A Blithe PALATE

Run away! Run away!

These are conversations I should avoid getting enthusiastic about:

"I'd love it if you could make our wedding cake."

These are responses I should avoid spewing:

"Oh absolutely, no problem!"

She notes she prefers certain flavors and her fiance other flavors:

"Oh no worries, I'll make one for you in your favorite flavors, one for him and one for the guests to enjoy."

She mentions certain motifs that have meaning for them:

"Oh that's easy!  I can totally make fondant cut outs of the fleur-de-lis!"

See, if I didn't already know that I was insane, I've now confirmed it for myself.

Don't I ever learn?

Battered and Fried.

K. and I met for lunch today at the updated River Mill restaurant, where sandwiches and soup have given way to an actual menu.  The chef has great imagination and greater ambition; the lunch menu is chock full of dishes more commonly found on a dinner menu and some of the ingredients actually surprised me.  Bear in mind....there are routinely hour long waits to eat at the Olive Garden in these parts, so I'm always interested and pleased when someone does something differently in town.   I picked the vegetarian lasagna with fresh tomato and cream sauce.  It was a little overdone and lacked subtlety, but for a cool day, proved hearty and  pleasing for lunch.

It growing late in the hour we considered dessert.  For the most part, none of the proffered sweets were tempting (chocolate torte, banana pudding), but one sounded so bizarre I had to try it. 

"Deep fried strawberries with dark and white chocolate sauce."

It actually gave me pause.

I've remarked previously about the frying culture of the South.  I joke that  they can render vegetables unhealthy here.  But never in my imagination had I ever considered taking a perfectly good fruit and battering it, frying it, and covering it with even more fattening sauces.  Fantastic. So of course I had to order that.

Would that the actual dessert had lived up in taste to the intriguing idea. 

I love strawberries.  I grew strawberries at one point in a desire to have heirloom strawberries that tasted like strawberries.  Strawberries are my go-to easy dessert accompaniment.   

But this...NO.  Really.  NO.  In essence, I bit into fried cinnamon and sugar dusted beignet batter covering a too warm and mushy strawberry.  NOT a good combination.  And apart from not tasting good, I'm sorry, but strawberries look great when they are red and inviting, not brown and beige looking like clumps of little fried fish nuggets.

It's bearing down on midnight and I"m still perplexed.  I love battered and fried food and spend a lot of my time happily consuming said foods.  But battering and frying a strawberry is right up there in the weird, right alongside deep fried Coke (you think I am joking, don't you?).

Ick

IM exchange:

N:  How are you feeling?

Me:  Ick.  I should have walked away when we pulled up to the restaurant and it was a converted Burger King called Hibachi Grill, selling Chinese fast food, with not a single Asian person behind the counter.

N:  Yeah, I have to admit, that sounds pretty shady.

Me:  I know better than this.  But no...I was being nice.

N:  Aren't you the foodie?

Me:  Read:  being nice.

N:  To whom?

Me:  I'll go back to being a food snob, thank you.  Hubby and I had a lunch date and a friend of ours ended up coming along.  He wanted to eat there.  I should have have known...so many omens.  Maybe he doesn't have taste buds?

N:  Or has an iron stomach apparently.

Me:  I thought mine was cast iron as well.  Alas, poor hygiene behind the counter = acid that burns right through the cast iron.

That's it.  I am never again agreeing to eat somewhere just to be accommodating and not be "such a food snob" when the end result is FOOD POISONING.

Marcus Wareing's Blueberry Muffins

In seventh grade, my middle school offered home economics class.  I have no idea if they still offer such classes.  It would be a pity if they didn't.

As incoming seventh graders, all the students were rotated through a series of fine arts classes for 6 weeks:  painting; home economics (i.e., baking and sewing); music; shop (woodworking); dance and one other class now forgotten to the fogs of memory.  At the end of the semester, we selected the class we wanted to take for the remaining semester in the school year.  Selection was determined by the order of the number each student drew in a random lottery; I, by strange fortune, managed to draw number six.  Thus, I had my pick of any class I wanted.

The two most popular choices were home economics, taught by a very warm and friendly woman, and the woodworking class taught by an irascible sexist who likely would be sued for sexual harassment ten thousands ways to Sunday if he were still alive and teaching, but whose charisma made him a favorite of most students.  His was definitely the "in" class.

