h o m e * e c o n o m i c s

thirty-five things I've done since the last time I posted

{this is a Kate Spade ad from 2000, I think, scanned from my recently unearthed personal collection}

I want to post about most of these things in depth, but the time has come to acknowledge this as laughably unlikely. So here, instead, in list form, are 35 things that have been keeping me busy, happy, and full. There is a recipe, or rather a suggestion of sorts, if you make it to the end. Since the last time I posted, and not in this order...

1. I turned 34.

2. I flew to Boston, fell in love with a house in Wellesley, and made an offer. Now we're in contract, knock wood/cross fingers/etc. Believe it or not, I'm actually starting to look forward to leaving San Francisco.

February dinners

I am emerging bleary-eyed from a trance induced by online real estate, and this on top of a heck of a bread bender--the first thing I did yesterday morning was to preheat the oven for a pizza made with Tartine dough, an appetizer for Bellinger Tartine loaf #3 (longer, colder rise; less dramatic holes; wimpier crust; excellent taste, especially good with salami). (And since I really am in danger of having "bread" become my only hobby/primary interest, I must add that Tartine Bread offers a pizza technique new to me, which is to use your fingers to press in a little trough 1/2 inch in from the edge of your dough round before you begin to stretch and shape it, thus ensuring that the crust is full of air bubbles. Perfect!) Ahem. Houses. Few things are as engrossing as click click clicking through all those pictures, imagining all the slightly different ways of living; but it's hardly productive, since I'm not there to see them right now. I told myself I'd do something before bed, and so I'm going to post our February dinners. One less thing knocking around this drafty mind.

i did it

As you know, about a year and a half ago, we moved from Manhattan to San Francisco in order to be closer to Tartine. I mean, the Ferry Building. No, wait, it was for Andrew's work. Or was it Tartine? It's hard to keep track here in the land of the Lotos Eaters. Whatever the case, we're down to our last few months here, so Bee and I have been trying to stop by Tartine once every week or two, lest we find ourselves regretting morning buns not eaten.

Tartine really is all about the morning bun for me. Okay, and the croissants, of course, I'm not dumb. Do you know that I've never even tasted the famous bread? Until the bread book came out, I actually didn't know it was possible for any old person off the street to buy the bread. I had heard that you had to be on "the list." It turns out that you, yes you, and I can buy it, if we call three days ahead and pay in advance (and then also stand in a line? I'm not really clear on that part).

But why not make it at home? You can spare 15 minutes a day for the next three weeks tending a starter, can't you? Call it your meditation practice. And really, haven't your pants been feeling extra loose? You look like you could use a slice of bread.

When I first saw and read about this book, I thought, no no no no no, I do not need to get into making a starter, and I don't even like sourdough bread that much. Although it was hard to resist another beautiful book from Tartine, I just knew that a bread-baking adventure was not what I needed. It was reported that the basic bread recipe went on for pages on end; the very thought of such a recipe drove me to bed for a contemplative nap. But then the January Martha Stewart Living included a condensed version of Chad Robertson's recipe, and it was on. The man advocated dipping hunks of bread in vinaigrette; what kind of stomachless fool would I be to ignore whatever else he had to offer? If I could bake a decent loaf of bread from the Martha version of his recipe, I would buy the whole book.

In a development that will surprise exactly no one, I procrastinated starting the starter, reluctant to commit. Once I had started it, however, I actually looked forward to its daily feeding, despite the fact that I really don't like getting my hands all ooky. The early days were thrillingly full of promise. In the dark middle period, I worried that my starter wasn't showing enough activity, so I started randomly tweaking because I figured it might be dead anyway: a few times I let it sit for 36 hours instead of 24, and I made it dryer or wetter according to some instinct I certainly didn't believe I had. It never started rising and falling predictably, the way it was supposed to, but neither did it start smelling or looking foul, so I kept at it. Almost four weeks after beginning, when I made a levain that floated (the first one I made never did), I baked.

And the bread is terrific! I suppose my mental tag for this kind of bread is "levain" or "country," "sourdough" being something I tasted and didn't like when I was eight. I didn't realize that the crusty brown Frenchified bread I've enjoyed all these years was probably made from a starter.

My first loaf puffed up gorgeously. (You bake this bread in a covered Dutch oven.) When I cut in I realized that this was because its interior holes were far too large. I think I let the final proofing go on a little too long, worried that my room was too cold; or perhaps my improvised shaping technique is to blame. Nevertheless, it looked and tasted wonderful.

The second loaf, with its lower ceiling, looked as if it might have a more conventional structure. But it turned out to have rather large holes in its middle, too.

Not ideal for a tuna fish sandwich, maybe, but this did not keep us from making croques monsieur! DIVINE. I followed this recipe, skipping the potatoes, using aged cheddar instead of gruyere, and slathering with slightly less bechamel than called for (plus 1/8 teaspoon cayenne in the bechamel).

