The Thing You Need is Always in a Box in the Basement

I suppose that wouldn’t hold true for people whose houses don’t have basements, but I live in New England, where most houses (and most apartment buildings, even) have basements. And I can tell you, probably 7 times out of ten, when you’re looking for something, it’s almost always in a box in the basement.

Lately I’ve been thinking about this because it came to my attention that we have been living in this row house apartment for five years now. In those five years, we’ve maintained a steady collection of Rubbermaid bins in our basement, neatly stacked on the floor and lined up on big heavy shelves assembled by my husband in a fit of organizational mania. The bins hold many many objects which are of either sentimental or practical value, and I have to go through them on a regular basis as a result. Without exception, the items in these bins are things that I’ve never managed to find a place for in one of the actual rooms of the apartment, not even in a closet. This is a nice row house we have, but it is not exactly brilliantly designed. Storage is a real problem. This is why I thank god for the basement and for the Rubbermaid bins, which I mocked my husband for buying, originally, when we were packing up the old place. Mea culpa: he was right, the bins are super-useful.

An example of Why the Bins are Useful: a few weeks ago my husband asked me if I knew where his chess set was. “What chess set?” I asked. I know perfectly well that he owns many objects that are complete surprises to me: when our daughter was about two, I learned one weekend afternoon that he had been keeping secret from me, since 1999, the presence of a violin and a clarinet in our house. In our house. I’d never known we had these things. Not that I cared, but — you’d think I’d’ve noticed. But no, I had not. So I wasn’t particularly thrown by the chess set query. I just asked, “What chess set?” “You know, the Yankees-Red Sox chess set,” he reminded me. This rang a bell, and I said, “Right, right, I remember that. It’s in a bin in the basement.” At the old house, it lived on a shelf in the coat closet, because that’s where we kept the three games we owned. (For no good reason; we never played any of them.)

The next time I had occasion to go downstairs, I moved my husband’s bicycle aside and a box of air conditioner air filters and there was the chess set, full-frontal view, through the side of a big Rubbermaid bin. I brought it upstairs and tossed it nonchalantly on the couch, where he was seated playing chess on his phone. “It was right there, wasn’t it,” he said. “Pretty much,” I said.

So the Rubbermaid bins are good.

They’re good because they allow me to keep track of things that I don’t need in an immediate sense but which I know I will need in the fullness of time. In the “fullness of time” category — very high on the list –: an ancient iron that my husband got at a Hadassah in Boston sometime before he moved to New Haven. I don’t know if he’s ever used it, but for several years I used it to iron the things we had that I really believed benefitted from ironing. Once in a great while I would iron a shirt, but overwhelmingly the items I felt warranted ironing were small things like handkerchiefs, napkins, and certain pillowcases. The occasional very handsome dishtowel. I used to devote great care to maintaining these things so that they were pleasant to use and pleasant to behold. I used the crappy old iron and I used a really phenomenally crappy ironing board that we found in the attic of our old house when we moved in. I hated that ironing board, but it was functional, and so I never bought a new one. When we moved out five years ago, I left it behind in the attic, because it was not worth relocating to our new place, and, to be honest, it was totally unclear to me where we could store it even if we brought it here. A full-height, full-length ironing board is not a trivial thing to store. If you store it incorrectly, you will not use it, because it’ll be such a nuisance to get at. If it’s at hand, you’re much likelier to use it. (At the old house, I kept it in a bedroom closet, which was ugly, but it was a closet only I used, and so I was the only one bothered by its presence. I got away with murder with that closet.) This is a variant form of the axiom that you should join the gym closest to where you live so that you’ll be more likely to actually go to the gym. I’ve never joined a gym, so I don’t have personal experience with this axiom, but I’ve heard people talk about it. So.

Once a year or so, I’ve lamented audibly the fact that we have no ironing board, and my husband has said optimistically, “I could make one for you. I could build one so that you could fold it out from the wall, it would store itself.” This is the kind of thing he says with pounds of good intentions but I know it will never happen. He’s a great person but he is not really what you’d call “handy,” let alone a skilled enough DIY person that I’d actually let such a project move forward. If I really wanted a built-in, fold-down ironing board, I know exactly who I’d call to build it, and so does my husband. But it would probably cost $300, and it’s not worth it. (Well, maybe it is, come to think of it. Maybe I should look into this.)

