%-off dalaimama code), gives you a good start, including a funnel and tongs to grab the jars. They also have quart- and pint-sized jars that you can link to from that page, and a whole canning page here. Plus, they sell a spectacularly beautiful, multi-purpose canner here, with a rack for the jars.

Okay, the beans:

6 garlic cloves, sliced

36 black peppercorns

3 pounds very fresh green or wax beans, washed and topped

6 dill heads or sprigs (or else tarragon or basil or lovage or cilantro--I like them all)

6 dried chili peppers or some chili flakes (optional)

3 1/2 cups white or white wine vinegar

3 1/2 cups water

4 tablespoons kosher salt

Begin by putting a large pot of water up to boil. Give six pint-sized canning jars a thorough, soapy scrub, then put them in the pot of water that you’ve put on to boil. Make sure you have six lids and rings to match. (The other thing to do is pull jars, hot and fresh, from the dishwasher—especially if you’re not planning on doing the full canning thing).

Into each of 6 sterile 1-pint mason jars, put 1 sliced garlic clove, 6 peppercorns, and a chili or chili flakes. Pack the beans vertically into the jars, adding 1 tarragon sprig (or other herbs) to each jar. You will want to gather an organized handful of beans and then cut them to size so that nobody pokes up out of the brine.

Bring the vinegar, water, and salt to a boil in a pot, then pour the hot liquid over the beans, leaving a half inch of headspace. Close the jars with hot two-piece caps. Process the jars for 5 minutes in a boiling water bath, or pasteurize them for 30 minutes in water heated to 180 or 185 degrees F. They're best after a month and keep forever.

If you're not a canner, then just make them and store them in the fridge! Or eat them.

And if you're an experienced canner, you can do what I do though I am not officially recommending it, and the Ball folks would have a fit because NOBODY RECOMMENDS THE OPEN KETTLE METHOD ANY MORE: pour a kettle full of boiling water over the beans in a colander in the sink, then pack them in the jars hot, with scrupulously clean hands. Then they’ll can up just fine in the hot jars, without the pasteurizing step (and they'll stay crunchier). But if you have any doubts, process or pasteurize them.

I picked these at our CSA and they were so fresh and green that they actually smelled like fresh-mown grass. In a good way.

Herbs. Garlic.

Beans, packed in a jar. The things is, everything you really want pictures of I didn't take pictures of. I'm sorry! I think I'm trying not to seem like a good starting-resource on canning because if you're going to get serious, you should read a book first and not just follow some crazy blogger's slap-dash method. But I made these for *years* before I canned them, just for the record. I used to keep them in an old pickle jar in the fridge.

After you add the brine, the beans turn khaki-colored. And the garlic turns blue. And your cheeks turn pink from standing over a hot stove, canning, like it's the friggin' 19th century.

Dilly Beans! Silly beans.

Fish Tacos

2011-08-22T11:50:00.000-04:00

"Fantastic!" the recipe now says, in Ben's careful handwriting. I'm encouraging him to write in cookbooks, because it's a good habit, don't you think? To make notes about substitutions or improvements, about whether or not you even liked something. My mother does this, and you can practically hear her crisp Britishness on the page when you read, next to a recipe heading, her damning "Not worth the trouble."

But these fish tacos were a tremendous success: easy and fun and absolutely delicious. Ben picked the recipe out of Eat Fresh Food: Awesome Recipes for Teen Chefs, a cookbook that inspires him with its appealing, appealingly colorful meals. And, if the fish tacos are any indication, the recipes themselves are excellent. The fish was savory and well-seasoned and nice and brown-tasting, if you know what I mean, even though it hadn't been crumbed or battered before its time in the pan. I volunteered as sous chef, and so chopped tomatoes and onions and the like while Ben worked on the fish, and, as is always true for me, I loved helping. Partly it's because I love Ben's company and I love that he's cooking. And partly it's that helping signals that I'm not the one cooking. And I always love to be not the one cooking.

Fish Tacos

Serves 4

Eat Fresh Food serves these with Avocado Mayonnaise, which looks super-interesting--a version of mayo made mostly from avocadoes and buttermilk. However, Ben doesn't like avocadoes, so we swapped in our delicious chipotle-lime mayo, which was perfect.

For the tacos:

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1 teaspoon ground coriander

½ teaspoon chili powder (Ben used chipotle powder)

½ teaspoon kosher salt (or half as much table salt)

1 small garlic clove

1 ½ pounds halibut fillets (or any firm white fish--we used hake, because it was cheap, and it was excellent. Also, we only bought a pound which served the 3 fish eaters plentifully. Birdy had cheese instead of fish in her tacos.)