Again, I followed the Martha instructions for the bread, which apparently differ slightly from the book (and might be a little more precise? I still don't have the book in my hands but hope to soon). My only changes were fiddling slightly with the starter as described above and failing to slash the top of my unbaked bread with a razor blade. I looked to this post from SFWeekly for moral support, and it led me to this page at Breadtopia, which gave me the information I need to keep my starter alive (I hope) without feeding it every single day.

Since I had pretty much convinced myself that my first attempt at this loaf would not work out, I was extra pleased when it did. It has given me unrealistic faith in the less successful parts of our tabletop garden. The bean and chickpea plants are thriving (perhaps because Bee greets them with a hearty, "good mornin', beans!" several times a day), but our carrot stumps, avocado pits, citrus seeds, and funny pineapple top have yet to show new growth. Undeterred, sustained by bread and hope, we plan to plant radish seeds.

my black heart and a chocolate caramel tart

For me, the strangest thing about being older but not yet old is how deeply I've come to feel the patterns of the year. I do not mean this in some celestially or chthonically transcendant way, with seasons and rituals and vegetables rising up and fading away in satisfying, preordained succession. I am talking about "I Got You, Babe" Groundhog Day style repetition--what, this again? Magazine covers are bad enough; I die a little inside every year when the food magazines all do their "grill" issue at the same time. What's worse is when the newsstand of the soul fails to delight or at least pique interest. (May heaven forgive me for typing "newsstand of the soul;" there it stands.) If it's February, I must be thinking about giving up sugar and getting into goddess shape before my April birthday. The year is young enough that I may still assign myself some absurd reading project. But most importantly, even if I don't give up sugar altogether, I must curb by baking habit. Right after I bake something special for Valentine's Day.

Or maybe it's against Valentine's Day, or in the face of Valentine's Day, not for Valentine's Day. After a lifetime of sensibly relating to Valentine's Day as a very happy excuse to enjoy cards and sweets and girlfriends and family, I have gotten a little bitter about being married to a non-celebrant. I don't believe in the candies and the flowers and the dinners and the pretty nightgowns, no, none of that is my speed, but why don't I have it anyway? I get greedy and worked up and passive aggressive in the runup to Valentine's Day--largely unnoticed by Andrew, whose first thought after a 30-hour shift is not, for some reason, buying me a bunch of tulips on the way home, but rather falling into bed. Alone, I mean.

The funny thing is that on February 14 I snap out of it and wear something pink and enjoy the day. This is in no small part thanks to my mother, who always sends cards and presents, and of course this year Bee is just old enough for fun with a glue stick, construction paper hearts, and stickers. There's also the excuse, always welcome, to break out the tart pan. This year it turned out Saveur's chocolate caramel tart, which I've had my eye on for a couple of years. Here are the facts:

1. Boy howdy, is it good. It is like a super-fancy Twix bar, and Twix is my favorite. It is very rich, perfectly (but not too) chewy, just wonderful to sink your teeth into. The caramel is slightly more dominant than the chocolate (the proper order of things, as far as I'm concerned).

2. There's actually no trick to it, if you aren't scared of caramel, which you shouldn't be. You make a pat-in crust and let it cool all the way; you make caramel, pour it in, and let it cool all the way; you make ganache, pour it over, and let it cool all the way. And then you keep it in the refrigerator until and after slicing.

3. Changes I made: skipped the crème fraîche (1 tablespoon!); cooked the caramel about 20 degrees too far (an accident, I was making breakfast at the same time), which I think only improved it--usually I'm too skittish to get it really dark; I used a 10-inch tart pan. Oh, and I did not dust with more salt since it already seemed rather decadently salty.

4. The whole works beautifully, but my crust did not turn out sublimely, probably because I overworked it. If you already have a foolproof chocolate cookie crust, I would use that; if I make this again, I might make it with a reliable shortbread pat-in crust instead, since I don't need extra chocolate flavor.

5. If/when I make this again, I would love to use a rectangular tart pan and slice it into bars instead of wedges.

6. This caramel was perfect, really, and trapping it between cookie crust and ganache means you don't have to fiddle with wrapping or otherwise storing it. I've not made these perfect caramels a second time mainly because I don't want to bother with wrapping them (and, yes, because I'm scared I'll eat them all now that I am a seasoned, shameless woman). There is a "lively" (read: hostile) discussion in the Saveur comments about what temperature the caramel should be cooked to; all I know is that my thermometer was racing past 340 when I turned the heat off, and I was perfectly happy with the result.

7. In my endless re-googling of the recipe, I found this extremely amusing post about two sisters and their different ways with this one recipe.

This, friends, is what happens when you try to photograph a piece of food that your whole being is yearning to gobble up right away: just point and shoot, hands, we're getting impatient! My final note on this tart, which I definitely do prefer to last year's chocolate custard tart, is that it is the rare dessert that pleases both Andrew, who loves chocolate, and me, with my preference for caramel (or fruit). Unless he was just telling me he loved it because he could see how smitten I was; that's the kind of funny Valentine I've come to expect from him.

