Caroline is definitely the baker on this blog, but once in while, we bake over here. Mostly for birthdays. Mostly involving my husband and fondant. You might remember the Lego Cake or the Volcano Cake. Not long ago, Finn had a birthday, and he requested a Hexbug cake. I made the yellow cake from this Smitten Kitchen recipe, which tastes just fine, but is not the best for working with fondant, still Kory managed. The colors were selected by Finn. The design is all Kory’s.
And then, my lovely daughter (again with her dad’s help) decided to surprise me with a cake from Whole Foods so we could celebrate finishing this book.
At some point this summer, I picked up the inaugural issue of David Chang’s new food magazine, Lucky Peach, and then, overwhelmed by work on this book, I let it drop to the bottom of my reading pile. Because this is not the kind of food magazine you flip through, tearing out recipes, and then toss in the recycling; it’s a reading magazine, and I was doing enough reading about food — in the amazing essays by our contributors — that I really couldn’t handle any more.
But this weekend (having submitted the manuscript; hurray!), I pulled it out and read it. I read the journal of David Chang and Peter Meehan’s trip to Japan, I read the story about the New Yorker, Ivan Orkin, who’s opened a ramen shop in Tokyo, I read about the invention of instant ramen and I studied the map of regional ramens. I read Ruth Reichl’s instant ramen taste test (she spent $80 on ramen noodles, so you know it’s thorough) and laughed at the recipes, like Instant Ramen Cacio e Pepe, which reminded me of the Instant Ramen Stroganoff or the Instant Ramen Primavera my college housemate and I used to make. And finally I read Harold McGee’s fascinating piece on alkalinity and alkaline noodles and I learned what gives ramen noodles that slippery feel in your mouth: alkaline! And I discovered that it’s really not too hard to make homemade ramen noodles. So I did.
I probably wouldn’t have been so drawn to the recipe if I weren’t living with a couple of young scientists who are fascinated by the chemistry of food and cooking, and who had just recently asked me why acids get so much more play in the kitchen than alkalines. I won’t go into the science of it all here — just go find a copy of Lucky Peach and read Harold McGee’s piece — but any recipe where you start by baking a pan of baking soda is kind of fascinating, don’t you think? After that, though, it’s not so different from making pasta:
This quiet week after Thanksgiving and before the happy rush of Christmas events begins, Lisa and I are collating and copyediting the final manuscript of this anthology to submit to Shambhala. I haven’t read some of the essays in a while, and I love reading them all together, one after the other, and spotting new connections between the stories. We all have so many food stories, and this weekend I acquired a few more, which I will share when I have more time to write.
But for now, since I have so little time for writing (or cooking, actually), I will leave you with someone else’s words on food. Not one of the amazing Cassoulet writers, whose stories I look forward to your reading next year, but a little essay dictated by Ben, years ago when he was five, I was working on my first book, and he asked me what an essay is. I told him, an essay is a piece of writing that tells people what you think about something. And this is what he offered:
Cashews
You can eat them. They taste like salt. Maybe they have salt sprinkled on top of them, like saltines do. When you eat them, they’re not there any more.
The other day, this is what I pulled out of my CSA share:
It was bigger than my head. The slip of paper in the box told me that it’s Pan de Zucchero, and that I could treat it like escarole or chard or any cooking green. So without giving it much thought except that it wouldn’t fit in my refrigerator, I chopped the whole thing unceremoniously up, tossed it in our biggest cooking pot with some water, and steamed it until the leaves were tender. Tony walked by at one point, looked at what I was doing, and commented, “That’s not my favorite kind of greens,” effectively telling me I was on my own with this one. I pointed out the greens would be great in a minestrone, but in the next breath acknowledged that minestrone was not going to happen anytime soon. So I drained the greens, stuck them in a glass container, and put them in the fridge, punting them for another time.
So, the next day, lunchtime, hungry, I open the fridge and start to rummage. I see the disdained greens and think again, longingly, of minestrone. I see some leftover tomato sauce and remember the can of cannellini beans in the pantry. Who needs minestrone? I warmed the greens and beans in olive oil, gave them a squeeze of lemon juice, and then spooned the warmed sauce on the side. I even made myself a nice piece of toast. So simple, so obvious, so delicious.
Last week, when I made this chive meatloaf, I made double. I rolled and froze the second batch, and took it out last night for a quick dinner. I baked it in our convection oven on the self-timer early in the day, around 3 pm.
But I also had mashed potatoes left over, and so when the meatloaf had cooked and cooled, I molded the potatoe into a little igloo over the loaf. I used my hands. Then, I suddenly remembered something from my childhood. Cheese in mashed potatoes ? Cheese on twice-baked potatoes? I quickly dumped some grated cheddar and monterey jack all over the potatoes, then baked everything at 350 degrees for 2-25 minutes.
The cheese crust turned golden and slightly crispy, and the kids were a little baffled, but then they tasted it and thought it was one of the best things ever. Finn ate two helpings and Ella just kept saying, “These potatoes are so good.” And she’s not much of a potato eater. Really, it’s the definition of comfort food, and it made for a very happy, easy dinner. In fact, the only thing more fun for the kids than this, which they thought was a totally new meal, was playing Finn’s new game, “Who Am I?” while they ate.
In this case, he is most definitely not what he is eating.
