What is the plural of daiquiri?

For our Blue Crush party, the house drink was the frozen daiquiri, adapted very loosely from Mark Bittman, but with less rum (to accommodate our guests who had to work the next day), and frozen limeade from concentrate substituting for fresh-squeezed lime juice and sugar.  We made pretty good work of a full pitcher.

Ingredients:

4 cups frozen strawberries
1 12 oz. container frozen limeade from concentrate
1 cup rum (Bacardi dark rum works well, but it probably doesn't matter)

Recipe:

Place ingredients in cuisinart or blender.  Puree.  Pour (carefully) into pitcher.  Drink.  Little paper umbrellas optional.

The Devil's Lunch

I returned to the Lee Bros. cookbook today (I really hope somebody gets me this cookbook for Christmas when I have to give it back to the Miami Dade library) for deviled eggs.  Simple, but I'd been craving them.  And a little satisfying:  when I waved the platter into the living room, my wife said, "you made that!?"

Ingredients:

6 Eggs
3 Tbsp mayonnaise (the Lee Bros. recommend Duke's which deserves a post of its own)
1 Tbsp dijon mustard
1 tsp something spicy (they recommend hot sauce or pepper vinegar; I used jarred cherry peppers from Cento, because it's what I had)
dash salt
1/4 tsp garam masala
Chili powder (I used New Mexico Chili Powder from Rancho Grande)

Recipe: 

Boil the eggs in simmering water for 12-14 minutes.  (The water should be simmering rather than boiling super-rapidly to avoid cracking the eggs.)  Cool them in running water.  Take the shells off the eggs, cut them in half, and scoop out the yolks into a bowl.  Put the hollowed whites in the fridge or freezer to cool.
Add all the other ingredients except for the chili powder, and beat the yolk mixture into a smooth paste with a fork or a whisk.  Spoon them into the hollows in the whites. Dust with chili powder.  Eat!  (They're yummy, but remember, they're rich, so don't make yourself sick.  I made 6 so that others could sit in the fridge for snacks or lunch supplements throughout the week.

[In addition to the eggs, I had couscous salad-- leftover couscous and a few handfuls of chopped celery, radish, and jalapeno, tossed with an olive-oil-lime dressing.  They only key is to dress while the couscous is straight out of the microwave, to maximize absorption of the dressing.]

Granola, Revisited

I went on a serious granola-making kick for a while in law school, although I haven't done so nearly as much since discovering a few brands of storebought Granola that are only moderately oversweet, nor since acquiring a granola-making mother-in-law.  When I did make granola, I had a recipe I was fairly happy with, except that the granola never really got clumpy, and I didn't want to have to add lots of oil and sweeteners to make it clump. 
According to David Lebovitz, the missing secret ingredient was . . . applesauce!  I will just have to try this.

Caramel Cake and the Oven of Doom

I spent much of yesterday morning in the kitchen, banging away at a pair of baking projects-- the now-famous no-knead bread recipe and a caramel cake that I have been craving this week (assembled out of a pastiche of these recipes).  The bread turned out okay, although the crust (as ever!) is not crackly enough.  The cake frustrated me.  Leaving aside the total mess I made trying to pour caramel glaze over it (thank God I was doing it over the sink), the cake itself took too long to bake, and by the time it was fully cooked it was much browner on the sides than I meant for it to be.
The culprit?  Our oven runs cold, so everything has been baking for too long at too cold of a temperature.  I suspected this so I'd been adding 50 degrees to my baking temperatures, but I've now concluded that's not enough.  I could just go buy a thermometer, but rank empiricism is the easy way out.  I need something else to bake, to try baking on +75 or +100.  What did Einstein say about doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results?

More Beans

I went for it-- the aforementioned Good Mother Stallards along with Christmas Limas and White Runners (both new to me) and Yellow-Eyes (my current favorite, followed closely by flageolets).

Everything Can Be Found on the Internet

Compete for a blind date at El-Bulli (via Clotilde):

how it works

i. Check to see if your diary and budget will allow you to be in Spain on Tuesday 15th December 2009.
ii. Email me – jules[at]thestonesoup[dot]com and convince me that you are the best person to share my evening at el bulli.
points will be given for humour and creativity.
iii. Cross your fingers
Entries close Sunday 15th November 2009.

Good Mother Stallards

I have a long post in the works about Rancho Gordo beans-- how wonderful they are, how they make me want to eat at least a pound of beans a week or more, but how I haven't yet scientifically compared them to non-heirloom dried beans.  But in the meantime, I'll simply say that I received an email today from Rancho Gordo about the new bean varieties available, with this link:

I hate when anyone asks me to name my favorite bean. Can you name a favorite child? No! But if I had favorites, I'd certainly have to consider Good Mother Stallards. Dense and delicious, they also exude the most perfect pot liquor of any bean.  Please prepare them simply and avoid the natural tendency to want to make them better by fussing about. Enjoy them without all the trappings to really get the most out of them!