And now, a new leaf. It is February, after all.

 

mung bean sprouts with garlic butter: baby steps into the garden

Along with Look and Cook and See and Sew, Sow and Grow was on my Amazon wishlist for many years. Time and again I almost bought them for myself--who could resist these great old illustrations?!--but I am actually pretty good about buying only the books I really need. (Ha!) Once Bee came along it was easier to begin to convince myself that they belonged on my shelf, but she's still so small, not yet two and a half, so I never clicked "buy." Thank goodness, then, that my mother gave them to me for Christmas, because Sow and Grow has been the hit of 2011 thus far in this house.

In New York, even window boxes were out of the question in my apartments. Special plants entrusted to me--Andrew's cherished fern, the fine orchid sent by a work contact as a wedding present--died as fast as they could under my care, and perhaps this accounts for my timidity when faced with our big shared back yard in California. Could I grow plants there? Yes, I was allowed to, but could I? Didn't you have to know a lot to grow plants? Surely one ought to read at least two books and start a list of garden blogs before opening a seed packet...

You can see why a child's book is what I needed to get going. I was delighted to discover that all of this book's projects, organized by month, can be completed indoors. That shared back yard is accessed by a rickety old outer staircase, and I never feel quite comfortable there (a whole other story). Besides, I really am an indoor sort of person, one reason the prospect of a move from paradisical here to the frozen east doesn't have me completely panicked.

By the way, we saw our first fruit tree blossoms of the spring two weeks ago, and now they have erupted everywhere. The clumsily assembled collage here shows four trees we saw on one block that day: the bare branches of winter, the darling buds of...January, something lush and green, and a tree stuck in autumn, leaving a thick carpet of red leaves around its trunk (absent in the pic thanks to my meager photo editing skills).

Sprouting mung beans in a jar, then, January's project from Sow and Grow, may not have been as much of a relief to us as it would be for little families trapped indoors by winter, but it was still great fun (and will almost certainly be repeated next year when the snow and slush and lost mittens oppress us). Furthermore, much to my delight, Bee was very involved and excited, inquiring after our sprouts often, oohing appropriately when given a viewing, and commanding me to "give them a bath" when I prepared for the thrice daily rinse.

It was beyond my powers of organization to take photos day by day, but here you can see a bag of mung beans, left, and the sprouts they turn into, right. A quarter cup of mung beans filled a one-quart jar in four days! Those of you with experience growing things are rolling your eyes, but it was really something to see. Honestly, I was a little freaked out. The beans and seeds in my pantry have this kind of potential lurking inside? All they need is the right conditions, which are very easily achieved? Wow.

In the end, I did not use the mung beans in my pantry; I bought a seed packet from Botanical Interests while we were killing time at a garden store, waiting for our taco place in Mill Valley to open after an early morning at the beach (again--California!). Its instructions were a little more detailed than the ones in Sow and Grow, so I followed them. (Although I decided to risk E. coli instead of washing the unsprouted mung beans in a bleach solution. As my whites will attest, I do not keep bleach around, and I couldn't imagine buying some to use on potential food. I have not done the research to see if this was truly reckless of us, but Andrew and I agreed that we would taste the sprouts ourselves a day before allowing Bee to eat them.) Basically you soak 1/4 cup sprouts overnight in a quart (or larger, even better) glass jar and then drain the next day. I fastened a square of unused diaper cloth around the mouth of the jar with a rubber band and drained through that. After draining, you prop the jar, still covered with its "drain" lid, so that its bottom is slightly higher than its mouth to facilitate further draining. Then you stash it in the dark (or cover with a dish towel) and rinse and drain the sprouts 2-3 times a day until they are 2-4 inches long, which will take 3-5 days.

This was maybe the second to last day, before the sprouts had truly outgrown their glass house! When they ran out of room, we cooked them for dinner. I tracked down this recipe at Sprout People (and resisted reading up on best sprout practices for next time--see, I can relax, really I can.)

Sprouts in Garlic Butter

Adapted from Sprout People

Heat 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon olive oil in a large pot over high heat until very hot. Add 1 large onion, chopped fine, 1-2 tablespoons chopped garlic, and 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper and stir just until the garlic is fragrant; do not allow it to burn! Add your quart jar of drained sprouts and cook, stirring very frequently, for 1 minute. Add 1 tablespoon soy sauce, 3 tablespoons water, and a tiny splash of rice vinegar. Reduce heat to low and simmer for a few minutes, or until the texture of the sprouts pleases you. Off heat, stir in 1 tablespoon butter until melted.

Serve over rice or noodles; we ate this with soba noodles and drizzled with a little toasted sesame oil. Two adults and a toddler polished it off. For a stunt dinner, I thought it was very good. I mean, come on--we grew food on our counter and ate it! The rinsing might be a pain in the neck for a normal adult going about her business, but as a reference point in a day with a toddler it was welcome to me.