Guess who I, in juvenile and puerile peer pressure stupidity chose when I had carte blanche?  Yes.  Instead of baking and sewing, which I infinitely would have preferred for six weeks I ended up making a wood replica of the Playboy Bunny logo.  I am not @#$%^&*( kidding you.  Somewhere, my mother still has this monstrosity (which [cringe] is mounted on a plaque board, God help me).  Unlike my sister Kaly's Matisse-inspired collages which are framed and hang throughout my parents' house, this thing has never seen the light of day after I gave it to her because (thank God), my mother is a woman of exceptional aesthetics. 

I distinctly remember the recipe our home ec teacher taught during that trial home ec class week:  muffins.  I remember learning how to measure flours and how to measure liquids.  I remember how muffin batter is supposed to be lumpy and gooey.  I remember most of all...how warm that class kitchen felt, how holding a spatula felt so right (in a way that the sandpaper block to smooth around the Playboy bunny's ears never did), how simply at home I felt with a recipe and with measuring cups and baking tins.   

The funny thing is...I haven't baked muffins since that time, not until this past week.  I was looking to give Puggle something new to munch on in the mornings, now that he likes to feed himself (by jamming food into his mouth with a chubby fist) and Marcus Wareing's cookbook has a lovely blueberry muffin recipe.

So, twenty years three post-facto, I still regret not taking that home ec class.  I probably shouldn't be so exasperated; regardless of childhood insecurity and the inability to pick what I really wanted, my cooking self eventually found me.  It's a bloody good thing.  Can you imagine me with a bandsaw?

Miracle Max's Miracle Pill (Chocolate Coated Strawberry Ice Cream)

Hubby, being prescient (and amply aided by a piece of paper on which was inscribed everything I wanted for Christmas), got me the Kitchen Aid ice cream bowl mixer attachment.  I have never had so much fun making ice cream before. 

The first batch of ice cream was hazelnut ice cream.  The second was chocolate.  The third was coffee.  Then Hubby asked me to make strawberry ice cream, which brought to mind a particular Gordon Ramsay recipe from his book, Just Desserts, in which he dips scoops of ice cream in melted white chocolate to make little ice cream bon bons.

Always interested in anything that adds fat and calories to my desserts, I melted down some chocolate and used a melon baller to make tiny ice cream scoops, then rolled them in the melted chocolate.  I didn't get the infuriatingly perfect round bon bon that Ramsay gets, but I was rather pleased with the bon bon.

As I was plating the first few to serve for dessert, Hubby walked past the kitchen, glanced over at me and smirked.  "Have fun storming the castle boys!"

It never even occurred to me what they looked like till he said that....

What does it matter?  It tasted great.

    

WTF Starbucks?

To the Starbucks barista who made my coffee today:

It's @!#$%^&*())_ 1:11 am and my human alarm clock without a snooze button will wake in 6 hours.

When I order "decaf," I am not being coy, I really @#%$%^&*()  mean decaf, damn you.

Saffron Risotto

Anthony Minghella died on March 18.  He was someone I admired.  He was a noted filmmaker, helming such movies as The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain and more significantly for me, the adaptation of The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje's lyrical, complex and aching novel about love, adultery and tragedy in the Sahara. 

         

-----------------------------------

Screenplay by Anthony Minghella, adapted from the novel by Michael Ondaatje 

EXT.    THE CAVE OF SWIMMERS.    DAY.

               He has WRAPPED KATHARINE IN THE SILK FOLDS OF HER PARACHUTE
               and emerges from the near the familiar cleft in the rock,
               struggling with the exertion of the climb as they approach
               the Cave of Swimmers.  He has a large water bottle slung
               around his neck and a haversack, and is loaded like a pack
               horse.  Katharine opens her eyes.

                                   KATHARINE
                             (whispering)
                         Why did you hate me?

                                   ALMÁSY
                         What?

                                   KATHARINE
                         Don't you know you drove everybody
                         mad?

                                   ALMÁSY
                         Don't talk.

                                   KATHARINE
                             (gasping)
                         You speak so many bloody languages
                         and you never want to talk.

               They stagger on.  He suddenly notices a stain of gold at her
               neck.  It's saffron, leaking from a silver THIMBLE which
               hangs from a black ribbon.

