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.