So we’ve lived in this place for five years, and in those five years I’ve ironed things precisely once. I managed it, once, on the dining room table, after covering the table with numerous layers of towels and newspaper and things like that, and it was such a pain in the ass, I never did it again. But I’ve wished, all these years, that I had an ironing board that I could at least use to do the napkins and the hankies. They are so much nicer to use when they’re ironed! It’s just better when the edges are flat and smooth. I suppose it’s a frill (no pun intended), but on the other hand, there are not enough small pleasures in life; if an ironed handkerchief makes me happy, let me enjoy it.

I recently attended a big tag sale at my daughter’s old nursery school. At this tag sale, all sorts of remarkable housewares can be found for dirt cheap. One year I found a hand-made child-size bar cart, a relic of the days when normal people had bar carts at home and someone thought it was a good idea to build a child-size one for their kid to play with. (It did not come with child-size Martini glasses, unfortunately, but the cart itself is a delight and has provided many children with hours and hours of entertainment and I expect to own it forever.)

This year, I found, for two dollars, a small table-top ironing board. It would be useless to me if I needed to iron tablecloths, but for the occasional napkin, hanky, or dishtowel (yes, I own dishtowels that benefit from ironing), it’ll be just dandy. Its foam pad had flattened to dust, and my daughter dropped it in mud as we were carrying it home, but no matter. I laundered the cover and made a new pad for it out of an old towel, and now it’s fully-operational. All I had to do today, when I wanted to start ironing, was go to the basement and find the iron. Mere child’s play, thanks to the Rubbermaid bin. I could see the iron as I entered the basement — it was about two feet over from the bin that held my husband’s chess set. Within half an hour, the freshly laundered hankies looked better than they have in five years.

I bet my husband won’t notice, but I will.

May 11, 2016 0

Mayonnaise: A Science Project. You know, for kids

Recently my family had the kind of day (and the kind of evening) where the only sane thing to do come dinnertime was have us all assemble sandwiches. The schedule had been bonkers all day long and there was no chance of my being able to cook something decent; it made loads of sense to just buy some cold cuts and rolls and a couple bags of potato chips and pretend that it was the kind of hot summer night when no one even pretends that a hot meal is a good idea. Never mind that in fact it was a cool 40 degree evening and that none of us were feeling at all summery. Some nights, you just say “uncle.”

The three of us built our sandwiches, and as we sat down at the table a large-scale discussion commenced on the virtues of mayonnaise. Now, many people fear mayonnaise. Some fear it for health-related reasons and some have what I guess we’d call “sensory issues” about it — they don’t like any food that’s white, or they find it slimy, or something — I don’t know what the problem is, I just know that there are a lot of people out there who won’t eat mayonnaise. And then on the other side of things, there’s a whole other crowd that regards mayonnaise as an essential food group unto itself. In other words, people have strong feelings about mayonnaise. My husband and I are vehemently pro-mayonnaise and I have been known to make it from scratch once in a blue moon. Our daughter, when smaller, accepted mayonnaise happily as the thing that bound her tuna salad together, but if you asked her if she wanted mayonnaise on, say, her turkey sandwich, she would protest loudly and declaim that mayonnaise was bad. In other words, she wasn’t quite grasping the situation, when it came to mayonnaise. Fortunately, in the last couple of years, she’s come around, and making good sandwiches for her is a lot easier now.

I voiced my relief that my daughter is no longer mayonnaise-phobic, and mused, “It’s so depressing when people make sandwiches and skimp on the mayonnaise. It makes for a very sad and uninspiring sandwich.” My husband agreed. Our daughter asked, “Can you make mayonnaise? I mean, can you make it at home?” My husband looked at me, and I looked at him and then at my daughter, and I said, “Kid, you were born into the right household.” I realized it had been quite a long time since I’d last made mayonnaise, if she was asking me this question, and said that over the weekend, I’d show her how to make mayonnaise.
So the weekend came, and I called the girl to the kitchen and showed her what we were going to do. “It is not hard to make mayonnaise,” I said, “but there are a few things you have to get absolutely right before you start, or it will not work at all.”

“Ok,” she said. I showed her what we needed. “We’ve got some olive oil, some vegetable oil, two eggs at room temperature, vinegar, a little bit of salt, and some mustard.”

“That isn’t a lot of food,” she said.

“No, it isn’t,” I said, “but you’ll see what happens.”