There are still 2-4 pounds of Rancho Gordo beans in the pantry (about 25% of what I received as a birthday present 4 months ago).  Is it unreasonable to take these new varietals as an excuse to buy more?

Yogurt Pancakes

Almost every weekend, I make pancakes.  This comes after years of thinking that I was tired of pancakes (which in turn came after even more years of loving them), so it may bear some explaining.  The pancakes I make now are yogurt pancakes, made with strong greek yogurt.  They're thicker and tangier and less fluffy than milky or bisquicky concoctions you might otherwise know.  The recipe is adapted from Mark Bittman, with two major catches.  On account of the thickness of the yogurt, it takes additional non-yogurt liquid to get them to turn into a batter.  And even so, they have a hard time fully cooking on the stovetop.

Ingredients:

Two eggs.
One cup of Fage greek yogurt, more or less.
1/2 cup of water.
2 cups of flour.
1 tsp baking soda.
1/2 tsp salt.
1 tbsp sugar.
Butter to taste.

Recipe:

Preheat the oven to 250 degrees.

Make the batter: Beat the eggs in a bowl.  Add the yogurt and water and beat again, until smooth.  Now add the dry ingredients (i.e., everything but the butter).  If you are fastidious, combine these ingredients in a separate bowl, then fold them in.  If you are not (i.e., if you are me), put the flour on top of the egg-yogurt  mixture, then put the other ingredients on top of the flour, then fold the whole mess together, counting on the baking soda, salt, and sugar to get adequately distributed in the process.  The mixture should be smooth, but not beaten.

Now cook the pancakes:  Place a skillet on medium-high heat, and add a small pat of butter.  Add batter (I use a 1/4 cup measure as a scoop).  When the top is all bubbly and the edges look firm, flip them.  Once the outside of the pancake is fully cooked, transfer to a platter in the oven.  Leave the pancakes in there to finish cooking as you move on to the next batch.  Repeat until you run out of batter.

Then set the table.  By then, the last pancakes will hopefully have finished cooking in the oven.  Eat with butter, plus maple syrup or jam if you must, plus coffee, orange juice, and the New York Times to taste.

From the Archives

Eating ortolans (not this kind of ortolan).

From the Archives

Failing to fry a lemon.

From the Archives

Roasting chicken.

Longneck Bottle, Let Go of My Hand

Oskar Blues: Dale's Pale Ale

It's famous because it's a microbrew that comes in a can.   It's not the best pale ale I've ever had, but it is probably the best canned beer I've ever had.  [One possible exception, the cans of Fat Tire I chugged while floating down the Yampa river, have an unfair advantage on account of the setting in which I consumed them.]  It's interesting, it's floral, and the can does keep it clean and fresh.  Oskar calls it an "everyday" beer, and that sounds about right.  It didn't make me go "wow!" and it could be a little sharper or crisper, but it might grow on me.

Turkey tacos and mexican coleslaw

I had ground turkey in the freezer and a desire for some comfort food, so I turned to my old standby (adapted from Casey Pitts and Mark Bittman).

Ingredients for coleslaw:

Half head of cabbage (red is much much better, but you can use green if you must)
One green pepper
One bunch scallions
One bunch cilantro
Six cloves garlic
Olive oil
Approx. three limes
Salt and pepper to taste

Ingredients for tacos:

1-2 pounds ground turkey
One onion
One jalepeno pepper (optional)
1-2 tbsp cumin
1-2 tbsp oil
One can chipotles adobado
Tortillas
Fage greek yogurt (spoonful)

Recipe:

First the coleslaw:  Thinly slice cabbage.  (I do this by slicing the head into quarters and then making paper thin cuts crosswise across the wedge.  You've probably seen coleslaw, so you have a sense of what we're going for.)  Throw out the very tough core at the brainstem of the cabbage.  Place in a bowl.

Thinly slice scallions, garlic cloves, and green pepper too.  (I also cut the green pepper into quarters and use the same technique.)  I suppose if you have a mandoline or a cuisinart it might do a decent job of this, but I do the slicing by hand because I think it's fun, and simpler.  Add to bowl.

Dress cabbage salad mixture with large quantity of salt (2-4 tbsp, more or less), olive oil to coat (maybe 2 tbsp) and juice of three limes, plus some grindings of pepper.  Toss and let sit-- for several hours if possible.  When you're ready to eat it, add one bunch of chopped cilantro, taste, and adjust seasoning.

This makes a large quantity (you could do the whole head of cabbage but I rarely have a bowl big enough), and it keeps very well, growing a little softer and mellower the longer it sits in the fridge.  I make this almost every week during the winter, so that we always have a raw vegetable dish that we can take to work.

[You can also make this in "spicy coleslaw" variation by adding cayenne pepper or, better yet, 3 seeded thinly sliced jalapeno peppers.  I think it's better that way, especially in the winter when bright crunchy flavors are hard to find, but I've learned from experience that spicy meat topped with spicy coleslaw makes for a really overwhelming taco.]

