HAPPY HOARFROST

A PERFECT ASSONANCE: CRACKED BLACKSTRAP MOLASSES COOKIES

2009-12-20T19:11:00.032-05:00

Few phrases are as entirely look-back-over-the-shoulder sexy as "blackstrap molasses."

Perhaps it is merely the wet crack of its assonance, but even the sound of it is gripping, something with drowsy heft, pear-like in hand; blanketing and more primal than the deepest of innocent-golden and carefree honeys.

Yes, well, carefree is as carefree does. Look what happened to Caligula.

Quite unlike honey, Molasses is a knowing look from someone unexpected, a pair of liquid nutmeg eyes cast over the top of a book with a hidden title, clasped tight to the chest.

Molasses, you see, is the sexy librarian of ingredients.

Delineate each sound, sort and classify and reach:

black, strap; m'lass, ass

Is it the apothecary depth of the color, glinting red-brown?

Is it the smooth, cool cylinder of the vessel, made opaque by its contents?

Or is its attraction really about ourselves, tipped over with our own anticipation, looking up for the slow start of the trickle, suspended, as if it's so heavy with possibility it cannot hope to compete with gravity and so it poutingly attempts to defy it, cannot get itself started for fear of what will happen when it does.

Which suddenly makes vapid-sweet ketchup something we waited for before we knew what we wanted, and a complete waste of time.

But once tipped to the pelvic shelf of the spoon's bowl, once come completely undone, Molasses, like nothing else, comes racing down the sides all crazy, spirals snaking furiously foreward and back on themselves and picking up speed past catching-without-overflow, till suddenly, you're looking down to find you're licking your fingers surrepetitiously in broad daylight, grinning like a dope, thinking,

How did that happen?

Molasses is about the slinkiest old-fashioned ingredient going.

molasses, splayed

Speaking of "broad," that's Molasses: a shape of a flavor we're unused to today--a little out-of-favor, a little out of practice, but fully recognizable. Cracked Molasses is the 40's pin-up girl of cookies, an archetypical beauty, but not everyone's flavor...

But if those lines happen to do it for you, oh, brother, look out--they really do it for you.

And so, it stands to reason (and to the pure anti-reason of desire) that it's hardly a waifish wafer, because surely this is a cookie with hips, meant to be held onto, hard.

Called treacle by the Brits, Molasses connotes something anachronistic (yum, my, um, favourite)--slowly, drippingly arms-trailing-down-sides complex: maternal and whip-smart and yes...slightly dirty.

Blackstrap Molasses is made from the third boiling of sugar cane syrup (either young and necessarily sulphurated, or mature and unsulphurated). First, Second (also called Dark), and finally Blackstrap: the deep, swirling sugar mama of all--the most intense and complex, the least sweet, the most distilled down, with dizzyingly concentrated nutritional attributes: potassium, magnesium, calcium, iron--a power elixir, a super syrup. The slow, slippy vision at the end of the Road to Wellville.

Make no mistake, these are not your grandmother's cookies, or perhaps, they are--which is to say, you might have had them and "remember them," with something of a falling sensation.

To taste the Molasses Cookie now?--is to see suddenly and sharply the old made new; it is the gasp-taste of adult knowledge, without a child's innocent inability (or need) to savor, suddenly stripped away.

More simply put, this is...the taste of knowing, and of being known: that exchange laid out on the floor of our tongues, that interplay between our best possibilities and our only possibilities, between the push-pull of memory and fiction.

This is the cookie of the mythical space between.

And that space between, my friends, is precisely the slightly bitter & indefinable taste we are hunting here:

The "UH-OH-I-just-ate-something-in-Hades" factor involved in the Molasses Cookie, the thing you ate when you were there because ohgod,

it looked so, so good and you couldn't help it, it seemed so...familiar, you were just going to have one--for heavensakes it was made just for you, and held out, still warm and at lip-level!

Hades & Persephone, poised to eat

And it's true you were starving, you were ravenous...but now, well, you can't ever go top-side or be fully released again, because that is the way it works, any time we allow ourselves to be "known."

The Cracked Molasses cookie, it occurs to me now, as I stand here and think, drawing the warm backside of one across my lower lip, with all the sweet, masculine roughness of a beloved beard with a little grey in it, has a toothsome understanding: that we can be baking and twirling about our kitchens smiling, with our efficient hands rolling, stirring, pinching and sealing, and with our minds somewhere else all the time.

This is the cookie with the delicate crumb of the following truth:

What it is to be grown-up is to realize you are not old or young (and to realize suddenly you have need of all new verbiage), but simply the same as your parents (and your grandparents), people who had trembling desires they had to darkly contain or experience parallel-ly to get dinner on the table, people, with physicalities beyond simply being...receptacles, altruistic and blank, adults who had sex after 30 for their own private set of reasons and rationalizations and pleasures and needs that didn't include you, and probably--just probably--they enjoyed it.

I now have the overpowering and inexplicable urge to buy a gross of The Bridges of Madison County (hardback), and distribute them to the readership, washing my hands of further contemplation. And since nothing is as distressing as finding yourself anywhere in Iowa against your will, especially at the hands of Robert James Waller (only slightly worse would be finding your unique and prized beach horizon forever encroached on by some horrifying indentification with Nicholas Sparks), I will simply stop here and say this:

"You think you know me, huh?--let's bake."

RECIPE:

CRACKED BLACKSTRAP MOLASSES COOKIES

(2 dozen)

6 T shortening

6 T butter, softened

1/2 C white sugar

1/2 C dark brown sugar

*1/3 C blackstrap molasses

1 large brown egg

2 & 1/2 C. unbleached flour

1 T baking soda

hefty pinch (all 4 four fingers and thumb) of salt

1 tsp ground ginger

1 tsp excellent cinnamon--if not, don't bother

1 tsp allspice

1 tsp+ freshly grated nutmeg

sugar to roll the cookies in.

METHODS & THOUGHTS:

Oven: 385 degrees; Baking Time: 11-12 minutes

I did a lot of research on Molasses Cookies: crisp, chewy, classic, updated. I am a fan of a crisp exterior, hesitating for a moment and opening up into a chewy-soft center. Most recipes I looked at were all-shortening. I use butter whenever I can (in and out of the kitchen) so I tried half of each and I got exactly what I was looking for: the texture, the cracking, and just the right spread.

You could add a teaspoon of cloves, which I omitted because they were lost in the back of my cupboard and found too late (sigh, Martha would take me to task for not having neat rows upon rows of things, one deep), but I liked the allspice save--it worked.

I mean it about the cinnamon--bad cinnamon is vile.

You could ALWAYS add more nutmeg to just about anything, in my opinion--and when you are fortunate enough to have a friend you sends you some beautiful nutmeg from her travels to Grenada...a friend who knows you...you will definitely want to. Don't hoard it, is my new mantra. Let the smell of being known permeate your kitchen (thank you Leslie, for the nutmegs and for giving me that thought).

1. Beat together the shortening and butter until fluffy.

2. Cream in the sugars.

3. Add in the egg and the Molasses until well-incorporated.

4. Whisk together the dry ingredients in a bowl.

5. Add slowly to the bowl of your mixer until a dough forms--it will be very soft and sticky. Keep adding a little more flour until you can get it to pull off the sides a little (so it doesn't smear, consistency-wise--otherwise, you will be licking your own arm all the way to the wrist, trying to get the dough off of yourself).

6. Chill the dough (an hour or so).

7. Using a scoop, dish up a ball of dough directly into the sugar (a mini tart pan worked well), and roll and press it gently until it's covered.

8. Arrange on parchment (I used a Silpat), and bake at 385 for 11-12 minutes...do NOT let them brown around the edges.

9. The cookies will be soft--let them set in between batches, before you transfer them to cooling racks.

Easy...I know.

Sigh.

Maybe the gift of the Molasses Cookie is simply the taste of the known, of being known. Because it is a fundamental need, to know.

Swallow that, and we are reminded of who we were, who we truly are, who we might still be.

WAIT-- you don't really think it's an accident that cookies are CIRCLES, do ya?

*Hmmm...if you used Sulphurated Molasses, you could legitimately call these...Brimstone & Treacle Cookies.

HAPPY LITTLE APPY: EATING IN THE MOMENT & the Letting Gophers recipe (bacon, brie custard & cherry bites)

2009-11-26T06:31:00.015-05:00

My love of food is complete: Circular, salty overwhelming at times—it is a constant primal swirling sea of recognition, of ebb, flow, neap. Are we having Bay of Fundy yet?
Sigh.

Food is love, food is the constant, the North Star and the Dark Star. Food--and sex--it is my filter. These are complicated ideas we are well-acquainted with here. And this hoar has been quiet--duality noted. I am an Elephant eater, ever the whole elephant attempter, never small bites—so today, rather than apologize for myself or my absence, or land something in your...lap I have worked quite hard on and diffuse it by claiming it's "just" a little something I threw together, I thought I'd simply give you a...taste of what I've been and am thinking.

The charge: a Thanksgiving Day appetizer, a metaphor to chew on, if ever there was one.

Because I am fundamentally disinclined toward crowds, supermarkets in crisis and also because one of my gifts is being equal parts resourceful and cheap, I thought..."What can I make with what I already have on hand?"

First, let's talk turkey: I have always been and still am completely opposed to the term "Leftovers." Forgive me, but this is the linguistic epitome of sloppy seconds, and it's distasteful to this hoar.

The initial issue I have with it and primary assertion is that nothing ever actually goes away--(duh). Second, the strikingly inadequate term "Leftovers" implies an after-the-fact process, a disparate, hopeless assembly of pieces of something which was better or more whole, something glorious which has already occurred but--too bad!-- you'll never have it again, and now we're scrabbling around, rooting around in the past, trying to make do and make do, the best we can which is to put together something "not too embarrassing with what we have left." Excuse the brevity of my technical term here (and even this is borrowed, thank you Little Bush Dog), but ICK.

So, let's agree we won't call them Leftovers, I refuse--plus, this is a recipe entirely made of things around the house. I want to do this now, in the present, and I need to coin a better term for my purpose. Not Leftovers—what am I trying to say?--dammit! It's got something to do with what I have been thinking lately, something new...about letting go. About being willing to see concepts and things as they are and not so linearly (is that even a word?) or in such little tiny old and inefficient cabinets. Not Leftovers...letting go...So, these are then...Letting Gophers?

How...um...appetizing!

I refuse the term Leftovers, because there are always new permutations, combinations, unique possibilities.
Without an attitude of platitude, I will say that the single thing I am most grateful for today…is my ability to choose what I call things--don't you tell me I can't make fetch happen--of course I can. I can choose which language and definitions I want for myself--and whether those are public, or private. And that is a heady ability--the one to choose--and one I am profoundly grateful for. To choose...anything. I slept-ate through life for a really long time—I ate often or a lot even—but I didn't eat well. Because I wasn't choosing well—in fact, I wasn't choosing at all.

Close your eyes, open your eyes--decide to play, decide to recombine, decide to choose.

Make a choice today, just eat something you love, own that choice and savor-swallow and come back and tell me about it. About how it was for you, and why. About what you loved in it. Because I love to be told.

That is what I make and what I see and all I can offer of myself. To let go. To cook for you and hand you something made with these specific hands, to let you taste me.

Okay, I don't remember exactly what I did—I can't give you a recipe, I only offer you my process. Your larder is different than mine, what you have at your fingertips--and the way you see it.

LETTING GOPHERS RECIPE (makes...plenty):

So, I had some old puff pastry,--soft and somewhat dry when thawed. which seemed more appealing tham actually making my own puff pastry at 3 pm yesterday. I cut it up and laid it into some little silicone muffin cups (thank you Target Dollar Spot), kind of criss-cross wonky. I made a custard with some whipping cream and some whole milk and some eggs and some brie and some white cheddar—and even though I tempered the eggs—it still broke and what I really made was…some kind of brie ricotta—which was DAMN good.

I grabbed some handfuls of the still-endless chard from my garden, and after frying some of the bacon from "our pig" I tore up the chard and quickly turned it over in the hot fat till it wilted.

I laid the brie ricotta into on top of the puff pastry in the muffin cups, folded on a little swish of chard (of course cracking myself up all the time), then crumbled some bacon over it, a pushed a big sweet dried cherry into the little pile. Oh, and a little eency leaf of fresh basil which is still hanging on here in Baltimore. Finally, I sprinkled some of this amazing sweet-hot spice mixture my dad brought back from Italy (and is now kept in something cloudy and well-worn and looks like a dime bag) all over the top and baked it.

For maybe 10 minutes at 425—but I'm not sure. I don't know--I have no idea how they will go over later today. But they were delicious for me in the moment.

Happy Thanksgiving, enjoy ITM.

CREDENCES OF SUMMER: THE BUTCHER'S GARDEN (recipe: Scrapple, Pear Chutney & Gorgonzola Pizza, with Matter of Thyme Crust)

2009-08-30T23:15:00.030-04:00

A garden is a cutting place. At Summer's end, I can still hardly talk about what's happened in mine—almost. It's been a place of brutal wonder, of savage, raw tastes and devastations, of sun-in-zenith expectation; a place of soul crimes run florid, a cacophony of buzzing and birdcall, of juices in every cleft, and violences I never imagined I'd actually love--much less thrive on--when I cast out heirloom seeds in early June.

I had envisioned a simple kitchen garden--and by this I mean 86 tomato seedlings, 54 glossy potato plants, double rows of curling, hopeful beans along one whole side of the paddock, rows of appropriately redemptive cruciferous vegetables—broccoli, cabbage, kale. A place I could draw from all Summer to Fall; to catch, to can, to freeze these labors in time.

It started with the digging; it always does.

One overgrown barnyard, one persistent, prodigal faith, one bramble vision. It's true, I'm a roto-tiller when I want something, and what I wanted this Summer was to turn over this hard rocky ground after years of living here; to get into it. This is not the activity for you if you don't like to sweat or if you need Lotto ticket proof of something, instantly. If you love to claw and rut, if you don't mind the constant saline trickle between your breasts, your body gone ropy or just plain gone, then yes, this is just the job for you.

Oh, this garden, this post!: Stage of archetypical dramas. There is bloodshed! There is subterfuge! There is suspense! There is song and dance! Costume and wild things! A pack of vicious groundhogs and doppelganger doves leaving mysterious eggs in white-platinum shells of Magical Realism. WARNING: Enter here, and you will find only the shade of a leafless, lightning-shivved Cherry tree for cover, uneven pieces of trunk fallen hard to the sides for seating, all of it some crumbling amphitheater in which to view these acts and these actors.

when the cherry tree comes down in the garden of metaphor, there is just no shade to be had.

I will also laugh and warn you now, most everything I learned about gardening this Summer was animal in nature anyway.

First, let me tell you what I've seen:

-A groundhog, a band or throng of despicable groundhogs, can raze a substantial garden to nubbins, to broken stems, in a single night. The hateful fatback or whistle pig can take five rapid shots to the body with a 22 Hornet and still run 150 yards, unfazed, still turn to leap-leer right at you before finally keeling down. You can butcher a groundhog on your patio furniture with some simple modifications, including plywood, latex gloves, a small supply of lawn and leaf bags and a hatchet. The sneer of the thing, the scythe-tooth, even lifeless, is unconscionable, however scattering the leftover body parts in the garden at points of entry is reputed to eradicate further threat.

-Doves--whether ash, wild or dark, turtle, rain or mourning--known for their softly urgent call (Coo OOO ooo, ooo!) are common but deeply selective and monogamous birds, often nesting in barnyards and gardens. Once in a long while, a dove will lay an egg in plain, low-lying sight—like right in your seed tray--allow your seeking hands in her nest, and will work alongside you in onyx-eyed company as you sweat, unruffled by clanging, swearing and sprays of dirt, mutually encouraging this daily suspension of disbelief, this bird-human breathlessness.

a watched egg is the only kind that hatches

Watch out, though! Doves are tricky! Because the male and female are eerily similar in appearance, and both incubate their egg, they're never seen together unless spied trading off, so you'll not realize it's two doves. The effect of a single seamless & tireless bird, a perfect egg hatched from a single parent, can be deceptive. Oh, and I have some news for you about doves: they're not there to bring peace.

-And finally (I told you this was a carnal post), contrary to what Freud--who is everywhere in this garden--said, a zucchini is NEVER just a zucchini.

What if I told you…told you it was all true? Well, it is all true.

The problem with writing in metaphors is that people think nothing real ever happens to you—let's just agree on this now. Poor Aesop!—what self-limiting face-to-face conversations could
he have—once the word was out? Could anyone trust him not to do the voices? Cloak everyone around him in skins and furs to make his points? Could friends count on him to just say it? Did they open their mouths in friendly conversational protest, only to be shocked to draw a wet incriminating feather from their OWN lips? A bone? A hank of hide? A gullet-slick pebble?

I mean, really, imagine the murk, the scrutiny you'd have to apply to his Facebook updates--all of them suspect or open to interpretation, except this: "Aesop is …totally FUCKED."

Most of us have a general sense we sew ourselves up tightly within our own stories, that it's an inside job, and that despite this, our treacherous tags flap away on the outside all the while. Mine says: "The Girl Who Cried Metaphor." Like any cliché, it's all right there, fully provable, knowable as a punch in the gut (to this end, I provide full documentation & photos where possible).

Nature is a real metaphor to contend with: pulverizer, long-vined redemptress, grueling schoolmarm, scrutinizing the details of our souls and bringing them right up between our toes and through the very ground where we must then walk.

Now, you and I know that attempting to grow anything under "controlled" circumstances is a risk--it's just another exercise in loss of control and vital fluids. The garden lets us toil in it, makes us beg to wait to see what comes next—but it does not yield to our hand. It cleverly generates body-specific soil we can't wash away when we leave, I will tell you, not seventeen cold showers and an aloofa later. It draws us in again and again by the possibility that we can change rock to loam, that we can protect our constructs and poses, even as we know there are no secure perimeters in the garden—in or out--what grows, grows.

Let me tell you, the dawn I entered the garden to find the doves had gone unceremoniously, saw the rodential massacre, the razored green ruin (I think this was the same day I fell into a rut and twisted my ankle), all I could get out was so simple, it was "But WHY now?"

It was exactly like the one you love turning away from you in the dark, no explanation but the smell of freshly turned earth, sheets of dove music, bloody post-its and gravel-cum-cuttlebones on the pillows; summer sorrels grown rangy and wild, leggy, gone to seed, rooted up and spread over all the furniture and the bed to dry to save the seeds. A shotgun, safety off, and the Wallace Stevens hid under the bed; a cloud of dust in the lane.

But didn't I get what I wanted? (and come on--can we save anyone else from what they want, even if we try?) Wasn't this the best Summer in ages? Under the bull fire dailyness of the sun, to find purpose, and during the night under stars, to rediscover the childhood game of connect-the-life. And under all of it, big splashing tears for being able to feel anything at all again, salt licks and rivulets of cathartic sweat—a salt deluge.

It was the Summer of raising foods beyond foods—metaphor and metafoods (email me privately if you'd like the recipe for bake-your-own-manna)--of cooling water from the Eden of old wells, of ancient barnyard taps painfully rushing the confines of slim copper conduits with murderous certainty, of the sudden vengeance of wriggling subterranean things, of weeping for consistency and pattern, of licking ice cubes falling into the grass from just-missed glasses on still-warm seats at the cosmic barbecue. Summer of carnival delights, of ether love escaping through the baking ground.

This is the Summer I dug up my old feelings and planted new ones, cut them down cut them out every night, only to have them spring up again by morning, espaliered. So I seasoned and seared them. I arranged them on a plate, I photographed them, ate them up—ate the evidence. Is there any evidence something happened here? In the garden overrun, can you see the fault lines?—There is no fault in the garden!—or, depending, simply piles of it to go around.

I suspect there aren't enough garden gloves to point all the fingerling potatoes.

Still, can you think of anything worth our time—no matter the outcome--like attempting to sustain and sate ourselves in the most basic ways? I can't. It was a fine Summer to grow tired, quite organically, of feeling desire could ever be too much--that I could ever be too much--of apologizing for vision, for the need to ascribe meaning, for the ways of webbing and weaving. The irony is, that in this leaf-shorn garden full of nothing but ghost-fruits, I have nothing left to offer you as a good hostess but my hungers and desires.

putting the boot down on guilt for dirty desires manifest

So, then. I can't apologize for my vision or my belly, for my animal nature, for hanging like a schoolgirl on the barndoor of the words. For planting my rows and my feet wide and trying. For believing my hands, my specifically dirty hands, must have some effect. I must continue to believe I can move landforms with my words, change my landscape, amend my soil, to believe that matter matters and exists even unseen.

The huge, the dizzying attempt, it's kind of my specialty.

And If you'd told me it would all end up this way?: the horrible groundhogs, the dove abandoners, the hours of sweat, the dark scary magic of the garden, I wouldn't have believed you anyway—mostly because NOW I get that it never ends. You can't garden for a single season, out of context. Fall follows, Fall will be here soon, sturdy and quiet and as plainly unappreciated as a root vegetable. And next Summer?—it'll be just the same but brand new, too. These may be the Credences of Summer, but this particular Summer's not the opus, the garden itself is a fine life's work, if we are very lucky.

So in the Fall, I will bow out of my too-warm kitchen, toasted spices secreted to coat pockets, and slip out again under the cover of rime. I will steal back to this garden and strike again with my spade-a-spade. At home in my thickening pelt, I will keep digging in the cold shrine.

And now an update, because here's how the Universe works:

The exact moment you doubt that all the garden love you sweated out went unnoticed or came to nothing—that you're empty-handed? The following will occur--ESPECIALLY if you're good for a clumsy dramatic exit, which I am (think Katharine attempting to leave Count Almasy with "something to think about" under the bleachers).

The precise second you give up on the garden, slam the paddock door and try to stalk off? Be assured, you will trip over a sheaf of wild thyme which conceals, rather unfortunately or fortunately, another fucking groundhog burrow, and so, run your forehead smack into a Pear tree, which has been just outside the garden fence, seemingly dormant--a tree you suddenly notice is...now bearing.

You will stand, in knee-buckling pain, tears sprouting from your eyes, one foot in a groundhog trench, feeling very, very sorry for yourself for a second, but also contemplating, almost instantly, pear chutney. You will turn back one last time to curse the garden and all its labor pains and see red.
No seriously—RED. As in, oh my Word, hundreds of little cadmium flecks of it on the garden floor.

a surprise red carpet, the garden's drama is not over

Apparently?—undermining groundhogs are not interested in tomatoes. Ignored, unstaked, unwatered—they grew new leaves, they grew anyway. The corn made its way up, frowsy and unnoticed, and the peppers were only slow. Only slow—can you imagine? In fact, the only thing I lost were the cruciferous vegetables—and I got their first and sweetest cuts, anyway. Frankly, you really only need redemption once.

Lovey Dovey--wait, are you sure?!--and Maybe Baby~

And okay, I used the two doves for dramatic effect—they didn't actually go anywhere. The hatchery served its purpose nicely, and the two, plus their squab (christened Maybe Baby) continue to circle and light in the garden at will, without need of shifts now. And sometimes they come to my window.

You see it only takes a little Magical Realism, come to roost in the slender arms of a tree, to be stopped in your tracks, returned to the garden, new perspectives and recipes in mind.

All I have to say is, Mr. Newton, you had it wrong. Sir, it was a pear.

Go ahead and make the chutney now. You're going to need it for the Fall.

Scrapple, Pear Chutney & Gorgonzola pizza, with Matter of Thyme Crust

PEAR CHUTNEY:

This is not rocket science, it's a chuntney. Chop the peeled green fruit you have—10 pears here—and put it in a pot with 3 cups of brown sugar and 6 of cider vinegar. Add things in amounts that taste good to you: chopped crystallized ginger (1C), golden raisins (1C), chopped onion (1), some lemon peel, cinnamon (if you must), dried mustard (1 tsp), salt. Cook the heck out of it, tinker with the consistency, follow someone meticulous for canning if you like (I got 4 pints canned, plus enough for a pork roast).

PIZZA CRUST:

This is the basic dough recipe I use and then abuse for pizzas, pretzels, etc. You may be disappointed to learn I often substitute 2 cups of pedestrian cornbread/muffin mix for some of the flour because it gives it a great texture, and because, if you think with all this patient rhetoric I am immune to looking for the shortcut, you are insane. This recipe makes one enormous pizza, or about 4 smallish pizzas.

1 ½ C warm water , 2 tsp sugar , 2 tsp yeast
4 ¼ C flour combination (use unbleached + wheat + cornmeal mix, etc)
1 T kosher salt , ¼ C + olive oil
Leaves from handful of thyme

Combine the water, sugar and yeast until it foams—10 minutes.
Put everything except salt and thyme in the bowl of a stand mixer with dough hook attachment. Run, gather, oil the dough in the bowl, cover with a clean cloth & put in a greenhouse window (if you have one). Punch down in an hour, then continue to let rise until you use it.

PIZZA ASSEMBLY/LAYERS, bottom up:
Thyme Crust
Pear Chutney
Grated Romano
Firm pear, sliced
Fried scrapple in exceedingly compulsive matchsticks (see next post for scrapple discussion, methods & a visual trip to the butcher)
Crumbled gorgonzola
Drizzled fig vinegar
Thyme leaves ~ leave these for last, so they will stay tender and green. Be patient and wait till it's almost done, then add them in the final minutes.

Notes:
-I used scrapple because I happen to have tons of it right now. Marrow would also be fantastic.
-I used thyme because this Summer was all about thyme for me—but marjoram might be amazing. Or even rosemary.

Okay, this was a huge meal--It's a lot to eat by yourself, but it keeps, you'll see. It's kept just fine.

NO REGRITS, FOR TWO: (REGRET VS. GUILT)

2009-08-01T10:24:00.042-04:00

The phrase “No Regrets” has always seemed exasperatingly short-sighted to me (like I can’t live and think compulsively about it at the same time?), more suitable for stitching on a pillow, barmop or apron than for actual daily consumption.

Let’s face it, a stitch is something painful you get in your side when you’re running; a mantra should be something you can do standing stock-still.

I don’t want to scoff at mantras or affirmations—they work. Whatever they are and whatever we call them, about everything we say long enough to ourselves becomes true, except, “I am taller with good legs and perfect pitch”—but I would feel fraudulent if I said I can tolerate this concept of “No Regrets.” This doesn’t make me a fraud—it means I think it can’t be done.
It means I’m not sure I want to.

Now, I have Norman Vincent Pealed away at a mess-hall pile of negative potatoes small and large in the past few years, and I invest fully in the power of positive thinking, but currently I am torn in little pieces, like a crisp head of romaine, wrangling this concept of Regret. Because I don’t think it’s a question of semantics and stresses, syllables and hard and soft beats--I think it’s just a matter of timing. Even term is a question of time.

Like most words attributed to the dark little weevil pile of human motivation, the endlessly composting heart and festering places of an eggshell-mind, there are words people misconstrue, and exchange and interchange, which have absolutely no business being so. Whether sound-alikes or dopplegangers, Guilt and Regret--like Tuna and Chicken of the Sea—are terms which have similarities but which--sorry Charlie--don’t mean the same thing at all (if that were true, I’d be out of a dissertation some day). And this is where the confusion…um...lies.

It is generally recognized and even screened onto boardwalk t-shirts in a variety of menacing neon colors that the difference between Regret and Guilt is action (but if overthinking your actions is a crime, I’m sunk): the belief being that Regret is about things not done, while Guilt is for things under-done or well-done, but oh fuck, we really shouldn’t have done.

I’m not sure what I think about this—and read this next in a breathy, sarcastic tone:“I have never regretted the things I’ve done, only the things I haven’t done.”

This might be true, the quote certainly forwards around the Internet like a cheerful airborne noxious event, the kind of thing given pixilated credence by being falsely attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt or Thomas Edison or even Mae West (ask yourself if you believe Mae West really talked that much, or if only a few people could have possibly said all the seminal things, in convenient Facebook application form).

Because then it sounds like maybe we could just collapse these terms into one Gold Medal All-Purpose, greased and floured pan that’ll turn out our perfect definition every time:

“Regret is all the things I wanted to do most, but didn’t because I felt too Guilty even thinking about them and was paralyzed by thinking about how I could realistically get away with doing them or making them a reality anyway.”

Sounds too easy, probably a hoax.

Nope, we need two different words and we need to keep them very, very separate: we need Guilt to keep us in line; we need Regret to keep us coming back to the starting line. There is a big difference between plaintive and just plain sad, linguistically speaking.

I love my Regrets because, like anything worth considering on a humid summer afternoon, there all the possibilities for self-discovery lie.

I “trust” my readers, a lot some would say. I serve you my underpinnings and my foibles and I just go ahead and tell you the ways to thrill me or undo me, because then, though you may disappoint me or think you know me, you probably won’t surprise me. So now you know: I have Regrets.

Regret is a word with a melancholic, wistful tinge to it—Regret is a word with longing. It is not entirely painful or ugly; in fact damnnnn, it has pretty good mouth feel. You can feel a savoring fondness for regret that you just can’t feel with guilt, which you want to flick away in fear and with haste, like a leech from a very small pair of swimming trunks. In fact, you can’t feel anything with Guilt but more Guilt. Guilt is just an old fact we can’t change about ourselves, limiting as hanging onto an expired racing form with all the wrong picks.

Listen up, all you GRE-takers~

Guilt : death, screech, scab, hector, roach AS Regret : rue, moan, spark, sparrow, rustle

...and Yes, I am known to love the sounds of just the latter.

If it sounds like I am Romancing regret, so be it. The definition of a "Romantic" is not one who makes things bigger than they are, it’s one who makes them bigger than we ever thought they could be.

So, Regret is about longing—a self-fufilling gerund if ever there was one. It’s about the possibility of becoming bigger—that’s why it’s called a longing, not a shortcoming. Guilt is stunting, but Regret?—stretches us to be better, greater, longer, longing versions of ourselves.
Sure, Guilt’s a familiar recipe: it’s Peeps in the microwave for 30 seconds, it’s predictable results, while Regret is absolutely wondrously unpredictable, ineffable. Regret isn’t all the things we didn’t do—it’s all the things we might still do, and all the things we might be, if we gave ourselves the chance. And for that reason, it is a vastly superior state to Guilt; for that reason alone we need it.