We also sprouted some adorable little mustard seeds on a damp paper towel. They developed a spot of mold and so were composted, but they were spicy and cute. I hope to develop a better procedure and toss them into salads. Now, too, the courage to sprout wheat for bread is mine, if I can just get around to it. I have something else in the bread department growing in my pantry and am too smitten to think about other doughs at the moment (even though my pet could be just a tease, for all I know--no telling if we'll go all the way).

 

food si love

Things you will see in India:

The best clothes ever.

A man pouring chai back and forth and back and forth between two cups.

Cows and pigs wandering the streets. Parrots, monkeys, and some very scrappy dogs.

Misty bright green fields of mustard supporting a haze of yellow blossoms.

Some remarkable roadside deep-frying: wok-type cooking vessel balanced on cinder blocks over an open flame.

Children playing in the street in the middle of the night while their mothers huddle around an open fire.

A god active only at the moment of creation, otherwise in meditation.

More people squeezed onto/into tiny vehicles than you would have thought possible.

Men getting shaved on the street by barbers whose establishment consists of a chair on the sidewalk and a mirror propped against a wall.

People taking pictures of the Taj Mahal.

Lots of people hanging out on roofs.

Men playing field hockey.

The Advanced Chickpea Research Insitute (cross my heart; I so wish I had gotten a picture of this, but the car was moving)

 

Things you will not get in India:

A relief from the incessant honking

A satisfactory explanation of Hinduism as a daily practice, which you will want after driving past dozens of little shrines.

Things I would not have minded skipping:

The Taj Mahal. Big, famous, crowded destinations are not my scene. I tried hard simply to experience it but could not. Mainly I resented the many extra hours of car time it ended up requiring of us. People keep saying, "But now you have a picture of yourself at the Taj Mahal." Yes, and? I would rather have had an afternoon at the bazaar in old city of Jaipur, which we did not have time for.

 

Things I did not see in India but wish I had:

FabIndia

An ashram, or at least a yoga class

More fabric

A meal in someone's home

 

I had no idea what to expect from the food on our trip. The first couple of days we subsisted on hotel breakfast cornflakes, Cliff Bars (offered by one of our extremely generous traveling companions when we were stuck for hours on end on congested roads or basically kidnapped by overzealous tour guides), and then whatever we could find at our hotel before collapsing into bed. Once the jet lag had worn off a little, we were taken by our tour guides to restaurants that were very clearly for tourists only. I can't say, however, that they gave me anything to complain about. I remember saag paneer, butter-garlic naan, chana masala, rice with cumin. The wedding itself involved day after day of very nice buffets, offering mostly Indian food from all regions, but no meat and no alcohol. They served the best dals I have ever eaten, but it was all so hectic and exhausting that all I remember is breaking into a smile when I tasted them.

Before the barat, the groom's procession to meet the bride on the final day of the wedding, we were offered Thums Up and wonderful nut brittles to sugar us up for the dancing we would have to do in the parade, which, I must say, was one of the most fun experiences of my adult life. The groom and his parents rode in on elephants, his sisters on horseback at his side, all of us milling about and doing our goofy best to clear his way by bhangra dancing as a marching band and a troup of Punjabi drummers tried to outplay each other. Every once in a while we stopped and danced in a circle while one of the older wedding guests held a handful of money aloft and waved it in circles over our heads before giving it to the band. It made me feel the way I did as a teenager at a high school football game--giddy, electric--or as if I had been plopped into the movie Underground.

By the time the reception rolled around, several hours later, all I could stomach was a plate of plain white rice. Completely worn out, I was longing for a glass of wine and something involving no cumin or ginger or turmeric at all. Although we generally eat a lot of Indian(-ish) food at home, I didn't know how long it would take us to get back to it. Requests were put in for brisket, pork shoulder, roast chicken, etc. I couldn't resist At Home with Madhur Jaffrey for more than a month, however. (MJ is one of my food idols, thanks mostly to her indispensable Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian. I once approached her at the Beard Awards to bleat my devotion; with queenly bearing she acknowledged my gushing, and that was that.) We had ground turkey with Hyderbadi seasonings--except with lamb, not turkey, fatty, fantastic, and incredibly easy--and a version of her dry khichri modified to include millet and quinoa in addition to white rice and plain lentils instead of hulled and split moong dal.

The grains were a wee bit overcooked and the lentils just barely cooked enough, but this preparation was a good compromise for the members of my family who make faces when served millet and quinoa (and I am not talking about the two year old). Furthermore, the inclusion of lentils made it something I could eat a bit of for lunch the next day, unlike a pot of plain basmati (of which I make a meal only under circumstances of extreme duress and secrecy). Maybe everyone knew you could just throw these things together; for me it is a nice new trick.