Now the filling:  Finely chop onion and jalapeno (seeding it if you can) and saute in oil until they soften and just start to brown.  Add meat, breaking up and stirring occasionally.  After meat is no longer pink, add cumin, stir again.  When meat is somewhat browned, add can of chipotles.  Stir and add a little water if you need to get it to coat the mixture.  Let simmer on low for a few minutes.  Add salt and pepper to taste.

Make a taco (or burrito, depending on the size of your tortillas):  Warm tortilla in microwave or skillet or (my preference) by holding in the flame of a gas stove.  Place spoonful of yogurt in tortilla.  Place meat in tortilla.  Add coleslaw on top.  Roll or fold, and eat!  (You will probably be inclined to overstuff them.  Be careful.)

Assorted Links, Gourmet Edition

1. Gourmet is closing! 
2. While lots of people on Twitter are sad about this, I bet most of them weren't subscribers.
3. In the meantime, here is Gourmet on Miami street food (I have not tried 7/8 of the list),
4. and here is a new R.W. Apple anthology.

Amusingly, when you click away from the Gourmet website, a pop-up window offers you a subscription to Gourmet and Bon Apetit for "one low price."  I should hope so!

From the Archives

 The overratedness of American pancakes.

Simple Question

Q:  What kind of apple is best?

Not a Very Good Manhattan, Revisited

My earlier cocktail post merits this trip to the archives:

Me: Can you make a manhattan?
Bartender: Sure, but not a very good one.
Me: Umm, okay.
Bartender: (Pours bourbon, ice cubes, in cocktail shaker. Looks around.) Drat! I'm out of triple sec. Sorry!
Me: (Stares in confusion, speechless).

I later discovered that this idea was not an aberration, although it is an abomination.

Not a very good Manhattan

The most horrifying thing I have heard or seen about a Manhattan in three years:

To Man Up a Manhattan:

• Replace the sweet vermouth with dry, to give your drink that rugged brown bourbon color.
• Order it “on the rocks.” Served with ice, your drink will come in a low-ball or “old fashioned” glass. Nothing long-stemmed. (Long-stemmed is fine for Martinis, a drink whose power transcends gender, and some have argued, time and space.)
• Order “with a twist.” Maraschino cherries are the clowns of the booze world, the stuff of nightmares.

And there you have it. “A dry Manhattan on the rocks with a twist.” A respectable, gentlemanly drink order . . .

The source is the new-to-me blog Sexiquette, which looks like it would be a very good blog if it had more posts-- see for example this ode to summer.

From the Archives

In praise of mackerel.

Assorted Food Links

1. The search for Cambridge Sauce.  (Via Trivial Comedy.)
2. A new cupcake store in downtown Miami.
3. Cupcakes hit the middle east, too.
   

Red!

Villa Pillo Borgoforte 2006:

Let this be its tasting note:  I poured a glass and said, "Wow!  Look at that color red!"  A little bit later, I took a sip with my Italian sausage and said, "It tastes as good as it looks."

I-95

After the Georgia Pig (meh!), we didn't really have the heart to keep trying places, but here is my nascent Yelp list for roadfood along I-95.  It will be supplemented next summer, and possibly earlier too.

Quote of the Day

The one thing I crave almost every day is a good burger.

That is David Lebovitz.  I am still not sure whether the best burger I have ever had was at Ray's Hell Burger or Capital Grille.  It sure wasn't in San Francisco or Paris!

Menus

Wednesday:

Flank Steak with assorted sauces (jerk sauce, passionfruit pepper sauce, steak sauce)
Twice-baked potatoes with ricotta and pesto
Canteloupe

Thursday:

Roast Pork shoulder (barbeque sauce on the side)
Cornbread
Coleslaw

Friday:

Risotto with saffron and pancetta
Salad with pear, pecan, and blue cheese
Roasted tomatoes and corn

Saturday:

Italian Sausages
Roasted garlic mashed potatoes
Baguette

More on Italian Stir-Fry

"It has always intrigued me to note that of all of the cuisines of the world the Italian has far less in common with those of its Latin neighbors Spain and France than it does with that of China.  Both Italy and China make pasta, for example, to cite one of the most obvious parallels.  But their culinary paths draw close in so many other ways: in their direct handling of ingredients, in the many quick-cooked dishes, in the integration of vegetables with meat or fish, in pairing sweet with sour.  When I first saw strips with broccoli stems and carrots cut into thin sticks in this dish I wondered who the Chinese cook was in the kitchen . . . ."

That is from the introduction to "Pork Strips with Broccoli and Carrots" in Marcella Hazan, Marcella Cucina 327 (1997).  Here is the previous post.

Mock Barbeque

In our quest for good barbeque near I-95, we never did manage to stop anyplace for good South Carolina barbeque, and yet it is one of my wife's favorite kinds.  So this weekend I decided to take a shot at recreating some of the flavors in a home kitchen, with the help of a number of Lee Bros. recipes, modified and spliced together.  There's no real woodsmoke involved, so this really is barbeque sacrilege, but it was still darn tasty. (This makes a recipe that is fairly light on sauce, all-told.  You could as much as double the sauce proportions if you like.)