Put another way, Guilt is grocery store ice cream. I open the freezer case of Guilt at Shoppers Food Warehouse, Westminster, and I’m greeted with a well-lit environment maintained by a careful, evenly chilled temperature. If I choose to get something out of there, well, I know what I’m going to get: stale rows of cardboard half gallons of predictable chocolate chip and plain old vanilla bean guilt. One half gallon=20 hours on the treadmill to pay it off—and you can pay it off. Guilt is an open and shut case. Even Karma can be repaired, given enough time. I mean, for heaven's sakes, they sell kits on the Internet.

But Regret…Regret is located in the monstrous old chest freezer in the deepest part of where you live. You go down to the damp cellar and force that one open, you break the hasps for good-- you may never get it closed again. But the homemade stuff is maddeningly good in there, so unlike anything else, that it calls to you and you just have to do it anyway.

Guilt is broadcast, it’s public domain and transgression like holocausts, genocides and abuses. Regret is a private communication between one or at the most two people—Regret says--thank you, Elvis Costello--You Belong To Me.

Since Regret is about longing, I am giving it points just for being forward-thinking, just for sheer momentum. Guilt is a very stuck, guttural, one-time word we fell ourselves with at the knees. You’re not getting anywhere with Guilt—it won’t let you—but Regret implies the possibility something new and different could still happen, and really, the point of words is that they go somewhere. I like that in my words.

the nature of confession
I’ll be a Confessor of anything I am Guilty of and hand it to you, but don’t ask me to give up my Regrets— they get me up in the morning just to see if they’re still there.
No one should have to give up their longings or their possibilities.

And you know, as far as where things lead, I can’t resist a good breadcrumb trail. It’s not where the breadcrumbs lead, it’s who they lead back to which is interesting to ponder (even if it's just ourselves), imagining the palm and sweat-slick knob of the wrist of the breadcrumb-owner. How did he scatter them? Was it a big, cruel casual spray all at once, or a determined parsing of the crumbs, plucked from a coveted cupped pile, careful, a little at a time, lovingly, line by line?

What we call a thing to ourselves is important—no matter what the rest of the world calls it. The definitions we make for ourselves and ways we make a word mold up against or even between our bodies so it will never, ever fit someplace else but in that space between those bodies again. No need to fear them…they’re just…words—right?

But certain terms are ridiculously impersonal and utterly unsuitable for personal use, and it seems to me should be abandoned immediately--if we are smart, we keep the words and make new definitions for ourselves. Grits do not taste gritty, for example--or shouldn’t—now do they?

Regrits, or instant grits, or Guilt are instant Anti-Gratification—same thing as the grocery store ice cream. You know they will leave you with "that taste" in your mouth. True longingly satisfying Regret takes time and space--no instant grits sold or bought here. All things are questions of time and the little tiny spaces in between: whether it’s the old moisture trapped under the glass of the stopwatch, the wriggly things under the sundial on the garden floor, the bits of sand rubbing up against and slipping past each other, endlessly turning at sixes and sevens in the hourglass.

Okay, all you Dread Pirates Roberts, let me sum up: Regret is necessary if the past has any hope of not repeating itself, or of creating itself from its ashes—of morphing into something new.

my, what a long cord you have
So the kitchen Regret line is ringing off the hook—so what? Regret’s lovely and circular, and nothing at all to fear. It’s just that old rotary business again, ringing away. No voice mail, no answering machine, no impersonal text function available, no off position for the ringer. It will keep ringing until it’s answered by your own hand. Personally?--I love the sound of it, I love that voice I know so well on the other end and the electric, frizzly charge running all along my arm when I lift it off the cradle, gently & expectantly, but that’s just me.

Oh, and I Regret to inform you, in the psychic phoneline to your true self?--only you can answer the call.

NO REGRITS, FOR TWO:

I have always found there’s almost no situation which can’t be improved by a clean, hard sweat, a big dose of the sun, a long eurybathic dunk in the waters of self-awareness, full-fat dairy products and a rasher of bacon—but that is my personal formula and it’s taken years and years of tinkering. Notice I say the situation can be “improved;” I never say, “eradicated.” I never said I wanted to.

A simple breadcrumb veil--butter and crumbs and some fresh flat-leaf parsley under the broiler for a minute—would also be appropriate for this dish. Start collecting your breadcrumbs now, possibly years before you expect to put this on the table.

INGREDIENTS
1 lb. center thick-cut cured bacon
2 giant handfuls fresh spinach, mostly de-stemmed and pulled apart
4 long green onions, sliced into rings, with greens
Purple basil leaves
1 cup slow-cooking grits
4 cups half and half
4 tbs/one half-stick unsalted butter
Grated salt cube or generous smattering of sea salt
Ground black pepper

METHOD
Fry the bacon as you like
Very slowly, melt the butter in a big saucepan, add and bring up the half and half to scald; immediately reduce heat to low.
Add the grits, stir.
Keep the heat low, stir, stir, stir the pot.
Wait for consistency. It's hard to tell how long this could take.
Season with the salt and pepper.
Divide into two large bowls and top with the torn spinach, scallions and basil, crumble the bacon over top or make a festive timbale, ever-heavenward as here.

I forgot about the pine nuts, but of course those work too. They’re a natural accompaniment to most foods; I do love them, even when they sit on a cookie sheet, nicely toasted, seemingly, "accidentally" forgotten.

Eh, I can always find a place to work the pining into a later dish.

NEXT UP, reader essays: "MANNA: Man cannot live by words alone."

drawing, courtesy of chestofbooks

BLACKBIRD PICKING & THE MERCILESS EDITOR; 4 & 20 TART

2009-07-03T11:40:00.026-04:00

In the language of our people, this will be a quickie.

I just finished picking a gallon of what I am almost certain are blackberries from my back field this morning, in a still-warm, too loose camisole and my dirty slogging boots. The boots are a pale robin’s egg blue, the berries black, the sun coming up, the straps slipping down.
You can see dichotomies are only slightly lower on my personal food chain of loves than ironies.

I’ve been picking berries for several weeks now, a task to which I am well-suited and with which I have a long history. There is a lineage to which I belong: of berry-pickers, Scrabble players, note-pluckers, painters. Compulsive all of us, in issues of small gestures of placement, the scrutiny and one-at a-timeness, whether additive or reductive.

I like to think my compulsive nature serves me at these times.

There has been some question of what to call them—are they black raspberries? Are they blackberries? Are they, in masterful, uncoy three-year-old summation, “backberries?”

Oh, I know myself--and if I am not careful, I confuse myself with my words. Still, I tend to know better what I am doing, gain confidence once I pluck a name for it.

Let's scrap certainty for anything literal and call them “Blackbirds,” then. I like everything about this word; it multi-tasks; it has inherent forward flight and references some past (I once sang Sing a Song of Sixpence badly but honestly and I believed upon request, 200 times in a row).

I suppose it is a risk to give something a name and especially wings when you’re unsure of your audience. “They” also say it’s a great risk to think we can pluck words for our own or keep them for pets, furthering the case for a bird name—you can’t get to them so easily, to own them.

But I'm no risk-taker, merely a picker; a plucker and namer.

I am very conscious that each berry is an action, a choice, has an entirely different flavor, depending on the chosen and the chooser. There I go confusing myself with my words again. We all need to believe that the component of choice goes both ways.

All I can say with certainty is that what I choose becomes a handful of words crushed to my mouth, a pie, a post. And what I take, I hope, gives some kind of life back to the bushes.

This year has been different, with new insights. I have always picked what I’ve seen at the sides of roads or conversations, simply blazed or backed into, protecting my eyes. Though there is meditation and contemplation in berry-picking, it’s funny that up until now, I always believed that what I was doing was random. Somehow, I had it worked out that the entire act was random, based only on the fact that I had not planted any of these bushes—that they were in existence before and outside my control. Maybe I did stumble on the bushes, but I selected carefully, painfully what I took.

I did it: I picked the glittering, wobbly, dark ones that suited my vision of what a berry should be and that I believed sang only to me. I have always been especially fond of those berries with their backs to me, as if I will not see them, and perhaps unduly fond of the scratches incurred while seeking those.

These bushes at the back, from this morning, are wild, and difficult to get to in ways that are maddening and possibly dangerous. This entire flank of bushes in the lower field backs up to someplace rough and a drop off you can’t see, but you can hear is there, if you are listening. It was there I recently discovered an old well. Unplacably familiar noises come from back there, songs and words I can’t decipher but must assume are some kind of benevolent encouragement meant only for me, else never come back. Of course, being compulsive, who am I kidding.

Then, also, there is the whole copse of berries in the barnyard. I have lived here for years, and till this year let it be overgrown. Berries I either never knew were there until now, or which have sprung up spontaneously, from the sun-warmed skull of Athena—from my own wishing them into existence now.

Which is more likely?

And I know that I am reckless, even in my order. I know, without looking, that by 10 am I will ditch the boots or anything which keeps me from feeling the unevenness of the ground beneath my feet, that I will look like the victor in a hillbilly barfight after a lost weekend in Ocean City: gasp-trashy bra-strap sunburn, scratches and track-marks up and down my forearms, my feet inconsolably black despite an hour’s soaking. Hands, like Lady Macbeth’s, stained red with ghosts.

“Oh,” gasped 5 year-old Sylph, running across the field to me this morning, small, confident and reverent-hungry fingers reaching past thorns, finding, plucking--me watching her train her eye on a single berry and pulling just that one, not minding the soft tear-scratch of the thorns and actually smiling just a little:

“they’re jewels.”

I fear she has the gene.

Damn words: potholes, portholes, birdholes, keyholes.

Sigh. When I want to get closer to my thoughts, I cook. So here’s the Blackbird Pie; The 4 & 20 Tart, on a nest of kitchen twine & lemon peel. It wasn't quite what I envisioned, but it is good.

BLACKBIRD PIE, OR 4 & 20 TART RECIPE:
[Wasn’t that a funny thing to set before the King? ]

CRUST:

1.5 C unbleached flour

1.5 cups toasted sunflower seeds, almonds, hazelnuts (or other mix)

1/4 C. light brown sugar

sea salt

1.5 sticks chilled, cubed butter

2 egg yolks

Grind nuts in a food processor, add other ingredients, pulse and gather dough. Reserve 1/3 dough to make cookies and bird top to tart. Press into a 10" tart pan, prick.

FILLING:

4 tsps water

6 egg yolks

1/2 C light brown sugar

2 C half and half

vanilla bean, split length-wise

1 cup sour cream

Make a custard (sigh, again with the brooding custard), cook and stir everything but yolks; temper tolks and return to pan and stir until thick. Cool.

BERRIES: Blackbirds, about 4 cups

Assemble: crust, custard, top with berries and bird cut out from crust. Bake at 400 degrees about 35-40 minutes. Cover crust when it gets brown.

People always say, but why did you make that--why that recipe?
As if I had any choice at all in the matter. See, the recipe was already there--I just named it.

Though I wish I was special enough that it chose me, specifically, I know in my heart that if I have any choice at all in the matter, it was only whether or not to act.

To paraphrase Yoda: Do or Not Do, there is no Why.

MADAME RHUBARB: DISOBEDIENT DIGESTIF OR SENSIBLE MINX? (and frozen custard recipe)

2009-06-20T10:04:00.039-04:00

My yearly rhubarb post is late, but it’s been stewing. There were rhematic and rheumatic unintended consequences to something I wrote recently, ones I hadn’t even considered. Rhubarb: rheum rhabarbarum—rue, barb.
Okay, this part is intentional.

With pure intentions--er, ingredients--like this, how can we go wrong?

Take a risk with your heart and it sours, and you can take your lumps and an antacid and move on. Take a risk with your heart in print, and the world tweets, I mean "risks" with you on Twitter.

Know that for every post you see plated here, there are 5 more on burners and ancillary heating elements, hanging out of cupboards or curing on hooks in inconvenient eyesight in my home and range of swinging into a forehead: on scraps of paper, in the margins of books “lightly in pencil,” on ubiquitous post-its. I don’t have much occasion to write on soft, damp cocktail napkins anymore (oh, how I loved their rank, nutritionally void dampness for a time!), but I have written on a diaper and on my own skin, on shopping lists even now crowding out staples, and on the generally sturdy fabrics and upholsteries of my late 30’s. Also, on writing in blood: I have never written with it, but have recently composed with its sweeter, anime form, beet juice.

There are concepts I know intellectually: things turn out pretty much as we already know; an untempered egg will scramble a custard; no one ever died from a broken heart; sorry doesn’t fix everything. These we dutifully swallow to call ourselves grown-up--doesn’t mean they ever go down easy.

I "know" that for every person who reads and takes home a doggie bag of meat here, there are five who pick at their plates and/or never really dig in, several more that won’t digest properly because of their own strictures and GI temperament, and at least one, who, like my favorite joke on this earth, will eschew it altogether like a cannibal avoiding a clown, because it tastes funny to them.

No one can explain taste.

I would know the numbers if I kept the statistics anymore, but for the obsessive-compulsive at heart and stomach, a blog can become one’s cud without certain stops in place. I can only tell you that you are probably in the company of 11 confirmed subscribers.
I confess (“I confess!”--absolute absurdity on a blog) I almost always mean one or more things at once, I’m a complicated magical pudding in the middle kind of girl who purports herself as simple and harmless and you know what?-- ALL of those things are true. We often think things are mutually exclusive when they—sweet irony alert!—just AREN'T.

Guilt free: no consolatory morning-after recipe needed for pure intentions. I suppose the worst you could say is that I’m a somewhat disobedient but ultimately sensible minx who occasionally (just occasionally now), means what I said the very first time and just that.

The thing about mistaken intentions is this, and then I’ll leave it: “Thank God it’s fatal, not shy.” Andrew Bird, whose whistling skills I greatly admire, said this. We think everyone can or should be able to cook and whistle, only it isn’t true (I can’t whistle, by the way).

Another way, have you ever been watching someone on stage, and realized as an after-beat that--waitaminute--they were unaltered but by passion and no other substance than ordinary blood and bile? How the eff are they doing it then, you asked, almost UNWILLING to believe they could say or do it--that they would choose to, without filters?

Madame Rhubarb is like that: like a former drunk who’s spent a long time learning something about restraint, to use her voice, her tone, her faculties FOR and not against herself—a stone cold sober girl who does it anyway—chooses to do it & with wild abandon, who doesn't feel like apologizing because there is no need.

And we are deeply uncomfortable about that. It makes us Heretics (read the words, I love all them all and they deserve space).

But why is it so uncomfortable??? Because it feels…disobedient, to witness passion without apology and because I think there is something like a perceptible smugness to being okay with the process over the product which causes sincere discomfort .

People sometimes confuse what I do here. SIGH. I will let you in on a Little Secret: while we avoid it everywhere we can, we must now assume that our concepts of "harmless" sometimes differ. Maybe “First do no harm” was good enough to be innaccurately ascribed to Hippocrates and for the field of medicine, but for Bacchus and Minerva & the realm of the tongue and the pen, that doesn’t begin to cut the rhubarb mustard.

Where craft is concerned, I think our creed must be this: “First, do what you need to that is good"—then I’m certainly not opposed to the corollary, “do no harm.” It has to be.

Writing serves no higher or lower purpose than to be heretical, hopeful, romantic, disobedient.

"What was going to happen? This question, as I’ve said, seems to be at the root of most romantic encounters, and at the root of disobedience, too."
-Jane Hamilton, from Disobedience

I can’t begin to navigate the rhubarbed wire wrapped around a single human heart tonight—it's not my job, but dammit, I can cook. Let’s make ice cream, and share a spoon.

Disobedient Frozen Rhubarb-Ginger Custard Recipe:
[For my Dad, who gets and loves rhubarb, exactly for what it is and without expecting something else]

This is in stages, motivated by freshness of the ingredients (who’s going bad and how fast). None of them are hard in and of themselves. It’s all very simple once you get to the point of throwing the switch on the ice-cream maker. Of course, it’s always simple after the hard part is done.
I am pleased to say I have no idea how it will all turn out; I am sitting here listening to the machine turn. Your guess is as good as mine.

Three Ingredients: Rhubarb-ginger puree, Brown sugar scalded custard, whipping cream.

RHUBARB GINGER PUREE:
De-leaf & chop 4 stalks of rhubarb and put into a saucepan with ¾ C sugar, a peeled and chopped piece of ginger root (about the size of the fat part of your palm, right under the thumb), and a little pomegranate or blueberry juice. Simmer, cook down, squeeze the juice of one lemon, seeds and all (you're going to puree it anyway), over the mix and keep adding juice or water until it’s a syrupy consistency. The rhubarb will string out, become soft and fall apart.
Cool and puree.

BROWN SUGAR CUSTARD:
Sounds hard and good, but this is all it is: scald 2 cups of whole milk and 2 cups of half and half in a pot. I like copper because it feels magic to me, but it’s entirely unnecessary.
Whisk in ¾ C of dark brown sugar, and bring the heat down.
Separate 6 egg yolks, temper them with a cup or two of the scalded milk mixture, then return to the pot and keep simmering gently and whisking until the custard coats the back of a spoon. Chill.

Put the custard into an ice-cream maker or a stand-mixer fitted with the well-frozen ice-cream bowl & attachment. Add 2 cups super-cold whipping cream, while running. Dribble in the rhubarb puree. Run for 30 minutes or until it thickens up. Taste, swoon, freeze.

It's all about consistency: still not thick enough to be misunderstood. Back in the machine.

A final note on this recipe:
You know, I have tried to resist Facebook, but really, so far it’s brought only good & in the past year reconnected me with what may be the only uncomplicated male relationship of my life. Equal parts destiny and that esteemed "harmlessness" you can hardly always make the claim for, it could simply be that any two people who meet while working in a library, not-yet of legal drinking age, are doomed or exhonerated.
He comes to me now in 40-year-old commentary, both real and imagined, having resumed pointing out the red lipstick on my teeth (a thing both impressive and scary to have taken on as a teenage boy), but also taste the words that come out of me, the hypocrisies and the gifts.

“Be carefullllll” I heard him whisper-smile over the steaming custard as I stirred, “this is exactly the kind of dish bright, lonely girls make.”

He’s right, I'm sure. Hot girls like beets. Girls with inconsolable grudges make rhubarb puddings.
Maybe not...or maybe also, the Sensible Minx eats what and whomever she wants, no matter who’s reading.

CHEF ANDREW LITTLE, THE SHEPPARD MANSION, HANOVER'S SUCCULENT SOURCING SALON & the RECIPE HE GAVE ME FOR FORTNIGHT STEW (phew!): part 1 of…?

2009-05-26T21:31:00.082-04:00

Chef Andrew Little and Kathy Glahn touch, talk and taste pea tendrils

It’s not often I can’t put an experience into words (an easy 2600 of them at that)--even with my mouth full. And while it doesn’t necessarily say much that I can do that, it is always, always instructive for me when I can’t.
In our peculiar society, heckling’s a pitcher of margaritas on a whitehot strip of sand, mockery goes down like a cool glug of water, and garden-variety disapproval?—it’s commonly gulped as air.
But true praise…now that’s the curious lump in the throat, requiring pause and precision to get it down right (and yes, something like two whole weeks of thought behind it).

Several weeks ago, CHEF ANDREW LITTLE most graciously and rather startlingly (now why is it that graciousness and plain goodness should startle us?) invited me up to meet the farms and the real people from whom he sources his ingredients for THE SHEPPARD MANSION, then spend the night behind the scenes of the restaurant.
Who knows what I expected? I just told him he had my soft and hard palates for the day and that I was willing to don waders and slog through a pit of country ham with him. And I was: Erin Brockovich that I am (okay, okay FINE, sans cleavage and desperate only to unearth really good food, not environmental toxins), of course, I bit.

So for over two weeks now, I’ve been stewing over what must be described as 13-hours of bliss-in-process—and it was a process, starting with anticipation and the drive up (rolling hills, sun on MD and PA trees, first day to let arms out of sleeves), to boot-sucking through the long grassy mud at Sheppard Farm (highland beef) and RETTLAND FARM (pig and chicken--“Um, do pigs get ticks?”), to the warmest soft-wet air and the mystery of provocative figs which made me want to please live in Kathy Glahn’s greenhouse forever—all of this before I ever ate a thing (wait—I did nibble on some micro-greens right out of the seed tray there). Doesn’t it say something I spent 10 hours with and getting to know the the food before I actually ate any of it? This is impressive, because restraint ain’t my forte. I’m not a Wait To Eat Until The Second Date kind of girl, and this was quite possibily the longest food foreplay in my history.

halibut with Kathy Glahn's micro-greens, carrots, asparagus & savoy cabbage..and my favorite, lick-your-wrist rhapsody, the rhubarb mustard.

Speaking of time, this is a PROCESS—in this world, Chef Little's world, food is everywhere, it is primal—but it's a slow and urgent process, not an event.
Obviously, being a part of and trying to plate for you this unexpected-yet-everyday pleasure process is tripping up the usual down-and-dirty “It's FOOD, he’s a chef, you’re a hoarfrost, do the math!” approach you've come to expect from me. You expect me to describe the food as something guttural and sexy and eyes-rolled-back-to-lizard brain—and you will be right and rewarded—but I cannot and will not describe it as food porn. While exciting beyond my wildest wettest food dreams, it’s been hard to write this (everybody leer and shout, “how hard was it?!”), that would simply be inaccurate, because porn is something ultimately unsatisfying and objectified and purposefully removed from reality. Porn is not real dirty. Walking tandem in the mud and talking with Chef Little, who is pig-in-shit happy to tell you all about their plans to build a real food culture in little ole Hanover, PA?—that is real dirty.

Highland calf at Sheppard Farm, plenty of MUD.

So, I was sitting at a table off the kitchen in The Sheppard Mansion later that night, in little black dress mode, reasonably cleaned up after this day of happy farm-touring grime, (wet washcloth and a place to change gratefully accepted from the lovely Karen Van Guilder + the sheer determination of my stomach), having met this exceptionally good (have you ever noticed that "good" usually means that while you might be kinder or have better karma, your grammar could be suspect and your hair is very likely two decades behind?--not this time) group of people: Heather Sheppard Lunn, Beau Ramsburg and Kathy Glahn, respectively. I was scribbling pensively on the 400th little piece of paper, breaking pencil points and trying to stay out of the way in the kitchen (though I had been given free range by said Chef to poke, ask and snap away), when I suddenly grasped that no, it wasn’t just my blood-sugar crashing (oh foolish girl who doesn’t eat breakfast this very day!), it was the not-unpleasant swoony experience of spinning on an axis within another orbit, because this was HUGE. Too huge for a single post--even a Hoar-sized one.
I was officially in the locavortex with Chef Little and I hadn’t even eaten a bite yet.

The manna of the day/pretzel roll of complete conversion

Sooooo many people have asked: "I can't believe he invited you to do all that stuff--What did he want from you?” (like I have anything to offer other than an earnest mouth and my eye). He just…wanted me to see and to taste the pleasure process, I think—is that really so radical?
What you have to understand is that Chef Little is a total hard-ass—and really, that serves all of us very, very well. He is a stickler for detail and consistency in every aspect of food on a level that reaffirms my faith in mankind, who I desperately fear has lost the view that these are absolute necessities. When he says he sources locally, he means three miles--not three hundred.

Understand also that Little is not talking about Local with a capital L because it’s cute or trendy or “gee, isn’t it nice to support the local folks?”—“Local,” like assorted other words, too often becomes a cardboard badge or a pair of blinders without context and understanding ("organic," "retro" and even magnifcent "luddite" are other such words reduced in scope this way).
This is not some Alice Watersed-down ride-the-zeitgeist interpretation of the current fashion that is "farm to table." What’s going on in Hanover is not a group of disconnected people throwing their stuff in the pot—it is a collective of exceptional people bringing their particular exceptional gifts to the table—and this I would call a salon, in the true sense of the word...

a succulent food sourcing SALON.
Rettland Farms pig...and in pulled pigs' feet salad with crawfish, Johnny Jump-ups & thyme oil.

Cooking this way is a commitment for Little, a renewable daily decision if you will--and above all, it is a question and decision based on QUALITY, not PROXIMITY. Because close just isn’t good enough.

How is it we are so accustomed and deadened to shampoo-bottle sound-bytes like “responsibly-crafted” and "shop local" that we're often willing to sacrifice accountability and excellence in the things we actually put in our mouths?--THAT seems radical--and reckless.
If Chef Little wants to develop a local food culture here, he is also insistant that it be culturally conversant—and in this scenario that calls for awareness and eating in context—which means knowing exactly where that pea shoot, that pork rillette, that beef tenderloin came from--and every server knows the intimate lore and genesis of the dishes to a tee, because they MUST (pop quiz, JeremyJessicaErinSamBrianLisa!--what the hell's a subric? what's a fingerling potato and will it touch me back? explain the pork rillette and exactly where it came from! why do you think old people are the most likely to order the sweetbreads?). Because it matters. Two people plant the same seed in different or even the same ground, two entirely different plants. Animals raised by different hands are distinctly different animals.

YET, The Sheppard Mansion faces food irony and challenge in its very name. I’m going to go out on a limb and say the word “Mansion” is the albatross in the room here, but it’s not a yurt, it’s a mansion (um, in south central Pennsylvania)—and though that’s an inaccessible fancy-pants, special occasion name, Andy Little is not any of these. (Okay—a little inscrutable when he’s at work in his eerily quiet kitchen [and where were the towel-snapping salty stories peppered with expletives that Anthony Bourdain led me to believe were de rigeur?—some of this may have been for my benefit, but I was assured that the chef DEMANDS a quiet precision and order to his ship]).

A Little action...Everybody better speak softly & carry a BIG accountability.
Look, this is a man who opened my door for me and drove me from farm to farm in his parents’ minivan (hasn’t moved his car in a year and is Vespa-bound) with Darryl Hall & John Oates perched brazenly in the dash (theirs, he swears) and has Hanson as his Blackberry ringtone, so…come on. Intensely verbal oddball genius, yes—fancypants, no.
Although the ultimate goal is huge—let’s call a spade a spade--making this area of snack-ridden and hotbrownandplentyof it, economical at all costs PA relevant in the food-world—the immediacy and simplicity of the message is, well…quite Little: KNOW FARMS, KNOW FOOD (join the Facebook group).

It seems to me though, that even under the most venomous of circumstances one might only be able to judge Pennsylvania as “awfully sensible with a desire to make all pennies count.” Pennsylvania is nothing if not sensible, so it must be a matter of time before the surrounding areas (an easy-peasy drive from Philadelphia, DC or Baltimore—and I could run if you put some of that halibut on the end of a stick) GET IT. Remarkable real food made by real people right here?—and seriously—I will be FULL?

Impossibly, I will now use the movie French Kiss to illustrate some points— Meg Ryan, who is a bit high-strung (hey!), has misguidedly gone to France with one intention--to re-snatch her fiance and return HOME, but along the way, she suffers beautifully thwarted expectations of locality when she encounters jewel thief Kevin Kline, which ends up being sort of charming/morally okay because it turns out to he comes from a long line of provincial wine-makers, and just wants the money to buy a piece of land of his own (sob). Which brings us to, you know, the scene with the wine-tasting. Meg has stumbled on Kevin ("Luc")'s true nature, by finding his adolescent sommelier's box of vials--of herbs, spices, and essences--and most importantly by seeing him in this context of locality. He has her drink and savor the wine again, this time guiding her taste with his knowledge, and really, with the benefit of having grown the grapes on that soil for generations. Of course, it's a movie and okay never mind it's doomed--that's her tipping point, and exactly when she falls in love. There is something critical to her experience of tasting the wine and standing on the land where the grapes were grown which influences the taste, and her experience of the taste--and her emotions.

Now, some argue (a relentless poetry professor of mine, and Robert Frost also shared this view) that there is no context for art (sorry to use "THAT WORD" Chef Little!)—that biographical knowledge of an artisan or let's just say "maker of things" is unnecessary or irrelevant to what is made. I don’t care a whit about anyone else’s bedroom policies, former or present addictions, or politics (save I’m a snoop and voyeur, of course), but it DOES make a difference that a real person made something and that something of that real person shows up in the final product—how can it NOT?—and would we want it to?

It’s simply so much more effort to reconstruct goodness and taste in an external or lab-setting (cough, Alinea)--and for what--just to say you could? Why, when you could just bend right over and pluck the juicy thing that is so ripe and perfect it’s begging to be picked—in fact, it practically rolled over for you? Theoretical food makes no sense to me. Certainly, one of Andy Little’s well-trod angsts is that we seek the taste of something but not the real thing itself, when it’s right in front of us. Well, making nature yield to us is just a very, very bad idea, based on every word written and moment on celluloid that exists since the beginning of time.

The only architecture we can place on nature is around it. Herb & flower garden, The Sheppard Mansion.

Why are we so eager to be skewered on an antenna, dusted in a powder with the “taste” of pleasure, and covered in a foam with the “feeling of orgasm?”—People, I WANT THE REAL THING. The good news is, we can still have it. You can celery rib a thing for her pleasure, or you can just, um, go get it, directly from the source (I apologize to any high school student forced by one Ulric Berard to read Michener’s tome, The Source—George C. Marshall class of the late 80’s, I’m talking to you!!!—who is still stung by the mention of the word, but think of it this way: the word has a new, redemptive meaning). I’m all for experimentation and scientific what-ifs. Suspension bridges, ships in bottles and blown glass are all fascinating—I just don’t want to eat any of them.

Pared down, what compels me are things which arouse in me an overwhelming need to touch and put them in my mouth, exactly as I find them on the ground (nothing changes from childhood)—is there anything else? Are there other guideposts? Don’t all questions and interactions in life boil down to one simple question (or two)?: “Do I want that in my body--yes or no?” And "how desperately do I need it?"

