A Blithe PALATE

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. 

Table à Deux

Part One:  The Romance of Memory

Leaves were falling ..Just like embers
In colors red and gold they set us on fire
Burning just like a moonbeam ..in our eyes

The night proved a poor chaperone, its nocturnal cloak allowing for a greater intimacy of conversation than would have otherwise occurred in real life.  The intensity of their naked conversations meant that falling in love would happen so much faster than if they'd been near one another, able to experience the mundane along with the extraordinary.  All relationships appear infallible in the beginning because apart from the joy of discovering something new, we are also hopeful, ludicrously optimistic.

"It seemed perfect," says Hélène (a pseudonym).  "We talked so much, we were so attuned to one another that when we were finally physically in the same place, the reality of him swept away everything I had imagined."

Memory is oh so malleable, so full of holes, enabling us to bend it to our will so that it reveals only what we want to see.

Romances that begin with the projection of perfection based on midnight conversations have no way to scale that cliff again.

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

Part Two:  Salt Wounds

Now I am guilty of something
I hope you never do because there is nothing
Sadder than losing .. yourself in love

One day H. says, she and Ross (another pseudonym) forgot how to talk to one another.  The mutual muteness had happened so gradually, so quietly that neither realized the prevalent silence until it had fully entered their lives, insistent and insidious, propping their twosome like a three legged stool.

In the beginning, said H., they carried on those midnight conversations, talking about books and life and music and dreams.  Lovers' talks.  In the darkness, a thousand words were exchanged as they moved closer, inevitably, to couplehood.  There was no shortage of things to say; only a dearth of time in which to say it.

H. says:  "We were talking one night and he said, 'I like talking to you.  You say thoughtful things."  Then she says, over time, the urgent calls became routine; and once they were together, the calls gave way to the comfort of a late conversation before sleep; but eventually, over time, the conversation became rote and the topics became mundane.

"I realized that I was talking to a roommate.  Not a lover.  An acquaintance maybe.  We were talking about salt.  Salt.  How do you go from Milan Kundera to saline?!"

She poses this question to me:   "Why does 'honey' sound more like a nomenclature now than an endearment?"

"I don't know," I answer.  And I don't.

"We don't kiss anymore.  We've forgotten how.  Or maybe he's forgotten to turn into my kiss and not away from it.  I don't remember when we last held hands, or when he put an arm around my waist to guide me along as we walked here and there."

"I don't know," I answer.  And I don't.

"Salt," she says, heart laid bare and stripped.  "I remember him talking about how one of the most real moments of his life was when he was six and he laid under the tree in front of his parents' house, looking up at the sky through the wheel of his bicycle."

How can the here and now compete with the then?

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

Part Three:  The Moment Slipped

Now, you ask me Just to leave you
To go out on my own and get what I need to
You want me to find ..what I've already had

Pork chops, garlic, lemon zest and parsley.  That's what H. associates with this moment in her life.

H. was cooking dinner.  Ross came home.  He looked at her, then said quietly, "I am seeing someone else.  I do not love you anymore."

Ross told her that he had found someone with whom he felt great affinity; their conversation had begun innocently over a shared love of John Prine, but that had eventually given way to something more intimate (and reckless).

(H now:  "If he wanted to talk, why didn't he open his mouth and say something to me?  I was here!  I was here!?")

All H. remembers now is how her brain shut down and all she could concentrate on at that moment was the smell of burning pork chops and the tangy, pungent gremolata.

-------------------------------
Part Four:  Auden was a Fucking Idiot

Somebody said they saw me...
Swinging the world by the tail
Bouncing over the white clouds....
Killing the blues

Some time later, H. and I are observing the orange, red and golden shards of the setting sun.

"That poem by Auden you like to quote?" comments H.

"He was my North, my South, my East and West / My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; / I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong."

"The other one."

"Lay your sleeping head my love / Human on my faithless arm"

"The other other one."

Oh.  That one.  "If equal affection cannot be/ Let the more loving one be me."

"Auden was a fucking idiot."

I think one day (I hope one day) she will not be so bitter.

Thin Mints Redux

Normal people.  (A box.)

Me.  (That's a case.)

To understand, go here.