Ingredients:

One 3-pound boneless pork shoulder
1 cup dijon mustard
1 Tbsp olive oil
4 Tbsp cider vinegar
2 Tbsp brown sugar
1 Tbsp black pepper
1 Tbsp oregano
1 Tsp salt

Recipe:

Combine everything but the pork in a bowl and whisk it together.  Then score the pork shoulder (to make sure the marinade gets everywhere) and dump everything in a ziploc bag.  Refrigerate for a while-- at least half a day and preferably much more.  (Ours took about three days, I think.)  

When you are ready to proceed, preheat the oven to 325.  Take the pork shoulder out of the marinade, letting as much of the marinade as you can drip back into the bag.  Brown on both sides for about 3-5 minutes each.  Pour all of the marinade over the shoulder, cover, and place it in the oven for about 3.5 hours, checking on it and basting it occasionally.  (The parts that are covered in liquid will become much more tender, so try to keep the whole thing covered in sauce.)

Once it is tender and done, take it out of the oven.  Take the marinade and drippings that have accumulated in the pan, place them in a saucepan on the stovetop.  Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer for about 5 minutes.  Chop up the pork, and pour the sauce over it.  Eat, especially with cornbread and pickled cucumbers or coleslaw.

For West is where we all plan to go some day . . .

Boulder Beer Company Hazed & Infused:

Citrus and hops.  Citrus and hops.  Citrus and hops.  That's all I could taste, but that was fine by me.  A simple but remarkably tasty microbrew--it reminded me why I like Western microbrews so much.  And made me eager to see what else was in my Boulder Beer Company sampler.

Snack

Have I mentioned yet that I am addicted to vegetables?  In the mood for an excuse to eat carrots, radishes, and celery last week, but deciding to make them slightly more interesting, I whipped up a small quantity of simply blue-cheese dip.  Proportions are extremely approximate, because I didn't measure anything, but the recipe is adapted out of my vague memories of something similar in How to Cook Everything.

Ingredients:

About 1/4 cup blue cheese
About 1/4 cup Greek yogurt (mine was Fage 2%)
Juice from one lemon
Lots of ground black pepper (or to taste)
Favorite raw vegetables (e.g., carrots, celery, radishes)

Recipe:

Chop vegetables into edible pieces. Combine other ingredients in bowl.  Use a fork to break the blue cheese up and blend it with the yogurt.  Once it has become as smooth as you want it, dip the vegetables and dig in.  (You may need to add a dash of salt, depending on how salty your cheese is.)

30 Minutes Too Long

Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA:

Apparently Esquire called it "perhaps the best IPA in America."  I would look at the other half of the glass and say perhaps not.  Too fruity, and not nearly as delicious as the 60-minute version.  And to add expense to inadequacy, it was far more expensive.  I've had much worse, but I've had much better.  [My wife deemed it "not too bad," but wouldn't call it good either.]

Lee Bros.

Apropos of earlier discussion about the uselessness of non-technique cookbooks, I have a confession.  Lately I've been cooking nearly everything out of a new book: The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook.  I picked it originally when it was mentioned on Smitten Kitchen, and I've already used it to produce not only cornbread salad and buttermilk dressing, but hominy with fresh mushrooms, okra-corn pudding, and soon perhaps an experiment in mock South Carlolina barbeque.  It's a book that not only has a good relaxed Southern personality, but also good, relatively manageable, recipes.  It will almost certainly be appearing repeatedly in future posts. 

[Here is their website.]

Assorted Food Links

1. The French don't love Julia Child.
   
2. Snickerdoodles!
3. Have you ever tried good tequila?
   

Ad hoc Italian Stir-Fry

Mark Bittman reports:

I found myself with the ingredients for a quick stir-fry: shreds of cooked chicken, two or three kinds of mushrooms, asparagus trimmings (the flower ends had mostly been used at a television shoot), basil.  But I also had a loaf of bread I wanted to eat, so I was caught in a cross-cultural conundrum: eat bread with a stir-fry, or try make an Italian-style stir-fry. The second seemed more logical.  And I tried — I used olive oil, I added a bit of white wine, I threw in a few thyme sprigs, I finished the dish with more olive oil and even a bit of lemon. But it really wasn’t very successful. I sat there munching on my bread and eating the dish and thought, contrary to much of what I usually think, that sometimes the style of cooking will conquer the nature of the ingredients. A stir-fry is somehow always going to seem Chinese.

I was faced with a refrigerator of leftover odds and ends and decided to attempt something similar.  Maybe I just have lower standards, but I surprised myself by how happy I was with the result.