This is a simple, but huge process--and all we can do is start with our respective roots, hooves and trotters planted firmly in the dirt, and go from there. Maybe that’s all we’re supposed to do. It's all I can do today, any way. Chef Little calls this “spreading the gospel”—which sounds ominous, but is really only as simple as a Halsa-hair commercial, circa 1979 ("and they tell two friends…")

And now I will tell you about MY absolute tipping point in this process-of-bliss, my most favorite metaphorical moment in 7 million amazing moments of May 9th, 2009--and I may well be the only one there who remembers it. We were trudging back from visiting Beau Ramsburg’s hogs, when I suddenly found myself, in my cute but truly amateur black garden clogs, completely stuck and isolated in this muck. Beau and Andy had taken the higher, grassy, been-there, ticks-be-damned ground—and here I was, just positively suctioned stuck in this fat mud wake on the other side of the truck rut between us (yes, that’s me: food lover and Elizabethan fool). Stripped of balance and with shameless possibility, I didn’t really think about it: I just reached out instinctively and grabbed for his hand, someone I’d never met until hours before, and he hauled me out, up and over the rut so easily. We didn’t say anything in particular about it, I'm not sure he even looked at me; we all just kept walking along again. It was nothing more than the physical execution of a friendly shrug--or was it a paradigm shift?

Indeed, there is a planetary insistence which is incredibly appealing about Chef Andrew Little--he's a big guy (but I think I could take him for a tray of those pretzel rolls and of course rhubarb mustard), but this isn't what I mean.
I can't decide if I want to be him when I grow up, or work near him often and with ease, or simply swallow him whole (in a purely filial, ourobouros kind of way, you sick, sick people).

What passed into me that day was this: never to try to adjust for the salt or bitter or even the unexpected sweet in life’s recipe by giving up and expecting less. Don’t EVER confuse snobbery with standards, with ideals and the simple desire never to compromise them. Stay in the orbit of good things.
To be in the presence of such good people working collaboratively made me feel hot and burnished and hopeful as a new penny—I mean, if we all agreed that pennies had a really promising future in their own right, color-wise, heft-wise, just because-wise, not just as a part of some greater “global economy.”

I would like to tell you about each of these local characters today, but I can’t--so I am going to come back to each in their own due time and explore further the concept: "What do you bring to the table?"—because each of these people brings something unique and excellent and responsible to the table. It DOES matter.

And, in case you had any doubts, if a Chef Little falls in the woods and no one is anywhere near, I am certain it makes quite a sound.

pre-pleasure process, and post-pleasure process. now who's the happier Hoar?

MORE ON HANOVER, COMING SOON!
“The Lightning McQueen of Bulls”
“Is that a pig post, or are you just glad to see me?”
“Tomato LA-DY!” (I'll bring the Air Supply cassette)
“The Silence of the Hams”

recipe: MADRAS MASH (BEET IS THE NEW BLACK)

2009-04-18T01:22:00.007-04:00

Beta vulgaris.
I only know one other person (disclaimer:"alive") who LOVES beets—and by this I mean feels true ardor toward them.

I don’t think you can get away with professing casual love here, tossing off shammy beet accolades which can only sound flimsy and rubbery, suspicious & unsatisying as an old carrot.

You must mean it.

A candid love of beets is exactly like expressing a trembling weakness for canasta, wingtips, an actual preference for the first row in the movie theater, Cleveland. It’s just hopeless.

It’s not that people don’t believe you love beets--they sense the veracity of the claim--but not feeling it themselves they simply can't place the urgency, and that’s really nobody’s fault, least of all the beet's.

Beets suffer (as all things do) from a perilous food irony, in this case sliding neatly into a catalogue of items observed to be “just so wrong, they’re right.” Michael Ruhlman's hair illustrates the phenomenon nicely.

Beets have their own lore, and it would be fair to call it folklore, since any discussion of beets, particularly pickled, necessitates the use of terms like "folks." Most people know or could predict that “beets are good for your blood," and here lies the problem. The marketing is all wrong. The previous remark asserts that beets are good for you, but that the act of consuming them is really only offset by some medical angle, akin to the benefits of being bled by leeches, or applying maggots to third degree burns.

Why offer a dish where the central characteristic is not taste, but some sort of trudging virtue? We should never start a meal with an apology--this I rob and believe of Julia Child.

Syndicated BEET TV, a glimpse:

[a Tuesday, 6 pm. Blue-striped crockery full of boiled beets hits the farm table]:

THUD.

[Eight pairs of weary eyes look on, at various heights, blinking into the cook's explanation, which hangs in the air like a bad ham]

"Beets are good for your blood."

[Stained apron tails turn and exit quickly, inadvertantly wafting a pickled scent into the collective sigh.]

This is all wrong. It puts the eater in a terrible position, like having to decide whether or not to breathe when someone in a stopped elevator or sealed space shuttle compartment says, "Wanna smell something really bad?"

If the beet's image is so poor, I blame beet journalism, all of which takes this apologetic (yet some would argue reverse-elitist) approach: that everyone hates beets but the lone beet-lover writing about them, who is mysteriously attuned to their true beauty.

Do I really have to say, "Stop beating up on beets?"--especially the beet lovers, who are worst of all and do the beet no favors by perpetuating its perceived shortcomings.

What does it say when we offer "A beet recipe you won’t be ashamed to serve!" (see, right there, some editor let go by a perfectly good opportunity to switch out "ashamed" for beet-red"--another tuber tipping point and chance for much-needed beet levity, gone).

I agree that some things are an acquired taste and are worthy of public encouragement, but the minute you start billing something as "hopelessly flawed, but with hidden perks on the backside if you just stay with it" you are dead in the water. I know. I feed toddlers. Even larger people can't think that long-term. You might as well try to sell them a side of our government's infrastructure, while you have out your order book and the complimentary drinks they'll wind up being billed for anyway are en route.

If you require documentation, please check out the beet support group thread on CHOW ("HELP! I am trying to like beets, but struggling!") Huh? How are people “struggling” with beets?-- I don't know, but they do seem to be. Apparently the world is divided jaggedly into beet-haters, beet-strugglers (which is, I think, admirably pitiable), and this ragtag bunch of beet-lovers, myself included.

Or IS IT?--that unevenly divided, I mean? Isn't it just possible this is some great gastronomical hoax? That NO ONE actually hates beets? That it's only something life-long they've convinced themselves of, like being unlucky in love, shin splints or the 16th century theory of bodily humours? OR, is Beet Badness a myth happily perpetuated by the loving population in a clever attempt to hoard all resources for itself and keep demand artificially low? For surely, there must be, there IS, a hidden Cult of the Beet.

I need to find these people.

The well-trod phrase “turned beet red” occurs to me now--a bodily experience we're all loathe to recall but can in an instant: the dreaded embarrassment of recalling embarrassment. But it is part of the annals of humanity, like helping someone move a piano and being dumped. More clues that beet appreciation might be more universal than previously thought, but less likely to be admitted to or brought up in daily conversation.

Let’s face it, they aren't a sizzling topic, and there is no obvious glamour in beets, which I feel is just shameful. My sister recently suggested that beets remind her of Padma Lakshmi, for which I only now forgive her (my absolute devotion to Salman Rushdie on any slight, real or imaginary, being well-documented), and that she could be the spokesperson to turn this thing around. Topping a burger with pickled beet is the fashion in New Zealand and Australia, so perhaps if we could get Padma to hike up her skirts for Hardee's once more and waggle one of these sandwiches in front of her crotch, beets would be in business, or at least experience a stiff esteem hike in the male population. Beets in black fishnet stockings, anyone?

Personally, I don't want that, on a number of levels. I find beets quietly glamorous without being vulgar (despite the Latin), or depressingly unattainable for the average American woman, which is comforting. They're a lusty red, and shapely--a comely, slightly dirty vegetable if ever there was one, and they’re overwhelmingly, naturally sweet but not cloying (sorry, Padma: FAIL), which is frankly very hard to pull off and should be applauded for the uncontrived feat it is, if nothing else.

By now you realize that by "beets" I do mean the lowly garden beet, the tuber, not the sugar beet first cultivated by the Germans, out of which they suck common table sugar, or the red carpet stunner, chard, with its enviably gorgeous mid-ribs (indeed a card-carrying member of beta vulgaris, no matter how far from its Norma Jeane Baker roots it would like to get). Spinach beet is cultivated for its beautiful leaves, but is still nursing a hurt over being passed over early in history by the introduction of common spinach...

So, let me beet you to the punch and say, "ENOUGH of this thinking. Where the hell is this recipe??"

Please believe me when I tell you that the following “recipe” (if you can call it that) for what I am calling Madras Mash was so damn good, that I watched a pot holder go up in flames, with some casual fork-to-mouth disinterest, while I surrepetitiously dug at bites of it before the Madras Mash or the rest of the dinner EVER hit the table.

This has only happened a few times in my life, where I threw together something and then almost had to sit down hard on the floor it was so good, and where I saw and heard myself from above and just knew that the resulting moaning was so obscene that it would never fly on my imaginary show at the Food Network. I think PBS could do something with that in editing.

The colors were phenomenal (and I'm so sorry my gloomy photography would contradict this), the tastes were explosive. It was striking, it was simple, it was beet poetry.

It will serve a family of four, if your family is inclined and if it makes it that far. I’m not arrogant; I don’t think my recipe is inspired--only the ingredients--but I will tell you that I could not stop until it was gone—a beet binge! I knew that what I was doing was too much of a good thing, was in fact "so right it was wrong," and I could not stop myself from going back to the bowl.

Recipe: Madras Mash

-2 largish (what is the beet standard?) fresh beets*, about regulation girls' softball size, scrubbed, peeled and chopped roughly. Don’t do this in white, or if you have a gig as a hand model within the day. Expect to be stained immediately and thoroughly or wear sissypants gloves.

-4 sweet potatoes, the size of stadium-calibur, complimentary nerf footballs—Hey! Cleveland Browns colors!

-Olive oil to coat the beets and potatoes

-Melted ghee…you decide (about 6 T?) You can use regular butter, but I’m addicted to ghee for its coating vs. drowning goodness.

-Sea salt. I like French Grey Salt, but that of course sounds pretentious.

-Orange zest, directly proportional to your enthusiasm for the project.

-juice of 1/2-1 orange. A blood-orange is nice, but uneccessary, and I would save its color for a dish that really could use some color.

-Roast the beets and sweets potatoes with the olive oil “in a bad marriage” (tossed and turned [with the oil] for a loooong time, in separate beds[pans]). Get them fork-tender, but with a slight pleasing resistance.

-Mash each pan of vegetables separately, then combine, folding the beets into the sweet potatoes, until they are just blended, but still distinct, like....a madras plaid.

-Drizzle with melted ghee and orange juice, whallop with sea salt and the orange zest, then fold again, carefully.

*A jarred beet is not, no-way, no-how, the same, but I will still always rather, than abstain, and if you liken the jarred variety to pity sex I think you will see I am only human and come around to my feelings on the non-fresh beet.

**Music to mash by: The Beat Goes On, from Sonny & Cher's brilliantly titled album In Case You Find yourself In Love.

I swear on my life that I ate it all, with my three year-old’s free-gift-with-subscription Animal Baby fork--though I strongly suspected this utensil contains melamine (and also there was no time for expensive third-party lead testing)--because I HAD TO. Because that was all I came up with, blindly rooting around (rooting around! Who was it that said beets aren’t hysterical!?) in the drawer at pelvis-height, as I kept my eyes riveted on the bowl.

Some foods do force a guttural, primevial reaction from a person. I have read that people always say “oh my God” during coitus, because, well if there’s ever a time where you have proof-of-existence it’s then, and I am thinking this is the same. The Romans considered beetroot juice an aphrodisiac, but it seems like they were always looking for an excuse to pull down their pants. According to Wikipedia, "Field Marshal Montgomery is reputed to have exhorted his troops to 'take favours in the beetroot fields', a euphemism for visiting prostitutes" so I feel like I am right on track with my thinking.
If you want to enter the root vegetable deity-carving and/or body part contest I am sponsoring, please drop me a line.

Though there is almost nothing corporeal I won’t discuss here, please turn your head and cough as we attend to something very important, which as far as I can tell isn’t getting much coverage at CHOW and I’m pretty sure Thomas Keller might ignore entirely: The other thing no one tells you about beets. Actually, I should call this section “The Number 2 Thing No One Tells You About Beets.” It may be the quantity of fresh beets I consumed, but I had a moment of pure panic, even days later, certain I was experiencing a massive gastric bleed. Like many things, chiefly childbirth, you cannot prepare yourself...but be prepared anyway. No amount of intellectual understanding will help you, but it will be strangely comforting after the fact to say to yourself “Come on, lighten up—YOU KNEW THAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN.” I felt it would be unethical to omit this, though also I felt it equally important to keep it out of the recipe.

Wikipedia does say this: "The consumption of beets are known to cause pink urine, but is very healthy for the immune system." I told you, with beets there is always the offset, always the apology. In case you're wondering, this condition is called beeturia, a name I like for its honesty and economy, and will certainly be the name of my next garage band.

Hey--did you feel like we were On The Road To Wellville for a little while there, too?

So, beets are UNCOOL. I think, though, that they are on their way to becoming REALLY cool (and certainly with this endorsement, how could they not) and are no doubt headed for a price hike. Beets are so tragically unhip that they garner hosility and provoke fear--WOW. Simple concepts like smiling at people, sharing and community gardens do that.

Enter The New Cult of The Beet. The New Old Cult of The Beet. It's just time. Beet is the new black.

...Of course, I see them on the menu at Woodberry Kitchen, and will give you a full report next week. On the...(I won't say it).

"EDIBLE" EASTER GRASS!...BUT YOU'LL HAVE TO EAT YOUR WORDS

2009-04-12T01:44:00.002-04:00

Certain words can never be ambiguous and should never be put in quotes, though mysteriously they often are: "edible," "safe," "delicious", "imported" and "meat" are a few.

As you can see and might expect, my grocery list is tied to human taste (which "should" be subjective) and human health and safety (which of course "should" not).

Today's example: Edible Easter Grass.

Because I am a sucker [insert first candy joke of the post] for a twist on an original purpose or ingredient, but far more importantly, because my mother trained me in utero not only to loathe or despise, but to vilify plastic Easter grass, "Edible Easter Grass; Imported From Germany; it's Grass-Tastic!" hit a number of critical levels for me--all purely aesthetic or curious and really not a bit environmental, truth be told.

Because I just can't stand the feel of plastic Easter grass, the cheap-staticky, thin plastic...and of course there are the echoes of my mother's latent fear of finding of it months and even possibly decades later in the personal landfill of our nubby tweed This End Up couch cushions, circa 1984.

So, I was delighted to find this "Edible" (and so the quotes begin) Easter grass, which comes in an array of truly non-offensive, lightly saturated colors which are neither nauseating neons nor non gacky pastels--simply a watery but true orange, a lovely green, a yellow which doesn't stimulate the bowels, a light red (do you know how many years I have looked for a "light red" lipstick?? "Oh, you mean pink?" Aaaaaaaaackhhh, nooooooo!!--I found it by the way, it's called blotting and wiping away most of what's already there).

Because of the recent CPSIA (Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act)/Lead Law debacle as it relates to The Happy Tomato (see Small Things Considered for a quick view of where I've been, lo these many months), I am admittedly increasingly fascinated and also horrified by claims and by packaging--especially on products for "children" (everyone 13 and under, incidentally, according to the CPSC).

And I liked the packaging here--no licensed characters, just a couple of retro, non-anthropomorphic bunnies; stripes, that perennial favorite, connoting a classy timelessness; and the following verbiage: "Edible Easter Grass. Imported From Germany. It's Grass-Tastic!"..."Fills a Basket--and great for crafts too!" and... "with New & Improved Flavors!"

Okay, any time you see that, you see those words, you know that you are absolutely dealing with a failed attempt at improvement, and the seemingly careless use of the ampersand?--immediately tells you to put even less stock in the second descriptor than the first.

Speaking of packaging, I tasted it, and 1) it's not sweet (I was picturing strands of Peeps), and 2) it is exactly the stuff my edible packing peanuts are made of (when I can afford them): potato starch. What a sad waste of a carb or two today.

Sylph, upon tasting the edible grass this morning, looked cheated to the very core of her 5-year-old being:"UGH. It tastes like foam." Even the cat won't eat it.

I suppose thought surely "Imported from Germany" would mean tasteful, if understated, like shoes or a handbag, not taste like one--after all, there are higher "standards" for products in Europe.

Sigh, it is very pretty, and empirically harmless (except, it may contain wheat, and it does contain phenylketonurics which I suppose accounts for the curiously non-sweet, non-detectable Green Apple flavor), supplies 1% of the recommended daily value of fiber, and it doesn't bother me aesthetically--in fact, has great drape.

Yes, as I consider the back of the package, it's funny to think that "servings per container" can be "1" considering the front also makes the claim that the content "fills a basket!" (and is "great for crafts too!")--I mean, what does it "do" in a three year-old's small intestine?

It would be great for crafts (if on the expensive side) to fill a gift bag, but...you know where I'm going with this, right?...if I start printing my designs on bamboo fabric, which is certainly arguably a foodstuff (for pandas, but there are more asinine loops and hoops in the CPSIA than this, and the is not YET written to specify "human" children ), could I then tag them with some nutritional label and get in under the umbrella of the FDA, bypassing this CPSIA mess altogether?

And then, this lead business wouldn't apply to me--or rather, I wouldn't have to test perfectly safe, non-lead-possible "ingredients" in my clothing line because the designs would be "edible"--whether anyone uses them that way or not?

I don't even want to think about edible underwear. Is Spencer's Gifts still in business?

Before I lapse into a bitterness which doesn't befit this holiday (Syph just brandished a green Peep at me and sing-songed "Wanna Peep, Mama?--They're DELICIOUS!" which should give you an idea, perspective-wise, of how bad the Edible Easter grass must be, for her to nose-wrinkle it), and before you say something along the lines of "But you were a Kindergarten teacher! You should have more tolerance and an innate love of 'kid-things," and not hyper-analyze everything--and what could scream carefree childhood more than Easter grass, plastic OR edible?" I say:

WRONG, WRONG, WRONG: being a Kindergarten teacher, a parent of small children, a designer of "childlike things" means I have even less tolerance for things masquerading as harmless.

Teaching 5 year-olds to read, being a mother and being preocccupied with safety in general means it is less likely that I will stand for for things which make claims they can't live up to. For being talked down to, for inaccuracies, for the cheapening of words. For simple bad taste.

I'm "back!"

CRABBY NEW YEAR! SET YOUR EYE STALKS ON '09: THE BLUE CRAB COOKIES

2009-01-01T00:36:00.000-05:00

I said I was finished with the cookie posts, but I lied.

These Chesapeake Bay blue crab cookies were an insanity--from trying to tint the royal icing a just-so blue-grey of a pre-boiled crab (without one on hand), to stippling the shells, to the seven failed methods for achieving the eyes, but...I think they were worth it.

They are a simple butter cookie, with a hefty smatter of sea salt, and a lot of orange zest, which many will recognize as a nod to the way that Blue Moon Ale is served (come to think of it, if I had really been working that theme, I'd have used a bit of coriander in the dough)
And frankly, this is a shameless plug for the CHESAPEAKE BAY FOUNDATION-- please, please give them--or any one of the Bay supporting entities--some money. The Bay I love is in some sad shape these days, and the eventual loss of this crab I have grown up with makes me, well, blue.

You can also buy the Blue Crab block design from THE HAPPY TOMATO, and have it printed to anything you like--from a baby bib to adult organic T, to some organic cotton tea towels, and I will donate for you. I always donate a percentage of the sales from this design, but for the month of January, I will donate 100% of the proceeds, if that gives you the pinch you need.

Despite the negativity of the bottom feeders, the depression-mongers, and the naysayayers, I have decided to set my personal eye stalks HIGH in '09! To give more, rather than less. To be more open, rather than clamped up tight like an, um...clam.

I think this year holds great promise--because I fully expect it will not be what I think it will be.

You know, I experimented with a number of methods on the eye stalks--from snippets of super-fine black licorice I attempted to fuse to the cookie and top with the a tiny blop of icing for the eyeball, before settling on this final stiffish but kind of amateur black icing.

Anyone who knows and loves crabs sees that their eyes they are just the most curious, bizarre, adorable, and strange appendages on any live creature (I mean, it won't keep you from eating them, but you will muse). I tried dragee-like candies, simple painted eyes...none of it worked. I kind of like the floppy, happy eyes I ended up with, though they were not what I thought I wanted. I could have waited, and built it up the icing slowly, in increments, ever higher, adding to the stalk like a drip sand castle...but where would I have stored it? How long would it have taken?!

They were nowhere near finished, and 3 year old Huckle filched one.

"But Mommy, they looked so GOOD! I wanted to eat one before he could see me."

Maybe less looking and more enjoyment is in my future. Even if it's "only" sideways.

A PEACEFUL PALATE FOR THE NEW YEAR...UP NEXT!: FORK OVER THE RESOLUTIONS

2008-12-27T07:14:00.003-05:00

More than one person asked me if these were my children, and if we were really cooking, which suggests it might be less complicated to make bakery-window versions of many real-life things.

Wishing everyone a peaceful (yet spicy) end to '08--and it's straight on through the chompers to '09!

MICHAEL SYMON PORTRAIT MEATLOAF: RETURN TO MY MEAT, NO POTATOES

2008-12-20T17:14:00.010-05:00

I was really starting to get off-track here with all these cookies--deviating from my ordinarily meatcentric focus.

So, last night, in honor of my return to dark-red center*, I made myself a nice, Michael Symon Meatloaf and I'm feeling much, much better.

Until I heard him describe himself as such, I thought I had made up the word "meatcentric" and damn! I was proud of that bit of succinct verbiage too! So rarely do we stumble on a descriptor which does its job, which is not effusive, elusive, metaphorical! "Meatcentric": it's juicy, red and blatant. Just the way I like it.
*Do I need to disclaim here? Meatloaf is NOT a rare item.

Sylph, speaking with the assurance of a newly turned 5-year old, walked into the kitchen and back out. "A Michael Symon meatloaf. That's horrifying."
She knew it was him, though.

There are a number of things I love about Michael Symon, all of which require a separate post. I just don't think it's fair to have his likeness-in-loaf at the helm of an homage-post...but in a nutshell: he has a kick-ass wife who I know I would like (which, as an only somewhat-reformed skeptic of other females, speaks volumes) and would like to consult about my upcoming tattoo, he has a fabulous goofy laugh, his food is fun, and he's a good old Catholic Boy whose go-to meat is pork.

I think I captured likeness, or at least I could taste it. True, his head isn't quite dome-y enough (which I mean with all respect)--something I rectified right before he went in the oven, but unfortunately didn't photograph.

The cooked version?---well, I really liked doing the meatloaf (my usual mom's-recipe of beef-veal-pork & grated zucchini) on an oiled cookie rack over a deep, square baker to keep him from getting coagulated meat-juice jowls, BUT when Michael Meatloaf came out, he was, um, a bit dark to recognize.
If you want to know the truth, after I hacked off a crusty ear to try, he looked like Van Gogh Curly from The Harlem Globetrotters.
If I did it again, I might use all-pork, which would be much lighter. The olives for the brows and soul patch were terrific, though--they roasted to a really nice texture which was, well, sort of facial hairy.

If there were a yoga asana called "Meat Pose" I would say that I now feel better, grounded, and centered having spent some time there.

Sigh...I still have a gazillion cookies to bake. Stay tuned for Star-bellied Sneetches!
Might as well start a new blog and call it Dough Dominatrix (I think a holiday special with the Ace of Cakes is an obvious one--but it might be more Super TV than Food Network) or Cookie Therapy. Besides, let's face it: I'm a fraud--I can't really bake. What I do like is tedium, a prerequisite for obsessive artful cookie-making.

Ah, food irony: you gift me again. Somehow, I, neither a baker nor a sweet-lover, found myself almost royally ice-boxed and Oreo sandwiched into pretty, meatless cookie-making.
Thank you Michael Symon, for helping me back to my comfort zone and food. Hope some day I get to meat you.

The Symons: putting the Cleaver in Cleveland~http://www.lolabistro.com/

HERNIATED WOODLAND CREATURES BEWARE!: GINGERBREAD MUSHROOM COOKIES W/ DARK CHOCOLATE ROYAL ICING RECIPE

2008-12-17T02:22:00.003-05:00

Each one of these babies is over a handspan and weighs about 5 pounds, which was the size of my second child after he plumped up.

Gingerbread Mushroom Cookies with Dark Chocolate Royal Icing.

I'll be honest with you: these cookies took a long time, and they were a big learning curve. Royal icing is basically akin to paint--and, as Shrek has pointed out, it's all about layers. And the space between the layers, which translates into patience, and drying time.

Now, one of the most insulting things you could say to a woman (any woman, but a creative woman) is, “Oh Gawd, I just don’t have time for that—SIGH...I wish I had that kind of time on my hands.”

I don’t have more time than anybody else—though perhaps I have less common sense and managerial ability, in addition to less sleep, intimacy with another human being, and certainly far less muscle tone—but I do not actually have more time.

In college, there was the most annoying girl—is "nemesetic" a word?, it should be. An awesome, talented painter, she had excellent taste and design sense. She wore pearls and sweater sets to the studio, unblemished, while I could not walk the thirty steps to my car without a cartoon mudflap splashing me. She actually was not dumb and even occasionally quite funny in an absent-minded way (oh, and she was a concert pianist)—and it didn’t help that everyone, including the love of my then-short life was completely and vocally smitten with her.

When she wasn’t giving a concert or attending her own opening exhibit, she was baking, volunteering at a hospice or reading to the blind.
I’m not so shabby—but sheesh, I can’t compete with that.

And while I subsisted on a diet of black coffee, cigarettes, tequila and non-fat yogurt, she drank English tea and actually ATE the scones that she made. With butter.

You know, she had a completely generic first and last name (please--couldn't I at least get points for "Stacia" and "Bagranoff!?!?") made more maddening by the fact that everyone had elevated her beyond mere confusion-with-mortals by referring to this girl simply as Her and She.

As in: "I saw Her at the Kroger/She was buying half and half."

In every respect, she was better than me (or so I believed, as we do with nemeses of our own creation) like some airbrushed, platinum–edition of my self: a far better painter, thinner, more angular but less forceful, better hair, handwriting and speaking voice, musical where I am not.
If she had been witty, I would have killed myself.

Oh, how I loathed her, and would often roll my eyes and quip, upon mention of HER name, “Yes, yes, I get it—and little woodland creatures like squirrels and birds follow her everywhere she goes” --referencing Sleeping Beauty, of course.

I’m not sure how this fits in with my theories on time and baking—except, as everything does, it relates to perspective and forgiveness. The mushrooms (and the stray comment "Wow, those sure look like they took a lot of time") brought it all back. Maybe these should be called Stephen Hawking cookies.
It leads me to consider how much we want to be, the nature of what we aspire to be—and for whom. This vision of perfection for other people.

I made these cookies just for me (and for my kids, and maybe for you), just because I could.
It’s taken me 17 years to figure out that She didn’t have a secret ingredient—a conclusion hurried along by watching Jack Black in Kung Fu Panda (I would leave anyone at any time for Jack Black and I don’t care who knows it). We are more than, and somehow defy, the sum of our parts. The secret might be enjoyment of our parts.
Well, sure, it really helps to have good parts.

I eat a 5-pound dark and spicy, partially sweet , very complicated and layered mushroom cookie of the past with nothing like sadness—in fact, with a keen, crunching interest, with wistfulness. I actually savor it…and then I look down in the palm of my hand and there is nothing there but a few tell-tale crumbs and some molasses-sticky perfume.

Dark Chocolate Royal Icing Recipe (ready? Don’t blink):

1 recipe royal icing : (3 tablespoons Meringue Powder, 1 lb. confectioners' sugar, 6 tablespoons warm water, almond extract)
Hershey’s Special Dark Cocoa Powder to color and taste
(also fantastic for tinting coconut, which makes great hair. I accidentally made Obama cookies—don’t ask, that's another post—but I'm telling you they tasted like CHANGE!)

You will have cocoa powder and confectioner’s sugar in your sinuses for quite some time and your kitchen floor will be a wreck. Put on a neti pot of tea and try not to take it too seriously. No one can see your sinuses, unless you give them permission.

REDUCE! REUSE! RE-FASHION!—DIY COOKIE CUTTERS, NO SMELTING REQUIRED

2008-12-09T10:55:00.000-05:00

Darth Vader cookie cutter

In some ways, this is a cautionary tale: Be careful what you forward.

“Um, what the HELL are you doing getting Martha Stewart’s Cookie of the Day?” my friend Jenny asked with horror (italics mine, her horror was fully perceptible in e-mail tone, sans caps or italics). Busted!

While my cookie fascination continues—the possibilities for a cookie canvas with royal icing are just mind-boggling--it has quickly become clear that Wilton, while the Macaroon Daddy of the industry, simply cannot give me what I need—which is something a skoche different in a cookie cutter. Where is the Peacock (or Peahen, thank you very little?) cutter?, where is the VW Thing? The Anvil? Where are the Yodas and Shit?

Yoda cookie cutter
Sure, some designs can be solved by using a cutter outside its intended purpose—you say pumpkin, I say tomahto, for example (see previous post). Or, use that tired teddy bear cutter and ice the panda off it so it looks new, and um, like a panda.

But sometimes, you just want what you want and there is no cutter for that. I’m sure someone on Etsy would make me one, but being fundamentally cheap, obsessive and curious I would never pay the shipping. So, I looked into DIY cookie cutters. Now, there are kits you can buy, and there are pages of web space devoted to buying 1 ½” copper or aluminum ribbon and having someone at the local community college rivet and fuse it all together for you…and ALL of it involves all-caps warnings like: “working with aluminum will give you small and painful cuts all over your hands, no matter which gloves you wear or how careful you are”—so, why, why would I do that?

Why not cut (ahem) out the middle man, and just refashion what you’ve got? I made these three shapes (Darth Vader, Yoda, and Woodland Mushroom from one star cutter (I think it was a star cutter, it was kind of smushed and in the back of an uncooperative kitchen drawer) in under 5 minutes. Same cutter, 3 ways, with my bare hands. This hits on a fundamental problem—and a plus!—these things are so pliable they are fragile, and will need to be stored accordingly. The good and bad news is that we’re not talking about one of Martha’s Copper Cutters (retail value $50); we’re talking about a .67 cutter from Michael’s.