Here's how I made it: Rinse 1/2 cup long-grain white rice (mine is usually basmati) and 1/2 cup lentils (I used lentilles de Puy since that's what I had, but plain green lentils or hulled and split moong dal should also work). Put in a bowl with 1/2 cup millet and 1/2 cup quinoa, cover generously with water, and soak for 2 hours. (I do not have the patience for rinsing quinoa, a step that has never seemed to make a difference to me.) Drain as well as possible.

Heat 3 tablespoons olive oil in a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan over a medium-high flame. When hot, add 1/2 teaspoon whole cumin seeds, wait a few seconds, and add 1/2 yellow onion, thinly sliced. Stir often until the onions have taken on some color. Add the drained grains and lentils, stirring for a minute. Then add 2 3/4 cups water and 1 teaspoon salt. Bring to a boil, cover tightly, turn the heat as low as possible, and cook for 25 minutes. Remove from heat and let pot sit, covered, 5-10 minutes before fluffing with a fork.

We've been home for a month. January was quite a letdown; after I had for many months looked forward  to Bee's Christmas, holiday time with my family, and an amazing vacation for the couple that never even goes out to dinner, it was all over all at once. But we made it through, thanks in part to a run of lovely weather (I heard there was a dreadful lot of snow on that other coast, the one we'll be on next year, but then I stuck my fingers in my ears, LA LA LA). Bee and I only just said "bye till next year" to the last of the straggling Christmas ornaments, but we decided to leave some of the twinkle lights up. And so I am finally ready to acknowledge that 2011 is under way. Hip hip!

"nothing embraces the whole of india, nothing, nothing, and that was akbar's mistake."

So said E.M. Forster, or one of his characters, anyway. Here I've been wondering what to write about our trip when I should have known from the beginning to forego sweeping summaries in favor of snapshots and glimpses. Then I can get on to the other things I've been wanting to write, right? Right.

I kept finding men who looked just like Maira Kalman's turbanned characters. They pop up in all of her books, not just Max in India. (Slightly related: today I realized that when I hear "Maria Callas" I think "Olivia the pig." Note to self, more adult culture?)

We traveled the Delhi-Agra-Jaipur triangle (without really getting to see any of Delhi, since we spent most of our time at a wedding in Jaipur). At least in Rajasthan, everyone--men, women, children--wears scarves and shawls, much of the time and every which way. As we prepared for our trip, I had gotten very nervous and excited. I expected to be overwhelmed by the poverty, the supposedly pervasive sense of the spiritual, and, to be embarrassingly honest, by all kinds of disagreeable smells. Instead, the poverty was as (horrible as) anticipated, and neither the souls nor the smells struck my dull senses as unusual. But the citizenry's way with a simple piece of fabric? Forget about French women. This was something.

It was the clothes that blew me away. Look at this spangled, colorful ensemble for hauling sticks along the road. On a detour down a country road (much smaller and more perilous than the one pictured here), we saw many women stooping in the fields, tending crops in their marigold, fuschia, and fanta-tinted saris. I still haven't wrapped my head around it. I loved the yellow mustard fields, too.

It makes for some lovely clotheslines.

Color! Color and fabric. Our tour guide tried to take us to a jeweler when we said we wanted to go shopping, and it took some doing to convince him that we wanted to see some block printing on cotton instead. He obliged and gamely spent a couple of hours waiting while we looked at fabric and had clothes sewn up. Crazy Americans.

I would feel guiltier about my superficial sartorial impressions of India if every American woman who heard I was going to an Indian wedding had not asked, "ooooh, are you going to get henna?" Yes! (These wacky threads, by the way, were borrowed from the bride, whose family gave her a bunch of clothes to pass around so we Americans would not have to feel lame in our lame clothes. The bride said this aggressive pink number would be appropriate for the fun of the henna application and bangra lessons, which were indeed superfun.)

The bride's clothes, you know, they were okay, too. That's her in the orange in the center, back to us. The curtain is made of strings of marigolds! This was a temple ceremony, mostly a boisterous professional performance of the life of Shiva, which culminated in the bride's and groom's families pelting them with flowers. This was the first day. There were two more days of ceremonies, buffets, fireworks, elephants, performances. I mean, have you ever. Two posts at least, don't you think?

OM.

Malaria pills, check; ebooks, check; paperback in case ebooks fail, check; new knitting, check; baby nestled in with grandparents, check. I'm off on an adventure and will see you in 2011. Happy new year!

merrily we roll

I do not have a Christmas cookie tradition. (Maybe something as overwhelming and reckless as my cookie love can't be expected to conform to tradition's mold?) Yes, I made palmiers a few years ago, and two years before that I hosted a cookie party, but I’ve never done large-scale decorating and delivering. It seemed to me that Christmas cookies meant spritz (which I don’t own) or cutters (which I was too lazy to use). And what did crunchy little butter cookies, built to keep, have on my favorite soft and chewy monsters, like these terrific chocolate chip cookies everyone’s been buzzing about, the perfect soft sugar cookies from food52, or the quinoa raisin cookies I may or may not share someday?