Nectarine pie

Before I left town for the weekend I decided to leave my wife with a homemade pie.  I started working off of this SmittenKitchen recipe for peach creme fraiche pie, slowly acquiring the ingredients and secreting them in the kitchen so as not to spoil the surprise.  Oh, I used nectarines instead of peaches, because they looked marginally less despondent at the grocery store.  And our oven is on the cold side, so it took forever to bake.  And please remember that other than the cherry slab pie pictured in the banner right now, I'm pretty sure this is the first pie I've ever baked.  But it wasn't so bad, really.  I might conquer this fear of baking yet!

How to puree an entire watermelon

The first time I pureed an entire watermelon, it was in the course of making Smitten Kitchen's watermelon lemonade (which was almost as fantastic as Deb's pictures look).  For our housecooling party, we decided to make aguas frescas, so it seemed like another pureed watermelon was in order.

Now, that first pureed watermelon was definitely harder than I expected.  The chief difficulty is that we don't have a blender, only a cuisinart food processor.  Food processors can do almost anything blenders can, except deal neatly with large quantities of liquid.  Well let me tell you:  a pureed watermelon is a large quantity of liquid.

This time around, I had a flash of insight-- the immersion blender we had just gotten as a wedding present!  No problem.  The only hard thing I foresaw was cutting all that melon off the rind.  [That problem, it turned out was easily solved-- just cut the melon in thick, round slices with a big chef's knife, and then cut the rind away from the outside.]

However, I had accidentally bought a melon that was not seedless.  This required a colander and a lot of paper towels.  [See right.]  We left a bunch of the watermelon to strain and went off to see a movie, and it worked pretty well.  I squeezed a bunch of the pulp through the paper towels at the end to make sure we weren't missing too much of the good stuff.

So, learn from my many mistakes!

How to puree an entire watermelon:

1. Buy a seedless watermelon.
   
2. Cut it into slices with a big knife.
3. Cut the rind off of each slice and throw it away.
4. Roughly chop the watermelon flesh and put it in a big bowl.
5. Attack it mercilessly with an immersion blender.
6. Strain it only if you are the kind of killjoy who won't accept pulp in your orange juice.
7. Enjoy!

Nothing fancy

Breakfast, and no it's not barley:

Bento

I am charmed by this New York Times trend story on bento boxes, and also vaguely pleased to say that I have friends who were in to bento boxes long before the Times picked up on them.  But it's a little odd that the phenomenon--as reported, anyway--combines two very different things.  One is having a convenient compartmentalized carrying case for bringing your lunch to work or school.  If you don't just bring a wrapped sandwich or a single big tupperware of pasta or stew or salad, it can be difficult to pack all of the pieces of your lunch in a reasonable way.  [My usual solution the past two years has just been to bring a ridiculous array of tupperwares and plastic bags, and my co-clerks were polite enough to keep their snickering to themselves.]  I liked the look of "Bento 2.0" from laptop lunches, which also seemed to have a good combination of compartment sizes.
The other half of the trend is cutting fruits, vegetables, and other foods into cute little cartoon-like shapes, or decorating them with little plastic thingies.  I find this just bizarre, although if it inculcates a love of fruits and vegetables I suppose I have no real complaints.

Quote of the Day

"[T]here is no reason home cooks shouldn't regularly be curing their own bacon."
That is Michael Ruhlmann, and here is my source.  It is comforting to know that there is a whole level of home-cooking-geekery that is totally foreign to me.  [I resisted the temptation to give this post the obvious title.]

A personal endorsement

Raffi laments:

"I never thought I'd say this, but I need those glass canisters one gets at places like Crate & Barrel."

Allow me to sing the praises of the Oxo POP container:

1. They're plastic, not glass, so they're lighter and they don't break.
2. The pop-up lid really is both easy-to-use and air-tight.
3. They have wide mouths (the width of the container), unlike most glass canisters, so you can actually reach a measuring scoop into them.  (Pouring flour out of a canister into a waiting measuring cup on the counter or over a bowl is a recipe for mess and disaster.)
4. They come in big sizes-- big enough for a big sack of flour.
5. They're not that expensive.

Ever since a terrible moth infestation that still makes us shudder, I've sworn by them.

Microwaving metal

I had always learned that you can't put metal in the microwave or else disastrous things will happened. Well, not quite "always"-- I grew up habitually putting my fork or spoon in the bowl I was microwaving and not really thinking anything of it (and with nothing bad ever happening). I always assumed this was some magical property of my parents' microwave.

Anyway, opening the microwave this afternoon, I discovered that ours has a metal rack in it. Like, built into the sides. As if it's supposed to be there. A little amateur internet research turned up conflicting authorities. Mythbusters apparently says its pretty much ok to microwave metal. The FDA recommends against it. This anonymous soul on the internet attempts to square the circle:

"When the metal is thick, smooth, with rounded edges--that metal rack--the moving electrons can bounce around freely while rarely hitting another metal atom."

Huh!