Woodland Mushroom cutter, I swear it's a mushroom
The next time I do this, of course I will get one cutter to refashion for each shape (who knows when they might snap, or which ones I might want to keep), but this was all I had on me and I got carried away.

I would buy the biggest heart shape cutters I could find to start with—because that would give you one really tight angle and the rest open to play with. Some needle –nose pliers would be helpful ; maybe a vice.

Things outside their intended purpose, things re-fashioned, are always amongst my favorites. Since the cookie fascination continues here, I am going with it. It’s very therapeutic—like gimp for grown-ups.

Oh, I wonder, as well, what kind of conversation The Ace of Cakes and Countess of Cookies might have. That man needs a Vespa cookie—I’ll get right on it.

RHAPSODY ON ROYAL ICING & HAPPY TOMATO COOKIES: IT'S KICK-BACK TIME FROM WILTON

2008-11-15T06:30:00.003-05:00

It's been so long since I have posted, I feel I'm entitled to rant, ramble, and perhaps break off from reality, like the crumb on a delicate shortbread.

I recognize that when I tell you what I am about to tell you, you will think I'm being paid some sugary stipend by Wilton--Did you just picture a #4 metal icing tip and glassine bundle of pristine white pastry bags when I said "Wilton?" I did.

I also pictured my three-year old running no-nap & pell-mell down the cake-decorating aisle (also called "Wiltondale" because really--who else makes the icing colors, frosting tips, flower-making nails and cake pans? Who else is allowed shelf space?) at Michael's, knocking every last Elmo and Lightning McQueen and Big-Headed Dora pan off the bottom shelves. What genius displays shiny, licensed character-shaped objects at toddler height?

Truth-be-told, I have always feared and loathed Wilton--a confectionary empire made of stiff, gritty/powdery, tasteless-but-perfect rosette making and (the part which seals the crumb-coat for me) not truly buttercream icing. Shrug. I hate monopoly--I don't even like the game (possibly even more than I hate licensed characters). I make exceptions for my son and Lightning McQueen based shamelessly on my own predilections toward sexy, flop-coiffed Owen Wilson (I'll fix you, Owen! I'll be your sober buddy and you don't even have to pay me!!!).

And then, I started having this thing about butter cookies and royal icing. I don't even like sweets! Wow. That is three things in four sentences I have grinchily foresaken.

What I do like and in fact love is things that are not what they seem, or things appropriated outside the realm of their original purposes. These tomato cookies (THE HAPPY TOMATO swag for glucose-dwindling table-perusers) fit the bill.

Why, they're not tomatoes at all (!) but are made from the teeny, tiny pumpkin cutter which came as part of Wilton's Harvest 6-Pc. Mini Cookie Cutter Set (or: Ensemble de 6 mini emporte-pieces) we received as a gift (Fall birthdays).

Royal icing is a versatile medium I would place second only to Sharpies--and I tend to avoid those for food-use. Thinned down to washy and hand-tinted it is marvelous stuff, and can transform a cookie to a canvas. It dries to a shiny, hard and completely stackable finish that makes it durable and transportable.

Problems with royal icing:

1. It takes like dreck.

2. It's made with egg whites, which freaks some people out.

1. The dreckish taste is solved easily, with almond extract. I believe it's the secret to most things. It's also clear, unlike vanilla (though "they" meaning "Wilton" make clear versions of butter and vanilla flavors).

2. Ix-nay on the egg whites--save them for omelettes. Three words: WILTON. MERINGUE. POWDER.

Are you ready?--This is Wilton's recipe:

3 tablespoons Meringue Powder
4 cups (about 1 lb.) confectioners' sugar
6 tablespoons warm water
Makes: About 3 cups of icing.

I throw it all in the stand-mixer for 7-8 minutes, with double the water and some almond extract. Then I transfer to small, lidded containers and make my colors.

Cookie recipes to follow--a whole season of shopping and baking unfurls before us, like the delicate broccoli fronds (and sprouts) of my next project. Let the obsessive icing fun begin.

MOTHERHOOD: TRICK...OR TREAT? (VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED IF YOU DO, OR IF YOU DON'T) and turkey meatloaf and sweet potato spiders recipe

2008-10-30T19:56:00.018-04:00

photos courtesy of The Baltimore Sun

We've had this conversation before. Spoken of the insidious ways motherhood has us judging each other. Never a thing more telling than running into another mom in the grocery store, and scrutinizing the contents of her cart, seeing her eyes flick over yours. The way we point one gleeful, sugarshaking finger--just out of the frosting can--at Angelina Jolie (my all-time favorite mark): "AHA! Look! Shiloh is eating Cheetos and Mallomars in her stroller--out of a non-recycleable plastic bag!"

That finger-waggling which means: I am justified in what I do as a mother; I am not that bad; We are One.

It's all fun and games...until you find yourself, your mothering and your food in the paper--literally.

In the biggest serving of food irony to-date, I, who never work from or write down a recipe, find myself with a recipe in a national newspaper article, as well as a mortifyingly large but okay mostly pretty good half-page photo of myself & the kids, happily assembling an art-project-style Halloween dinner.

I was asked to share my recipe & be photographed making this healthful pre-trick-or-treat dinner recipe for The Sun (a truly delightful female experience from reporter Maria Blackburn and photographer Chiaki Kawajiri, to food editor and Charm City Moms' blogger, Kate Shatzkin).

An experience where, shockingly, both my kids and hair seemed to cooperate fully. I feel good about the article and great about the recipe (Turkey Meatloaf and Sweet Potato Spiders), which is really just an art-project riff on the same meatloaf I always make (thank you, mom), honest.

Leave it to me to stir the cauldron: No, I haven't received any negative comments (but then I don't call Angelina directly with my bitter concerns) on the article, and the comments I have received have all been more along the lines of "You out-Martha'd Martha, girlfriend!" which has caused me to wonder: Should "Martha" be both an adjective and a verb--and... is it a compliment?

Or is it backlash? (not to me specifically, but as a part of our culture)

Seeing the paper and hearing these comparisons, my dear friend Edamommy immediately quipped,"Your photo is 4 columns wide! The last time that happened to Martha, she was being sentenced."

Martha Stewart, the strange, the unattainable, the easiest of all deckle-edged targets:

"She may be a creative genius, but I hear she was a pretty bad mother."

This is human nature: another mother's perfection, felled at the knees. And motherly perfection right now in our society means being the most green, the most organic, the most nutritious (it's not even good enough to be slyly nutritious, your kids have to looooove it too, to almost thank you for it) the most creative, the most interactive--in short, the most most-ness.

The biggest, tricky truth in motherhood is that you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't. The only maternal plaguing fear bigger than being "not enough," is being too much. Most of us inhabit the torturous rack somewhere between these two seeping walls in The Pit of Despair.

And lordlove Martha Stewart and her genius, but that is not a Good Thing.

Another trick of motherhood is the more exceptional you are at more aspects of it (by this I mean grossly neglectful or over-the-top involved in your kids' lives), the more scrutiny you invite. So, if you want to avoid scrutiny, the middle ground beckons...and maybe, um...there's nothing wrong with that--if that works for you.

As I mulled over some other recipe concepts with my own mother (ones which did not make it into this article), I debated things like whittling spooky ulnae & radii out of cauliflower. "Oh God, don't do all that," my mother cautioned. "People will hate you."
Yes, motherhood is like an endless Pantene commercial on a loop, "Don't hate me because my kids like _______(insert healthy food name, past time, standardized test score)."

Just as waves of secrecy and shame tell us that a complete childhood diet of Sour Skittles, dinosaur-shaped chicken and generic boxed mac and cheese is wrong, so we also know in our hearts that no child's palate should enlarge while his 3-year old quads atrophy, shoved in the back of a Trader Joe's cart for hours in the pursuit of those ingredients. We know no one can afford to shop local or organic 100% of the time right now and that that no kid--not even Anthony Bourdain's kid--really wants to see just-pulled beets (albeit gorgeously organic) laid artfully in her cereal bowl.

If I didn't know myself better, it would sound like what I am suggesting is some...sort of...moderation.

What I wonder most is if I will be drawn in butter and quartered for taking my mother's meatloaf public. My mother, who has a habit of turning out the most magnificent food like it is nothing--nothing!--waving it away with an easy ice-glass tinkle of a laugh, who actually shares all secrets with you without proprietary talons. Maybe because she never writes down a recipe (in fact, it took us an afternoon on the phone to turn the familiar ancient action of making this meatloaf into a legitimate recipe with measurements--and even that had to be edited)? Maybe this is the key? Because there really is no secret ingredient, Po.

For everyday, I am fondest of a mixture of beef, veal and pork for pure meatloaf flavor, but I do like turkey--as long as you can bypass its dry, tasteless aspects--the hoisin does the trick. Turkey meatloaf a la mom's recipe is fantastic, but B-V-P is divine--you just cannot get that addictive hardened juice-fat crust (arguably the best part), slightly bitter, slightly sweet, 100 proof distilled "meat" flavor on top of the loaf with turkey--you just can't.

The original recipe I submitted was bound with a mixture of ground flax seed and organic oats--NOT because I am wedded to either of those things, but because that was what I had in the cabinet that day. And, since I was really trying to hit the mark of high-protein/long-acting carbs for pre-trick-or-treating, the flax/oats and turkey combo fit the bill.

The point is, it's about a willingness for substitutions, and method and luck, over details.

I think occasionally we all luck out in motherhood--very occasionally there is a camera present, and this was one of those times.

What you can see in this photo?--my kids love meatloaf, sweet potatoes, and making a mess. So, we know it's genetic. And, those fancy hoisin webs are a product of Bobby's Flay's favorite gussying-up item: the lowly squeeze bottle, and the fact that my daughter would eat a shoe if she could be in control of the hoisin sauce.

You know what else I think?

I think most moms I know make very good if not excellent, thoughtful food for their kids on some kind of reasonable, creative-when-possible scale, without neglect or scars necessitating years of therapy.
I think sometimes I get a lot of mileage out of my previous career as a kindergarten teacher, and because I can draw and make a blow-out on my hair last last a week (if I am really careful).

I think I'm thrilled I worked myself, my mom's meatloaf recipe, and Bobby's squeeze bottle into a newspaper, as well as one of the new colored shirts from THE HAPPY TOMATO--in a very organic way, even if the casual reader won't notice those things, because that is my life.

Yesterday was Huck's birthday and Sylph came to the table in a hotel shower cap, initially without any explanation, a radically funny visual.

"In case there's overspray. You knooooow [shoots me the "obvious" look]. With the ice cream cake." Ahhhhh. Behind the fantastic visual, a whole story--a practical explanation.

The newspaper hits the stoop-of-dawn on another perplexingly huge day of motherhood. Here comes The Sun.

*************************************************************************************

I think this recipe straddles simplicity and festivity; kid-participation and adult-direction; nutrition and taste. Somewhere between Brittany and Martha (dear heavens, I said it), lies this recipe.

Turkey Meatloaf and Sweet Potato Spiders

(Makes 6 servings)

3 large sweet potatoes, scrubbed

1/3 cup quick oats

1 soft piece 12-grain bread

1 1/2 pounds ground turkey

2 envelopes dried onion-mushroom soup mix

2 eggs

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, or to taste

1 large unpeeled zucchini, ends trimmed

1 jar hoisin sauce, about 7.5 ounces (divided use)

2 tablespoons butter, or 1 tablespoon olive oil

sea salt and pepper to taste

Decorating

legs: carrot and celery sticks, cut in small, thin pieces (about 4 inches), enough for 8 per spider (or use whole-grain pretzel sticks)

eyes: black-eyed peas, sliced olives, scallions cut into small rounds or peanuts

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Prick potatoes with fork and put in microwave.

Bake potatoes in microwave for 12 minutes or until soft. Make bread crumbs by pulsing oats and bread in food processor.

Place turkey, soup mix, eggs, Worcestershire sauce and bread crumbs in large bowl.

Grate the zucchini, skin and all, directly over the mixture in the bowl.

Using your hands, mix very gently, until just combined. Do not over-mix or it will be tough.

Spoon a generously mounded mixture into 6 greased muffin cups (3 inches across).

Measure out 1/3 cup of hoisin sauce and pour the rest into a squeeze bottle for webs.

Use the 1/3 cup sauce to brush the top of each meatloaf.

Place muffin pan on a cookie sheet in the oven.

Bake for 35 minutes or until a meat thermometer inserted in thickest part of a meatloaf reads 160 degrees.

Let sit for 5 minutes.

While meatloaves are cooking, scoop flesh of potatoes into a food processor and pulse with the butter or oil until just smooth. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

To assemble: Have kids help make a web on each plate by squeezing hoisin sauce into concentric circles, then pulling a toothpick or plastic knife from the center outward.

Lay one meatloaf body on each plate and, using an ice cream scoop sprayed with cooking spray, top each with one scoop of potatoes. Allow kids to decorate spiders by pressing "legs" into the potatoes (or the loaves), and adding eyes of their choice.

Note: Kids also can help by rinsing the black-eyed peas, cutting vegetables if possible, and setting decorations out in small bowls.

per serving (without decorations): 443 calories, 28 grams protein, 18 grams fat, 6 grams saturated fat, 41 grams carbohydrate, 5 grams fiber, 164 milligrams cholesterol, 862 milligrams sodium

HALLOWEEN THROWDOWN AT THE DISCOUNT SUPER-STORE: FLAY VS. DARKON

2008-10-08T04:03:00.010-04:00

Does Bobby know his empire is tacitly heralding an energy drink?!

There will always be vague concerns about shopping at the discount super-store--especially where food or dry-goods are concerned: the clientele, for one, quickly followed by the Eurasia-sized parking lot of doom, blurry expiration dates, botulism, and of course weevils.

I remember my grandmother opening a sad box of commercial fortune cookies of unsure origins, filled-to-disappointment with a horrifying swarm of little horned creatures.

Still, packs of buckwheat soba, little vials of saffron threads, espresso (in fact very good), herring tins, shimmering bottles of rapeseed oil--these are gem-like enough to brave perfectly ordinary cart-ramming folk I need to wash off when I get home.
After all, here in Vastland, there are supposed hermetic seals and boxes within boxes and stamps of number 9's approval.

I remind myself that this is not like an ex-college roommate of mine who shopped only in the discount meat section of the grocery store ("I am not Discount Meat Mike, I am not Discount Meat Mike"). I am a mom who is responding to the economic crisis, and the need to liberate more of the family budget for my wanton cafe breves and Retin A--you know: the dribs and drabs funneled off for The Post-Baby Mind and Body Treatments & Potions Slush Fund.

No matter how much money I have or lack, the truth is I love the hunt (I always have, and thank you mom), navigation made more complex by the introduction of strollers, slings, the sands of the breastfeeding hourglass & willful little personalities other than my own.

I love stores full of dusty, forlorn boxes and oddities--like these enormous cans of "Freek Juice," "Ace of Shakes," "Mongrel" and "Whooopaz!"--seizure-like nods to the orginal Red Bull--I have found today. Every single can and every single brand tastes exacty the same: like Sweetarts, shame, loose expectation, and rivulets of sweat.

It seems that simply adding Taurine to a beverage sanctions the use of bigger, more frightening labels, with outrageous if intriguingly magnanamous claims. "44 ounces--two ounces free!--6,000 mg of caffeine will make you keen like a howler monkey and forget your home address for six consecutive weeks!!!"

Taurine is something they give detoxing alcoholics going through withdrawal, an intermediary step to staving off the DTs (though good grief, I am not making any medical claims here). Something which mends frayed nervous cabling--and yet here we are, adding caffeine in contradictory if not lethal amounts.

And now I am exactly like Lightning McQueen (having a 2-year old boy I have seen Cars over 500 times and in what feels like the same endless day) grasping the concept of The Cozy Cone Motel:

Lighting: "Oh I get it, these rooms all are shaped like cones, which of course, cars usually try to avoid, but now we're going to stay in them."
Sally [speeds away]: "Figure that out all on your own, didja?

That being said, how could I forgo a find such as "Joker Juice" with its merrily evil orange and black can, fortuitous bounty for my kids' Halloween birthday party? Aside from the fact that I adore orange in any form, frankly I just need to see what will happen. One of the reasons I had children was to amuse myself.

The no-sugar 20 0z. Throwdown?--another 60 cents to shamelessly amuse myself. If Bobby Flay isn't man enough to come to my house to challenge me to a Fritter Throwdown any time soon, then surely I can drink some approximation of him down in one Taurine & Caffeine-riddled quaff.

Shopping with a 4 and 2-year old in the late afternoon, Dante-esque circle of No More Naps means our limited window of time is closing, and the whining and pie-eyed looks tell me it's about ten minutes away from slamming down on the fingers I hope will soon be wrapped around my car keys, with any luck. I muscle the cart full of these cans, linens, black sesame seeds, and sheer hope toward a check-out line where I will face the inevitable shopper participation required of me when using a credit card: "Did your cashier greet you today?"

Does he ever.
Too late to retreat, I see and hear the giant behind the register: golden, reddish mane streaming, ashy incongrous at-home blond streaks on either side of the meaty face, which he shakes to the side exactly the way one would if one had been slow-framing Val Kilmer-affecting-Jim Morrision for oh, about 8 years now. In that instant, I am completely certain he has a homemade catapult in his backyard, proudly, "accidentally visible" through fraying green chain-link.

"Here!!!!," he bellows and gestures widely, "LET me do my maniacal laugh for you! Boo wah ha ha hah ah haaaaaa!"

And so it begins: the unsolicited exchange I provoke with waiters, sales clerks and passersby, simply by being me and have apparently passed to my children, who look...intrigued, frightened and are momentarily roused out of sniveling.

He picks up and peers at the can of Throwdown: "Ho, ho, hooooo...wait!--wrong seasonal festivity, M'lady! [he chortles and strokes his portly sides with Santa-ly emphasis] What do we have heeeeere?" (what if I were buying Tampax, Rid, four boxes of Fleets enemas and a bowie knife?)" He leans in. "I like Bobby Flay--you know, the native war-cultures tipped their arrows with a serum made from hot peppers and LSD. Boo wah ha ha hah ah haaaaaa!"

I have to give Aslan some points. We just had an entire conversation and I understood the leap--from the word Throwdown to poison-tipping--and I never said a word.

If he tells me something like "You know, 97.3 % of all primitive females desperately wanted to bone the australopithecine predescessor of Bobby Flay" with enough hayseedic, 24-year-old, smoke-curled authority, I may have to believe him.

Instead, he gives me the critical piece of information I already knew, one maw on the plastic bag, which is already shredding, thinner than a garlic skin, proudly claiming to be recycled. He hands it to me knowingly, "I do The Renaissance Festival, and a Medieval Gaming Society, so...[stage whisper, modestly] I'm really good at modulating my voice."

My children have been stunned into silence, and before my lips can even put together the rubbery sound of wonder I know is in there, fruit-gum-snapping Mandy arrives on the scene: his understudy, his costumer, his relief. Apparently, we were his last appearance for the day. There is the predictable blue eyeshadow and some sort of speech-impediment--or maybe it's drugs? Oh dear lord, I have it now--she's managed to sit on a stray arrowhead in the Lysol-smelling locker-room.

"Oooooooooh! Your kids are so cuuuute!!!" she squeals and thrusts onto my son's head the somewhat fragile straw hat we are saving for our Farmer Alfalfa costume. "OH. MY. GOD. He can wear the hat OUT of the store!!!!!"
He's weakened by fatigue, but that hat will be no match for El Destructo if I let him have it now.

"Um..." I say. "I wouldn't do that, 'Smash' is his middle name."

Dead, green-eyed seriousness. "Shut up, that is so cool!--is that really his middle name?"

Aslan rolls his eyes at me. Mirth, nothing short of mirth at some secret we share. He changes out the cash register drawer and shuts it with a flourish like he is shooing along oxen.

We both sigh. I don't know. I don't know who has won here.

In the parking lot, the cans of Joker Juice are heavier than expected.

FEEL FORTUNATE YOU HAVE YOUR SENSE OF TASTE TO GUIDE YOU

2008-09-17T13:20:00.007-04:00

This works for me on so many levels, I'm astonished.

And, in light of my book group's case study of "Bourdain Poisoning" and political turn for the...interesting/vengeful/spiritedly loud....it was almost ominous.

Some Asian, Bourdain-doppleganger, toiling his heart out on the bottom rung as "Head of Pristine Fortune-Stuffing Operations" surely slipped me this gem with purpose? Or at least for my pleasure.

I rarely save little bits of (okay, other people's) paper, but I'm holding onto this--at least through the election.

THE BOURDAIN BOOK GROUP MEETING : FRITTERING AWAY THE NASTY BITS OF THE FEMALE SOUL (ZUCCHINI FRITTERS WITH TANDOORI SAUCE OF UNKNOWN ORIGINS)

2008-09-11T01:04:00.006-04:00

I love my book group (smartest far-flung women you will find), and I don’t think we’ve ever eaten one of our own—but I will offer that apologetic aperitif now...
It was my pick: Anthony Bourdain’s The Nasty Bits, a cluster of human observations enrobed in dark, libidinous and dopamine-producing--for me--culinary essay. Over the past year, I have become hunched over with the distinctive honor/lead (rhymes with "bled" and "dread") mantle of picking tomes, so it was time I zagged.

After all, I sincerely doubted anyone could classify Bourdain's dizzyingly whip-smart food discourse to be lite fare after reading.

The conversation?--a bilious bouillabaisse of takes on Tony...as opposed to the book, I think.

What I didn’t count on was what is best-described as a Bourdain food allergy manifesting in some of our members. I believe there were at least three documented cases in a single evening--which sounds more like..Bourdain Poisoning, with its classic, universal symptoms: concern over his testosterone-damp swagger, the deep suspicion that one would not be liked/approved of by the author personally, and a curious dismissal of his sense of humor and self-effacing dorkiness (which goes along way as a digestif).

You just never know, in a communal eating experience, who will get the bad mussels, and how bad it will be.

Everyone nestled comfortably in my living room with tapas plates by 8:30 pm, and it began: “I just feel like Bourdain is judging me.” Never in the history of book group have we done this--evaluated a book on whether or not we thought the author would like us, or approve of us personally, and we have never, ever foisted the expectation on a book that it account for all of our viewpoints or steward our reading experience with some sort of equanimity.

There seemed to be some alarming question of whether or not Bourdain would resent a child’s food allergy, whether or not he would roll his eyes if that request walked into Les Halles. Whjhat?! Why does he have to like accomodating someone else? Especially food accomodations (not allergies--I'm talking about his exasperation with the vegetarians and vegans he pities) he clearly thinks are idiotic or at the core inconvenient for everyone? And what does this have to do with book?...

If we read Mein Kampf, would we evaluate and discuss the text based on the points where we agree with Hitler, where he "gets us?"

The difference between sitting in judgment and vehement opinion?....maybe nothing, and still I think it's there. Bourdain is mouthy, but fair--the universal heckler. Crepes, do I really find myself in the position of having to publicly explain/defend my attraction to another abrasive male?

Well, I like the lewd angle at which Bourdain's pork pen is clearly poised.

It should have occurred to me that he wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of hemlock, that not all would appreciate what I consider to be some of Bourdain's finer points as narrator and chronicler of human food experience: namely, slatherous and persistant use of some of the most delightfully cacophonous language available to a writer; many all-time favorites including: shekels, blow job, deli, rube and horrific. And of course, the f-word. But my favorite thing about Bourdain is that, as former addict, criminal, and current Everyman's Snob, he is NOT judgmental.

Best sound-bytes ever from the discussion, where I am trying to defend Bourdain (actually funnier without too much explanation):

"But he's not judging you--he's saying do what you want (even if it's stupid) and I'll do what I want--and don't try to tell me what I should do."

"But I assume we would draw the line somewhere with accepting another person's behavior."

"Come again?"

"How about eating babies? Would you eat a baby?

[interjection]

"In a plane crash, of course, I have no problem with that." (this from the vegetarian of 20 years for self-described ethical reasons)

What?!

Oh sweet cheese, why didn’t I make twee fruit and baby kabobs for this fey discussion, so I could drive a bamboo skewer into my own eye right now?

I, who have the trump card of potential Bourdain turn-offs (my bottomless/topless love of Bobby Flay), do not feel judged when he rails against the Bobby Flay brand and the evil Food Network empire. I do not really worry that he wouldn't like me. I think he would give me shit, but in the end Bourdain really gets that we are each a big contradictory bitch-broth of our own making. A jumble of ironies, the things we once scoffed at, and reconsidered. We are walking fusion cuisine. And, at the marrow, I doubt he'd truly sneer at a thing which roasts another's bone.

I am honestly shocked that some of the people in my living room did not and did not want to see food as the single unifying element of our lives—that they don’t really care about food. However, I respect that. I think it’s absurd, but I respect it. Food. Alcohol. Art. Sex. Aren’t those all the nutritional groups?

But this assumes that Bourdain is right of course--if you believe as I do he’s right about it all. I feel like some of the group missed what he was saying—missed him. That did make me sad, because the man makes my pastry bag explode. In the chapter on Woody Harrelson, I found it odd that the conversation veered into some focus on feeling like AB was overstepping a boundary in feeling sorry for Woody, who would never experience the classic cuisine of a centuries-old culture with his trendy raw diet, and completely bypassed the real question, which I feel is the essence of Bourdain, embodied in one of my favorite lines in the entire book: “why would anyone listen to Woody Harrelson about anything more important than how to be a working Hollywood actor or how to make a bong out of a toilet-paper roll and tinfoil?” (p. 169)

Areas of expertise—everyone has them. Opinions. Lips, snouts, ground-up nether-parts…indeed it is a matter of taste.

Slow food, fast food—we covered it all and then it turned (sigh, double-sigh) to politics.
“Any overriding philosophy or worldview is the enemy of good eating” AB TNB

What Bourdain seems to be saying is: leave me alone, I’ll eat what I want, you eat what you want, but keep your paws off my foie gras, and don’t expect me to be quiet about the places where you exasperate me. Oh—and don't be a pud.

Well, I love that he's an Everyman's Snob. And I plan on making him meatloaf if he ever comes to my house to dinner.

Ladies, I say this with love: some of you are clearly missing the Bourdain region on the tongue.
****************************************

About 40 minutes before arrival-time, I had an idea! I could make one dish for each section of the book: "Salty," "Sweet," "Sour…"

The clock read 7:20, I was yet-unshowered, smelled inexplicably of an old bag of sauerkraut, and I thought: "I am not fucking making a tasting plate of these book chapters."

So, I made FAST zucchini fritters, served with a bottled tandoori sauce which came off some dusty shelf at a Big Lots or Marshall's. It was fantastic.

* The picture is so awful, I apologize. The fritters look like gangrenous bull's balls, but they were good.

Loose recipe follows--I'm not much for being exacting. Which is why I will never be a chef, but remain a cook.

ZUCCHINI FRITTERS:

I make lots of substitutions, but this is my method. The critical element is the scallion, fresh grated ginger, and garlic. Sweet Potatoes and cilantro (this was a cilantro-free zone, out of respect for Bourdain), fresh peas and mint...these are good too.

Grate 2 zucchinis with skin onto paper towels, let dry

Mix with a couple of eggs, a handful or so of panko

a little sprinkle of flour

salt, pepper

a couple of scallions

chopped shallot

slivers of carrot

grated ginger, garlic

heat oil in a pan (I like olive, butter and canola)

cook on each side and let come to room temp. Best at room temp--the egg keeps cooking.

serve with tandoori sauce, plain yogurt, crema fresca, sour cream...you get the idea.

THE OMNIVORE'S HUNDRED: A HOARVORE'S HANDFUL OF CENTIMES

2008-09-06T06:06:00.003-04:00

Well friends, I pass along to you THE OMNIVORE'S HUNDRED, from the London-based blog, Very Good Taste. This is like a slam-book for the palate. Now, I ask you (bat, bat) what harm could come of that?...

Here in the U.S., the list--100 things, have you eaten them?--is making the rounds of blogs and begging to be plated for Facebook (and surely has by now)--it's a foodcentric adult parlor game minus the usual cleavage, pokes, and third-party widget-spreading of that joint (Facebook is another post, another day).

Here's how you play:

"Below is a list of 100 things that I think every good omnivore should have tried at least once in their life. The list includes fine food, strange food, everyday food and even some pretty bad food - but a good omnivore should really try it all. Don’t worry if you haven’t, mind you; neither have I, though I’ll be sure to work on it. Don’t worry if you don’t recognise everything in the hundred, either; Wikipedia has the answers.

Here’s what I want you to do:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.

2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.

3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.

4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at http://www.verygoodtaste.co.uk/ linking to your results."

I'm no Andrew Zimmern, but I was shocked to see I've eaten everything on this list of 100, save nine--thanks, Dad!--(those in red). There's nothing too, too crazy here. No head of Benjamin Raspail, not even a fava bean (oh dear, are Silence of the Lambs references funny in the UK?). But certainly great fun and cause for tasty reflection. P.S.: Umeboshi is one of my all-time favorite foods.

It's probably best if you don't ask why I've eaten kaolin. No, I do not have pica, but I will say it was only partially intentional, and it was long after "The Dirt Guy" ate his way through an episode of That's Incredible.

I didn't strike through anything, because well, there are very few things I wouldn't eat, and I didn't comment on the items, for your sake.