This year I finally just womanned up and decided to roll out some dough, inspired by this and that. In November, Luisa mentioned the dough curing on her balcony, and Amy Karol mentioned that she was not going crazy making dough in advance this year. Something clicked, and I knew I had to make several kinds of Christmas cookies. Martha Stewart had cookie packaging at Michael’s, so it was an excuse to buy something. And then there was the tiny jar of sparkle sugar that dove into my basket during the pre-Thanksgiving Target run, and the gifts my mother brought at Thanksgiving, and, perhaps most importantly, the fact that the mysterious Bee recently figured out how to clamber over the safety gate and then moved her waking hour from a consistent 7 a.m. to somewhere between 5 and 6, a cold, dark hour at which you might as well put on the Nutcracker and dust a work surface with flour. (I made dough in the late afternoons and chilled it overnight.) Cookies! You and I were meant to be. This was the lineup.

 

Sugar Cookies for Decorating from The Craft of Baking

I decided to make simple sugar cookies meant for icing and decorating. I wanted to have fun with the icing, but only if the underlying cookie was outstanding all on its own. Since I never got around to making an icing (errant box of powdered sugar), I was well positioned to judge. These cookies were dense and hard but not what I would call crunchy or crispy; they exhibited a certain tenderness. They were best when baked a little too long, and I wish I had made them with top-notch butter instead of any-old from Trader Joe’s. With better butter, these may have been winners. They did not last long enough for me to judge how they age, which I guess says something in their favor.

Holiday Sugar Cookies from Flour

I am really enjoying this book, which is fortunate since we’ll soon have to wean ourselves from Tartine and rely on the talents of Joanne Chang at Flour in Boston (a couple of recon trips in the summer of 2009 suggest that we will survive, perhaps even happily). These cookies were airier and crunchier than Karen DeMasco’s, less like shortbread and more of a straight-up sugar cookie. It wasn’t love at first bite with either sugar cookie, but these are the ones I will definitely make again to try with icing. To be fair, both cookies grew on me and are not going uneaten. After a few days at room temperature (in a box, not a tin), these cookies had softened pleasingly, just a smidge, and were still very tasty. A final note about both sugar cookie recipes—I know it is sick and juvenile, but I could eat sugar cookie dough all day. Love it.

 

Gingerbread from The Gourmet Cookie Book

Since this recipe claimed to produce a cookie that improves with age, I feared that it would be dull or even cardboardy right out of the oven. The opposite, or something like it, proved true: my gingerbread stars were irresistibly chewy and spicy the first day or two, but after a few days in a box (still not a tin) they were a bit tough and slightly less pungent. I still love the recipe, since my other current ginger cookie recipes are for thin and crispy or big and soft. I added 1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, and I ran out of molasses while filling the cup and so had to top it off with a few tablespoons of honey. This was the hardest dough to handle, the only one that really gave me any trouble, so instead of rerolling the scraps I rolled them into a log, chilled, and made slice-and-bake instead.

Even though I, lacking a man-shaped cutter, made stars, Bee called these “gingerbread mans,” which was a treat for me in itself. (By the way, we have had in heavy rotation a Richard Scarry book in which a porcine baker hawks gingerbread pigs. My thought the first time I saw it was, “What kind of sick creature would make a cookie in its own shape?” So that’s the level of brainpower we’re dealing with these days.)

 

Rosemary Shortbread from Flour

This recipe gave me an opportunity to bust out the green food coloring and to use up some of the lingering Thanksgiving rosemary, hooray! I realized before I began that this recipe was almost identical to Sally Schneider’s salty butter cookies, so I made the dough according to Schneider’s instructions (cold butter, food processor) instead of Chang’s (softened butter, mixer). Both recipes incorporate cornstarch, which, in my opinion, gives shortbread the nicest texture. The rosemary flavor here was perhaps a bit weaker than I would have liked, but maybe that’s the point; this is still a sweet, buttery, toddler-friendly cookie, not a resinous flavor bomb for grappa-sipping adults only.

 Cardamom Shortbread from The Christmas Cookie Book via Remedial Eating

Molly sold these cookies well, and they did not disappoint. The flavor is amazing—strong but not at all overwhelming—and the texture may be my favorite in this bunch of cookies. I’ve made shortbread with powdered sugar before and have been disappointed in the way they turned soft and powdery in the mouth. I’ve had success only with recipes that incorporate the cornstarch separately (which I know is odd, since powdered sugar is just sugar that already has the cornstarch mixed in for you, right?). Anyway, these were shattering and almost flaky, and I loved that. A few days later, they were still crisp and delightful. Molly also shared some helpful hints for rolling out cookie dough, which I wish I had found at the beginning instead of the end of my cookie odyssey.