First I separated the eggs, explaining that if the eggs were cold, the mayonnaise would not happen. They have to be at room temperature. If you’ve not planned ahead and taken the eggs from the fridge an hour in advance, you can run them under hot tap water to get them ready. But it’s obviously easier to just let them sit on the counter a while. The whites were set aside in a little plastic tub; we wouldn’t need them. The yolks went into a large steel mixing bowl. I got out a big whisk and said, “Ok, I want you to whisk these together.” She held the bowl steady with one hand and began to awkwardly whisk the yolks. I said, “Now I’m going to add some stuff. You keep whisking.” I measured a couple of teaspoons of white vinegar into the bowl, and added a pinch of salt and a small dab of Colman’s prepared mustard (because I’m out of dry mustard). “Keep whisking,” I said. She kept whisking. “My hand’s getting tired,” she complained. I said, “Ok, let me take over,” and I finished the first round of whisking. “See how it’s all one nice thick yellow thing?” I said. She nodded. “Ok, so now we take some oil and we pour a tiny, thin stream of it in. I want you to whisk while I do this.” I took the bottle of olive oil and began to pour in a very, very thin trickle of oil while my daughter whisked like crazy. My husband ambled into the kitchen. “You’re not doing this in the blender or something?” he asked. “No,” I said, “because I want her to really be able to see what’s happening. This is Science!” “True,” he said, and ambled out of the room.

“What’s science about this?” asked our daughter.

“Well, what we’re doing is called making an emulsion,” I said. “That’s when you take two things that wouldn’t normally combine together, and you get them to become one new thing. We’re taking oil and eggs — the eggs are mostly water — and we’re making it so that they will combine into one new thing.”

As I said this, I was pouring in more oil (having switched to vegetable oil after a while), and I’d taken over the whisking. About three minutes later, we had a big bowl of mayonnaise. How did this happen? Naturally. The action of whisking the oil and the yolks forced the two to form an emulsion, i.e., mayonnaise. Homemade mayonnaise in my experience is not the creamy white color that Hellman’s is — it’s yellower, and definitely has a more pronounced taste — so I don’t regard it as interchangeable with Hellman’s. But it is good stuff, no question. My daughter was impressed. “Now what do we do with it?” she asked. “Well, you can taste it with a spoon,” I said. She did, and was even more impressed. “But what are we going to do with all of this?”

“I don’t know,” I said. The thing about homemade mayonnaise is, it doesn’t keep very well: you have to use it up fast. Fortunately, my husband had a plan: we would be making steak frites for dinner. More accurately, I would cook steak and he would cook the frites. Dinner at home was luxurious. It turns out, the road from a turkey and cheese sandwich and potato chips to steak frites is very short indeed.

May 9, 2016 0

Passover Ends and a Local Doughnut Maker Gets a New Name

Folks, it’s been busy here. You’ve been wondering where I’ve been, and the answer is multi-faceted. I was in DC for a few days, celebrating Passover with my family down there, for one thing. But that’s a hollow excuse: mostly, I’ve been tied up with the preparations for a big fundraising event for a very weird place called The Institute Library. I’m not going to post a link here – if you’re curious, you can Google it – but I’ll just say, We were hosting a party for 125 people, and there were a lot of moving parts, and for a while there was no phone or internet service at the Library, which did not facilitate matters, and it’s been hard on the Hausfrau. And my husband and child as well. Not all dinners were what they could have been, during this time. OK: some of that had to do with it being Passover for eight days, but let’s be honest: usually, Passover cooking doesn’t get me down.

But it’s been a mess around here: The laundry has piled up to some degree. God knows I haven’t vacuumed. To say there’s a lot of domestic catching-up to do is an understatement. I will say, in my defense, that the bathrooms aren’t too disgusting (I managed to swab them down a couple of times in the last month) and that we do have clean underwear, thanks for asking. I mean, it hasn’t been that bad. But today I’m doing four loads of laundry on a day when I’d normally do two. I mean, I was down to maybe five clean dishtowels in the kitchen. It hasn’t been pretty. Peg Bracken would nod understandingly; Martha Stewart would cluck her tongue and ask why I hadn’t hired help.

One aspect of hosting a big social occasion for a non-profit organization is, If you’re lucky, there are some good leftovers to take home with you. I know some people would disagree with me, and say that if you’ve done the job correctly there are no leftovers at all, but those people are wrong. One should never have an event where the table is stripped clean of food: it means there was not enough food. In our case, on Monday night, we had ordered madeleines from a local bakery (Whole G), by request of the Executive Director, who apparently has a thing for their madeleines; but more importantly from my perspective, we had managed to get Tony’s Square Donuts to donate several boxes of their mini-donuts to the event. Tony’s Square Donuts used to be known as Orangeside Donuts. They got famous a few years ago when Jane and Michael Stern wrote them up for Saveur Magazine — one of America’s 50 Best Donuts. Because Orangeside was, at the time, around the corner from the Institute Library, I used to go there in the mornings before I went to the Library. Maybe I’d get a bowl of grits with some syrup, on a cold winter morning, if I was feeling virtuous, but more often, I’d get coffee and a donut. The Sterns wrote the place up and pretty soon Orangeside was booming. They relocated, and started serving more regular diner-food items, but I think Tony missed just being a donut guy, so now he’s back to having a small storefront downtown, and he’s changed the business name to Tony’s Square Donuts. When I asked him about providing donuts for this event, I explained to him that we liked to order desserts from businesses very close to the Library, and he lauded that effort; when I said that Jane Stern would be coming to the event — which she was; I wasn’t just making it up for the sake of getting Tony’s attention — he was excited, and said, “Anything for Jane Stern!”