8 6-inch corn tortillas

For the taco bar:

2 cups shredded cabbage

½ an onion, finely chopped

1 cup chopped fresh tomato

1 cup diced avocado

½ cup fresh cilantro leaves

Lime wedges

Chipotle-lime mayonnaise made by whisking 1 teaspoon of chipotle puree and the juice of a lime into half a cup of mayonnaise.

Combine the olive oil, spices, and salt in a pie plate. Push the garlic through a press and add it to the bowl. Cut the fish into 1-inch strips and toss it in the spice mixture to coat. Set it aside while you warm the tortillas.

Heat an 8-inch skillet (ideally cast iron) over medium heat for 3 minutes. One at a time, crisp the tortillas on each side for about 30 seconds. Wrap in dish towel to keep warm.

Heat a large, nonstick skillet over medium-high heat, then cook the fish for 2 to 3 minutes on each side until opaque and flakey. Transfer to a large plate and break the fish into large chunks. (The fish helped us with this step by breaking itself into large chunks as we were transferring it. Full disclosure: Ben needed help getting the fish out the pan as it all started to happen a little too quickly at the end, and it was sticking a bit.)

Give each person two tortillas and let everyone assemble the tacos as they like.

One nice thing about Ben cooking is that he actually follows recipes. Unlike me. So, where I would have skipped the cumin because I got sick of it in the 1990s when we dumped a pound into every single pot of beans that we ate every single night, he used it--and it was perfect.

The fish did not gross him out, which was nice. I was honestly surprised that he picked this recipe because he is not always wild about fish, but I concealed my surprise behind genuine enthusiasm.

Doesn't that look good? It got a little touch-and-go in the pan, which is why there's no photo of it actually cooking.

Taco bar. Any meal this colorfully interactive is bound to be a hit, don't you think?

That looks perfect to me, just like that.

But you know it's immoral not to add the rest--and then it really is even more perfect. Oh that chipotle-lime mayo! Don't skip it.

All of a sudden Ben is Mr. Raw Onion. I love the way their tastes evolve.

"fantastic!"

Zucchini Olive-Oil Cake with Lemon-Crunch Glaze

2011-08-15T10:22:00.000-04:00

I am not an animal! I am a vehicle for excess squash! Also, a really good piece of cake.

I remember this from Augusts past--this desultory fog that starts to creep in over the children. They argue in the back of the car, something to do with What's your name Mary Jane? "No, no" they are laughing and irritated both. "No, no. You have to say cucumber immediately. You have to--hup" I look back into the sudden silence, and they are both staring straight ahead, holding their breath. They resume their good-natured bickering as soon as we're past the cemetery.

Later, reading in bed, I hear them brushing their teeth, giggling and arguing in whispers. "Fine," Birdy says audibly, crisply. "Then I'll call you Scrotum McClitoris."

And so, when I ask the kids for help with this cake, Ben grates the zucchini like he's on kitchen duty at a tuberculosis sanitorium, leaning down from a high stool, his face on his fist, dragging the squash limply across the grater. "It's not really grating," he says, as a green slush gathers up at the edges of the grater. I show him that it takes force--real pressure--explain that he's going to have to actually stand up. Birdy comes to assist him, and when I look over, she's punching a measuring cup full of grated zucchini, her fist balled, green shreds flying. "Um, honey? Why are you hitting that poor squash?" She laughs. "Ben said to pack it tight, so I'm punching it." They are so pleasantly ineffective that it's hard to be irritated with them. Hard, but not impossible. "Go," I tell them. You guys are the best--I'm so grateful for your willingness to help. I am. But go. Leave me!" They walk out of the kitchen arm in arm, and I hear them laughing gently at themselves: "I was punching the zucchini!" It could be worse, I know. Especially since two minutes later I have to yell, "I know I just kicked you out, but can someone please grate the nutmeg for me?" and they both run back in cheerfully.

The thing is, I actually love baking--and it's partly because I have systematically hurdled the obstacles standing between me and this love. For one thing, Pam baking spray--the kind that manages to grease and flour at the same time? (With real flour!) It saved me. I used to think, "Maybe I'll make a bundt cake!" and then the thought of greasing all those awful ridges would totally deflate me. No more! Similarly, the Beater Blade on my Kitchen Aid spares me the irritation of stopping the mixer to scrape down the bowl (aka Batter Knuckles), and this seemingly minor improvement is huge for me. Plus, you can cream butter without letting it soften first, and everything mixes so beautifully. I cannot recommend it enough.

My boyfriend, the Beater Blade.

The Utah friends are selling it here, and, as always, enter the code "dalaimama" for 15% off your entire order.

Of course, if you don't have a mixer, I am recommending that too. But that might be more of a holiday/lottery-winning/rich-unknown-relative-dying situation.