Benne Wafers from The Gourmet Cookie Book via the Wednesday Chef

I had considered making these before Luisa posted about them, but I worried that the tiny amount of butter (just 1.5 tablespoons) was a misprint! Then, after her rave, I worried that my wafers would stick to the parchment, or that even if they came up, they would disappoint. I worry often and usually, as in this case, needlessly. These were Andrew’s favorite cookie this year; since he is allergic to tree nuts and doesn’t usually get to enjoy good, nutty desserts, I was especially pleased to be able to offer these to him. I rolled most of mine into little tubes. These would be perfect with tea or ice cream at any time of year.

  Only a few people got a box of cookies from me this year, but maybe in 2011 I’ll expand the operation. (After each batch had cooled, I froze it until it was time to pack everything up and mail. This seemed to work well enough.) Even though a hideous wheezing cough is, for the second December in a row, shaking my faith in my iron constitution, I think what I’ll remember most about this month is being up hours before the sun and liking it. I would resign myself to the fact that Bee was up, which was a little easier once the gate she had been silently hurdling was rigged up with a jingle bell alarm, pull on my hideous slipper socks, and tromp down the hall to her and the kitchen. After turning on the Christmas lights and quiet music, we drank tea and/or milk, made cookies, and talked about Santa. If there was no dough to roll, I stitched away at the quilt I started for my nephew in September while Bee decorated and undecorated and redecorated her tree like a festive little Penelope. My evenings got shorter, as, puzzlingly, did her naps, but we survived the pitch-black mornings, merrily even.

*I was going to write up Joanne Chang's holiday cookie recipe, but the Boston Herald published it earlier this month. And while I am here in an asterisk, I have to point out that Jane Lear has a blog now! (I noticed it in Molly's sidebar.) She is what I miss most about Gourmet and also the source of the cinnamon sugar palmiers that remain my proudest feat of cookying.

a la recherche du pizza

The pictures in my iPhoto go almost straight from Bee in a witch costume to Bee with her miniature Christmas tree. Granted, this is in large part because my parents came for Thanksgiving and took charge of the photographic duties, thank goodness; nevertheless, I’m more than a little alarmed by the passage of time. As you know! For instance, here’s something I’ve been meaning to share for ages. A few months ago, probably in the summer (“summer”), I had a revelation while making pizza, a revelation that was reinforced the next month by something I saw in a restaurant.

What happened this summer was that I put together a batch of Mark Bittman’s basic pizza dough, which I have made a million times, and found that it was far too wet to work with. Very exasperated and wondering what we would eat for dinner, I was preparing to scrape the yeasty goop into the compost bucket when I realized that maybe I could do that thing people used to do a long time ago, that thing I’ve read about, where you just add flour until the dough feels right.

“You sound crazy,” is what Andrew would say if he were reading over my shoulder, which he is not. I know that for most people tinkering until something is right is second nature, but I am a follower of rules and recipes. I am still a little amazed every time I make dinner without opening a book—now that I have been cooking on a daily basis for about six years. Tampering with a recipe for dough—dough!—well, I would have  thought it beyond me.

But I’ll tell you what. I kneaded flour into that wet mess bit by bit until it turned into a nice, springy ball. And then, instead of being heavy and floury, it was some of the finest crust I’d turned out in a while. So lesson number one was don’t be afraid to add flour until the dough feels right.

What happened in September was that Andrew and I went to dinner at Nopa. This was a big deal, at least for me—the second time in fifteen months that we got to go out to dinner alone. It happened on the spur of the moment, however, so we didn’t have reservations and were lucky to be seated at a little bar area right next to the kitchen. The restaurant buzzed at our back while we had no choice but to gaze at the master of the pizza oven.

He is a calm, slender man with a long black ponytail. Although he didn’t stop moving the entire time we were there, he never seemed rushed or frazzled. There is only one pizza on the menu, an appetizer, but he was also in charge of some wood oven sardines and other tiny dishes. When an order for pizza came in, he would take a ball of dough from a large plastic container full of floury dough balls, which I believe came out of a refrigerator. Calmly, always calmly, he rolled the ball in a little more flour and then stretched and spun it into a large, thin disk. He brushed it heavily with what appeared to be a puree of roasted garlic (it was in a container labeled “garlic schmear;” I have yet to try this and really want to) and then sprinkled it with sausage, onions, and a little cheese. (I think. This was all three months ago.) He had obviously done it innumerable times, but he didn’t look bored, or even aware that anything existed outside of the pizza station. He just looked zen.

Me, I’m not so zen, but I resolved to try using more flour when I stretched my pizza crusts at home. I also decided to stretch them over the backs of my hands instead of patting and pushing them out, as I had for some reason taken to doing. The result is that now I feel like I really have a handle on pizza dough. Now that I’ve made it a million and five times and tried a few things out and kept my eyes open while other people were making or talking dough.