                                   ALMÁSY
                             (overwhelmed)
                         You're wearing the thimble.

                                   KATHARINE
                         Of course.  You idiot.  I always
                         wear it. I've always worn it.  I've
                         always loved you.

               Almásy CRIES as he walks - huge sobs, no words - convulsed
               with the pain of it.  They approach the Cave.

-----------------------------------

I saw the movie with my friend Elizabeth.  It overwhelmed me in a way the book had not.  I love that book; it touched so many chords in me; but the visual adaptation tore me to pieces, from the opening scene of Madox's plane casting its shadow across the desert floor like an aerial swimmer to the final sequence of Almasy carrying the dead Katherine out from the Cave of the Swimmers.

I was so haunted by Minghella's intense direction and saturated scenery that eight years elapsed before I was able to watch the movie in its entirety again.

When an artist's vision can hold a person in thrall for that long...well, then you can understand why I note the passing of someone I've never or was ever likely to meet.

There's always saffron on hand in the house...some of it stored in a thimble.  Why, I just can't say.

Marcus Wareing's Chocolate Chip Cookies

Despite protestations that I don't care for cookies, I notice that I write a lot about them:  cantuccini, macaroons, Madeleines, lace cookies, jam cookies and my all time favorite, Russian Tea Cakes (aka The "Heroin Cookie").  And let us not forget my particular Achilles heel, the Girl Scout Thin Mint Cookie.  So maybe the truth is that I don't like certain cookies.  Or maybe I've gotten over my decades-long cookie aversion. 

I grew up eating Chips Ahoy.  Perfectly good cookie.  Processed to the hilt and overly sweet but a good proxy in a house that never made them (because my mother grew up making croissant and cream puffs, not peanut butter cookies or sandies and so wouldn't have the foggiest what a chocolate chip cookie was supposed to be).  A French friend spent a summer with us and became addicted to Chips Ahoy (having grown up on croissant and cream puffs he was enamored of the overly processed and sweet Chips Ahoy.  You see the irony here, yes?).  Staying with his family the following summer, I won huge (ahem) brownie points with the family when I made chocolate chip cookies from scratch for them.

After years of eating Chips Ahoy, Oreos and Mint MIlanos and other sundry store-bought cookies, I finally burnt out in college.  For nearly a decade and a half I couldn't bear to look at, or bake, much less consume, a cookie -- any cookie.  I can't really say what happened.  I'm odd that way:  I can go decades without eating something then suddenly desire it overnight (pineapples), or lose complete and utter interest in a particularly favorite food.  I'm not sure what changed; I think it was the cantuccini that Janine gave me at Alon's Bakery.  Suddenly there were cookies of sophisticated textures and subtle flavor to which I'd been previously unexposed.  From that cantuccini I found my way to other cookies but I never went back to the more plebian chocolate chip cookie. Until Marcus Wareing. 

This is currently my favorite cookbook:  Marcus Wareing's Cook The Perfect...He's a former Gordon Ramsay protege, and one of Ramsay's partners and head chef at Pétrus at the Berkeley, and at the Savoy Grill.   We had the opportunity to eat at Pétrus a couple of years ago and it was an absolutely stunning meal; Hubby says that after our first French Laundry foray, this was the second best meal we'd ever had.  Chef Wareing even signed his page in Off Duty, a collection of recipes from U.K. based chefs.  This cookbook is a compendium of some of his favorite dishes and does not pretend to be an haute cuisine cookbook.  He offers little tips on how best to cook or bake to achieve success; I have cooked almost every recipe in the book and not one dish went astray.

His take on chocolate chip cookies is absolutely simple and utterly delicious, although I made a change (due to preference rather than any fault of his instruction):  I prefer to shave my block(s) of Valrhona or Callebaut for nice un-uniform chunks of chocolate rather than using chips.  He recommends rolling the dough into a log and keeping it chilled, ready to slice and bake -- my freezer has about four rolls for last minute snacks or desserts (they have replaced the depleted Girl Scout Thin Mints supply).  Another recipe I'd like to try shortly:  shortbread.  I'll let you know how I like that cookie, too.

The All Guinness Meal.