Zucchini-Olive Oil Cake with Lemon Crunch Glaze

This recipe is from Dolce Italiano, by Gina DePalma, but I got it from lottie and doof, which is one of my favorite food blogs. Even though he's forever posting outrageously glamorous recipes for, like, elderflower fritters and mulberrytinis, because he and his partner are young and unencumbered by the fact of actual meals and, thus, get all the nutrients they need from elegant desserts and fancy alcohol drinks. Sigh.

I've made many changes, however. One is that I'm using half whole-wheat flour because I just can hardly bear to bake with only white flour these days. Another is adding lemon zest to the glaze, which totally MAKES this cake--it's simply the best glaze I've ever made. And you know I'm not a frosting person (by the hundredth frosting recipe I post, you'll be like, "Um, Cath?"). If I made this again, I'd use half vegetable oil because the strong olive-oil flavor actually makes this cake almost too savory. I'm wondering, though: What would this be like with grated chocolate in it? Grated chocolate and rosemary--keeping the vanilla, but skipping the spices? That's how I'm trying it next.

For the cake:

1 cup walnut pieces, toasted 4-5 minutes, and finely chopped

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 cup whole wheat flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 ½ teaspoons kosher salt

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg

1 teaspoon ground ginger

3 large eggs

1 3/4 cups granulated sugar

1 cup extra-virgin olive oil (or half olive oil, half vegetable oil)

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

2 1/2 cups grated zucchini (about 2 medium-small zucchini)

For the glaze:

The grated zest and 1/4 cup freshly squeezed juice from one lemon

1/3 cup granulated sugar

1 cup confectioners’ sugar

Preheat the oven to 350° F. Grease and flour a bundt pan. Or use the evil, wonderful Pam baking spray.

Whisk together the flours, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and spices into a medium bowl and set aside. In an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment (aka my boyfriend), beat the eggs, sugar and olive oil together on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes, then beat in the vanilla extract. Scrape down the sides of the bowl as needed (ha ha, but you won't need to!). Beat in the dry ingredients all at once on low speed until they are thoroughly combined, then switch to medium speed and mix for 30 seconds. Mix in the zucchini and walnuts on low speed until they are completely incorporated.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan, smoothing the top with a spatula. Bake the cake for 45 to 55 minutes or until a tester inserted in the cake comes out clean and the cake has begun to pull away from the sides of the pan. Bake a little longer than you might be inclined: it's a heavy cake with a lot of moisture that needs to bake off.

While the cake is baking, prepare the glaze. In a medium bowl, whisk together the lemon juice and granulated sugar, then whisk in the zest and confectioners’ sugar until the glaze is completely smooth.

Allow the cake to cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then carefully invert it onto a wire rack. Using a pastry brush, immediately brush the glaze over the entire surface of the warm cake, using all of the glaze; first it will all pour off, but it will start sticking as the cake cools, and you can scoop up the puddled glaze with a spoon and pour it back over (I forgot to use a pastry brush! I just spooned it and made a mess.). Allow the cake to cool completely and the glaze to dry--which it will, beautifully.

Don't be fooled by the smile. She is up to no good.

Don't be fooled by the huge pile of squash. I grated that myself.

Squashtastrophe.

Okay, go. Go, you guys.

Oh--but wait!

I love olive-oil cakes, but maybe the combo of zuke and oil conspired to make this one just a tiny, tiny bit too vegetal. As I mentioned, swapping in half regular oil would solve this, I'm almost sure.

My boyfriend.

Sigh.

Ready to bake.

Meanwhile. . .

And then!

I absolutely love how this looks for some reason.

This and That

2011-08-12T11:04:00.000-04:00

Thank you. You guys are always good for a little melancholy, I know, and I'm grateful.

Between writing that sentence and this, I sneezed a million times. But why?

Okay, onto the this and that portion of the blog, which is primarily about how we've occupied ourselves on recent car trips.

This audiobook, which we all loved, even though it had been misplaced in the children's section of the library. I have to warn you that there's a bit of profanity (sometimes hilariously) and also that, gulp, the mom dies of a brain tumor in the middle of the story. But mostly it's a memoir about an English family pooling their resources to buy and rehabilitate an old zoo. It's very funny and captivating and English, and we all loved it. The kids did not seem too overly crushed by the mother dying, and that may be because it's told in a moving but unsentimental way.

That audiobook. We are big James Herriot fans, so after listening to one English story about animals, it seemed time to listen to the classic, and it doesn't disappoint. Again, though, in warning: he is elbow deep in cow rectums and sheep vaginas for most of it, so if that's going to trouble anyone or make them vomit out the car window, then skip this. But it is really, truly funny, and still so fresh and delightful even after all these years--the mix of great work ethic with hard-drinking hedonism really speaks to me.