I've actually seen some competitive nimrods give themselves a percentage score (shaking head). While I am seduced by the likelihood of my getting the math right on a list of 100, I'm pretty sure that's not the point.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred, Happy Hoarvore's to-eats, in red:

1. Venison

2. Nettle tea

3. Huevos rancheros

4. Steak tartare

5. Crocodile

6. Black pudding

7. Cheese fondue

8. Carp

9. Borscht

10. Baba ghanoush

11. Calamari

12. Pho

13. PB&J sandwich

14. Aloo gobi

15. Hot dog from a street cart

16. Epoisses

17. Black truffle

18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes

19. Steamed pork buns

20. Pistachio ice cream

21. Heirloom tomatoes

22. Fresh wild berries

23. Foie gras

24. Rice and beans

25. Brawn, or head cheese

26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper

27. Dulce de leche

28. Oysters

29. Baklava

30. Bagna cauda

31. Wasabi peas

32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl

33. Salted lassi

34. Sauerkraut

35. Root beer float

36. Cognac with a fat cigar

37. Clotted cream tea

38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O

39. Gumbo

40. Oxtail

41. Curried goat

42. Whole insects

43. Phaal

44. Goat’s milk

45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more

46. Fugu

47. Chicken tikka masala

48. Eel

49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut

50. Sea urchin

51. Prickly pear

52. Umeboshi

53. Abalone

54. Paneer

55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal

56. Spaetzle

57. Dirty gin martini

58. Beer above 8% ABV

59. Poutine

60. Carob chips

61. S’mores

62. Sweetbreads

63. Kaolin

64. Currywurst

65. Durian

66. Frogs’ legs

67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake

68. Haggis

69. Fried plantain

70. Chitterlings, or andouillette

71. Gazpacho

72. Caviar and blini

73. Louche absinthe

74. Gjetost, or brunost

75. Roadkill

76. Baijiu

77. Hostess Fruit Pie

78. Snail

79. Lapsang souchong

80. Bellini

81. Tom yum

82. Eggs Benedict

83. Pocky

84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.

85. Kobe beef

86. Hare

87. Goulash

88. Flowers

89. Horse

90. Criollo chocolate

91. Spam

92. Soft shell crab

93. Rose harissa

94. Catfish

95. Mole poblano

96. Bagel and lox

97. Lobster Thermidor

98. Polenta

99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee

100. Snake

************************************************************************************* Thank you, Andrew, for this only partially mindless cut-and-paste fun!, and to SERIOUS EATS, for having its finger on the pulse of the world's blood sausage.

BROCCOLI RABE-D OF CHILDHOOD?: FOODCENTRIC DNA-IN-SITU

2008-08-29T00:18:00.005-04:00

A recent conversation between my daughter (4) and a girlfriend's son (just-5), coming from somewhere in the blueberry bushes at local, pick-your-own favorite, Larriland Farms.

She: I love chives. Very chivey. You know, if you pet them they really grow.

He: What about basil?

She: Eh [skeptical]....I've tried it. It's pretty bitter and strong, though.

He: Ah!...but have you tried the purple basil?

My sweat-slick sunglasses dropped right off my nose--that's 150-degree plastic by 10 am in picking weather--as my eyebrows shot up in the kind of pure wonder you can only experience when you observe your own DNA interacting with someone else's (if you're lucky, someone you like a lot).

In this case, the other mom is a chef.

Naturally, this led me to wonder how much influence I, with my food-ramblings and she, with her CIA training might have had on this little conversation. (And the ancillary mom-fright: "Um, is this okay?")

Is this natural?

I almost dropped 4 pounds of hard-won, very small and sweet berries.

"Relax, it's just food talk--it's harmless. Where could it possibly lead?" But I am a believer in Anthony Bourdainisms--I know exactly where food can (and eventually should) lead.

No, I quickly decided, it is natural for them to talk like this, and completely organic (in the true sense of the word). This conversation on taste was so matter-of-fact, so helpful, just plain 4 and 5-year-old experience without food-snobbery, the endorsements and reflections of childhood savants. I am back to a core theory: DNA talks, and bullshit walks.

I admit I found it refreshing, most notably in this little duo-logue, absolutely no fear of extolling the virtues of a (gasp) non-local ingredient. Who the heck cares if it's Thai Basil?--I'm not even double-digits and I just know I like it!

Yes, yes, yes: I'm all for eating local, buying local, thinking local...as long as it tastes good [and the important corollary: "tastes good to me"]. This, as Anthony Bourdain says, should be the primary concern. Let's eat what's there, as much of it as possible--um, in this case, six pounds of blueberries in a week: blueberry pancakes, blueberry muffins, blueberry ice-cream (oh, blueberry diapers). But there will be a day when we crave "The Blueberry in Winter" just because we can have it--and dammit, that's okay too.

There is what we can learn, but underneath there is always yearning, the human flesh of the taste-bud.

Note to self, continuing to pick blueberries: "Hmm...worry less about the origin of the thing, and focus on the thing itself. Experience over dogmatic categorization and analysis of experience..."and then "Drink more, you're dehydrated."

"Give it a rest," I said to myself out loud, stuffing a handful of berries in my mouth for good measure.

Sylph had snuck up from behind and moved in next to me soundlessly, getting the lower berries I had missed.

"Oh, I get it--give it a rest...like you do with meat."

Patience, Grasshopper...you may yet learn to love basil. Or not. (see basil photo, closely)

photo credit: Doug Aghassi http://www.dougitdesign.com/

SIR SALMAN RUSHDIE: THE ALPHA & THE OMEGA 3s

2008-08-21T01:11:00.000-04:00

"You must shut out the outside noise. You must keep your heart out of your head."
--Sir Salman Rushdie

We each balance on the edge of a chef's knife at various points--what's astonishing is how long we can actually remain there, going absolutely nowhere in state of complete terror.

(photo of Sir Salman Rushdie by Kyle Cassidy)

We're always told panic is self-limiting, but it's not true; we're capable of excruciating balance, wince-gripping this blade for a loooooong time.
Peering forward (too afraid or not ready for that direction), peering back (too unwilling to release it).
Do I have to move?... They're MY bleeding haunches--can't I just sit here on them, in the complete indescribable pain of my own making, if I promise to be very still and not complain?
At least one other person will think that sounds completely reasonable. One who's been through childbirth.
Why do we equate stasis with comfort?

I recently read that we should view food (and surely this was meant of something other than glorious, faintly mooing New York strips, duck fat fries and whole milk cheese) as a medicine cabinet, but I side with a long-ago professor that it's art--particularly words--we reach for when we are in pain.

Indeed, opening a book is the exact same motion as drawing open a mirrored door and reaching for the tums or nitroglycerin tablets.
What has always been unclear to me is whether or not we create more or better art when we are in pain.

And so it was the other day that I feared the future and the past and dilly-dallied on the knife's edge, when the unbidden seduction of Salman Rushdie's words came and coolly lifted me, like a skirt.

Charlie Rose was asking without asking: Was Padma's actually the slapping hand that helps, Sal? Does good art come from bad relationships? Was being dumped a blessing for your work?...(do not get me started on she-who-wronged the brilliant goat).
But what Rose actually asked was: "Does pain inform your work?"

Rushdie's marvelous, twinkly-grave reply--those blanched almond shell eyes, brows perennially cocked as spider legs--which caused me to fall madly further in love with him, was this [with a slight, lip-wetting smile]:
"Pain is always informative."

That's when he said the thing about keeping your heart out of your head. That although pain is informative, it doesn't inform his work and is ultimately distracting. You need calm to create.
He was quietly adamant about this.

You see, I've been having chest pains which make me fear it's finally happened: I am becoming my own metaphor. Some hardened manifestation of food irony, in a body which queerly appears healthier (as that is culturally understood as "thinner") the more pure protein and saturated fat it consumes. The embodiment of the Type A truffles and eggy stress stratas of the past two years, which surely brought the THE HAPPY TOMATO to its current, exciting yet-terrifying knife-point?

This pain is informative. I need to create calm to keep working, or I'm going to have--literally--a heart attack.

Someone once said, in the only real criticism musterable, that Bob Dylan has gotten to looking like a caricature of himself. There is an uncomfortable wedge of comprehension radiating under my left sternum, as I smile and try to move off the knife, which is currently stabbing me in the over-worked--but thin!--kidneys no one sees anyway.

A stay-at-home dad with whom I once maintained daily long, intellectual conversations-- changing mutual toxic diapers & charting developments across the miles--used to swear that his two-year old gobbled up (um, adored to the point of having to hide) fish oil capsules (the preferred source of Omega 3s over Flax).

Of course this drove me to the brink of despair, as my child could barely be persuaded to take a gritty multivitamin, even Scooby-Doo shaped, and then only the orange ones.
Sigh, I've failed again as a mother.

Or so I thought until recently, when I started panicking about my heart and my diet, and actually tried a fish oil supplement myself. I felt much better because I realized there is no other explanation but that he was lying.

There is no magic pill and certainly no such thing as the ridiculously vulgar packaging claim of "no fish burps." We are what we consume.

It's only that everything can't help but become more noticable when it becomes bigger--parenthood, career, creation--duh. It's why we're doing it, right? And not a reason not to do it.

I have to keep my heart out of my head and shut out the outside noise to move off the knife, but I continue to hear Rushdie describing his breakthrough--not his first--novel, Midnight's Children, that he simply decided he had to take the biggest creative risk possible" (taking on all of India, indeed!).

To do it that big.

And then I hear his ultimately heart-strengthening very big words:

"I've always preferred a glorious failure to a moderate success."

Yes, yes, fish oil or flax or something--I know I have to take better steps to protect my heart and find a supplement which works for me.
I can't completely ignore my heart, but I will have to practice mindful segregation.

Why are you looking at me like that?--I can still have my steak, I'll just consume more Salman.

IN DEFENSE OF FOOD: CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS (AND HEARTACHE)

2008-08-14T02:09:00.005-04:00

Yesterday afternoon we had the threat of ominous storms, but I drove my children outside anyway, because I thought I would put both of them in with the recycling, close the lid and back away quietly if we didn’t get out.
photo credit: Patrick Dignard

Late afternoon as a stay-at-home mom: the witching hour. Also: "The Starving Hour," when the threat of a fistful of (not-so-bad) cheese sticks or (dusty but gratifyingly saline) Goldfish crackers, or worse, covert dark chocolate M&Ms looms incredibly high. Sheer emotional desperation brought on by monotony and ingratitude and the sum total of the day's skirmishes. For the record: any substance in secrecy because I can and you can't stop me?--not so good.

There was only a sprinkle and far-off, very faint thunder, "does this make me a bad mother?" While they dug, threw, wriggled and bulldozed over each other in their absurdly over-portioned sandbox, I surreptitiously stole pages of Michael Pollan's fascinating In Defense of Food [eat food. not too much. mostly plants] and remained some semblance of a guardian (for heaven’s sakes, I was right there, sitting on the lip of the sandbox). I'd whipped straight to this chapter on the 30-year-old American myth of the lowfat diet. The new research secondarily debunks the fatty diet/dietary cholesterol link to heart disease, making me feel much, much better about my nearly eschewn (!) title of Meat Mistress and Pork Princess, in light of my latest bodily terror: heart disease.

When I heard the car pull in at the top of the driveway I felt this primitive urge to throw my book into the high grass, lest I be perceived as doing anything in addition to watching both children grow (this would include running my business, pulling mental or physical weeds, and/or staring vacantly into space contemplating how I got here). On cue the kids started chanting in yippee-singsong: “Daddy’s home! Daddy’s home! Daaaaaddddyyyy!!!!

Very quietly and with a surprising lack of tooth-grit or jaw-jutting, I asked absolutely rhetorically: "What about Mommy?" A shock coming out of my mouth--I usually avoid asking needy or impossible questions of people smaller than myself.

And, without missing the moment to transfer another shovelful of cold, heavy sand, The Sylph assured me (without malice, I think): "You're home Mommy, nobody cares about YOU."

Excuse me while I go pour some whipping cream in my coffee, and eat a block of cheese.
I'm not confident a glass of olive oil and belly full of legumes are going to preserve my heart...but I will keep reading.

[Truly the book is fantastic.]

TNFNS FINALE: YOUR ZEN SELF'S TOO LITTLE, TOO CASSOULATE

2008-07-28T01:05:00.003-04:00

Possibilities posed by the Food Network's own leak of the winner (and subsequent damage control) on Friday are discussed at the end of this post*

It's true and perhaps a flaw that I expect a lot from everyone. I expect Shrek-like layers from my onions, and I seek metaphor and irony and so, I find it.

[Calligraphy by Kanjuro Shibata XX]

Last night's TNFNS finale is just the kind of thing I am fond of: weeks of this voyeurism of others' soul-searching, layer-exposing & process-revealing coming to a head, with each of the final contestants on a spot-lit plate, left "alone" to face his or her Achilles Tenderloin:

Adam, a competence-obscuring goofiness of self-destructive proportions; Lisa, a fancy-poo-perfectionism within a Vulcan bubble; and Aaron: a curious ineptness with the camera belying genuine skill, warmth or any desire to watch him light a pilot.

Nothing like personal growth on the menu (and learning on the FN's dime, as Susie Fogelson pointed out in an earlier episode).

From the initial episode, the issue has been change. Who needs to, who doesn't, who can and who just plain can't. The soft-spin on "change" (that's selling out, and audiences hate that), is the more palatable concept this evolved into, which is "revealing the self that was always there."

AHA!

Look, I'm all for a little harmless lotus-eating--it is only a TV show--but am I wrong here?! The Emerilian Essence of what we heard from the judges all along (over and over) was "Be yourself--but be the self we want you to be" and the corollary: "Trust yourself--but trust that we know what that self is."

I am probably overthinking it to call this a dark psychological journey--but let's face it, I was fed my lines.

"I know what my purpose is now." "I am exactly where I'm supposed to be." "I must look inside myself." "People are realizing this is a really intense personal journey," and finally, of course, "It's NOT JUST ABOUT THE FOOD!"...

I'm talking about everyone involved here: from the contestants, to the panel of judges, to the Vegas show-folk. (I will leave it to you to match up the quotes.)

It would seem, if you look at Aaron's winning words and work backward from there in the season logically, that the "purpose" of this season was to find and be able to communicate the true self. Don't think so much, just "be..."

Hmmm, a good idea in theory, a rather Eastern one. There was an Eastern flavor to this season, the more I think about it, but....well, isn't it sort of funny that the person who really is Eastern (Nipa) could not pull off being Eastern (philosophically and culinarily speaking, not to mention that failed Bollywood wiggle on the Coast Guard ship), but instead displayed a bizarre chutney of ego and self-delusion? Nipa was one of the most egoic and he least self-reflective people I have ever seen on television at any time.

Actually, the only person who didn't appear to change, but merely "revealed himself," was Aaron--and he won. I told you we love redemption and moreso failed redemption stories!--but we weren't going to reward either of those.

The twin party tricks the judges seemed to be impressed by were "Who's got the best FLOW?," and "Who is (will let the camera in on) the most of him/herself?"

For flow, you can't beat the sequence where Aaron forgot to make the chicken parm during the Vegas Throwdown, and at the last minute, after Lisa's head-jerking reminder prompted him (wonder if she regrets that now?) threw together a Chicken P, beating the pants off Kelsey at her own signature dish and was described as everything anyone expects from this dish by Bob Tuschman. Phew!--Talk about somebody's atman/higher self doing the cooking!

Ultimately, I think the reason Aaron won is that, of the three, his final performance deviated the least from what we already knew about him. While in their pilots Lisa and Adam were both fairly skillful--if not masterful--at concealing, rearranging and supressing their respective flaws (but how long can that last, anyway?), in the end, we all know that Lisa really LIKES cooking fussy food and has no intention of giving it up, and Adam's true love is entertaining us over feeding us.

I'm beginning to think that "being yourself" is just plain easier when the self isn't all that complicated.

Aaron's words, from the FN site: "I have a real and unique personality and delivery on food. I have a more down-to-earth way of cooking."

I think we were led to believe that if Lisa and Adam could change they had a shot, but really they'd have to reveal some true self neither of them have. Dinner: Impossible.

I will say that Lisa did something pretty genius (and Eastern) in presenting three different proposals for a her show concept to Gordon Elliott in box-form--she Bentoed herself! Way to tap into the marketing zeitgeist, Lisa!-- in a way that felt so organic (the way the "community outreach" blather of her original 4Cs definitely did not). It appears Lisa does have the ability to self-reflect--or at least take it apart her strengths and shortcomings in some kind of meaningful way--whether or not she's capable of executing that knowledge. I think she accurately anticipated a cultural need for the show-concept "Beautiful Basics" (though the language she really wishes she'd coined is, "It's a good thing"), but what Lisa is doing, arguably beautiful, is awfully far from basic. She just doesn't have the kind of street credibility to assure me that "zabaglione" only sounds intimidating, but is truly simple (if Bourdain told me it sounds snotty, but is worth the learning curve, I'd do anything). When she said not to worry zabaglione is only a custard, I thought--whoa! this This is like the time she simplified "green beans" to "haricots verts" to that 8 year-old Brownie. It's always unhelpful when someone attempts to clarify one thing by drawing on an example you know just as little about.

Now, let's talk about her line of aprons (which FN is sure to pick up or to hit stores everywhere) Quick: how many people just Googled "Lisa Garza apron?" If Isaac Mizrahi could make a killing designing for Target, so could Lisa--but since she has often expressed concern over her $500 shirts and Pucci shoes, I don't think she wants to. If you brand yourself as "beautifully basic," you have to come down a notch, somewhere. The rack of aprons she "showed us" looked like they were reeaaaaallly hard if not hell to clean (but, owning a line of white clothing for children, I am willing to be proven wrong), and would scarcely cover any of the parts of the body people including myself usually spatter. But that's her look: silk, 4-inch heels, chunky necklaces--I'm not sure you can get people to buy that that's "beautifully basic."

So, perhaps the reason Lisa lost is that she actually was true to herself? In her own words from episode 7--she just wasn't willing to sacrifice her cassoulet to outdo Adam's mac and cheese--even though that was an equal part of the challenge. If she was too accessible, I might not respect her as much. Was she just missing the mark with her own branding? I wonder what would have happened if she'd just called her segment "Beautifully Snooty?" There is a beauty in that too.

Shoot, what do you do when no one likes or can relate to your true self?

Adam, dear, funny, cleft-but-nebulous-chinned Adam. I liked that he worked the internet/audience into his promo--he knows himself well enough to know he needs the blood of an audience to play against--and Bobby sanctioned (though didn't love) his beer-can chicken. He eases the burden of his failed restaurant with his sense of humor--so shoot him. A technique, perhaps transparent, but darn effective and sanity-saving; I've been relying on it for years. I wonder how hard it was for Adam to restrain himself from doing something silly or ill-advised with that web-cam, how long it would be. But I'm not too concerned about Adam's future either--there will be a smokehouse full of women who are willing to comfort an adorable 30 year-old man who can cook, and keep them rolling on the tiles.

In this way, you can say that everybody won here. All these people were true to themselves--the selves were just sellable in varying degrees. I love the irony in goading people to be themselves, but ultimately being suprised and punishing them when they do just that.

"This is very, very personal" said marketing expert Susie Fogelson. Actually, from mixed personal feelings I am going to argue that you can put a smiling face on the tomato, but at the end of the day, there is nothing darker and more intense than the journey to a brand identity.

In the end, let's remember the symbol of The Next Food Network Star is not a circle of life, an enso...it's a star.

*I'm disappointed but also intrigued by the tactical error FN made by releasing information on their website last Friday, which made it clear who the winner was.

After Friday, but prior to last night's finale, the information and comments were wiped from FN's site. Could be an incompetent or disgruntled intern...could have been completely intentional (I really DO walk around hoping/fearing the world is populated by evil geniuses).

If FN knew it was going to be Aaron, but wanted to give Lisa a real shot/use her for something in the future legitimately, they could have leaked the info and some buzz, so that the public would become outraged that Lisa was gypped.

Then, the audience would be even more inclined to vote for her as "deserving to win TNFNS" while the show aired. Some nice, beefy redemptive statistics to back up a FN decision to use BOTH Aaron and Lisa at some point in the future.

And yes, that would leave poor Adam doing oblivious prat-falls in the background, cartwheeling his way out to the bus to FLA to Ringling Bros. clown college.

If they had kept the audience voting, that is....

THE NEXT FOOD NETWORK STAR: LISA CAN SING?!... LIKE OIL IN THE PAN

2008-07-21T02:18:00.003-04:00

Who will wear the Crown Roast?

Um...er...am I going to have to eat my words when it comes to Lisa Garza?

This is too much for one person to swallow. In 24 hours, I've conceded that Angelina Jolie might possess something other than extraterrestrial mothering DNA and now I'm about to defend Lisa--the woman I deemed intractably Vulcan and emotionally unfathomable only days ago.

Yet there I was, catching the last 20 minutes of Iron Chef America (Flay vs. Hamilton), treating myself to a nice little pre-show appetizer of Bobby Flay and a lovely snack portion of Michael Ruhlman (a mercilessly articulate judge). I'd just settled in for this next-to-final episode of The Next Food Network Star, going over my hate mail (hate mail! If you thought I was harsh, you've no idea), when I realized the whole problem:I've become too familiar with these people.

Cardinal Rule #111 of crime, heckling and sustained cruelty: "Do NOT identify." Somewhere along the line, Lisa became...human? [see Senator Martin appealing to her daughter's kidnapper in The Silence of the Lambs: "Her name is Catherine. Catherine Martin."]
Let's talk about that last post--where I made these assertions:

Lisa is going to win
Lisa doesn't deserve to win because she can't change enough (or maybe precisely because she can't change enough)

Everybody loves to hate Lisa

Everybody loves a redemption story; a failed one moreso

Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I'm going to eat some escargot

My sister read my last entry: "Okay, well I hated Lisa at first too, and J couldn't STAND her...but she's grown on me like a good spore. Okay...don't get mad here, but...

"But what?!"--I sizzled.

"Well, she's kind of a big goof, and I think she's really trying...and I sincerely like everything Lisa cooks, and, well...

Now I must wait for her to spit out the bone.

...she reminds me of you."

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

My head is reeling as if I've done tequila pot-shots to my psyche.

And then there was tonight's episode. In Vegas, one of my most favorite cities--and one where entertainer Adam, my previous favorite, should have shone. It was revealed:

Lisa can SING. Lisa is (gulp) not so bad. Lisa cooked pears for Bobby (hey! I thought that was our dish, Bobby!)

It's really not the singing that got me--though the singing got me (obviously I can't sing and that took some Rocky Mountain Oysters).

I found, strangely...I'm okay with it. It is suddenly much easier to stomach Lisa, especially now that she looks all red and puffy and tartare-ish, and on the verge of tears almost all the time. Maybe it's because she was frazzled enough to let 7 pounds of monkfish fall out of her cart--not something incidental, like paper towels or couscous, but the main dish ingredient (because this is something I would do), or because, though she looked enviably fantastic in that Aeon Flux get-up they put her in, she couldn't memorize her lines for crap.

Yep--after tonight I still think Lisa's going to win. The only difference is that now, I think she might actually deserve to--and not just because she's the best of the poor options. I still cannot watch her painful grimace in the face of the judges, and fluffing her coiff is just so "coiffy" (but if it's true that we detest in others what we see of ourselves, then what does that saaaay?) but I no longer think her winning depends solely on some unfair tenet of this world: that the loathesome & undeserving are sure to win.

Am I just cracking? Really, would Michael Ruhlman apologize? Okay, maybe not apologize--but would he go back on a Ruhl-ing?

I was pulling for Adam, but Holy Smoker, he can be so Adumb. As a woman who has fallen for goofy, theatrical men more than once (relationships where I was doomed to compete with some imaginary camera), I just can't quite "buy him" completely. Bobby has made this observation more than once, but EVEN I am even having a hard time completely buying Bobby on this show. Is he trying that hard not to emote? His lack of expression is Botoxic. I'm exasperated that they keep powdering his eyebrows, and these suits they're putting him in are well...judgmental! The total effect is that of "dirty food leprechaun" (sigh, okay that kinda works for me, too) and you have NO IDEA the kind of gastric and psychological pain it gives me to say that. Especially when he's saying things like this to Lisa:
"Your buffet looked like who you are. And that's really important."

And poor, poor Aaron, who we all have no trouble find completely believeable, likable...three pasta dishes on that buffet??!! Insane. I've never met a carb I didn't like, but I loathe pasta salad. Nothing says, "I'm 23 with my own apartment" like pasta salad--or in this case, "I'm going to commit suicide now, wanna taste?" He said he wanted to keep it simple, but I would argue that keeping three pasta dishes from falling into the culinary buffet chasm on either side of al dente is not simple, it's IMPOSSIBLE. And I almost had to leave when he tried to pass off eating disorders as funny in a room full of professional show-people (men, women, men dressed as women). Know your audience. If Bobby Flay likes your food--has given you the "Bold" seal of approval in the past--do more of THAT! If Aaron wanted to keep true, and simple and unpretentious (which I think was the goal, next to Lisa), where was the mulfaletta with homemade spicy olive spread? The po'boys to go with that crabcake? Even an atomic-fire lollipop lampchop would have fit the bill.

Adam spent so much time trying to prove he really can cook, creating some elaborate smoker out of a mammoth set of woks and a make-shift heavy duty foil pup-tent that he, the man who might be accused of all snazzy intro & no main course to back it up, let his food presentation really slide. Luckily he followed Aaron, so anything he said appeared clever and polished, but Guy Fieri was onto Adam instantly:
"Were you really as prepared as you could have been with that intro?" and then, leaning in finding that just-tender-at-the-bone spot with his gravelly I been there Buddy grin,"Didja set yourself up AGAIN man, to do more than you could pull off?"

And then there was the little matter of Lisa's spread--her food and wings, when she belted out a throaty invitation to sample her food. In SONG.

Did I set myself up, by claiming that Lisa couldn't change? Do I set my sights too high with respect to consistency in others? I don't think so--though I am willing to eat crow or squab or dove any other bird the French might find tasty here (but I hope to learn my lesson and never eat the same upalatable bird twice).
Some people never serve a meal of their observations at all, lest they be forced to confront leftovers. Our culture is fascinating: Whom do we brand a loathesome hypocrite--and who is merely approvingly "flexible?" No, I don't think people are capable of real change (see, I haven't really changed)--but I do think they can watch shrewdly, keep an eye on the inventory, keep moving the dry bits to the back of the platter and just pray that won't be all they have left by the time Bob Tuschman gets to them in line. Keep on pushing the very best of the good stuff they've got to the front of the buffet.

And if you can sing? For goddsakes--break out your Texas Tendergroins and serve it forth!

Kudos, Lisa. You might turn out to be the master of the conversion oven.

[photo credits: 1. crown roast: flickr creative commons-lance36y; 2. Lisa: FN; 3. crow: WikiMedia CC, nat'l wildlife/public domain]

TEAT FOR TAT part I: BE A LOVE & PASS THE CHEETOS, BRAD PITT

2008-07-20T01:11:00.003-04:00

With the recent, two million-dollar birth of the Jolie-Pitt twins, I think it's time to indulge in a little junk-food. The bloom's barely off the placentae (yes, that's two of them with fraternal twins), and I'm about to be critical (as in "critical thinker," of course).

I can do this: I'm a mom. I'm about to introduce or bring you deeper into an uncomfortable subject (as if the word "placenta" is homey, and puddling-like), a phenomenon some call Mompetition, but I call: Teat for Tat.

(photo credit: John Stephen Dwyer)

I will admit that I rejoiced last year when the news leaked out that the Jolie-Pitt kids are allowed to eat (‘zounds!) ice-cream (and it’s not even organic!) for breakfast, and were spotted all over town with tell-tale Cheeto-dust clinging to their beautiful little mugs and MacLaren hardware. It doesn’t take CSI: Namibia to figure out the euphoric reaction I'm certain others must have shared. Frankly, it was a great relief to mothers everywhere to hear Angie’s not perfect (and of course, possibly negligent).

And, now that she's just popped with the twins (I was soooo hoping she and Brad would name them "Tigris" and "Euphrates," but I clearly lost that moms' group pool) I feel the time is ripe to crack open a Diet Dr. Pepper and criticize her--I mean--postulate (look people, you opened the door; the fridge light is on)

You will say this is just my irrational (or maybe entirely rational?) female loathing of Angelina Jolie talking. That she wronged the lovely, funny and perfect-skinned Jennifer Aniston too greivously for me to ever forgive her. That perhaps I have a husband who continues to believe she is utterly incapable of error or malice, as evidenced by some shoddy, unformed argument having something to do with...her cheekbones (her cheekbones!), and her willingness to walk into a minefield while pregnant to bring attention to unsafe conditions (and he's such a Republican). Perhaps I criticize her simply because she is so otherworldly/alien in her beauty.

Because, from the time we are Nehi to a grasshopper cookie, we are taught to compare ourselves to other women, to compare, contrast, fall short and writhe like bugs on the end of a pin for it. This never becomes so apparant as when we ourselves become mothers. It all seems to start out innocently enough, with the milk of human kindness ([insert fellow, sleep-deprived yawn]"Are you nursing or aren't you?"), but the expiration date is quickly reached. There has never been such sour fodder for venomous comparison as the subject of what we allow our kids to eat. ("WHAT?! She gave them hot-dogs?! Regular, cured, nitrate-filled HOT DOGS!")

I don't care what you say, lady. Unless you have an unlimited Trader Joe's Platinum card (and someone to do that time-sucking shopping, cooking and cleaning up for you), you will occasionally lapse into doling out a little sanity-saving junk-food here and there. Sure, the additives in the technicolor orange cheese and sour gummy sugar spell relief (for you) now but hypoglycemic disaster (for your little ones) later, but you will not care. My friend, EDAMOMMY is working on a rabbit cage water bottle-model dispenser for Skittles for her 4 year-old, which will allow her to continue to work from home, while my friend JT shrugs and simply refuses to be sucked into the mompetition, the madness, the pathological competition surrounding food, females, friends.

She applies The Jolie Decree: “If it’s good enough for Shiloh, it’s good enough for my kid.”

I have a lot to learn from these women.

I love JT's statement!!: It sums it up. If Shiloh's eating Cheetos, we are ALL off the hook. In perhaps the oddest entry to-date, I have now supposed that the normalcy of Angelina Jolie can increase your mothering confidence. After abusing her relentlessly, every chance I get.

Yes, well...before you feel too sorry for her, or start relating to her in any sort of permanent life-changing way (remember, childbirth does make us bond for a little while), understand that her breasts are surely currently residing in some sort of million-dollar nursing bra equipped with a zero-gravity chambers in the cups, being pumped with pure oxygen like Michael Jackson. Perky, flawless, eternal.