I've been reading Suzanne Goin's Sunday Suppers at Lucques.  Now that my day job consists of working for non-lunatics, dinners have gotten back to normal:  instead of rush, harried and thoughtless meals or take out, I can actually plan and prepare good suppers for my boys.  Goin is an alumna of Chez Panisse, so it's understandable that she marches the seasonal cooking road; and I've decided that despite the paltry access to fresh and seasonal produce here, I'm going to try to cook and eat seasonally, if for no other reason than to make sure that Puggle is getting the right fruits and vegetables at the proper time.  I am so looking forward to Annie's love (Philip) planting in the garden for us...

In any case, there was a recipe for saffron chicken that made my brain go, "YUM!" but when I brought it up at lunch with Hubby today, he frowned and said, "It's St. Patrick's Day though.  We should be making corned beef and cabbage."

Ick.  "Do you want corned beef and cabbage?" I asked.

He paused.  "Actually, I'm thinking a Guinness stew might be nice."

During our trip to Ireland, we enjoyed several versions of Beef and Stout stews; and yes, of course it's St. Patrick's Day but it was 70 degrees out today and hardly the right time of year for something so rustic.  But also in Goin's book is a St. Patrick's Day menu which included a chocolate and Guinness cake with Guinness ice cream.  Goin swears that she's not the type to make dishes out of weird ingredients but says the stout really does enliven the cake and ice cream.

And being a whore to my blog, it was hard to resist the challenge (and conceit) of an All-Guinness meal.

I learned two things from tonight's dinner:  1) you simply cannot go wrong with stew regardless of time of year; and 2) it is entirely possible, despite previous sentiment otherwise, to overload on Guinness.  The stew:  absolutely delicious and fulfilling; the cake:  kinda iffy and a little on the icky, weird side; but the ice cream was a pleasant surprise.

Lance and Margie, two of our cohorts from the Ireland trip, had given us an Irish cookbook on our return, and there was a recipe for Guinness and Beef which looks deceptively simple  -- it's actually a 3 hour process, but the dark, flavorful stew at the end is entirely worth it.  First you brown the meat and saute mirepoix and leeks;  Guinness Stout and reduced beef stock are added, then simmered for 90 minutes or until the meat is tender, after which the meat is removed, the liquid drained and the vegetables discarded; then streaky bacon bits, shallots and mushrooms are sauteed in butter, and flour is added to lay the roux, which thickens the liquid; and finally, the meat returned to the pan.  Ladled over piping hot mashed potatoes made from heirloom fingerling potatoes, it is not possible for a stew to be more perfect. 

Alas, would that the same were true of Goin's Chocolate Guinness cake.  Now, to be fair to her, I did miss an important step.  I forgot to add the cocoa powder so essentially I made a Guinness bundt cake over which I poured melted bittersweet chocolate in a post facto attempt to add in the chocolate.  The cake, however, was just funky -- too spicy (it has cinnamon, nutmeg and whole cloves) and too...mealy to be luscious or enjoyable.  It looked pretty but certainly didn't live up to its aesthetics (kind of like a culinary version of, "Don't ruin it by talking.").  The Guinness and molasses were overpowering in the cake and while I'm aware that the taste problems may (and probably do) rest on my accidentally forgetting the cocoa, the resulting cake was so bleah that I have no wish to repeat the exercise, even with the correct ingredients.  But the Guinness ice cream was absolutely outstanding:  rich, creamy and just  right sweet, like a vanilla-scented pint of plain.   Who knew such a bizarre concoction could yield something that could stand up to its principal ingredient with aplomb?

So two out of three isn't bad for the All Guinness meal.

Chicken Parmesan and Brian Wilson

Well its been building up inside of me
For oh I don't know how long
I don't know why
But I keep thinking
Something's bound to go wrong

(Santa Monica, 1994)  Uncle Mike is working on the 10th Street house.  I am helping, outside painting one of the doors, the melodic backdrop of "Don't Worry Baby" filling the California afternoon.  I have neither Brian Wilson's wistful falsetto nor any hope of pitch, but it's too sweet a song not to sing along.  After the fifth replay of the song, Uncle Mike pokes his head out the back door and begins to laugh.

"You listen to music that was out like thirty years ago."

"Sure," I reply.  "But that doesn't make it any less superb."

The CD player automatically replays the song again.

But she looks in my eyes
And makes me realize
And she says don't worry baby
Don't worry baby
Don't worry baby
Everything will turn out all right

Don't worry baby
Don't worry baby
Don't worry baby

I get this reaction a lot:  "Beach Boys."  Shudder.  "Ewww."