We are late to the audiobook party, but catching up quickly. It is such a joy to be together enjoying the same story in this way.

Finally, although this picture does not quite capture it, we made rock rainbows at the shore, and it was just the most dorkily fun project. The rocks did not look like anything in particular on the beach, but after we'd gathered all the brightest ones we could find and put them together, it really did make a kind of color spectrum. Right?

Wishing you brightness in unexpected places. xo

p.s. Okay, I know I've mentioned this book already, and I know the wait-list at your library is four thousand million patrons long, but just add your name patiently to it. Think how delighted you'll be in February, when you suddenly get to read THE BEST BOOK IN THE WORLD. Just saying.

Any-Berry Jam (the melancholy version)

2011-08-08T12:30:00.001-04:00

I mark summer's passing by the making of jam: strawberry, when the world is still a riot of damp, fresh green; raspberry and blueberry at the halfway point; blackberry and peach as the lawn withers and the children's arms and legs turn to butterscotch, no matter how much sunscreen I torture them with. Ben is visibly alarmed by the back-to-school ads on the radio. He does an exaggerated double-take. "Are they kidding me?" He is offended, incredulous, despairing. Midway through a bike ride on Cape Cod last week, we stopped for ice cream and he was uncharacteristically moody--pushed his root-beer Italian ice away after only a few bites, grumped about the heat, slumped at the picnic table. "Do you need a little special attention?" I asked, which is what we've developed as an alternative to the question, "Why are you being such a pain in the ass?" (I notice this even in myself: sometimes it's easier to sulk and groan than to request the wrapping of arms around me.) Ben climbed into my lap, his long limbs splayed all over the place like a larger-than-life marionette with its strings gone slack. "What's up?" I asked, because seriously: sun, breeze, beach, bikes, clams--it was hard to understand. And he said, simply, "School." This happens to him every year when July click to August. I squeeze him, remind him that August is the longest month of the year, which makes him smile. But also I'm strangely glad here beneath him, surreptitiously gulping in the smell of his hot scalp, feeling his ribs beneath my forearms, the steadying thud of his heartbeat.

Me and my pet giraffe.

Last I wrote, it seems, I was agloat over our easy camping: Nobody needs us, life's a breeze! I gushed. But the last few weeks--a trip to visit my brother's family in North Carolina, a week in Wellfleet--I've felt a little empty-lapped. I've been missing the rhythm of the napping days: the easy excuse to disentangle a small, sleepy child from the fray, to lie down in a darkened afternoon room with the fan whirring softly and watch a beloved face flutter and drift. It's the way I used to feel about Michael, and still do: that no matter what the day brings, how much space or time between us, I know that at the end of it I will climb into bed with him and touch down. And now, with the kids: we spend so much time together--delicious, easy time--but I am missing the promise of that physical closeness, of the loving touch-down. I just miss it, that's all. They're busy people, these kids. They still hold my hand, they kiss me goodnight, I'm so lucky. I can't complain. I would never. But sometimes. I just miss my babies.

Any-Berry Jam

Makes 4-5 cups

This is a recipe I developed for FamilyFun, and it's in this month's issue along with a couple others, including Pool Noodle Salad, which I've made many times this summer. As for the jam, which is bright, fruity, and fantastic: there are lots of different kinds of pectin, and they all seem to work fine with this super-easy, fool-proof method.

4 cups crushed blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, or strawberries (hulled). Crush the berries with a potato masher before measuring--it will likely take about a quart and a half of berries to make 4 cups crushed. If the strawberries are not crushably ripe, slice them first.

1 ½ cups sugar

1 pouch powdered or liquid pectin

Put the berries in a large, heavy pot. Stir together the sugar and pectin in a bowl (if you are using liquid pectin, skip this step), then stir the sugar and pectin thoroughly into the berry mixture. Bring the berries to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring constantly. You are looking for a full, rolling boil--the kind that can't be stirred down. Boil for one minute, then ladle the jam into very clean jars (leave an inch of headroom for expansion in the freezer), cap, cool to room temperature, and then use or freeze.

These were strawberries we picked in late June. We've eaten all it already but a half inch left in one jar.

Hulling and mashing the berries is a good job for a child. Ben made this entire batch of jam, start to finish, and he could not believe how easy it was.

Into the pot with you!

I like freezer jam because you can use much less sugar than you'd need to if you were wanting to can it properly.

"I don't understand the part about the boil you can't stir down," Ben said, and then said, a minute later, "Oh, okay, now I do."

If you get serious about jam, a canning funnel is a nice thing to have.

Jam.

Jam on bread.