Sugared sugar

As an avid consumer (and sometimes a harsh critic) of the DC cupcake scene, I was intrigued to see this Slate article by Daniel Gross predicting a cupcake bubble. Unfortunately, this article is an example of a great idea and terrible execution. Yes, lots and lots of cupcake places have opened recently and there is reason to wonder how many people will become regular cupcake consumers after the novelty is less charming. But after dressing up this basic observation in several needlessly long paragraphs, Gross concludes:

I've tried a bunch of these new cupcakes and find them to be way too sweet—sugar on top of sugar.

Okay. Now it is true that nearly every cupcake does consist of sugar (in the form of icing) on top of other sugar (mixed into a cake). But this sentence made me wonder if the fault lay not in the cupcake enterprise, but in the cupcakes themselves-- or at least the ones that Gross has tried.
To take just DC as an example, there is a big difference between Baked & Wired's sugar-loaded (though yummy) monstrosities and the much less sweet and more perfect specimens at Georgetown Cupcake. If the real problem is just that most of the new companies make their cupcakes too sweet, then plenty of good cupcakes should survive the creative destruction of the marketplace.

Technique

Commenters to the previous post and Raffi at Waddling Kitchen point out that while recipe compendiums may well be rendered obsolete by the internet, serious cooking techniques (like most serious things, I guess) are still learned from books. Here's Raffi:

They are studied, pored over and mimicked by professional cooks across the country. They are the avenues through which the cutting edge is transformed into the quotidian. In other words, if you're eating sous vide short ribs in your local upscale restaurant in Oklahoma City, say, it's either because the cook there did a stage at Per Se (or the equivalent) or because they read and studied Under Pressure. That kind of cookbook simply isn't in competition with epicurious.

Best Two Sentences I Read Today

I hope to get back in the kitchen as soon as humanly possible after the baby is born, and the only way to get me back in the kitchen is to let me get hungry for something that nobody makes the way I want them to. It is the only reason I cook, it’s the only reason I’ve ever wanted to cook and it’s the only thing that’s going to get me to cook when feasting on pudgy baby cheeks no longer cuts it, as impossible as that is to imagine.

This is the source. This blog will soon be re-titled "Crescat reads Smitten Kitchen."

Are Cookbooks Dead?

One of CrescatK's other two readers says, in a comment below, "it would seem now, more than any time else, cookbooks are dead." I'm not so sure.

It's true that 5 nights out of 6, I cook dinner from memory, instinct, or necessity without cracking a cookbook. (As I have been dodging gainful employment for weeks, my mind is not currently on these weeknight-I'm-starving-and-lets-get-it-on-the-table dinners, but they'll surface on this blog sooner or later.) And it's also true that when I do turn to a recipe-- or (rarer still) feel inspired by a recipe to actually go out and acquire the ingredients to make it-- it is just as often one I found on the internet (almost always SmittenKitchen). But I still have a stock of cookbooks I use regularly.

To wit: How to Cook Everything, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, Fish, and, more recently, The Perfect Scoop. (The clever reader will notice what those first three books have in common.) I hope that someday Julia Child's book goes on that list, and at some point I intend to finally conquer my twin fears of baking and of desserts, but I don't yet have a cookbook I fully trust on baking. [N.B.: I feel as if total trust is required to conquer this new and feared area of cooking-- I'm not yet in a position to glance at a cake recipe and know that I should cut the sugar in half, add an egg yolk, and expect the finished product to be better. Thus far, I trust Deb and my wife and no one else.]

Now, the commenter still makes a very good point-- that serious cooks are much more likely to use the internet rather than a cookbook much of the time. Even if cookbooks are not yet dead, the genre is sure dying. Just look at the cookbook section in your local Barnes & Noble. Nearly every one in the store is either pointlessly gimmicky ("95 vegan things you can make in a pressure cooker") or full of too many pictures and too little cookery (aka "food porn"). These items should be moved to "self-help" and "art" respectively.

But I'm not sure how much worse the world of cookbooks is than it ever was. I recently read Julia Child's retelling of her attempts to publish Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and even then she and her co-authors were being pressured by their publishers to make their books more like mainstream mass-market American cookbooks. Maybe we only notice because blogs are finally providing some competition.

I-95

Posting will be scarce for the next few days because I am driving a fully-loaded compact car with my wife and dog down the I-95 corridor. On the other hand, we are armed with some internet information and a copy of Roadfood and hunting for the best barbecue in the I-95 corridor, so some Yelp! reviews will be going up soon.

I think this blog has only two readers who aren't on the road with me, but there you go.

After Julia, what?

As I was talking to my mother on the phone about the delightful Julie & Julia, she asked what book somebody would choose now if they were going to attempt a Julie-Powell-esque cookbooking project. It's a difficult question. Mark Bittman is out, even though he is the best cookbook writer alive today, because his recipes are too simple. Indeed, it is almost antithetical to his minimalist cooking philosophy to treat his recipes as a self-actualization marathon.