Oh, cry me a river of Yoohoo.

THE NEXT FOOD NETWORK STAR…CAN LISA CHANGE? : SNAP PEA OUT OF IT!

2008-07-15T00:15:00.006-04:00

Lisa, who has been described as Vulcan, inhuman, extreme, and impossible for viewers to relate to, is going to win The Next Food Network Star, and no one is happy about it except Lisa. It’s completely unfair--and it’s probably rigged--which makes it 56 times more likely to happen.
Of course she will win, solidifying my fears that success is almost never merit-based, but rests on a number of other random factors, including iconic hair, inflexibility, the snake-like female ability to cry on cue, and complete predictability. [photo credit: Food Network]

From the very first episode, when contestants were asked to distill their “culinary points of view” for the camera, where she stridently plucked about 80 props & ever so carefully arranged those severely theatrical bangs to “peek out” beneath her toque, before underwhelming and perplexing Alton Brown with her unintelligible and completely contrived diatribe on “something I like to call the 4 Cs,” I felt an emotion I can best describe and instantly recognize as loathing.

I can only imagine the casting call for this thing. Out of the haze of FN-wannabes, the Dallas Diva emerged, likely grinding the heel of her 4-inch peep-toe pump into the eye of the articulate, funny and talented chef she had just stepped over to be seen. The producers zeroed in on Lisa, realizing ‘Holy Smokes, people are going to hate her, this is fantastic!”
I wonder if she realizes we have all been set up to hate her, or if, as a true batter-ladder climbing contestant, she doesn’t really care, as long as she wins.

You don’t have to watch the show to understand what’s going on here. In fact, my own viewing is spotty, my true motivation transparent: Bobby Flay hosts this culinary version of Survivor. The formula is universal: amass a combustible, rag-tag group which cuts across the viewer demographics, with a single prize in mind (his/her own Food Network show), then watch them scrabble toward that goal under the threat of episodic elimination.
If Lisa keeps blowing it, is continually criticized for her inability to relate to anyone else (the judges, other hosts, contestants, small children), and her stuff isn’t all that great (yes, I’m pretty sure I CAN cook better than this—and would likely win a personality Throwdown betwixt us girls?), why, why, WHY is she still in the mix? [photo credit: Xatufan]

Continuing to fall short in the interpersonal aspect of the challenges—pretty important for a television host, no?-- it would seem she is on a main course with disaster—certain to be booted off next…and yet, she is one of the final four.
She has been told over and over again she needs to “tone it down,” soften, the judges expressing this concern: Does Lisa have a middle ground? So we wait and we watch and the question looms, “Can Lisa change?”

Snap pea out of it!—of course she can’t change—no one is capable of real change. The irony of our rehab-obsessed society is that we are not interesting in the “hab,” we’re merely interested in the “re.” Advised that she must change her abrasive, bossy, severe, QUIRKY personality, what does she do?—she changes her outfit. She dons a “softer” Peter Pan collar, a “softer” shade of yellow, a less dominatrix-y shoe, and hopes that changes her unapproachable affect…which it does, for a few minutes. No one is fooled. The judges aren’t mollified, and neither are we.

Still, they won’t eliminate her, and I sadly predict she will win the whole enchilada. Because, while people loooove a redemption story, what people like even more is a failed redemption story! “She just couldn’t do it;” “He started drinking again after 20 years;” “I can’t believe she went back to him.”

Of course she can’t change enough or in any lasting way necessary to become a Food Network icon, which is exactly what we’re waiting for: that defeat to register on her face, publicly. The humiliating self-knowledge of one’s limitations made public—we have a sad, collective fascination with that.

This means good ratings now, but might very well backfire on FN, long-term. Has anybody at FN thought this through to its conclusion, to what happens after they make her the winner? Um…they have to give her her own show. It'll be like the (first time) Oprah lost the weight on Optifast, and after the initial gawking was over, viewership dropped off dramatically (except people checking back to see if she’d gained it all back) I mean, what could they actually do with her if she won? Does anybody really want to tune in to watch her massacre interpersonal relations as a host? We’re not talking fun-to-be-insulted-by (Bourdain), or grazing what is nearly ungraspable intelligentsia for most guests (Mario)—we’re talking irritatingly, gratingly, just plain clueless about other human beings.
Isn’t that the definition of an “anti-host?”

What distinct role would a show hosted by Lisa be filling at FN? Sacrificial lambchop? We already have Giada’s boobs, Paula’s accepting Aunty Emness, Duff’s skateboard genius, Alton’s academically amusing desseminations, and Bobby—good Lord, that man is the workhorse and resident stud of that place. [by the way: for all the guff it takes, I do not disrespect FN, because it is still a really, really great concept. Hating it would be like despising the public school system, just because it’s not so hot right now.]

The reason they have kept Lisa on TNFNS is also the central problem for FN if she wins: she is the antagonist. If Lisa had her own show, she’d have to be a protagonist. By definition, she CAN’T win ,because she could never exist outside of this role as antagonist. And if you start looking at this thing as a Neil Simon play, Adam is the clear winner.

If she wanted to win AND be successful long-term, she’d have to start doing prat falls right now, and reacting in some new, unexpected ways…She'd have to change--which of course, people never do.

Take everything I say with a fat grain of grey salt, because one could argue I’m just hotly blackened and blistered by her proximity and not my own to Bobby Flay. Presenting my dish, I might well stammer like a dullard, unable to speak, understanding that something of mine would be going in Bobby’s mouth.

Whether or not I can cook better than Lisa or be more charming on camera or DESERVE to be on this show simply because of my flagrant adoration of food (and Bobby Flay) is completely irrelevant. Whether it’s all rigged or she’s got those judges in some kind of Vulcan mind-meld is also irrelevant. [photo credit: J.Ranney]

I wonder what Julia Child would say (WWJS?) were she alive—she’d make a quick reduction of Lisa, I think. My fantasy is that in the final episode of TNFNS, the contestants are asked to revisit their culinary points of view, their Mission Statements. Will it come back to this, I wonder? Will it come back to haunt them?—it should. It should for each of us.
In this ideal episode, the spectral incarnation of JC interrogates Lisa: “You’ve given us some gobbledy-gook about making fine cuisine accessible (by..being…um... inaccessible? ) Do you feel you’ve achieved this? Are you your persona?” We should all have a handle on our personae...think about that Mission Statement and how it matches up with what we do...whether the cameras are rolling or not.

This all sounds suspiciously like the sour grapes of wrath, and I will say it so you don’t have to: I didn’t enter this contest, so how can I be rankled by who wins?

Because I can. Because I am sick of the wrong people getting the right things, having the path ahead open right up for them, while most of us slog along for eternity with our machetes. It’s just so…predictable. I am sick of poor writers becoming BlogHer stars or published novelists, crummy bands dominating the radio, and these people being shoved down my palate as “all that’s out there.” And what lies beneath? Or a little farther back in the Google rankings?...we will never know.
Wilco says it much more succinctly:

The best song will never get sung
The best life never leaves your lungs
So good, you won't ever know
I never hear it on the radio
Can't hear it on the radio
[from "Late Greats"]:

I'm so weary of the same old people winning in life, repeatedly, never doubting that they completely and totally, absolutely deserve it. Mostly, I can complain because I hate when something sub-par wins by default. “There just wasn’t that much to pick from…” Nonsense! I think we should have an immediate write-in ballot (I volunteer myself, if we can get Bobby to wait in the other room, or at least have a supply of hyperventilation pre-empting paper bags on hand).

Dying to know what my culinary POV is, eh? I can name it pretty easily: “Meat Lust & Food Metaphor."
Can you?
To be fair, which life is not, I didn’t have to do it on camera.
Now, if only Bobby had been sitting on that prop table…

ON RESTRAINT: THE FINAL STRAW(BERRY)

2008-07-09T08:17:00.008-04:00

Clearly, Thoreau didn't have children, and certainly not toddlers.

"When I used to pick the berries for dinner on the East Quarter hills I did not eat one till I had done, for going a-berrying implies more than eating the berries. They at home got only the pudding: I got the forenoon out of doors and the appetite for the pudding."

-Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

photo: We found this curious specimen, one of the few we did NOT eat "a-berrying" for obvious reasons: "Get that crazy thing back to the house! Mind the de Bergerac, kids!'

Whuwhuzzah? For a great thinker, what was Thoreau thinking? Not eat a single berry while you're berry-picking? Lest this dissolve into a rant upon those without children right now, feeling my particular agonies, let me say my real concern in this passage is seemingly needless self-restraint around non-harmful substances. Misspent self-control (spoken like a true glut).

Am I the only one who "wants to see Thoreau's good points," but often finds him....um...inaccessible? Ironically, a bit unreasonable? Ditto on his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson--whose tone I find only slightly less hectoring at times.

Excuse me, did I just call the forbears of Transcendentalism hectoring?

It is awfully funny that "rhyming with 'furrow' is the absolute first bit of Wikiness we see on Thoreau's page, especially in light of this photo--If ever there was a brow-furrowed male candidate for the Botox injections he have surely rejected had they been available, it's this fellow. This gives rise to my suspicion that while nature is certainly more "natural," it doesn't always look more comfortable or appear more rewarding, externally.

photo credit: Wikipedia Commons/public domain

I think I like Thoreau in theory, much more than in print. Note to book group: "I tried!" Perhaps if I spent more time diligently getting past his dry maleness, his over-intellectualization of passionate subjects...and less time looking for thematically relevant foods we could serve at the discussion.

I did find it fascinating to learn that, while working in the family pencil factory, Thoreau actually refined/rediscovered the process later robbed of him and patented by Nicolas-Jacques Conte--yep the Conte crayon.

I wonder if Thoreau was bitter.

I'd have shoved a whole handful of berries in my mouth, post-haste.

THE 4TH OF DENIAL: THE CARPET PICNIC

2008-07-05T06:03:00.000-04:00

All hope of holiday fireworks dashed, we opt for the indoor picnic. It’s just too soggy to strap everyone into the Eurovan and head out now; it's almost 8 pm and it's been raining for hours.

Surely, surely the county won’t be dim enough to try to set them off, and will reschedule the whole shebang for Saturday? (I will find out they went off, as planned). But I am the mom, I make the call. (photo credit: Zuen)

There are always carpet picnics. Sure, that sounds just plain wrong, and you may be vaguely ill, envisioning toddlers with their arms tied behind their backs, eating egg salad directly out of the carpet nap (and who crashes carpet picnics--carpet mites?). But The Carpet Picnic--the ultimate parental concession to carefree fun, but also practicality, perfect climate, and realism--is an extremely useful concept to have handy at all times.

We can put on The 1812 Overture, right? The living room floor is cozy with a quilt, the kids are just happy they are up late with a license to eat...anything. Dark Chocolate M & Ms, chips, cherries, pickles, the usually verboten undiluted happy-juice. We can actually see some of the fireworks from the darkened windows, going off over a field. Given where we live, the sounds could be attached to those, or to the simple trigger-happiness of the good ole boys.
(sunnier days, below)
Sylph looks at the bottomless, green foil bag and begins reading to me: “Organic Sunflower Chips, 100% whole grain. French Onion flavor." [Crunch, crunch, happily…then thoughtfully, as an aside]..“They’re not really French, you know.”

It’s not easy having a 4 year old who can read everything—from your doctor’s orders, disaster plan and e-mail, on through your prescriptions. It’s equal parts charming, horrifying, awe-inspiring and confounding.

I lie back on the quilt for a second, trying to figure out how deep she is being with these kinds of assessments. Well, she's already smart enough to know she's being handed something other than what's being billed. Huck, at two, recognizes all of the colors as pink or black (at best) at this point, and is just happy to be handed something messy and stay up late. Everyone seems unscathed. [crunch, crunch]

Oh, little girl. You are My Sun Chip, My Only Sun Chip.

They're not really French, we are not really sitting under the fireworks, but this is almost like being there (as a parent, I feel like I’m "almost there" a lot). And when the lights stop popping, the CD is over, we are dry and sleepy and it's three steps to the newel post. This was a good decision.

When hard-boiled life gives you green-tinted yolks, disguise it all with chopped pickle and whip up a plate of deviled eggs. When it rains, stay in--but really, really enjoy staying in.

That's the trick, I'm thinking. Embrace the back-up plan; make it your own.

WHEN LIFE HANDS YOU GALL, MAKE A GALETTE: (GANESHA GALETTE, REMOVER OF OBSTACLES)

2008-06-13T01:25:00.001-04:00

Oh, Ganesha! Remover of Obstacles! Worshipped by Hindus, Buddhists and beyond--what's not to love about dear, reassuring, pot-bellied, elephant-headed Ganesha? Lord of Obstacles, beginnings and intellect. [painting: Dubost, circa 1730]

Oyster Mushrooms look elephant-earesque, don't they?

OBSTACLES: Recognizable because they're common to us all, these obstinate sows in the road can generally be tolerated with a good-natured, if sometimes fake-it-till-you-make-it: “Oh well, these things happen,” “Some people are just clinically insane,” or my favorite catch-all ,“That’s why God made OxyClean.” Plus the fervent hope that the frozen donkey wheel of karma will start turning sometime painfully soon.

You know how it goes: The freezer conks out with a stainless steel gasp, at the precise moment you take possession of a dressed, butchered elk. The pan boils over in a sudden scummy bloom, out of nowhere. The soufflé deflates like a skimpy tire over a Schlitz can, and the oven preheating for a dinner party emits an acrid “off “smell, revealing for the guests a forgotten plastic-handled pan stashed in there days ago to soak off some pedestrian hamburger grease.

You discover an ugly gash in your professional, non-stick Calphalon, leaving you to rhubarb the day you relied on someone else to stir the pot with a thoughtless metal utensil of destruction. Reliably, during every important phone-call, your toddler finds a previously undiscovered box of ball-bearings, chocolate sprinkles, fish food, unpopped popcorn or 5-pound bag of sugar to upend on the kitchen floor you’ve just finished washing with expensive, non-chemical cleansers intended to preserve the life you now want to cut short, or at least feel an equal pain. It’s your birthday, and the 90-pound, Janus-faced hostess of the tony restaurant you'd pinned your hopes on purposefully shoots you a look, then smilingly hands your table to a party which strolled in after you, without a reservation…
And there’s nothing you can do. About any of it.

We all encounter small, vicious people and moments. Sometimes it feels like the world is made up of these (for perspective, note I started writing this on Friday the 13th--weeks ago).

Yes, obstacles--in isolation or staggered over a week--can be borne. But dammit, sometimes I want to kill that flippant little Morton’s Girl [photo by toytoy] because when it rains, indeed it often pours.

Of course I believe in taking responsibility, that we "bring certain things on ourselves. Listen, if you’re chump enough to fill up on the hush puppies and French fries at the all-you-can eat crab-legs buffet, keep on eating despite a gnawing pain in your lower quadrant, then have to walk around the parking lot for two hours until you un-bloat enough to fit behind the wheel, don’t come cryin’ to me.
But how about the times you’re just minding your own business, eating the safe, non-mayonnaisey stuff of life, thinking you’re doing some good by taking steps to the pure, introducing more leafy, green vegetables into your diet, when WHAM! you’re gripped with an agonizing food-poisoning which lands you in the hospital? Three times in a week?

I’ve come to believe that neither obstacles nor successes (“breaks”) are evenly apportioned. That's just how it is. There really are different kinds of people and trajectories, three, actually:

1. “Prime-time Drama People”—these are people who generate craziness, chaos and interject Redi-Wip ACTION into the world's vacuums, often in the absence of their own talent, attention or happiness/unhappiness. Dangerous, but, well initially, fun. Unfortunately, not always immediately recognizable.

2. “Evening News People” (aka “Dump-truck people”)—simply, people stuff happens to—they win contests, lose half their body-weight, get diseases, overcome diseases, are backed up into by dumptrucks full of melons, and accidentally meet celebrities or are mortifyingly de-pants by their toddlers in line at Target with equal likelihood.

3. Free Paper People”—people who faithfully, almost journalistically--and this is key!--evenly post to every aspect of life: Weddings, funerals, home closings, restaurant openings, boat christenings. Their lives feel perfectly apportioned, with very little that’s shocking.

Now, which do you think I might be?
Sigh, I have come to accept that I am a Dump-Truck Person (there really is someone referred to as “Dump Truck Kim,” by the way). I used to think it was overly dramatic, or feared I was exaggerating, to think my life just doesn't follow the same chronology as other people's. Not simply a matter of "When it rains it pours"--when it comes to my course, there is monsoon and there is drought—very few plain sunny days at 75. LBD recently conceded: “I used to wonder about your trajectory…but more stuff really does happen to you—good and bad.”
Could it be, as she suggested, the pendulum swing which necessarily comes from trying lots of things? If you don't start a small business--you won't have a small business learning curve; if you don't have a website, you'll never see how hard it is to make it work; if you don't enter contests, you'll never be rejected. And well...if you stay out of the art-therapy room at the asylum, you will surely bypass some of the craziness, but you might miss some real innovative moments.

I like being a Dump Truck Person, for the most part, I really do…but sometimes, even I reach an intensity-threshold and I just need to pull to the side of the sow-strewn road for a little bit. And if you're going to indulge in some self-care/sulking, there is absolutely NO better way to do it than with carbs (You can’t un-spill the whole milk. You CAN scald it and add it to potatoes.) It’s time to make: The Ganesha Galette.
GANESHA GALETTE:

Yukon Gold potatoes, scrubbed, sliced to thin rounds, parboiled
baby Vidalia onions, chopped
olive oil, butter
oyster mushrooms, softened in hot water
flat-leaf parsley, cilantro
dried coriander
salt, pepper
PS: I also threw a rutabaga in there to represent the bitter-sweet. And really, how down can you be if you start saying the word "rutabaga" out loud and often?

A "galette" is a term which generally refers to flat little cakes, often sweet--but it also refers to a flat, cooked presentation of ingredients like this. Spiraled tightly in a pan, cooked on one side, the hope is that the galette will hang together when it's de-plated, crispy side up. You really should be able to cut into the cake, like a pie, and serve it--but as you can see, my galette was a bit more "free-form" than than that. It still tasted great, and the buttery-crisp potatoes, tender on the inside, were just the thing to improve my mood.

Attempting this (or any other) galette basically involves slicing the potatoes (and rutabaga) very thin (mine was still too thick), and laying them in a spiral with the other ingredients in a heavy skillet which has been buttered and oiled. I had quickly sauteed the mushrooms, onions and bloomed the coriander first, and alternated that mixture with the potatoes. Then you sort of drizzle the whole thing with oil, salt and pepper it, and then stand there on a low-medium flame while it cooks, pressing the whole thing down periodically. The problem is a lot of guess-work (ah the future, the unknown), as you can imagine. You really can't tell what's going on on the bottom of the pan without disrupting the whole thing, so you cook it on low, and pray the potatoes will be cooked through but not burn the bottom (this is how the cheat of parboiling saves you).
When the potatoes test done, turn off the heat, let cool slightly and invert on a platter. Top with chopped parsley, cilantro, more salt and pepper.
If the galette cuts into tidy wedges, GREAT, if not...just accept that your expectations have been thwarted, and use it as an excuse to eat directly off of the platter (or out of the skillet).
There is no obstacle you can't eat your way through. No discontent in the absence of evidence!

THE HERBAL BIRDBATH: TO RE-INVENT IS EVEN BETTER THAN RE-USE

2008-06-06T15:44:00.001-04:00

Okay, it's a soapdish, I'm sure (I think I'm sure). But something about these little birds intrigued me, and my love of using something for other than its original purpose, well-documented.

I filled it with ice-water and left my herb cuttings here for almost a whole day while I flitted in and out of the kitchen, working.

Something restrained and almost Asian in the glaze on this piece, the birds' expressions, which reminds me of my grandmother.

I was a little shocked at how perfectly they held up, which allows for the possibility there is something nefarious in the glaze, "preserving" them?...

Listen: my kids will eat herbs by the handfuls; I'm not questioning it. Chive-breath on a 2-year-old is actually strangely inoffensive.

OBJECTS OF MY CONFECTION, part 1

2008-05-30T08:55:00.003-04:00

There are many things I love and most of them are not sweet, literally or figuratively. I have a simple aversion to objects, concepts, colors and people that are cute, or sweet or too, too blechy-silly-girly.

In my business (and infant and children's apparel would certainly be the logical place for cuteness/sweetness, if ever there was one), I have tried to avoid anything close to cute. I take the stubborn 43 extra steps necessary to hand-mix an ink I call "Cha-Cha Pink," which is a very warm, non-Pepto, non-girly hue, and favor visuals like Anvils on onesies.

And, well, I can't tell you how many arguments I have had with people over my teeth-grinding, vitriolic insistence that dreaded symmetry--so often found in tandem with cute and sweet things-- must be eradicted from the earth.

That being said, there are a few things which might fall into the cute or sweet paradigm which even I cannot resist.

One is my own child prancing with dirty feet in these tutus we made together (letting a 4-year-old determined to "help" pin 10 yards of tulle?--not intrinsically fun. You must choose to be joyous above aggravation for the greater good, in that one).

Another is a Floating Island Dessert, the kind with the crazy-beautiful Spun Sugar.

"A floating island is a French dessert consisting of an 'island' of meringue floating in a "sea" of Crème anglaise....It is prepared from whipped egg whites, whose chunks are briefly cooked, and then scuttled into vanilla-flavored custard cream." (Wikipedia)

Aside from the fact that I just plain LOVE the word "scuttled," what's not to like?

The spun sugar crown on this floating island (oh, Martha) is made with beeswax from ebeehoney.com ( a site with all kinds of unbelievable, bee-borne things I covet). It's like a plate of delicate live power lines down; it's gorgeous. But other Floating Islands I've encountered with the sugar are equally, eerily intriguing--and can lure me to otherwise neglected dessert.

I think both of these--the tutu and the wild, spun-sugar island--meet the same criteria, blowing mere cute or sweetness out of the creme anglaise:

A little wild, fragile, asymmetrical, exact results unrepeatable. Much more impressive than the sum of its parts (eggs, cream, sugar, tulle, patience)

Sweet, but not too sweet,

Dirty feet.

Trick-or-Treat!

STRAWBERRY SEASON: PICK YOUR OWN FLASHBACK (and Brown Sugar Ice Cream with Strawberry-Rhubarb Compote)

2008-05-24T07:02:00.004-04:00

My sister and I grew up picking fruit--we weren’t migrant workers, but we developed a joint-popping, sun-burnished savviness for each crop and season; we knew our way around. My father’s cousins in St. Louis had a farm and there were treks out there, an orchard. My grandmother was seemingly always back from a walk down the mountain, or abruptly stopping the car and disappearing down an embankment, returning cradling blackberries from some secret copse of hers in a hammock made of her shirt-tails or her palms. And it seemed a summer of picnics, adventures and crabbing couldn't officially start without strawberry-picking. When it comes to strawberries, it’s Pick Your Own Flashback.

Most immediately, it speaks to me of the wonderful, structured, yearning things my father did with us on weekends, before it was “really okay” for divorced dads to just “hang out” with their kids during visitation. It’s why today I have a fondness for college lacrosse, astronaut ice-cream, museum-quality air-conditioning, marble and paper documents. He might have splayed on the burnt-orange shag rug while we girls diligently tried to watch a Terps game with him (nodding out on roughly four occasions per year for a total of 37 minutes of desperately needed sleep), but he spent real time with us, and this is a very good thing.

A strawberry-picking memory smells of Coppertone, dirt, jet-fuel (possibly the same day or merely stored on the same synapse as the memory for a Blue Angels air show), and the half-eaten fruit cast off by some wasteful picker before us, crushed underfoot and now picked up by a slight wind. It sounds like a stake-body truck bumping down a dirt road and echoing over the ruts, a tractor starting up and vibrating in the distance, a strawberry hull twisting and suck-popping out of its body with your teeth. Picking is a gentle tug, the exact pressure needed to get a berry off the vine without crushing it. It’s dusty hair parting, bringing a warm berry almost subconsciously to your lips with stained fingers, a little grit.

Strawberry memories also include the post-picking events, invariably involving the current blond incarnation of “my father’s girlfriend.” Now happily re-married for many years, he cut a dashing Magnum PI-esque swath through the late 70's/early 80's (including the heart of my 4th grade teacher, who was not blonde but looked exactly like Crystal Gayle). We shared him on these weekends, sometimes grudgingly, sometimes sufficiently distracted by the mysteries of a new, skyline apartment, the not-my-motherness, the grown-up things we were allowed to do as my father attempted to meld an adult life with that of a parent (which I now have great respect for, for all of us). So I have dribs and drabs of canning knowledge--but not enough I won’t have to Google this year--based on these intersections with grown-ups, my sister and I running in and out of the festive atmosphere of the kitchen, high on natural fruit sugars. I see strawberries plunked in a glass of champagne, buoying up, fizzing. A black and white speckled enamelware pot simmering with Mason jars. Pectin (what the hell is pectin? I remember thinking). A lethal pan of hot melted wax, terra-cotta colored rubber seals. Matte, brown-pink foam skimmed from the top of the gurgling pot with a wide metal spoon, a job I desperately wanted. I hear a sliding glass door open 30 floors up from traffic, and Ella Fitzgerald coming out of tall brown fabric-covered speakers. Metal jar tops being spun down and closed tight on the jam, with the dizzying strength of my father's huge hands.

So picking strawberries means many things to me, but it never occurred to me to be fearful. Today I have four apple trees, a pear tree, a gaggle of blackberry and mulberry bushes, a towering cherry tree. I have two small children and a 5-minute drive to an enormous pick-your-own farm. And I have a moms’ group—GOD LOVE THEM--that has recently been “concerned” about and “discussing” the pesticides potentially used at local PYOs.

We never had these concerns. The words "organic" and "free-range" were still distant. The extent of the"fear" instilled in me regarding food came from My Mother, the Realist (My Father was off pulling a Ferdinand-the-Bull, smelling flowers and possibly eating them, in addition to unknown nuts, berries and grasses). She uttered darkly glittering terms like “ptomaine”, “ salmonella” and even the simple, dazzling word “poison,” as she made a circular attack toward the chicken-ghosts on her cutting boards and countertops with a non-abrasive powder containing bleach (the smell of which still makes me feel safe, purified, despite what I know).

"Green" wasn't a movement or way of life!--it was simply an indicator of ripeness, a color to be healthily respected. The most sinister thing I ever considered with regard to picking fruit (before the moms’s group conversation) was The Dreaded Mullygrubs. She would shake her head as I ate another green apple and say, “Okay, that’s the 5th one. [Shrug] You’re digging your own grave, Yorick. You’ll the get The Mullygrubs.” painting: Franz Hals "Youth With a Skull"

I never had to ask her to explain that term. My Mother had a way of setting a term or phrase on the table, leaving no ambiguity, even if you could have no possible way of knowing what she was talking about (also, I think it’s instinctive among animals and humans--even small children--to be wary of copious amounts of possibly unripe fruit). I knew what I was risking. It didn’t stop me then (and it doesn’t stop me now). The Mullygrubs: that was the worst you could do to yourself or your offspring picking strawberries.

It was the first picking trip of the season the other day, the first tractor ride out to the field, first squat in the rows, first time brushing strawberry-leaves aside to expose every red gem. “Okay people," I said, handing out boxes, "we are looking for the red-reds.” Color-blind, or just impatient, two year-old Huck ate his impetutous share of berries with pink-to-white tips. The end with absolutely no color there yet, like a thumb pressing down hard on your palm, a whiteness devoid of juice. And still there were plenty of ripe berries, we ate so many, dark-red juices running down all our wrists. Both my kids stopped at exactly the same moment, and looked up at me with complete awe, looked down the rows of fruit, looks that said, "All this, for me??!! You're kidding!" I cautioned them not to step on the black plastic which keeps the plants warm, to "pick clean" by removing ripe fruit of every size, but I did not stop their hands on the way to their mouths and wash off the fruit. I didn't even consider it. And for the rest of the day, I observed them periodically squinting to the left with smiling concentration, suddenly understanding that they were remembering the trip, ferreting out endless, surprise seeds from fruit long-eaten in their new molars.

This is what I love about strawberry-picking. It can't be measured in pecks or bushels, because it's the sum total of what’s in your baskets and boxes, and everything you ate in the field--what the farmer fully expected you would eat—what you could eat. Everything you could stuff in your face, in fact. Everything you could remember. The only thing you can measure is what’s held in the ride or tired walk back from the field, before anyone weighs in. It’s an ultimately hopeful act shared by farmer, picker, grown-up and child.

Post-Picking Recipe: Brown Sugar Ice Cream with Strawberry-Rhubarb Compote

Brown Sugar Ice-Cream Recipe:
1 cup whole milk, very cold
½ C Dark Brown Sugar
1 T almond extract
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 C Whipping Cream, very cold

Beat the sugar into the milk two minutes, add extracts and whipping cream one more minute. Immediately transfer to ice-cream maker and continue with manufacturer’s directions.

I feel like this is a little white-sugar lie, if not a complete misrepresentation to say: “I made ice-cream.” I put some things together into the swirling belly of the electric Cuisinart ice-cream maker (which is on loan from my sister)—it did all the work. No rock salt, no cranking. Master a basic recipe, learn proportion, and a few quirky technique-things, and suddenly you’re the old-fashioned, double-dipping whore in the ice-cream parlor and a lady in the bedroom every man wants to meet. Once you get the basic recipe, pie in the sky’s the limit (coming in second to this is a lavender-buttermilk recipe—essentially the same recipe with white {gasp!} sugar, buttermilk over whole milk, where you soak fresh lavender to get the essence. Don’t make my first-time mistake and eagerly put fresh, chopped Hidecote leaves the first time…)

There is just too much for me to say about rhubarb—my affection for it runs as deep as the horseradish root. I have many, many rhubarb memories and its own post is due here soon. Yes, you can use this technique to make a simple strawberry compote, but you’ll rhubarb the day you dismissed this gloriously tart rhizome.