~~We couldn't possibly eat all that before the summer's over!~~

Any berry, left to right: raspberry, blackberry, strawberry, blueberry.

I.O.U...

2011-07-30T11:51:00.000-04:00

columns!

Home from taking the kids to North Carolina to see my brother and his family. Leaving today for the Cape. Vacation is my vocation, it turns out. The only problem with freelancing is that nobody actually pays you while you're not working. Teeny, tiny problem.

Recipes and news when we return!

I hope you're enjoying yourselves so much.

xoxo

China-Moon Shrimp. And Knives.

2011-07-25T14:55:00.001-04:00

So, yes, when it comes to pickles, I am an unreliable narrator. I love them beyond my ability to interpret how widely loveable they might actually be. I pickle cukes and green beans, beets and red radishes and daikon. I have pickled turnips and cauliflower and a fleshy weed called purslane. I make vinegar pickles. I make fermented pickles, like sauerkraut, kim chi, and classic kosher dills. I make pickles you eat right away and pickles you put up in jars so that you can crack open some sweet, fragrant, turmeric-hued bread and butters in the middle of winter. If you left your Birkenstocks here by mistake, I might put them up in a jar of brine.

So, pickled shrimp. I don't even know what to say, except that I do believe there's precedent, and that it's a fairly traditional Southern dish. But this version is based on the late Barbara Tropp's recipe for Chinese-style Pickled Salmon in her fantabulous China Moon cookbook, and it's one of my favorite party and potluck dishes. After pickling, the shrimp get meaty and chewy, addictively puckery and lip-tinglingly spicy. They're a great gateway seafood for uncertain children because they're so firm and "unshrimply," as Ben puts it. I make them and eat them and crave them and then make them again. You will too. Unless you don't like them. And then you won't.

And, about the knives. These are my kitchen workhorses, and I think that why I'm so happy cooking--or at least part of it--is because I have good, sharp knives that make prep work a pleasure. I can sit down with an enormous heap of vegetables to trim and chop, and if I've got my trusty knives, then I just hunker down contentedly to the task. Plus, they're the same knives I'm teaching my kids to cook with, and I feel much safer with them learning to use sharp knives carefully than with them hacking away at stuff with cruddy knives (you are more likely to cut yourself with a dull knife, apparently, because it takes so much more force to slice with it). I am the person who brings my good knives camping, you brings my good knives to our thumbnail-sized vacation rental, because I miss them if I don't (I make a little stapled cardboard sleeve to make traveling with them less scary.)

So, there are others--a good serrated bread knife, for instance--but these two are the knives I use for almost everything:

This Kyocera ceramic paring knife that I've had for years, and that's still as razor-sharp as the day I opened it. I reach for it constantly.

Oh, lovely knife!

There's nothing too hard or soft for it to manage. It's the knife that Birdy uses most of the time for serious cutting, because it fits so nicely in her hand.

And this beautiful Wusthof chef's knife that my Utah friends sent me, and that I love even more than I loved my old Wusthof chef's knife.

Ben cutting the onions.

It is so exquisitely sharp, and wonderfully heavy, and it just feels great in your hand. Of course, it cuts and chops like the dickens. Plus, there's something about the shape that I enjoy for what is likely just an aesthetic reason.

Birdy cutting zukes. She made a cucumber salad the other evening, all by herself! Sliced cukes, fresh mint, and seasoned rice vinegar. She was beyond thrilled.

They aren't cheap, these knives, but here's what you tell yourself: one expensive knife costs the same as going out to dinner maybe once or twice--and you'll use it to make hundreds, or more likely thousands, of meals. Or else go ahead and put it on your wish list in case someone is buying you a present. But, of course, if you order it from the Utah folks you can enter the "dalaimama" code to get 15% off. Sharp.

China-Moon Pickled Shrimp

Serves 6 as an appetizer

Active time: 20 minutes; total time, including pickling: 1 day

Find fragrant Szechwan peppercorns at an Asian market--or substitute black peppercorns. This is the kind of recipe that should have the word "disappearing" in its title. It's like that.

1/4 cup finely slivered ginger

1 tablespoon Szechwan peppercorns (or regular peppercorns)

1 cup unseasoned rice vinegar or cider vinegar

1 cup distilled white vinegar

1/3 cup sugar

2 tablespoon kosher salt (or half as much table salt)

2 or 3 spicy chiles (Serrano or jalapeno) cut into thin rings

1 pound medium shrimp, peeled and deveined (thaw frozen shrimp by running cold water over them in a colander for five or so minutes)

1 small yellow onion, cut into skinny half moons

Mayo, soy sauce, pickled jalapenos for the dipping sauce

Add a tablespoon of the ginger and a teaspoon of the peppercorns to a medium-sized pot of water, and bring it to a boil over high heat. Meanwhile, in another medium-sized pot, bring the vinegars, sugar, salt, remaining ginger and peppercorns, and chilis just to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Remove from the heat.