Maybe it's my limited imagination, but the best sequel I could come up with was The Best Recipe. It's also big, hard, and encyclopedic. But even so, a "Best Recipe" project would hardly compare to the Julie/Julia Project. The Best Recipe lacks the same personal myth, and the book just isn't designed to teach you to "master" cooking the same way Julia's book is. Am I missing a good one? Or maybe there is no comparison.

Resolved

Next time we roast a duck, we will follow Julia Child's direction.

Pizza Resurrected

The Craving: "Hey, doesn't a pizza sound really good tonight?"

The Supplies: A mix of white and whole-wheat flours. A little bit of creamy chevre in a plastic tub. A handful of leeks. A Brandywine tomato.

The Obstacles: We had no yeast. I had remembered that even without yeast, you can get a little rise out of a basic flour dough by keeping it pretty wet and making sure your baking surface is blazing hot. As the water in the dough turns to steam, it bubbles up, like naan. But that left the dough a tacky mess.The dough managed to get stuck all over the rolling mat just as I getting ready to stick it on the pizza stone.

The Intervention: My wife exercised her household prerogative over baking floury doughs and commandeered the project. This meant taking my messy smear of dough, adding flour, rolling it out with a rolling pin, and using a handful of olive oil to keep it from sticking. A pizza peel transferred it to the oven for 5 minutes of pre-cooking. Then we layered on thin-sliced tomato, little crumbles of goat cheese, and a bunch of sauteed leeks (plus coarse salt), and gave it another ten minutes or so.

The Results: Delicious. The dough did indeed get up a little bit of a naan-like puff, and the gooey goat cheese and crunchy leeks made for a perfect summer supper. Yes, it would have been better with twice as much goat cheese, and yes the dough still slightly resembled hardtack, but it was either that or no pizza at all.

Tomato-Corn Pie

I am never actually going to cook this. But I still think about it almost every day since it's been posted on Smitten Kitchen.

A tale of two fruit salads

Once upon a time, when serving fruit salad for a large brunch party, we used to make two-- both with the fruit lightly macerated and dressed in lemon juice, and one with the addition of mint. [N.B. The best way to add mint to a fruit salad is to treat it as a giant mojito. Julienne/dice a large amount of mint, then toss it with sugar. Then muddle (i.e., smash) the sugar against the side of the bowl until the oil in the mint leaves starts to make a paste with the sugar. This is easier than you think! Then add lemon juice. Amounts to taste, but 1/2 a cup fo sugar and the juice of 2 lemons was pretty good for half a watermelon, a canteloupe, and a quart of strawberries.] We figured that some people wouldn't want such a fancy addition to a simple fruit salad and would prefer the simpler version.

Every single time, we ran out of mint fruit salad long before the plain one. We learned from experience, and feel unabashed about adding mint now.

Recently, I've begun to think about adding crumbled or diced feta cheese to our basic mint fruit salad. "And yet," I thought to myself, "some of our guests are vegan, or don't like briny cheese. So we should make two. . . ." [I haven't tried it yet.]

Pictures

Another thing that has changed since I started blogging is the prevalence of pictures. Indeed, I can't think of a top-shelf food blog (Tyler Cowen doesn't quite count) that doesn't have a lot of pictures. When I find my camera cord, expect posts like "what I ate for breakfast this morning," and "how to puree an entire watermelon." (The latter is a lot easier if you use a stick blender rather than the Cuisinart.)

Breakfast

I generally look forward to every meal I get to eat at home, because it's another chance to cook something. (I try to force myself to wait to cook something until I (or somebody else) wants to eat it.) The meal that is the general exception is breakfast. I've never really mastered breakfast.

Part of the problem is that breakfast comes in such a varied scale-- in terms of preparation time, size, and protein/etc. content. There are the minimalist French breakfasts of bread, butter, and jam, or more substantial spreads (peanut butter! cheese!). There are eggs of all sorts. Cereals (sweet and savory). And these breakfasts can have very different effects at staving off hunger for the day. Some leave me hungry by 11 a.m., others basically take me past lunch. To cook yourself the perfect breakfast, you have to know in advance how hungry you're going to want to be later, and when. On some days (like in the midst of my clerking routine) that's fine. But on Saturday mornings, who knows what the day will bring?

Another part of the problem is that I prefer savory breakfasts to sweet ones, and I haven't yet found the perfect savory-yet-whole-grain nutritious breakfast cereal for default days when I don't know what else to have. Seedy bread with peanut butter and salt, or with melted cheese and spices, make for a pretty good and satisfying start, but both are relatively high and fat. Eggs have a similar problem, and I can't eat eggs every day. I went through a phase of eating grits with salsa every day, which was pretty good, until I learned that the grits available in my grocery store were sufficiently processed that they didn't count as a whole grain anyway.

Cookbooks can change the world

At dinner today, a friend asked me to explain what the point of starting a food blog was. (Why limit it to food? What's the theme? What's the goal? "What's the elevator pitch?"). A blog with a readership of four doesn't really need to have a "pitch," and the immediate answer is just that I saw Julie & Julia two days ago and realized that I had about eight blog posts about food and cooking that I had to write right now.