Strawberry Rhubarb Compote:

4 or 5 rhubarb stalks, scrubbed, chopped. Leaves discarded*
2 Cups strawberries, hulled, halved
One giant orange
Couple teaspoons dark brown sugar
Grated fresh ginger, if desired

Throw strawberries and rhubarb in a saucepan. Grate in some ginger root. Zest the orange into the pot. Juice the orange over the fruit. Bring to a simmer for about 5-7 minutes, stirring carefully until rhubarb is soft strands melded with the strawberries, trying to keep berries intact. Add a couple of tablespoons brown sugar and let simmer until the color deepens and it thickens up.

*Ironically, any poisonous threat of eating strawberries off the vine is offset by the very real danger of consuming rhubarb leaves, which are, simply put, toxic, whether they are treated with pesticides or not. Any resemblance to celery stops at the stalk-like appearance. These leaves do not add charming flavor, they add toxicity. The entire plant is a laxative, by the way—not lethal, but worth a warning.

MEAT: A LOVE STORY CONTINUES

2008-05-19T08:57:00.006-04:00

Awesome digital mastadon project by Dr. Daniel Fisher.

There has been simply too much meat-love making its way around this week not to share--even if it's not all Original Recipe Hoarfrost.

First, the seggue: the lovely, lovely egg, not technically a meat. Yesterday, I had brunch at The Old Ebbitt Grill before heading off to the museums (yes, I was trying to imagine preparing a mastadon steak). Though a sample of the mascarpone strata was indeed a cloud-like morsel, and the fried oysters over spinach & scrambled eggs sounded swoon-worthy, I went with my old fondness for poached eggs in Eggs Chesapeake (poached over crabcakes). They were picture-perfect, which you'll have to imagine, since I reserved the failing camera battery for actual family photos.

Apparently, the Australians top their burgeoning burgers with an egg, and often, hmmmm... beets. My vote is: medium-rare of course, poached egg of course, and (though I love a hot buttered beet root), would opt for beet greens w/ horseradish mayo. A delectable discussion at Serious Eats.

eggburger pic by Aussie, Neil Gould

Most interesting, meat-motivated clause in a rental agreement: The Little Bush Dog (herself a non-judgemental Vegetarian who still has occasional bouts of meat-lust weighing a Quarter-Pounder-with-Cheese-or-so, and whose previously discussed younger brother is nick-named "Meat") just moved two kids and a husband across several states, one reaaally big one (the meataphor here being that is a bloody, molar-grinding task if ever there was one) and is temporarily renting in their new town. The house comes with a crib (a plus) and a clause in the contract which stipulates that no meat may be cooked on the Vegetarian owner's grill (neither plus nor minus, just fascinating). Brother Meat and I will surely visit soon, as long as it's BYOH(ibache)!

photo by Sally Hamilton
And finally, in the week's great mystery, "someone" has been sending me MORE magazine (for women over 40), which is certainly not funny, but is a great magazine. Rebecca Adler's June book-pick and interview is Susan Bourette's Meat: A Love Story, one reporter's tryst with Vegetarianism (following a slaughterhouse, undercover story) and eventual return to "thoughtful" carnivory (I've got an Amazon-cartful of books on carnivory & on compassion in general right now. Thoughts to follow, but I think I'm a "compassionate carnivore"--I always say thank you and I do not listen to my lobsters scream). According to Bourette, who traveled the world & immersed herself in meat-eating activities and cultures ranging from cattle-roping in Texas to whaling with the Inuit for this book, the perfect meat is BACON, but "I've come to respect what the farmers, chefs, artisans and hunters are doing. One man's meat is another man's poison."

I like her thoughts. They re-affirm my belief that in meat, there lies acceptance of our humanity.

THE DUM DUM MYSTERY FLAVOR?: MOTHERHOOD

2008-05-15T04:28:00.002-04:00

I've decided I am the Dum Dum pop. We are one, and I am savoring the intricacies of the metaphor on my tongue.

The life-cycle of candy--as social indicator, enforcer, reward-system and icon--is proof-positive that whatever the prevailing wisdom is, it's only "prevailing" at best.

I remember a very, very old (possibly even Sassy magazine) article where Rosie O'Donnell and Madonna were kibitzing; the lithe, competent Madge instructing her poor, chubby disciple. The rock-candy-hard secret she exposed (likely along with one of her other body parts) was that if Rosie had to crack, for surely she would (I don't believe Madge was condoning this next for herself, but my theory is she was playing with some future, completely contrived identity involving empathy) she should just go ahead and eat an entire box of fat-free Hot Tamales, if that meant she would gastrically bypass one loathesome, fat-globulithic piece of chocolate.

Yes, those were the "fat-free" days--post leg-warmer, but pre-Kabbalah, pre-Atkins, South Beach and Starbucks skinny latte, somewhat concurrent with Oat Bran, but as always, a food-deprivation age powerful enough to inspire its own raging minions and, as always, "shoulds." At the time of this article, I was in that Sassy, pre-child, pre-child body phase where, had I known the ravages and insults which lay ahead, I would have enjoyed myself--and my body--a whole lot more.

It's all come full circle; it always does.

Now we're all supposed to be eating that same single square of dark chocolate every day for its anti-oxident properties. Fat can no longer be abhorrent if it's medicinal. It's not fat that's bad, it's just certain kinds of fat (oh I could write for days on females and fat). Now it's the sugar which is anathema. I would be willing to bet that today you could not convince Madonna to eat the sugar contained in a solitary, fat-free Mike and Ike, even if you dressed it up as a tantric enlightenment pill, a mere handful of which would promise a lifetime of a seamless British accent and gyrating proximity to Justin Timberlake.

I will be honest: none of that appeals to me either (except for the Justin Timberlake part), but that is because I have a two-decade greivance with Madonna over her vulgarity, and because sweets are one of the only things which hold little sway over my person. I am blessed or cursed with a knack for complete restraint around sugar. Don't put a Halloween bag of tequila in front of me, or mashed potatoes, because someone is going to the emergency room, but candy, eh?--I could care less.

I never had candy or soda as a child. My mother had me completely fooled into begging for something I called "cookies" which were actually sliced cucumbers, to the point where I would argue the definition with other parents and children in their own homes, preferring my version. That has to be one of the all-time most successful mother-dupes in the annals--and maybe it's one which led to my life of sugar-indifference, but I suspect it was motivated by my mother's own lack of interest in sugar...like most things, it's just plain DNA.

But it's not just me anymore, and it's a good thing I don't have a sweet tooth, because once you're a mother, that thing transmogrifies into a sweet fang which will turn on you in a rainbow-sprinkle second. Not only does your own body simply revolt against metabolizing sugar post-baby, but you may find you are unable to emotionally or socially process its implications either. You will be summarily judged an incompetent, uneducated and possibly downright abusive mother should you knowlingly let anything with an "ose" cross your child's lips, or fill a non-BPA sippy cup with a solution stronger than 25% juice. The use and misuse of the substance C12H22O11 is just another of the mind-boggling ways mothers judge each other. More arse in the arsenal (but that is another post).

But really, the abuse of giving sugar to a toddler or small child is only the abuse of ourselves. This is like the teacher taking recess away as a punishment (then when are you going to do grown up things like go to the loo, make copies or a phone call, genius?) If you doubt what I say, give a three-year-old a juice box and a ring pop, while you try to rinse a coffee cup. There is sugar in envelope glue, too--and you have just licked the flap on your own commitment papers.

Yes, I believe in watering down juice when we have it. Yes, I believe in reducing sugar (but fully believe Nutrasweet is ten thousand times worse). But I also believe in the use of the Dum Dum pop to achieve harmony--and to get the job done.

Case in point?--Little Boy haircuts. Two year-old Huck maintains a moppish coif which occasionally requires me to shape it like a hedge in front, and buzz up the back--all of which must be achieved in the time it takes to polish off ("a-one, a-two, a-three, CRUNCH!") a Tootsie Pop--or rather, a Dum Dum pop.

So, I have adopted the practice of plopping him in a chair, handing him a lollipop and letting the fur fly--which it does, then of course fuses directly to his sticky minicarpals. Yes, it's the Charlie Brown sucker in the leaf pile. And? Your point is? It appears counterintuitive, but it works for us.

So, he gets one Dum Dum (really, I've grown peas bigger than those things) per haircut per 6 six weeks. Which comes out to 8.666666 haircut bribery lollipops per year, but certainly does not take into account any other fruit snack, goldfish or buttercream frosting scenario of complete desperation on my part.

My sister is a fantastic mother, and she is much more relaxed around sugar than I am. But since I am a lover of devil's advocacy and on some level a masochist, here is an oldie but goodie from Kate at ACCIDENTAL HEDONIST. A list of foods and products containing high fructose corn syrup. Of course, the number of time Kellogg's is mentioned is simply aneurism-inspiring, and no one will be surprised to see Starbuck's Frappacino on THE LIST, but I actually find it makes me feel pretty good to know my kids have never eaten anything with "Lunchable" in the title (Why would you title something "like lunch?" This disturbs me. Like selling water called "Potables," or cars called "Drivables"). I'm not above it, I can only say it hasn't happened...YET.
Because if Forrest knew life was like a box of chocolates, Motherhood might be an ubiquitous bag full of these babies: the Dum Dum Mystery Pop.

From Wikipedia: "Dum Dums are made in about twelve different flavors; nine or ten of these flavors are classic flavors; two or three are cycled in and out. The "Mystery Flavor," present in every bag of Dum Dums, is a combination of two flavors in the bag. The combined flavors are random. This combination occurs because the production of Dum Dums is continuous--there is no stop between flavors. This practice results in the flavor combination."

The Mystery Flavor never changes or it always changes--depending how you look at it. Timeless, we still don't really know what the Mystery Flavor is, or even if we like it. After all this time, we still can't pin it down, or define it with complete certainty, or do it the same way tomorrow. Because, like Motherhood, it's constantly in motion, an endless reality borne out of need. Ignoble or not, that little magenta question mark comforts me as I tear off the wrapper.

This delinquent bowl of Criss Cross Apple Jacks might buy you enough time for a shower or blog post. If you're willing to pay the Piper.

TEMPUS VOLVO: (TIME ROLLS ON) AND THE QUEST FOR THE PERFECT POACHED EGG

2008-05-10T10:16:00.010-04:00

Geek alert! This whole post, with its emphasis on Latin, Brookstoney devices and the rhapsody on poached eggs is a geeky smorgasbord.

"Tempus Volvo" translates to: "Time Rolls"--but more accurately, it is the Latin phrase: "Time to Meditate Upon," for "Volvo" means to not only to roll onward, but also, fittingly, to meditate.

I meditate on this: in a hundred year-old house undergoing renovations, with toddlers and a small business, time doesn't march or fly, it rolls. It's not linear, it's not a perfect circle. Time is ovoid.

Wobbly, haphazard, Weeble-like. There's a lot of, ahem, "potential"--which is a clever and possibly self-delusional way of framing the excruciating act of simple waiting.

Waiting for someone to finish napping, waiting for someone to call back, for something to dry, something to cool, something to give. Nothing will happen for the longest time--life just goes along wonka-wonka-wonka, then in a so-far-beyond-Emeril's kind of BAM! it would make his furry head spin, it takes off down the driveway. I run feverishly after it, heels hitting hard against the pavement--slap! restrain! slap restrain!--desperate to catch up, but also to keep from going headlong down the concrete, and then, ZAG! there it goes skitter-slide to the other side of the driveway. Guaranteed. So I have to bank hard left to rescue it. The more I try to predict, the more I try to make it conform, the more elusive it is, the more unpredictable the results.

I don't know why I've got that child whose favorite present in months was this kitchen timer from Brookstone, a four year-old who justified her maniacal glee and looked at me like a dullard: "Don't you get it Mommy?, it's an egg timer." A girl who has always gotten down eye-level with bugs, who I recently found scribbling furiously in Sharpie with the back unscrewed from her CD player, creating a diagram for the new battery placement--but I do. And I embrace her curiousness. Today it's an egg timer, tomorrow it'll be something else, but I cannot contain her and I will roll with it, because this is not a cookbook-raised kid.

Look, every cookbook has a recipe for poached eggs. So why don't more people actually serve them--worse, why don't more people do them well? I adore poached eggs with a passion bordering psychosis, but but order them at a diner and you will be served at best a shrunken, stringy glob in a watery dish reminiscent of Eraserhead, at worst, your own head on a plate for asking too much of the vicious waitress who snarls: "We don't DO poached eggs." For myself, I've never figured them out at home. It should work, but my results are unpredictable--I wouldn't poach an egg in public. And that clever little Williams Sonoma gadget?--only makes matters worse for me. I don't want a perfectly round poached egg. I want it to be firm and solid, hang together, but delightfully non-conform to its pan-mates.

You've heard the egg described as the perfect symbol of life, but I believe the poached egg is the perfect symbol of time, events and our individual trajectories.

Today I came upon this recipe, accidentally I might add:
"For the perfect poached egg on toast: Take one very fresh egg. Set a pan of water to boil with a dash of vinegar. When boiling, turn down the heat and swirl with a spoon to create a vortex. Crack the egg into the middle of the vortex. Put on the lid and leave to simmer for eggactly (sic) 3 minutes. Meanwhile toast your favourite bread. At 3 minutes precisely take out the egg and place carefully on toast. Add freshly ground black pepper and sea salt...
recipe & above photo by John Evans of THE TIPPING POINT

THUD: "When boiling, turn down the heat and swirl with a spoon to create a vortex. Crack the egg into the middle of the vortex."

I have never seen a recipe espousing this method! Conventional recipedom has always advised sliding that egg into the water as close to undisturbed as possible. In addition to following a recipe, stifling disruption, attempting to squelch the free-form nature of things, keeping my arms inside the car and waiting for it to come to a complete stop...is against my own basic inclinations. So why have I been trying to do just that lately, and then wondering why I'm not happy with the results?

Maybe this is what I've been missing. I've been trying to keep it all together, fight my nature, eliminate the eddy. At some point, you not only have to stop fearing the vortex, you have to welcome it, and stir the pot.

DUFF GOLDMAN: A BUCKET FULL OF FUNDANT

2008-04-29T23:11:00.018-04:00

I am having a devil’s food of a time coming up with anything even scantly clever to say after meeting Duff Goldman, and getting to spend some time inside his Emerald Charm City (CHARM CITY CAKES). My faithful pastry bag of metaphor is just plain clogged.

I could care less about cake—eating it, that is; it’s well-documented I am a savory kind of girl—but squint-grin-and a few strokes with his #10 offset spatula, and I find myself crumb-coated into a state of sweet, ravenous interest--and an uncharacteristic dearth of words--by The Ace of Cakes himself.

A staggering assortment of talented people are coming together across this city to birth a new, out-of-box breast cancer event grown right here, a giant give-back to address Baltimore’s own patient-needs. When I was asked to be a creative consult and advisory board member on this delicious vision to pull together MICA, The PEABODY INSTITUTE, BSO, the AMERICAN VISIONARY ARTS MUSEUM--and now Charm City Cakes--to build this novel confection of art, entertainment and fashion, I could see it: this is an event which needs a spectacular cake—or eleven (yep, Duff said eleven).

I had no idea what to expect from an initial visit to CCC, and never thought for a second that a cryptic “meeting with the design team” meant he’d actually be there, but sure enough, the big wooden doors in the stone building-face opened (very Scooby-Doo and the case of the Creepy Castle), and poof! Duff appeared.

I am a lover of things used outside their original purposes, working on the theory of The Right Tool for the Unexpected Job— and this is the place. I respect anything made to yield to or forcing you to yield to a new possibility, a new view—the one you fall happily ass-backwards into, like cake batter, its sudden knowledge closing over you as you disappear down in it like a spatula-head. Always, I am after that ineffable, fascinating ingredient which changes the whole nature of the dish, that surprise filling--and Duff is that embodiment.

Though I am food-centric, it is my 4-year-old Sylph who adores & knows more about this man than I do, having been granted the uber-cool preschool permission of staying up to watch the 9 pm premiere of Duff’s Chefography. You see, Charm City Cakes is part of the village it takes to raise my child. “But why not, Mommy? [arms over chest, stamp] Hmmmf—Mary Alice chews gum and she is much cooler than YOU.” “But why can’t we use the Sawzall? Duff loves the 'resiplickating saw.” “Mommy, what’s graffiti? [Vespa wheels turning], because it looks like a really good job for me.” And my all-time favorite quote from an emergent reader: “Why does Gee-off talk so slllooooowly? Duff is a fast-talker.”

Not just a fast-talker—a springform-launched, self-confessed ping-pong ball. “I’m like a ping-pong ball whizzing around the room. Zewp! Zip!” I’m going to say he’s more like 70, graffiti-covered ping-pong balls thwacking you in the forehead in quick succession, and as annoying as that could be, it’s reeealllllly fun to be around.

(Fondant Tube explanation by Duff, shoes by Rocket Dog)
In addition to vices and secret pasts, we all have a super-hero persona—and yes, his is “Bad-Ass Baker.” But that is one layer, which leaves at least six, subtle, Clark Kent layers. Without revealing Duff’s soft pudding center, I will give you two: #4:Philosopher, and #7:Shoe fanatic.
#7 is fortuitous, because the particular event is a shoe metaphor from every angle, from walking the Project Runway-esque survivor show, to the individually interpreted auctionable shoes, to the formal-wear with sneakers attire. Though Duff claims Docs push the soles of his dressiness-quotient, he has a bazillion pairs of athletic shoes of every make and model--almost.

As a 12 year-old boy in thinly-iced disguise, he desperately needs to add to a pair of Heelys to this collection—rue the fact the line maxes out at size 8 ½. Um, am I the only person who thinks he’s a shoe-in (ugh) to sponsor DUFFS shoes?

My tiers toppled when Duff gave me free reign to take pictures, as long as I steered clear of any licensed characters or monikers, or anything, um…marginal. (You do the recipe math: Pack thousands of square feet full of creative people and fondant. Some people might make body parts to amuse themselves. They might.) My brain is on fire with creative love: I miss teaching Kindergarten; this looks like my old classroom spewed through a rickety Spin Art—only much cleaner, in fact pristine, fastidious. Ranks of ribbon, jute, stickers of all sizes, gobs of color, color, color. Tubs of fondant, airbrush guns, miles of clean, cool silver rack. There’s something I Love Lucy meets surgical suite meets Heart of Darkness meets life-size Play-doh Fun Factory here.

The implied soundtrack is Orff jangled with Primus and an overlaying track of 1982’s Q-bert, and Duff shares it all, stopping our tour with a pensive goatee-fondle, contemplating various boggling phenomena: How do we teach Empathy? What is Celebrity? What is the meaning of Paula’s Party? (He recently filmed an episode of PP: the guests were Dionne Warwick, Clay Aiken, and himself. What the Duff!? What did they eat? What did they talk about? That had to be some crazy kind of graffiti-covered, butter-filled ten gallon hat worn by a Solid Gold dancer of a party.

Brains sufficiently hyper-stimulated, we returned to the drawing table, and I was prodded into sharing the creative on the cake-design concept from the event-end. It doesn’t take a rock-candy scientist to see the irony in pitching a creative idea to Duff, right? But I am telling you: it took mere seconds for the Food Network, The Ace of Cakes factor, to curl away in a Harry Potter-esque dry ice reaction, and he was encouraging my windmill hand-gestures with a generous rolling boil of enthusiasm:

Me, feeling insecure: “Are you sure this is okay?”
Duff, genuinely collaborative: “No, dude, go GO!”

Because Duff Goldman’s appeal and accessibility is exactly the same as if he were head fry cook (if said fry cook were a witty, dry, philosopher-cum-creative madman, with an infectious cackle). Of course, his take on the original design goes to eleven.

Most visually satisfying things in life have stark trade-offs. Ever seen a room full of people eating (non-Charm-ing, surely) black frosting? If it’s aesthetically spot-on, it’s almost guaranteed to taste horrible, metallic, turn everyone involved into tar-mouthed fiends, like poor, unsuspecting Francis falling for the trick piece of gum in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. Well, I couldn’t find the trade-off in Duff—and I’m always poised to find it. For those of you maddeningly literal types, this means that yes, the cake is really good: I barely got a couple of fingers in the box without losing a digit to toddlers, swiping a few test-crumbs of blueberry with lemon curd. And yes, it was not just good it was divine. For those of you who enjoy the moistness of metaphor, the cake is really good. These things they’re creating at CCC look awesome (Duff uses the word awesome a lot, and on him it is flat-out endearing), and there is really delicious cake under there you can sink your teeth into.

You’d think it would be natural for me to turn meeting him into my typical Hoarfrostian licked-beater allegory, but Duff is testing my deeper layers here. Like a cake-skewer to my core—he went in deftly and came out surprisingly clean. Surely you’ve guessed, dear reader, that according to the super-hero theory, even I, notorious Meat Mistress of Metaphor, can’t lasciviously eat steak 24/7, that despite turning my beleaguered past and neuroses into fun-food-fodder on this blog, the only “barstool” I’ve recently perched on has been an 18-inch Little Tikes number at my kids’ art table, and that my Bobby Flay obsession and celery-ribbing of Vegans is just good fun. REALLY.

It occurs to me: Duff is the process and the real product, as is fun. The fondant medium is gorgeous creative license--endlessly malleable, but ultimately (cake blasephemy?) incidental. Fun matters. The creative process matters. Empathy matters. And yes, a closet full of a happy, non-harmful obsession matters.

Call it tzedakah, call it karma, call it a crux to carry—maybe empathy is the surprise filling. It was a central goal in my kindergarten classroom, is now of fundamental concern in my parenting, is a defining factor in my business—and it is what compels me about creative, charitable events. Via layer #4, Duff gets that. Like the give-it-away, give-it-away, give-it-away now-ness of sharing this place, letting me take the pictures, hear the stories, it is an act of faith--an action. You can write it, paint it, build it, bake it. But you have to do something.
It’s serious and fun in Duff Goldman’s world and I am thrilled to the last bite I got to be there for a little while.

I know you're all waiting for the zest. You're expecting the Hoarfrost in me to say something incendiary like: if it weren’t for the insurance issues, and if Duff were made of marzipan, I would surely suggest we blow something up together and then devour him. But I can’t do that. If you want your celebrity food trollop--I mean dollop--you'll just have to wait for the next installment of the Bobby Flay Game here on HHF. (As if to mock me, Throwdown is on as I type this. Is it an accident or cosmic attempt to thwart me that the episode up is STEAK not cake?)

Bobby may have my tenderloin, but this guy's got me by the duff of my neck. My brain-stem, my empathy?--they belong to the Ace of Cakes.

GAIA CHEESECAKE W/ CANDIED GINGER CRUST OF UNREST

2008-04-20T09:05:00.060-04:00

(See the absurdly simple directions at the end of this post)
All human assemblies worth assigning energy are foodcentric, my book group is no exception. My taste-buds heel to my brain and I am like a dog: I must lick what I love.
"It's not your average book group"--this is not snobbery (which I'm certainly not opposed to). I actually mean markedly different, for better or worse, falling both well-above and well-below current averages for social eptitude, book selection trends, and the food offered at our gatherings, which became along the way, deeply thematic--from homemade guac and No Country For Old Men to Hellacious Blood Orange Tart with Midnight Crust for Dracula, in 60 Kitchen-Aid seconds.

A New Earth Cheesecake with Candied Ginger Crust of Unrest 4/17. I suppose "Tolle-house Cookies" were another possibility.

Mothers but not "mommies," we're no composed salad of Jennifer Weiner-wielding, Girlfriend-series clutching shells of pre-baby personality. The Let's Not Discuss Our Offspring During Group Time souffle occasionally falls, but is a policy nonetheless. Jodi Picoult is deemed anathema; she is viewed with the benign irritation of toast crumbs stuck in a rush seat, to the pure evil of say, salmonella poisoning. We are not (shudder) an Oprah's Book Club. Which is why the selection of A NEW EARTH--Oprah's latest fascination--was the Zebra Cookie of all Zebra Cookies.

I feel we should be concerned any time someone gets 500,000 people to join her "little" online book club and claims, in conjunction with ANE author, Eckhart Tolle: "We're out to change the world, folks!" Whoa. It feels to me like Oprah has just gassed up some kind of hideous world-wide mini-van, we're all going to the Harpoland Ashram, and I'm supposed to want to climb inside.

And let's be clear about "Oprah's Books." They are not her books, she did not write them. I had to admire that plucky Jonathan Franzen for not wanting her stamp on his masterpiece of mannerism, THE CORRECTIONS.
Frankly, Oprah's blessing on a book isn't the Big O I'm after, either.

Okay, so Oprah herself is probably not akin to ptomaine, but I wrestle with her pervasive grip on our culture. My personal conclusion is two-fold: her power cannot be underestimated and, as an entrepreneur I must contemplate her to be socially conversant.
But book groups are a bizarre phenomenon, and take these strange turns, a propensity shared with any group of women numbering greater than one. This is a group of super-smart, even intimidating women. But we're all...outcasts to some degree, fringe-people. The introverts who masquerade as extroverts--except when we don't have to. We've asked many people to join, but it is rare--and I am glad. I don't want more people to discover my masa-cheap hispanic market or join my book group.
Despite the number of women in a small space, there is safety and comfort in our book group. No one criticizes my time-management skills when I bring cheesecakes which look like planet earth. We fully embrace the duds or authors no one else loves. When it is your pick, it is your pick: warts, boils and carbuncles. Plus, since I am always up for and continue to suggest Anna Karenina, someone else's picks are great for forcing me outside of my comfort zone. I almost never read non-fiction, unless it's food and/or someone like MICHAEL RUHLMAN (and when it's both, a girl practically needs privacy, between his writing and his wife's photographs).

I tried to take it evenly, when, over home-made naan (they were NOT hockey-pucks, despite JT's insistence) and chutneys, my beloved, beloved SALMAN RUSHDIE was maligned, or I felt, sorely underappreciated and misunderstood. (Do not get me started on the evil Padma Lakshmi, who broke my old goat's heart, leaving him bereft. Yeah, now he's "just" the smartest man on the planet. Wait!--maybe I can angle to be wife #6?! ).

Even if you despise or feel discomfort with the upcoming selection (e.g. Sophie's Choice: "Damn. I'm not going to like the choice, am I?"), you can look forward to eating well, because when it comes to book group, it's "Eat together, Die alone," a LOST reference which makes me at least appear TV-savvy. [Wait a minute--is that a copy of THE FRENCH LAUNDRY COOKBOOK on Benjamin Linus' bookshelf? WOW--The Island IS a wormhole. If I were on that island, I would have to be an Other (with their mysterious proximity to really good food, clean sheets and book clubs) or have found my way off the island by the end of the pilot--lest I be forced to eat Dharma Initiative hash out of a can and learn to spear-fish through the projected 6th season. The only way living on the Beach might work for me is if everyone was immediately rescued "accidentally" leaving me with Dr. Jack Shepherd (he's a "fixer" he'd like me) in the Hatch with an unlimited supply of Dharma cans of beer.]

A New Earth was disappointing "but I'm glad we read it." We had a phenomenal discussion without merely and unsatisfactorily roasting the book. The problematic and not all that new earth-shattering reduction?: Ego is bad, attachments cause suffering, harboring the past or obsessing over the future will kill you. To which I say: Ego is responsible for many of the world's great works and certainly great meals; I am attached to my attachments--some of them bringing me insane pleasure; and finally, no KIDDING, but 24/7 mindfulness is just impossible and actually makes a person like me more clumsy.

Oh well, next month's book is The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime. I am not going to be silk-screening longitudal lines of chocolate syrup onto puff-pastry. Probably.

RECIPE AND PROCESS FOR GAIA CHEESECAKE WITH CANDIED GINGER CRUST: What's more ironic than revising a Cook's Illustrated recipe?
I almost never use a recipe, but I love cookbooks for ideas/ogling. Like a fling with pornography, cookbooks bring innovation & lecherous assistance to the day-to-day, year after year meat and potatoes of kids, mortgage, chicken. I've no interest in making America's Test-Kitchen of my life, but I appreciate those who'll try 65 versions of a recipe for me--especially if when it comes to my insecure realm: baked goods. This is adapted from the Cooks' Illustrated recipe (which is, yes..ironic).
All I did was add some finely chopped crystallized ginger to the crust, and some almond extract and three times the lemon zest to the batter.
The visual part of the cake is a ridiculously easy effect with disproportionate, almost unfair wow-factor. Though applied before baking, the color sits right on the surface, and while I had concerns the level of color would taste dreadful, it tasted like...cheesecake. No trace of food coloring bitterness, so I will ignore whatever those technicolor chemicals are doing to my insides.
SUPPLIES:
8-inch springform pan
pastry brush
green & blue food coloring
clean paintbrushes
hammer

Prepare cheesecake batter and pour into springform pan. Scatter drops of green and blue food coloring on top of the batter, swirl with a pastry brush until earthily delightful, but mindful not to lose the separate colors.
Bake according to directions. If you don't like your landforms and waterways, you can refine by hand-painting once the top of the cake is set (after first 10 minutes @ 500 degrees in this recipe).

All little girls need to go ACE OF CAKES on things at times. A hammer and curiosity lead to the perfect graham crust.

NOTE: I like my cheescake tall, dense and tart, with a pretty little crack like a shiver which indicates imperfection. Cooks' Illustrated gives 3 versions of this recipe, this one being for that dense texture, however...as Irony would have it, the time I actually follow a recipe (method-wise), I got something unexpected! This turned out super light and fluffy-creamy--which is fine, but not my true preference.

Also of note is that this is the only time in my life a cheesecake has not cracked. I figure that somewhere between the stratosphere and the mesosphere, the food coloring and swirling motion of my brush must have mystically sealed the earth's surface?

Am I the only dummy who has to re-measure my springform pan every time I use them?

To arrange platonic pan-measuring or a copy of the Cooks' llustrated recipe, e-mail me.

TODAY'S BACONUNDRUM:

2008-04-12T05:40:00.005-04:00

I am not being coy when I ask with complete brow-furrow:

Can Vegans accept blood transfusions?

Welcome to the reader-participation segment of our program. I encourage you to submit your own baconundrums.

supreme, thick-cut photo: Anna Moderska
For some truly magnificent photos of meat, see Anna's work for POLISH MEAT.