Now add the shrimp to the boiling water, stir, and cook for 2 minutes, until they are just pink. Drain them in a colander, then add them, along with the onion, to the warm brine and refrigerate overnight in a non-reactive bowl or jar (I use a large mason jar for this, and love the old-fashionedness of it).

To serve, drain the shrimp and their seasonings and arrange them on a platter around a dish of dipping sauce made by whisking 1/2 cup of mayonnaise with 1 tablespoon each of soy sauce and pickling liquid, and chopped pickled jalapeno to taste.

This is actually quite simple to make.

And good knives make it all the easier! Okay, I'm done sermonizing. For now.

The pickling liquid.

The shrimp, after their brief poaching.

Jar o' Yum

I played a single game of pingpong, and when I came back upstairs, the shrimp were long gone. Sigh.

Loving

2011-07-22T10:02:00.002-04:00

This book. I have slowed way down since the middle, in absolute dread of finishing it. And if you haven't read this either, you should.

This music. It's like the Bee Gees crossed with the soundtrack of Friday Night Lights, crossed with all your own memories of broken heartedness. In the most beautiful way. Just listen to a bit of that first song and see if you like it. And if you do, then go watch this Bonnie Raitt cover.

This blog. Which is my friend Emily's. She's as lovely as she seems like she would be.

These movies. Right on the edge (and by "on," I mean, of course, "over"), in terms of appropriateness for the kids, but I have never actually seen Birdy laugh so hard before. I thought she was going to choke. We regaled our friends Daniel and Pengyew so thoroughly over lunch, that they rented the first one too and are still chuckling over the line, "I'm boiling a roast." Speaking of: major heat wave around here. Yikes.

This dress, which I wear every day, all summer long. I even hiked the Alps in it last summer! I have it in black and scuba, and I even bought it new, which is an exceedingly rare phenomenon, as you know, if you see me at the Salvation Army on Family Day.

These skirts. Okay, full disclosure, that's my friend Nicole's etsy shop. But seriously. How gorgeous are they?

This snack. Mmmm. Though it gives us all the thing we call "nut sickness," and I know you know what I'm talking about--the eating equivalent of pouring liquid into a bottle through a funnel and forgetting that it's going to keep filling, filling, filling for a little while even after you stop pouring. If there's no Trader Joe's near you, maybe you can figure out how to make these, and then tell me all about it.

Stay cool. And thank you for co-reminiscing with me over that last post. I am always in such good company with you.

xo

p.s. I see that somebody ended up here from Googling "Catherine Newman Brazilian." I sure hope it was only chocolate cake you were looking for, given the expansive fact of my navel-to-kneecaps pubic hair.

Nickerson Again

2011-07-19T10:58:00.001-04:00

I think it's from a Sandra Cisneros story--about how, at every age, you still have all your other ages rattling around inside you. It's so true. I used to picture time as this rope you followed along, hand over hand, into the distance, but it's nothing like that. It moves outward but holds everything that's come before. Cut me open and I'm a tree trunk, rings of nostalgia radiating inward.

This is what I'm thinking, camping for the eleventh year in a row, in the exact campsite where we have pitched our tent since Ben was a baby. At the picnic table I write on a pad, "like rings in a tree trunk, all the years inside all the years," and my friend Nicole sees it and asks if it's a poem. "No. It's just camping. Every year I think about the year before when I was thinking about the year before, and it goes all the way back. You know?" "I think you said that last year," our friend Jonathan says, and I say, "Exactly." In fact, writing this just now, I Googled "Catherine Newman matryoshka dolls" and sure enough--I've also described camping that way, all the years nested inside each other. It is my own personal house of mirrors, writing about it. Here first, for example. And then here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And, um, here. Oh, and also here.

I drive everybody crazy with my nostalgia and happiness. I am bittersweetness personified. Only, for some reason, the older the kids get, the less filled with dread I am about their growing up--it's sweeter and sweeter, with just a thin bitter core filled with the babies who are gone from us, with snapshots of their chubby pink cheeks. Mostly, it just gets better and better: everybody swimming and biking and wiping their own cracks; fewer marshmallows stuck to weeping heads of hair and less vigilance required from the grown-ups. "I can't believe how much better it gets!" I exclaim, as the kids tear around the campground in wild bicycling circles while we sit at the campfire with our beers and happiness. "I think you said that last year," Jonathan says. Exactly.