Well, let me tell you: those donuts were beautiful, and they were utterly delicious as well. I fully expected there to be no leftovers, though I was hopeful: I mean, you have to have hope, when it comes to leftover donuts. At the end of the evening, the small crew of people who’d signed on to help clean up, as well as the guy who’d been playing accordion tunes for us all evening, Adam Matlock, all migrated over to the desserts table to see what could be scavenged. The answer was: not much, but enough to satisfy us. There were maybe a dozen madeleines and roughly twice that number of the mini-donuts. (I don’t mean donut holes, by the way. I mean mini-donuts. If a regular donut provides you with many mouthfuls of delicious soft glazed donut, a mini size provides you with, say, three or four bites. The thing is, Tony’s Square Donuts are often beyond rich. There’s a caramel turtle donut he does that can actually give you the collywobbles if you eat the whole thing in one sitting. The regular glazed or chocolate donuts, you can plow through — it’s the specialty items that can really knock you for a loop, gastrointestinally speaking. Tony’s mini-donuts are perfect because you can, without guilt, sample many different flavors and glazes without starting to feel like you’re going to be sick. You could have four or even five mini-donuts, as made by Tony’s Square Donuts, and still feel perky.

We all divvied up the spoils, grasping quickly that there were some real finds still on the table. Folks had not realized, for example, that those caramel-covered glazed donuts on the yellow tray were not just plain donuts with caramel glaze: they also had an exquisite apple-pie filling. Unless they were filled with Boston cream pie filling. Or raspberry jelly. Since Adam Matlock and I are connoisseur-level appreciators of Tony’s Square Donuts, we quickly created our stashes, nodding appreciatively at each other’s selections, and I think all who got in fast got what they wanted.

My husband and I drove home and I offered the babysitter — who works around the corner from Tony’s Square Donuts — a chance to snag a donut or two. She’s been known to drive real distances for donuts, all the way out to Wallingford, so I knew she’d take a couple happily. But even after donating to the Babysitter Donut Fund, we had quite a few, maybe six or seven, for ourselves.

The next morning, our daughter came downstairs and saw the big pizza box of donuts on the dining table. “Pizza for breakfast?” she asked, confused. “Donuts!” I said. She opened the box, peeked in, and smiled her crazy, missing-the-two-top-front-teeth smile. Our daughter being no fool, she asked, “Tony’s Donuts?” Suddenly, my husband burst out laughing. “Tony’s Chametz? Is that their new name?”

I began to laugh, too. “What are you talking about?” I said. “They’re Tony’s Square Donuts.”

“I know!” he said. “But — I thought you said –”

It didn’t matter. The damage has been done. The end result is that Tony’s Square Donuts will now always be Tony’s Chametz to me. I’d better notify Tony that he should print up some new business cards.

May 5, 2016 0

Tomato Soda: Why Not?

Some days ago, I took my daughter to school with a quietly growing realization that I was not in good health. By mid-morning, I’d realized I had a fever, and thought, “Well, this is inconvenient.” Not that it’s ever convenient.

But I slogged on, thinking, “I can manage all this, it’ll be fine.” I was, at the time, trying to prepare for her birthday party, which was a Big Deal. As the morning wore on, however, it became increasingly clear that I could not manage all of this, and it was not fine. Proof that I was ill, and not just having a cruddy day, was that I suddenly really wanted a glass of fruit juice.

I never want fruit juice, except when I’m sick. And, despite ours being a household with a child in it, we do not keep juice around all the time. I know, I know. What kind of people are we, to not have apple juice at all times? Well, that’s just how I am. I don’t keep juice around. As such, we had nothing to quench this specific thirst of mine, but, I did remember that in the fridge, we had an old bottle of Bloody Mary mix, leftover from New Year’s Day. I thought, “There is no good reason I can’t drink that. I’ll just thin it out with some water.” So I cut it 50% with water, and put in a lot of ice, and guzzled it down. It was, let me tell you, delicious. The horseradish, I reasoned further, had to be good for me under the circumstances. I drank about a third of the bottle of Bloody Mary mix that day, combined with lots and lots of water. The next day, I’m happy to report, I was right as rain, but I was still thinking about tomato juice and novel ways in which to drink it. Mostly I was thinking, “How come there’s no one selling bottles of tomato soda?”