"Never mind," advises my aunt Lori.  "While everyone else was stealing other people's music or riding on the shoulders of breakthroughs before them, Brian Wilson was creating something new."

I'm of the opinion that the Beach Boys' music sounds clichéd to modern ears because (for most us in the States) their music is indelibly and inexcusably linked with commercials and pop culture.  In my head, I can still see the Sunkist commercial in the 80s which feature "Good Vibrations" as its musical centerpiece.  But  just because something is trite doesn't mean it isn't good.

I guess I should've kept my mouth shut
When I started to brag about my car
But I can't back down now
I pushed the other guys too far

She makes me come alive
And makes me wanna drive
When she says don't worry baby
Don't worry baby
Don't worry baby
Everything will turn out all right

Take chicken parmesan.  When was the last time you ordered this dish in a restaurant or had the urge to make it?  Chicken Parmesan is one of those workhorse dishes that appears on most Italian restaurant menus yet no one feels inclined to order it.  "Oh God that dish is so passe," shuddered a friend when we were at a swank Italian restaurant in New York.  La Tavola in Atlanta, a favorite Italian trattoria, has never put that dish on its menu even though other classics have found their way on and off.  I asked Heath (their former head chef) about it once.  He smiled and said, "Too old school."  But he agreed that it's hard to go wrong with chicken breasts dredged in butter and breadcrumbs, and baked under a blanket of tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese.

And in my own collection, among 100+ cookbooks, I could not find a recipe for Chicken Parmesan.  Either I have the wrong cookbooks or this dish is anathema to most cookbook recipe writers.  And consulting various cooking websites, I discovered that their versions of Chicken Parmesan were too haute or modified and updated to resemble the original dish.  Is it because it's a simple dish?  is that why it's considered pedestrian?  When does a classic cross the line to cliche?

Don't worry baby
Don't worry baby
Don't worry baby

She told me baby, when you race today
Just take along my love with you
And if you know how much I loved you
Baby nothing could go wrong with you

(Santa Monica, 1995)  So I'm watching a documentary on Brian Wilson...and I feel like crying.  I know it sounds completely stupid but this is a man whose music I admire and whose songs I know backwards and forwards; and there he is, a virtual wreck of ruined cadence in speech and vocals.  His voice is aged and shaking, the result of years of alleged abuse.  In his interviews, he sounds timid and scared, his inflections odd, as though he's forgotten how to talk.  And when he sings.  Oh man. 

I keep muttering, "Oh my God."

Then he sings, "Caroline, No," one of my favorite songs from the seminal "Pet Sounds," and I nearly come unglued.  I have to remind myself that he's not a teenager any more and it's impossible to expect a man whose life is (in)famously consumed with  illness and drugs to sound the same as he did some decades earlier (never mind Paul McCartney!).  And seriously, just when I'm about to change the channel because it's too painful to watch, "The Warmth of the Sun," comes on.  The song was written on the same day that President Kennedy was assassinated and Wilson said in an interview that he always associates the song with that day.  If we're going to get totally gooey on it, the song makes me think of the end of innocence; makes me think of the passing of one generation (the post-war) to another (the hippies); makes me think of helicopters flying over rice paddies (I think this a leftover shaving of the movie "Good Morning Vietnam"); makes me think of a long farewell.  His take on "The Warmth of the Sun" has none of the strength or resonance of his youth; but he sings it as an older man with weight and sincerity; and it's this evocative wistfulness that saves the song from ruination (think Maria Callas post-weight loss and after 1954).

It's about as much as I can take.  I grab car keys and head out to my car.

The sun roof's open, my windows are down, and I'm cruising up Pacific Coast Highway towards Malibu.  Brian Wilson's falsetto rings loud and clear on the stereo.

Oh what she does to me
When she makes love to me
And she says don't worry baby
Don't worry baby
Everything will turn out all right

Don't worry baby
Don't worry baby
Don't worry baby

This is how Brian Wilson's music is meant to be heard:  in the milieu to which it pays homage.  The Beach Boys never sound so right as when you're driving up and down PCH with the sun setting in the water and the ocean sparkling in the remnants of the day.

If you're going to be cliched, you need to make it worthwhile.