I have always loved the camping, but now I look back and feel like maybe it kind of used to suck. I mean, there was the beach: nursing a hot and sandy somebody in a little blowing-away tent, a pee-bloated swim diaper soaking in my lap. Or the campsite itself, where I seemed to spend every minute chasing my miniature humans away from the road, or shepherding them up to the bathroom so they could admire the vast and flapping entomology lab while pooping for hours on end. I know I loved it. I did. But seriously.

In fact, we saw a couple out by the bay with a two-month-old--and they were trying to keep it out of the sun, and the baby was red and crying, and the parents were taking turns wading into the water up to their ankles before darting back to make sure the other person wasn't mad at them for being gone so long, and I wanted to say, "Oh, go home. Turn on the AC and the TV, and just relax. You can go to the beach later, when it's older." But I remember how much fun we thought we were having--and were, I'm sure--and I spare them my demented advice.

Oh, but then, some things don't change at all. I walk down the road to our campsite with Birdy's hand in mine, and it is this same moment from my entire life of mothering her: her trust and curiosity. Her absolute hereness. "Is it true, about stars, about how we see them even if they're maybe not still shining?" she wants to know, and I could burst into tears, like the weirdo I am. "I think it is," I say, "but it is so hard to understand." I feel her fingers in mine, the full moon rising up into the pines like a cosmic lantern, the squirrels chuckling to themselves in the branches above us, and I want only now. The glow that lasts beyond itself. And I have it.

The beach.

The Pond, also known as Heaven on Earth. It is the most beautiful spot on the planet, and we are always the only people there. There just happened to be 16 of us this year. . .

The Brewster General Store. We bought Turkish taffy and gummy coke bottles and Mary Janes and black licorice and jawbreakers and caramel bull's eyes.

The thrill of victory (bean bag toss).

And the agony of defeat (mini golf).

This was The Year of Whittling. We whittled and whittled and it was so much fun. I cannot recommend it enough. Try it: make chopsticks, because then you'll have a goal. And also something beautiful at the end, besides your own blistered hands.

Ben whittled. "I should pitch this to FamilyFun," I said, dreamily, and he said, "Good idea, Mama. You could call the piece 'Fun with Fire and Knives.'" Oh, right.

Birdy whittled.

Everybody whittled. It is the most companionable activity ever. Only a very few injuries were sustained.

Shavings galore. By the time we packed up camp, it looked like hamsters had been living there.

Chopsticks.

And more chopsticks. Seriously, do try this at home, but don't cut off your leg or anything, okay?

"If we had ham, we could have ham and eggs," Michael's dad likes to joke--"If we had eggs." Luckily, we had eggs.

And home-grown ham. And raspberries from our friends' patch. Also fluffer-nutter sandwiches. Just so you don't think we're so fancy.

If you bring pizza dough camping but forget to use it, fry it up in bacon fat the last morning.

Then fill it with raspberry jam and be prepared for the best donuts you ever ate in your life.

Camp Rice and Beans. Fry garlic in olive oil, add 2 pouches of Success Instant Brown Rice (out of the pouch), one can of black beans with their liquid, one bean-can of water, half a cup of salsa, and some salt and lime juice. Simmer until the liquid is absorbed (10 minutes) then turn off the heat, top with cheddar cheese, and cover until it melts. So, so good.

I hope you're loving July.

Japanese Restaurant Spinach with Sweet and Salty Peanut Dressing

2011-07-10T10:18:00.000-04:00

In order to make enough of this, I think I'd need some kind of a dump-truck delivery of spinach.

At our favorite Japanese restaurant, Osaka--the place where the kids and I always want to go for our birthdays (links to me writing about it before, only oddly unflatteringly. . .)--there's a crazy-addictive spinach dish that's listed on the menu as "Osmitashi." You might see it on your favorite Japanese restaurant's menu as "oshitashi," which seems to be the preferred English spelling, and if you order it, it will be delicious: chilled balls of steamed spinach in a light dressing of soy and sesame, or maybe ponzu, which is soy and citrus. It's always good. But at Osaka, it's different: the dressing is thick and creamy, rich and salty and a little bit sweet. It says "sesame dressing" on the menu, but, in the way of many "sesame dressings," such as the cold sesame noodles from Empire Szechuan on 100^th and Broadway, your mouth says "peanut butter." It's topped with papery flakes of dried, smoked fish (bonito) and the four of us used to get one order, to share, and now we get two, to share, and it's not enough. "I'm getting my own," I say. "For just me. I want you guys to understand that and order accordingly." Only then Michael and the kids decide to share one, and what do you know, they need to get all involved with mine when they run out. I think "step off," but sigh, instead, in my maternal spinachless martyrdom.