Also, while watching the movie, I was struck by Paul Child's prediction to his wife that her cookbook would "change the world"-- and by how right he was. This blog has no such grand ambitions (thus the tagline on the slab-pie picture), but that's still the real reason I started it: because cookbooks can change the world.

Yelp!

I have now added to the sidebar an updating list of my most recent Yelp reviews. This blog will focus on cooking food more than just consuming it, so I probably will continue to rant or rave about restaurants on Yelp, rather than doing so here.

(This was done through a simple Blogger gadget. I hate to sound old, but Blogger has sure gotten a lot more advanced than it was in my day!)

Funniest question I read this week:

"Guys I need some information I will be opening a Cuban restaurant in South Broward by the end of September can you share with me what are the best dishes, sal[a]ds, soups, deserts, were can I buy Cuban meat I like butchers that know the meats. . . . Tell me about this dish Tasajo, I have never had that where can I go and buy it fresh. I asked someone at Publix and they never heard of it. Also some of the most common ingredients used in Cuban foods. What is the best non-stick pots or pans.

Thanks."

Here's the link.

Cooking for company

I loved this mouth-watering post by Mark Bittman about a going-away potluck for Frank Bruni. Not only because the food sounded great (what do you expect when Florence Fabricant, Melissa Clark, Mark Bittman, and their friends get together?), and not only because Bittman is entirely right that there should more meals like this in the world. I liked that Bittman confessed that he was "was nervous about cooking for [his] peers . . . was rushed, and (not surprisingly) . . . probably put in less effort than all or most of them."

I love to cook, but this is the story of my life. Cooking for two already requires a great deal more attention than cooking for oneself (attention to whether it's legitimate to have clafoutis for dinner, to put peanut butter on a hamburger, and so on). Cooking for guests is yet another level. Like Bittman, I'm often making these dishes at the last minute, while rushed or rushing out the door. But the bigger problem is that I like things spicier, saltier, sourer, and stronger than the average bear (as, thankfully, does my wife), and those preferences creep into many of my workaday recipes. Vinaigrette: three parts vinegar, one part oil, more salt than you want to know about. Most Indian recipes: double all spices, then proceed. Sorbet recipes: cut sugar in half, then proceed. And so on.

Sometimes these preferences win converts at dinner parties. (Nobody has ever complained that our desserts were not sweet enough, or that I oversalted the salad.) But some of these preferences are just idiosyncratic. People whose brains have not been properly trained just shouldn't eat chipotle or cayenne pepper in the same quantities I do. I'm so used to cooking without recipes, without worrying about what normal people eat, that I don't even know how to taste-test my own cooking for mixed company. Normally I cook dinner by asking "what do I want?" and then "how can I best make that happen in my kitchen with the ingredients I have on hand?" I hardly know how to cook in any other way.

Strawberry Rhubarb Sorbet

Getting married is awesome for a lot of reasons. One very minor reason is that you receive lots of housewares as gifts from your friends. One of the best such gifts has been an ice-cream maker. We have already put the box to work on several great creations (largely in the hands of David Lebovitz) and tonight was another experiment and success-- strawberry rhubarb sorbet.

We're trying to cook as much of our freezer as we can before we move to Miami Beach. We had a load of very tart rhubarb from the farmers market in the freezer, already measured and chopped (leftover from several enthusiastic rounds of this recipe from Smitten Kitchen). I also uncovered a bag of Trader Joe's frozen strawberries. That was enough to make a variation on this David Lebovitz recipe:

Ingredients:
12 oz. chopped rhubarb
1/2 cup sugar
2/3 cup water
8 oz. frozen strawberries
1 tbsp Rose's sweetened lime juice from concentrate (leftover from making gimlets)

Recipe:
1: Plunk rhubarb, sugar, and water into small saucepan. Turn to highest heat until the mixture starts to boil, then turn heat down to the elusive "simmer" and keep it there for 5 minutes. (Rhubarb will probably melt into unidentifiable rhubarb mush.) Remove from heat.

2: After a few minutes, when steam is no longer rising from pot, add frozen strawberries and stir. Let frozen strawberries melt and rhubarb sauce cool. Once the whole mixture is around room temperature, put it in a blender or Cuisinart and puree till smooth. Refrigerate until dessert-time.

3: Run through ice-cream maker. Eat.

[N.B.: As you'll notice if you look at the linked inspiration, my contributions to the recipe largely consist of making it less sweet-- less sugar, fewer strawberries, and by the way my rhubarb was on the tart side. I think its better that way, but I used to eat raw lemons in college, so you shouldn't trust me.]

Cooking, Clerking

I've just spent two years clerking for a pair of brilliant judges, and I've learned a whole lot from them about law-- certainly more than I ever learned in law school. But this blog isn't about that.

In those two years, I've also learned a whole lot about cooking, and about food. This blog is about that instead.