(This reminds me that I should tell you that I did not finish my NaNoWriMo novel, not at all, even though I was using the “cheat” of updating a classic, but I did relish the experience. It teaches you how much time there is in your day if you really look for it, and it reminds you what pleasures are incompatible with squeezing out those extra quarter hours—in my case, the internet, television, and wine. [And I am talking not about a half bottle with dinner but about a single glass of wine, which may relax you just enough to pack it in for the day just when you should be picking it up.] As a cynic and a longtime holder of the position I Can’t Do This, I was really delighted to discover that I can dredge things up out of my own head when compelled. For me the key lesson of NaNoWriMo, however, was that if you want to do something, you have to do it. Again, I know this sounds obvious to all of you who add more flour without even thinking or start businesses instead of mentally tallying all the ways those businesses could possibly fail, but for some of us, just getting started feels impossible. But you have to get started, and then you have to do a little every day. And some days, a lot. This is the only way your storytelling skills will improve instead of stalling where mine are, which is, I think, about neck in neck with two-year-old Bee’s drawing skills. I got good, not great yet, but good, at making dinner by doing it every night for six years. Nothing just happens.)

Ahem. The marvelous thing about practicing making pizza is that everyone is happy to eat your test pizzas. They may even like them more than things you put much more effort into or have higher hopes for, like certain tofu-millet pilaf-maple roasted squash dinners I could mention. At this point I even have a method that bends all the pizza rising and kneading to my schedule, but I’m not sure it’s replicable. I’ll do my best to put it into words, and then you’ll just have to try it for yourself.

So here’s how I make the dough, with Mark Bittman’s quantities and my no-knead-inspired method. The night before I want to eat pizza, right before bed I put 3 cups (14 ounces) flour in a big bowl. I use bread flour, all-purpose, 00, or some combination of these, depending on what I have on hand; my tastebuds are not sensitive enough to register a preference. I add 2 teaspoons kosher salt and a slightly rounded quarter teaspoon instant (bread machine) yeast. I once tried to cut the salt back to 1.5 teaspoons, and while the result was certainly edible, my tastebuds were hip to that alteration and demanded a return to the original recipe. I whisk to combine the dry and then use a wooden spoon to stir in a cup of water and 2 tablespoons olive oil. If a bit of rough stirring fails to suck up most of the flour in the bowl, I add more water a tablespoon at a time until the flour has all been incorporated. It isn’t really stirring any more, but I do use the spoon to bully the dough for a minute before covering the bowl with plastic wrap and a dishtowel and moving it to a quiet corner of the counter.

The next day, at nap time—around noon, say, 14 hours after the dough was mixed—I turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead it for about 5 minutes, adding more flour as necessary to make it easy to work with. Is this kneading necessary? I have no idea. I just do it, hoping to reach a stage where the indentation left by a finger poking into the soft, smooth dough springs back immediately. Then I roll the dough in flour, put it back in the bowl, and cover the bowl again. Sometimes I leave it on the counter, but I have also refrigerated it, just to see. If you choose to refrigerate it, experts say you should remove it an hour before baking, but I have forgotten to do that until just before stretching and baking and found that it didn’t make a huge difference at all.

Half an hour before dinner, preheat the oven to 500 and divide the dough into two to four balls, depending on how many pizzas you want. Knead them for a minute, just enough to leave them smooth and round, and then sprinkle their tops with flour and cover them for 15-20 minutes. After this little rest, stretch them into rounds. I like to work on a piece of parchment paper, which I later slip right onto my pizza stone (slightly more confident I may be, but do I look like I’m pizza peel confident to you?). Plop a ball of dough in the middle of the parchment and then dust your hands with flour right over the dough, so that the excess showers down on it. Many advocate spinning and stretching the dough without picking it up, but I like to pick it up and pull it wider and wider in the air. I drape it over the backs of my hands, gently pull them apart, rotate the dough, and pull again. If your dough refuses to stretch and keeps springing back into its original shape, let it rest for 10 minutes and then try again. If your dough tears, all I can say is that I have had luck pinching tears together or, in extreme situations, kneading and starting over with the stretching. After many months of patting out rounds of even thickness, I discovered that I have to leave the rim a little thicker for crusts that I won't just leave on my plate but instead will eagerly take from the baby.

When a round is ready, brush it all over with olive oil, top, and bake for about 10 minutes, depending on your toppings. I find that 8 ounces of mozzarella is enough for one batch of this dough, and I make a very simple tomato sauce by cooking a few cloves of crushed garlic in a few glugs of olive oil and then adding a box of tomatoes, a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of oregano, and a pinch of red pepper flakes to simmer until thick. This is too much sauce for one batch of this dough, but you’ll use the leftover one way or another. If nothing else, you can thin it out with water, use it to simmer red lentils, and call it soup, maybe adding some carrots in the beginning or a spoonful of yogurt at the end.

I’m sorry I don’t have any pictures of pizza. I’m always so dying to eat it that I can’t bring myself to slow things down by getting out the camera. I must say that if one of the hardest things for me about becoming an adult, a real one, has been letting go of fantasies of instant success, one of the nicest things is making a really good pizza and sharing it with an enthusiastic two year old, especially if Andrew is home and Christmas lights are up in the dining room. It doesn’t get better than that.

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