Thus we came (when? just now) to a recent evening of toying, unflushly, with the idea of going out to eat. It was really the osmitashi itself I was craving--not even the expensive rest of the meal--and so, thriftily, I bought a huge bag of spinach instead, and we set about to copycatting. And we got pretty close--close enough to make something addictive, and so we bought another huge back of spinach the very next day and nailed it. The first version had toasted sesame seeds and sesame oil in it, and it was a little wrong. Also miso, which was also wrong (maybe I was confusing it with our other addiction, the miso salad dressing at Fresh Side in Amherst, which CANNOT BE DUPLICATED no matter how hard we try). In fact, it turned out to be incredibly simple: peanut butter, rice vinegar, soy, and sweetener. And the bonito flakes, which I got at our local Asian market, but which you could get more expensively from Whole Foods.

We've made it a half dozen times now, and it disappears in about a minute. It's crazy good. I want to say that it's irresistible, except that Ben and Birdy's friends Harry and Ava managed somehow to resist it. We were shocked, but it's true--they didn't like it. I mean, they didn't wipe their tongues off on a dish towel (*cough* Ben and hard-boiled egg *cough*), but they ate about 4 nanobites each. So if you really are not a fan of cooked spinach, this may or may not convert you. But the dressing is great for cold noodles too, so you might want to make it anyway.

Speaking of--what? Cold noodles? No. Nothing, I guess. But we're leaving today for our annual camping trip on the Cape! See you there? I'll be the one in line at Moby Dick's trying to decide between scallops and clams.

xo

Osaka-style Osmitashi

Serves 4

Active time: 10 minutes

Total time: 45 minutes

1 pound clean spinach (in a pinch, a 10-ounce bag will be okay, but not enough)

2 tablespoons peanut butter (mine is not natural-style: it's the organic kind from Whole Foods that has sugar and salt and oil in it, like eco-Jif)

2 tablespoons seasoned rice vinegar (or plain rice vinegar, with a little more soy and sweetener to compensate)

1 tablespoon soy sauce or tamari

2 teaspoons agave nectar (or, I'm assuming, honey or sugar)

2 tablespoons warm water

Bonito flakes (or toasted sesame seeds) for topping

Cram all the spinach into a large lidded pot with a steamer and a half an inch of water in the bottom of it, and bring it to a boil over high heat. Steam the spinach until it is thoroughly wilted and collapsed--a minute or two. Leave it to cool while you make the dressing.

Combine the peanut butter, rice vinegar, soy sauce, and sweetener in a food processor and whizz until it's blended and creamy, then drizzle in the water with the motor running. Now look at it and taste it: it should be thin enough to pour (add more water if it's not) and it should be a perfect balance of sweet and salty, with just enough vinegar to keep it from being cloying. Try it, ideally, on a piece of spinach so you'll see what it's going to taste like, and adjust the seasoning as needed. Scrape the dressing into a jar you can pour it from easily.

Ideally, with all your dithering, the spinach will be cool enough to handle now. Gather it up and wring it out over the sink. Really squeeze it--you're going to end up with something around the size of a baseball, which is kind of demoralizing but totally fine! Squeeze and squeeze it. Now grab the ball of spinach in one hand and a pair of clean scissors in the other, and cut the spinach ball over a bowl so that you are making smallish pieces of spinach. (Why couldn't you do this with a knife on a cutting board like a normal person? Good question! I'm sure you could!). You're not looking for it to be chopped fine--but you want to be able to grab at it with chopsticks and have some come away without a lot of trouble.

Now grab small handfuls of the spinach and squeeze them loosely into balls. You will get around 8 balls. Arrange the balls in a dish and then (ideally, if you can stand to) cover and refrigerate for a half an hour until they're nice and cold. Now drizzle the dressing around them, sprinkle the bonito flakes on top, and serve.

Oh, that's got to be much too much spinach!

I'm kidding, of course. It all but disappears.

When I'm wringing it out, I think about saving--and then drinking--the spinach juice, but then I think of the "Hard Core" song from School of Rock. I think that might be too hard core even for me.

Snip, snip, snip. A knife would just make it taste so. . . knifey.

This takes just a few seconds--in case this picture gives you that hours-and-hours feeling of making dumplings or ravioli or something. Nope. Easy peasy.

Voy-lah.

The dressing is quick and easy. And here's my weekly plug for the Agave Council! Kidding.

You could pour the dressing actually onto the spinach balls, given that you're not trying precisely to recreate the way Osaka does it.

~~Fish food!~~ Bonito flakes. I know they don't seem promising, but they're so smoky and delicious.

Birdy is ready. . . set, go!

Funny that I mentioned "fish food," since the expression "feeding frenzy" comes to mind here--the way goldfish swarm at the top of the tank.

I feel like the Star-Wars light-saber sound-effects should be playing. We eat this so quickly and thoroughly.

Waaah.