HUNG LIKE A HORSERADISH: WHO KNEW SOMETHING SO DIRTY COULD BE SO GOOD?

2008-04-06T08:19:00.033-04:00

Yep, that's a girl's best friend--the horseradish root--in all its nubby, primitive and externally misleading glory.
It's a far cry from the oft-spongey, pickled & jarred version you'll meet in the deli case. In a variation of "Even cold pizza is good," I am an addict; I will take it in a pinch and for some purposes* however, I place fresh horseradish root up there (or should I say down there?) with various other culinary mannas, nectars of the gods, blessings, boons and fabled elixirs.

In the distant past I knew a bartender who would see me coming, whip out the horseradish and immediately go out back to start coarse-grating. Returning with a lovely white mound at the bottom of a very deep glass, he'd squeeze in lemon juice, sprinkle with Old Bay (Baltimore, Hon) & enough Tabasco to sweat out A Case of You, wending around this piquant sculpture the most astounding Bloody Mary you've ever experienced. I'd like to think I was special, but I suspect I was just one in a long-line of the bar's horseradish-lovers.

Ginger and I also have this relationship--on the side of course.

I have decided to plant my own horseradish, ginger, rhubarb and garlic this year. A garden bed full of these tumescent pleasures (I will share the progress), which is why I bought this particular specimen. But it's a rapscallion of a root! Counterintuitive! I assumed I could save what appeared to be the rootball for planting, and reserve the shaft for delicious kitchen experiments. Well (I cannot believe I'm saying this, but fear it's unavoidable) I blew it. Why didn't I consult BERT first? Post-hasty-pudding research on horseradish cultivation showed me that the entire root needs to be inverted and planted--the ball-end UP and strands breaking the surface of the soil. GRRR. I might still be able to get something out of it.
No worries, my mother would say: There are always more roots in the bin.

But let me tell you what I learned from my destined-to-be-brief tryst with this individual:

Scrub it well before you peel and work with it--it's endlessly muddy and hairy.
Like ginger (a great wing-man for HR), it benefits from a quick freeze before cutting or grating.
I made a steroidal Tom Yum soup, folded it into crema fresca to serve with meats (also ignoble collards, asparagus and artichokes), and grated the rest into some cider vinegar (this will keep forever, but lose the bulk of its flavor quickly).
A live horseradish root is, um, BIG. You can't possibly use it all at once, so keep it in the fridge in plastic so it doesn't dry out, peeling up to only what you need and grating that off as you need it.
MY NEXT CONQUEST: Perfecting a recipe for a Horseradish Souffle...I'm envisioning something light, almost popover in nature, maybe with smoked gouda. To serve with..what else? MEAT. Recipe to follow.

Oh, baseborn horseradish, why do we restrain your plenum? So senseless for you to be condemned, mutilated and jarred, then meagerly stirred into treacle which doesn't doesn't suit you at all. Skull-achingly sweet cocktail sauce, a too-mayonnaisey-to-be-useful side for a tenderloin or roast, these are a misuse. Like putting a great ass in mom-jeans and keds.

When it comes to horseradish, She cried more, more, more.

*Yes, I saw Bobby Flay use it, somehow making even the vile and inviable, seductive.

RECYCLING VIRGIN

2008-04-05T14:21:00.011-04:00

Far more revealing than any neurosis, past addiction, genetic flaw or latent Republicanism has got to be this: I am a recycling virgin. It is 2008, I am 30-something with two small children who generate scads of daily, if not hourly waste, and I am just now in the game.
Image: Malene Thyssen

Is it "too late" to start recycling? I asked and immobilized myself with this question for years. Generally, I avoid anything I'm not in on on the ground floor and/or cannot be perfect at immediately. Is learning to recycle now like "taking up smoking"--an activity in which no one over the age of 23 could possibly engage?
Until recently, a guest's Oregon microbrewery, bottle-in-hand-query, "Do you recycle?" was met with either:

A) "Don't worry about it." (shrug and turn back to trussing, basting, or caramelizing something). Theoretically said guest could be impressed that I don't want to trouble her, and might assume I would go through my own trash later to separate the wheat from the chaff.
OR
B) The Deadly Eyeroll (aka, the stoic refusal to explain any of my more puzzling behaviors). As the hostess, I will say that I never had anyone challenge me onmy recycling habits. As the writer, I will say that I've rarely had anyone challenge me on The Deadly Eyeroll. Period.

I have mentioned that something began to change in me when The Pink Wolf was diagnosed with breast cancer. A desire to reduce the amount of plastic we use, recycle what we must, eat a few more vegetables, be a bit more cognizant. (note: NOWHERE did I say "Become a Vegetarian" or heaven-forbid Vegan).

And this is when I first encountered the venomous, wily specimen known as THE ECO-ELITIST.

Now, two of my dearest friends are, to put it mildly "recycling enthusiasts." I have seen both of these women offer to take the recycling for an entire dining room full of mothers and toddlers at Chipotle when the restaurant had no means. They have witnessed over four years of errant Diet Dr. Pepper cans hitting the inside rim of my stainless step-can, and as far as I know, there were never any plans for an Intervention.

In short, they are both good friends and neither belongs to this frightening camp known as "The Eco-Elitists"--a perplexing band of creatures, seemingly partial to moms' groups and the public eye--who appear to forget we all crawled before we walked to the recycling bin, and who can make a person such as myself, who is trying to know better and do better, feel very, very small. About the size of a plastic molecule. "You can't recycle the CAPS" someone said blisteringly of my pitiful yet impressive milk cap collection. (Eff you; I'll make pins and sell them on Etsy!)
I've said it before and I've said it again: change is downright exhausting--mostly for the people around you. Isn't it funny the way doing something positive, with the best intentions (the path to hell, silly!) can cause a veritable allergic reaction in those around you?

And once you've been initiated into the American Anti-Plastics League (The AAPL or "Apple"), which is spearheaded by these people, you must consider every piece of plastic a deadly threat to yourself and your children. Serve goldfish crackers in some of those mod little IKEA plastic bowls at your next playdate? You will be reviled as if you were serving a snack-mix of crack cocaine, crushed glass, lead paint chips and ball-bearings.

I hate the fact that I feel like a poseur with my new SIGG bottle, having tossed every plastic bottle in my fridge, looking upon them now with an unease reserved for black bubos spores. I would happily use glass, but I am a chronic klutz (day 2, and the $20 SIGG rolled out of my van while I wrestled somebody into a carseat, squashed ugly but perfectly usable on the sidewalk). I am embarrassed that I don't know "how" to recycle, which barcodes mean organic produce, the difference between PVCs, VCRs and PDA.

I am trying to think yogically about this. I believe that sincere intent is what's important-- as evidenced by years of entering contests without winning. I should not care what anyone else thinks. If the dreaded ego is mortally concerned with others' perceptions (of course, the ego is also responsible for 99% of world-humor, namely "people falling down"), then the real issue for me to consider is: how is this affecting me, and by extension, my kids?

My kids are fairly excited about recycling (because kids like change and also love hoarding and sorting things) as evidenced by Edward Scissorhands, who takes all of the paper out of the bin, cuts with wild abandon and leaves it on the pantry floor 18 times a day.

In the Relationship department, green is the color of stress. My big campaign has gone over like a sack of wet mice:

"I don't understand why you have to grab this from me--I mean, I'm going to take this trash out in a second anyway."

"My God, couldn't you at LEAST flatten it?"

When you live with an uber-conservative Eeyore McMolehill, who lives by such mind-boggling, unfunny & uncharming beliefs as: "Global Warming is propaganda,"Radon is a hoax," and "We can't recycle~it'll draw bugs!" this is destined to be one of those wars. Another composting dialect in the subterranean language of relationships.

Perhaps he feels like I changed the rules on him?

He thinks it's exhausting? HA! Here's a smattering of my brain-transcript: "Dammit, I can't remember--is it that 2,3 and 4 in the little triangle are okay, but not 1 and 7? What happened to 6? You mean I can't microwave these things because it leaches out..oogy stuff? OH CRAP: What about all those years of lonely Healthy Choice entrees and red wine out of an aptly named Solo cup? What about the yards of mac and cheese (shame on me--not even ANNIE'S organic mac and cheese!) my children have consumed, which was then stored in plastic--possibly reheated and then served AGAIN in plastic? Sweet Crap, What about Zoo Pals 'silverware?' Hey--what about those black Madonna bracelets I encircled every limb with in 1984? What about Swatch watches? Glo-light necklaces? What about the Flight pants I wore in 7th grade?"

And now a completely pedestrian confession: More than the Eco-Elitist's scorn, the household chaos or the fact that I just despise change, what depresses me most about this new dearth of plastics is the added fear of plastics to my worry plate. Because I actually love plastic spoons. And really thick, clear plastic forks. I do not like the black utensils (too flimsy), and I can't stand it when a plastic fork tapers too steeply toward the tines like a foot with hammertoes, or when (as is often the case) the tines are too pointy, like little wombat teeth. (Obviously, by extension, I can't abide by sporks.) photo by Xatufan

I recently experienced something called SPUDWARE. Eco-friendly, made from 80% potato starch & 20% soy oil, it nicely fits my criterion for heft-of-picnicware but it isn't quite the same. The truth is I adore deli take-out containers, the clear plastic ones which resemble terrariums filled with sesame noodles, lemony marinated mushrooms, fat balls of fresh-mozzarella--pretty much any delicious content which likely leaches the toxins right out of a container which doesn't qualify at the Recycling Center anyway.

Well, increasingly there are non-plastic options, I think. I DO like those funny little wooden spoon-sticks which come with Italian Ices...until they become soggy and splintery and your tongue feels weirdly dead--but that's another entry. They're probably made from godforsaken pressure-treated lumber, anyway.

I'm going to go cook something in cast iron now, and try not to fall down. But when I do, I can't fault the kids for laughing.

BOURDAIN: HEZBOLLAH TOFU CAN'T TAKE TONY

2008-03-22T15:46:00.024-04:00

ANTHONY BOURDAIN needs No Reservations and no defense--he writes and speaks sans net. Still, I find myself fascinated and unable to reserve comment on the bizarre flame-war involving him (except, near as I can tell the flames lick in one direction--South-South-Bourdain--as Tony's not licking back) and HEZBOLLAH TOFU, a blog dedicated to--shake your heads with me now--Veganizing Bourdain's recipes.

Attempting to make something seem as much like the original as possible without being the original in any significant way is a stunning bit of irony--"it's not foie gras, it's faux gras, folks!"--if not a complete misuse of resources, in my cookbook.
However, comma.
Knowing Tony--which I don’t, other than living hungrily, vicariously through his acerbic trouncing & eating of the globe for the Travel Channel, and having utterly enjoyed being lashed by his literary tongue--he is simply Bourdained to death with them.

In a cockle-shell still lined with briny bi-valve, Bourdain, the roguish former executive chef of Brasserie Les Halles, is Vegan Apoplexy personified (ah, but do they know Les Halles is recycling their grease into eco-friendly fuel for diesel-run vehicles?). The master of French cooking, in all its creamy, buttery, meaty & heart-stopping glory, now hosts Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, where he lustily tears into far-off, often meaty local fare and then, juices running down his chin like a savage, folds his arms across his ever-present leather jacket, leans back in his bistro chair and lights up a cigarette. Satisfied.

I will address this core concept, Satisfaction-with-a-capital S, as it relates to Veganism, but first my trusty disclaimer: I have great respect for everyone on the planet and his/her food choices. Why, I even know Vegans in real life! A mommy-friend of mine has just gone “experimentally Vegan” (which sounds dangerous and painful to me) and is blogging about it for KIWI magazine as the clever EDAMOMMY . She calls me “Meat,” I call her “Cud”--no conflict. She appears to recognize that we are merely two aspects of the same mother cow.

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: Vegans are fascinating, but it's true I am innately suspicious of them and have accused them of lacking a sense of humor. There’s often that pesky holier-than-thou aspect I find grating. The one I was once jarred into understanding of by a Vegan boyfriend who sniffed at my frosted offering of (I thought) Vegan carrot-cake: “I don’t EAT honey—honey exploits bees.”

Now to Hezbollah Tofu, an...entertaining blog. Even as it describes the offensive dishes it seeks to “reform,” it is lusciously written in a way which smacks of heavy cream that can’t possibly be thickened with some skinny little root vegetable pureé, now can it?

Not to be a nippy charger of chaud froid here (Shoot, if I had any faith in the world’s vocabulary, I would have named this blog Chaud Froid), but in the case of Hezbollah Tofu, "The ladle dost protest too much, methinks."

“Monsieur Tofu,” a menacing little spokes-graphic who most closely resembles an angry piece of Wonderbread crossed with a can of Natty Bo’, claims to have been “wholly unimpressed with Les Halles,” yet this entire project is dedicated to extolling and veganizing precisely that fare—if not Bourdain himself.
And the name "Hezbollah Tofu" is a plum-pit spat from Bourdain’s own mouth:

“Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistant irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat demi-glace or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.” [Kitchen Confidential p. 70]

Now, the collective unconscious tells me that Vegans are slower-paced, serene and sentient beings, a bit like cows blinking into the sun (“in a good way”). That they are peace, love and dandelions (assuming dandelions don’t exploit anybody, but then I had to be set straight about bees). Self-ascribed to be healthier (though, devoid of animal protein they oft-resemble the inside of a fish’s wrist), and environmentally if not morally superior. So imagine my fiendish delight when I began to read the comments section of Hezbollah Tofu—why, they’re a bunch of angry, angry critical people! Angry Vegans! I love it!

Real reader comments from Hezbollah Tofu:
“I am a slightly angry veg-preferential foodie too. Bourdain and his cronies are such sticks in the mud.”

“I happen to be French, like Bourdain, but luckily it's the only thing we have in common.”

“Vegans really rule that world-which only blindly bows to those idiot-elitists like Bourdain...”

“I love this idea and the recipes look great. When the 'zine comes out I'm gonna buy copies for everyone I know, especially the two friends who insist that Bourdain is ‘misunderstood.’ I understand that asshat just fine.”

WHOA! When did the sun go in on these gentle Vegan cows?!???!! Don’t they know that those who live in grass houses shouldn’t throw stones?

[Of note: my favorite comment for different reasons, from the clodded cream with no cumbersome background to subjugate his opinion: “I have no idea what Cafoutis {reader-copied misspelling of the post on Clafoutis} is or who this Bourdain guy is, but I love cherries so this recipe sounds great to me.”]

Marvelous! Because exemplified here is the dark roux of my favorite dyad, "Ironic & Inappropriate." Spurious, furious Vegans, whipping themselves into a frenzy on a blog which would not exist without Anthony Bourdain, while he's off someplace, laughing his ass off, slurping down an oyster or some blood pudding.

Their vengeance is so…serious! Are we to believe that a stodginess about life is the only hope we have for being taken seriously? Switch from heavy cream to half-and-half if you must, but for crying out loud, LIGHTEN UP, Hezbollah Tofu-ites.

Okay, we all know there’s nothing worse than being set to boil about some personal offense, and having the other party blasély move your caustic stewpot off the burner; minimizing or ignoring it. An ex of mine, when called on the mat for bad behavior, was fond of replying with an open, lazy-Sunday smile, “Hmmm. That’s alright.” It was a brilliant tactic.
Because we all know the best way to reconcile the irreconcilable is not to try.

Bourdain again, supporting my fears about Vegan incapacity for humor: “Meat class was fun…I found for the first time that constant proximity to meat seems to inspire black humor in humans. My meat instructor would make hand-puppets out of veal breast and his lamb demo/sexual puppet show was legendary. I have since found that almost everybody in the meat business is funny—just as almost everyone in the fish business is not.”
[Kitchen Confidential, p. 39]

Comments like this must be a rutting boar of reminder for the Tofu camp. Of how primitively goooood meat is. If it’s a fidgety burr of something sadly missed, then I apologize--I do try to understand the folks who are Vegan for "health," or in the hopes of reducing their environmental impact--but at the end of the meal, I simply WILL NOT apologize for my incisors, they are my God-given gift. (Bourdain, at 6’4” must have a rather large carbon footprint, which he’d never apologize and likely take credit for, with a rakish grin).

I will reduce, re-use and recycle, I will support fair-trade and sustainable goods with my business, but I am getting damn tired of my predicament, summed up as usual, by The vegetarian Little Bush Dog: “As a meat-lover in a politically correct world, people often give you a level of disgust better saved for child abusers or Scientologists. It's just MEAT, everyone calm down!”

What will it take to remind us of the basic, maddening elasticity of human beings? The seduction and frequency with which we all stumble ass-backwards into hypocrisy? Isn’t that an acrid little pastille of truth for everyone to suck on. Because let’s face it: most of us suck (Bourdain loves this term, self-applied) in some form. Irony, opposing views--even hypocrisy, these things actually don’t suck--The only thing that really sucks is a flat-out mean spirit--and the surest way to "de-suck" is to flat-out admit it.
Case in point, we all know I’m sweet on Bobby Flay, who Bourdain enjoys reducing to some culinary Prom King, living comfortably ‘neath the scallion-green orb of the Food Network logo. Tony’d be mystified and mortified...(etc.) if he knew the true grasp of Flay’s 16-inch tongs (thank you reader, pink pika) on my heart—and that’s okay with me.
Sweet-light-golden Irish coffee has its place—as does the polar hell-black pitch at the bottom of the pot. Bourdain is the gritty, acrid brew I love for different reasons. Where there is the capacity for meat, there is also acceptance.

Call him a Snob (the world needs more self-confessed snobs; it gives us standards), call him a Purist, call him Cutting (oh, cry me a river of Sauterne--he’s acidic to everyone, and is as self-deprecating as he is charming), I'm not aware that Anthony Bourdain has ever been anything but true-to-form—but then, I’ve never followed the grizzled boar around for 24 hours. How can any raconteur worth his sea-salt possibly succeed if he is doomed to the literal, the meat-deprived, the rigid?

Hezbollah Tofu can’t seem to hone its criticism. It’s too angry for such precision—and in the end, it owes Bourdain too much. How can it truly lambast him without stepping in its own pee?

My take on Anthony Bourdain: Carp away, old man. You have my devoted ear. Let me travel the world vicariously through the soles of your expensive but tired looking sandals, squint at the things you hold up and cradle in your permanently nicotine-burnished hands. Let me ride on your back brandishing a mammoth mutton leg and refusing to apologize as we skid through a puddle of drawn butter. Because above all, it’s your refusal to apologize for being human which makes you a requiem for a cream.

To Hezbollah Tofu (and anyone who wants me to feel like some "green motherhood" and meat-love are irreconcilable) I say: Suck it up, Buttercup.
I think those are still allowed on your people's menus.

Yep, that's Bourdain and me going Balkan.
I sent my video entry, "The Case for Bulgaria," to the No Reservations FAN-atic contest just the other day...
If I win the chance to accompany him, you'll be the first to know.

BOBBY FLAY, APPLE OF MY RIBEYE

2008-03-03T21:44:00.106-05:00

Find a complete transcript of my mind-boggling conversation with Bobby Flay at the end of this post.
What do you give the girl who’s eaten her way through life--now that she’s grown up? Whose father whisked her up and down the D.C. corridor for pickled plums & wasabi, Korean barbecue & dim sum, who grew up coaxing cilantro seeds and believing Phyllis Richman (food doyenne at The Washington Post) had the ultimate job, and whose most-prized possession is a signed copy of Julia & Jacques Cooking at Home?

Why, floor tickets to see Bobby Flay, of course!

Do you smell something burning? Look at me, I can hardly stand.

He was in Norfolk last Friday filming a Throwdown with Wood Chick’s BBQ, a hot local phenom (www.woodchicksbbq.com ). I braved the I-95 corridor by myself with toddlers (don't worry, I left them in good hands) for Saturday's demo.

“What do you mean you’re going to 'see' Bobby Flay?” people asked me for several weeks prior. “What is he going to do?” I guess the implication is that he was…"just" going to “be Bobby Flay.”

Which is pretty much the definition of celebrity.

Look, any breathing woman who is worth her kosher salt & in viewing distance of The Food Network has at least a first-degree crush on Bobby Flay. BUT, do you know WHY?

It’s a funny thing I’ve observed, observing his celebrity evolve over the past twelve years: people somehow assume he must be a roué, a cad with tongs, the devil in the crabshell your mother warned you about (okay, okay, this would not be inaccurate of my own past tastes), manning the grill at the FN, easy on the eyes and inciting to the palate...yet they positively salivate with wonder: Can there be any meat--any substance?

Digest this: Bobby Flay has meat to spare—and a sweet underlying vein of marrow, to boot.

We settle into our chairs, and my father leans in, gesturing to the big screens and laser-swirl of lights, “This is weird. It’s like... he’s a…rockstar.”

The celebrity chef phenomenon—(let’s face it: it’s the Food Network’s genius doing) is nothing short of bizarre. As Bobby Flay narrates and cooks, people nod furiously (to prove they knew enough about food to agree with him?, or that they themselves already employ that technique at home?) People, quite frankly, lose their minds. And it's not just because they're high on the smoke from the spice rub and the indoor grilling.

"Oh no, now everybody's going to start coughing,” he rasps charmingly. “Sorry. Indoor grilling—what a great idea" he says, as fragrant plumes of spice-rub roll out over the crowd, over me. Perplexingly, someone takes him seriously—“Okay, you realize I was just kidding about the indoor grilling being a good idea, right?” he later clarifies.

It must be uncanny to have people hang on your every morsel.

Okay: this is like worm-holing to a Beatles concert crossed with the cutest guy in the world tossing pizza dough in the window, the summer you’re fourteen.

I can also see that his life must be peppered with endless, celebrity-seeking questions (though he’s far too gentlemanly to use such an assessment), which he handles deftly & gently, folding in answers to audience-questions like lump crabmeat. The questions he is asked seem pretty...self-serving (note: I cannot be responsible for the continued and unconscious use of food terminology) and, exasperatingly, many of them are inane riffs on “Can I come down and be your little helper?” (um, hello, sous-chef?), posed by females in the crowd.

Yet he continually reveals himself to be skilled & perfectly generous, with the crowd--and with other chefs. Another part of his appeal. “People think that Emeril just throws stuff in the pot and yells BAM!, but let me tell you something: Emeril can cook his ass off.”

And then, "The Dreaded Cilantro-Hater" pipes up. “Am I missing a gland in my tongue? Because it tastes like soap to me.”

“I knew you were going to say that,” he says--but instead of fleshing that out (as he could) to say, "I knew because every single cookbook and food blog on this planet lists a soapy taste as chief complaint," he simply disarms her by shrugging and saying:

"I grew up eating a lot of soap, so it doesn't bother me. But cilantro is definitely an acquired taste."

He also cleverly gave her the absolution she was seeking, however subconsciously—because not only do we have food celebrities, but we live in an age of celebrity foods:--cilantro, pomegranate, truffle oil, kobe beef. It’s like we need permission not to like them, or to be unable to afford them.

And then somewhere in the middle of making this killer lobster-avacado salad ("Okay, it's basically a Bloody Mary with lobster and avacado," he says), with enormously appealing amounts of horseradish, Bobby Flay does two things. He praises the lowly ribeye, and woos my father, all in the span of two minutes.

He walks us through a spice-rubbed, chipotle-glazed ribeye, a cut I was delighted he endorsed. "I love it, because it's got a lot of fat," he says (oh, me too, me too!), and I am smitten to hear him rhapsodize over a piece of meat other than the more obvious supermodels of cuts. "If you don't see any marbling, I can guarantee you of two things,” he said. “One, no flavor, and two, no moisture."
And no meat thermometer required to check my temperature--because of course I immediately extrapolated his praise of the ribeye to mean he cannot possibly be shallow in any other area of his life.

I can't help it: I'm big on the metaphor.

And then he went and pulled out The Tarragon Card. And of course, the resulting anise-reference. Not the workhorse of herbs, but the mac daddy of style: tarragon.

(And he had to go and mention Paulie and Henry's razor-thin garlic trick from Goodfellas...is there any other movie?)

To my right I could feel my father (who was tucking little sprigs of tarragon into my first-grade chicken salad plates) relaxing and approving.

As if to say: So, maybe there is something my daughter sees in this Flay fellow, more than simply...Chef Bad-Ass.

The boon to our seats was the backstage pass (for all practical purposes) which allowed us to thread through a long line to meet Bobby Flay and his magical Sharpie.

Now. I coulda-shoulda told him how much I loved his restaurant.
Devastated we missed his visit to the Las Vegas MESA Grill by a mere week this November, I, well, grilled the waiter mercilessly:

“Well, what would Bobby have?”

He threw back his head and laughed.“Bobby would have a steak three meals a day.”

I closed the menu.
I have been diligently trying to replicate his sweet potato chicken hash with poached eggs, that made me swoon that morning (and I may have been the only person in Las Vegas without a hangover).

And whatever the orange-red sauce is (Smoked Red Pepper? Red Tomatillo?) I would like to bathe in that please, in the big tub at The Bellagio.

It's much better when he makes it.

I could have told him, in fact, that the very best thing about my MESA Grill experience was every little thing. The enormous number of touches everwhere the color of smoked paprika (sigh: my favorite color), the lighting warm yet utterly alert, the way even these fabulous tiles on the bathroom floor are set at this very subtle & compelling angle which made me grin.

That sitting in his restaurant feels exactly like a silky spoonful of his Pumpkin Soup with (good Lord, I am only human) Cinnamon Crema going down.

It is a satisfying complexity which starts in the primordial pleasure of the lizard brain, then radiates out into your limbs. And then if you’re me, you walk around on a gnocchi-light cloud all day, not caring too much about losing at Craps.

By far the most impressive thing about MESA Grill is that everyone who works in the house (front and back, from my furtive observation) is HAPPY. Slammed to the gills, but ultra-focused & collectively engaged in a damn happy thrumming process. You can tell a lot about who’s at the helm by the way everyone else acts when he’s away. It occurs to me without warning that, though I’ve no idea what the price per pound could possibly be on a stay-at-home mom with a palate for all and an eye for minutia, in some alternate life I would very much like to work for Bobby Flay.

Copy you will see on his site and beyond: "Bobby Flay possesses a remarkable ability to create and maintain the individual character of each of his projects, insisting on uniqueness and integrity."So when you ask--how does he do that? (i.e. Why is he Bobby Flay), that's how he does it. It appears that he's plating and eating life on those terms. Bold moves.

I finally reach Bobby Flay. He is sitting at the table, a little oasis. I hand him the copy of the MESA Grill Cookbook I'd intuitively flung into the diaper bag the day before. I’m okay with the fact that I didn’t bring Bold American Food for him to sign.

I had planned on perhaps thanking him for affirming & espousing the ribeye, on possibly talking hash, but this is what I came up with:

"So...thanks a lot---now we'll never get in to Wood Chick's."

Always putting the mock in mock turtle soup, I am reduced being a six-year-old girl who socks her playground love in the arm—hard--and skips away.

But his face cracks open like an egg into that smile. (I’m your humble reporter, but I am only human, people).

"Oh man, you should have told me last night--it was PACKED."
Which is the scant teaspoon of encouragement I need to go here (are you ready?):

"So," I drawl, "What about pears? Yay or nay?"
Where did THAT come from?

Actually, I know just where it came from: I'm not going to insult Bobby Flay by tritely asking him what to do with a tomatillo (or for goshssakes how to grill something); I know what to do with a tomatillo--mostly. And, I don't have a tomatillo tree at home. I have a forlorn, overbearing pear tree. And Pear-Patron Granita sounds really good, but ultimately self-limiting.

"Paris?"
He looks bemused, confused, but also, slightly…enthused.

"No, pears."

I laugh easily, though I am squirming inside. Jiiiiiicama, he thinks I’m some crazy food-groupie who's asking him to go to Paris!, and then it occurs to me: this must happen all the time. Food hussies attempting to proposition him to foreign lands.

"OH, PEARS."And now there is simply no stopping me. I am holding up a gigantic line of people who look like they want to come at my throat with William Henrys if they could only hear this conversation.

"I want you [here I cross my arms & arch my brow, take a step back] to tell me one thing I should do with them. An assignment.”

What am I doing?! To my surprise I am not tripping over anything or passing out. I am volleying his smirk and shamelessly holding up the rest of the line, demanding a culinary homework assignment from Bobby Flay.
And, he's off!

"Well, what I like to do is....poach them in some red wine....something, something, something...”

[insert dizzy, disbelieving part where I am seeing myself from above, trying to listen but not stare, even though he is only looking at me because I asked him a question] "…something, something…star anise"(which he pronounces ah-nees, and I have always pronounced ann-is)"...finish with Blue cheese.”

Screeeeech! I repeat him like one would winning lotto numbers and visibly swallow. “Blue Cheese.”

"Oh, he nickers softly,"You like blue cheese?"
Is he joking? What's not to like?

Revealing the new classic recipe for "Poached Paris," flicking some imaginary star anise into the pot.

Yet there is something so languidly nice about this conversation, his limbs, his language. It's like he has an extra lung taking extra breaths, and frankly I am glad someone is breathing, because I cannot. Actually, STOP. Okay, I am exaggerating, as I am wont to do...

Look--What if I told you the truth? That talking to Bobby Flay—even with the security goosing you along was, well...as easy as pie?

Another reason I'm impressed. Plus, he zigged when I thought he would zag—in the eighth of a second which represented presence of mind before I asked The Pear Question, I completely expected him to suggest a smoldering pear salsa, but this is even better because a) I didn’t expect it and b) it involves blue cheese. And I certainly NEVER expected a personal recipe.

Finally, I ask, with a lot of Italian hand-gesturing, “Can we do...the picture thing?”
Now who's harnessing the word “bold?!”And to my shock, he gets up, comes around the table, wraps his arm around my waist, and turns perfectly to the camera (I, in the other hand, stand directly under the same fluorescent light in the most unflattering angle possible for my aquiline nose, which makes me look like a roman vampire).
Still, rarely have I been so grateful for the little things in life:12-hour deoderant, the invention of

chlorophyll-based gum, lycra.

Gone is the frivolous & sexy crush of a petite filet, replaced by some bolder, substantial admiration for the ribeye.

I gnaw on that.

Something I might share if I had the right food analogy.