I posted a remark on Facebook about this and was met with what we could charitably call much skepticism. But I remained undaunted.

The next time I was in a grocery store, two days later, I noticed a big bottle of tomato juice on the shelf, and bought it. I brought it home and said to my daughter, “I’m gonna make tomato soda.” She said, “Why? Is it good?” and I said, “Well, I don’t know, but I think it will be.” I took a can of seltzer out of the fridge. My daughter watched curiously. I poured about four ounces of tomato juice into a tall glass and then poured about six ounces of seltzer in. The drink formed a tall, foamy head, just like I’d poured a bottle of red beer into a glass. I took a sip, and thought it was delicious. Ever since then, I’ve been making myself tomato sodas when I feel particularly thirsty for something more than water. I’ve been tinkering with the proportions. It’s always good, but I’d say one part tomato juice to four parts water is probably my own personal favorite.

I realize this isn’t for everyone. It’s distinctly odd. It turns out, what’s more, that (of course) the Japanese have been marketing a similar product, called Tomash, for the last couple of years; I’m not sure how much headway they’ve made in the American market, but it is out there, in Japan, at least. You can read about it online. Tomash seems to be a combination of tomato juice, fruit juice, and carbonated water: that is not what I have in mind. I’m after a totally unsweet experience. If anything, it’d be a slightly spicy experience. I’m envisioning variants with a dash of horseradish, a dash of celery salt. Maybe some lime.

I’ve also been thinking about clearer, less intimidating-looking variations. Remember a few years ago when chefs were all abuzz about “tomato water” — the water that they drained out of their tomatoes before using the fleshy part in other recipes? Tomato water combined with seltzer could be fabulous. I’m imagining tomato water ice cubes floating in homemade ginger soda. Tomato water ice cubes in limeade. Why the hell not play with this stuff, instead of just pouring it down the drain? And on lazy summer days, yeah, you can always buy a can of tomato juice, water it down, and fill the glass with whatever un-frou-frou ice cubes you might have on hand.

I’m not going to live on this stuff, but for a change of pace? I’m definitely taking a long view on this. Tomato soda: you heard it here first.

April 12, 2016 3

Breathtaking Chocolate Sandwich Cookies

Oreos, I love you, but you may never be purchased again, not that I can even remember the last time I bought Oreos anyhow.

It is my mother’s birthday this week and I felt that it would be wise and nice to bring some baked thing when we go visit her. Since traveling with cake is a dicey prospect, I thought cookies would be the way to go. I don’t know why but the idea of a chocolate sandwich cookie, like an Oreo, but with peanut butter filling (because my mom likes peanut butter) sprang to mind. I voiced these thoughts to my husband, who said skeptically that it sounded “awfully experimental,” but I ignored him and plotted my next steps. Cracking Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Chocolate Desserts (which is a fabulous book, one of the first dessert-focused cookbooks I bought — in fact, I think it was the very first such book I bought), I found a recipe for chocolate wafers; grasping immediately that I had on hand everything it would take to make these, I moved forward. This is the list of ingredients:

2 oz. (2 squares) unsweetened chocolate
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons sifted all-purpose flour
3/4 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. baking soda
Pinch of salt
2 oz. (1/2 stick) sweet butter
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 1/2 tsp. light cream or milk
1 large egg

So, naturally, the first thing I did was say, “Two ounces of unsweetened chocolate? Screw that, I’m using cocoa powder instead.”

I subbed in 5 tablespoons regular Hershey’s cocoa and one tablespoon Special Dark cocoa powder and added some extra butter to the bowl at the stand mixer — so it wound up being about 3/4 of a stick of butter, not 1/2 a stick of butter. (Three tablespoons cocoa powder plus one tablespoon of butter equals one ounce of unsweetened chocolate.)

But I otherwise did exactly as I was told. I preheated the oven to 400° and I lined cooky sheets with aluminum foil. I creamed the butter, added the sugar, threw in the vanilla and the egg, and then whisked all the dry ingredients together. I added the dry to the wet, mixed thoroughly, and cooed at the beautiful dark brown cooky dough (not that we’re told to do this explicitly, but it’s a totally natural reaction to such a beautiful dough). I then formed it into a brick, wrapped it in waxed paper, and put it in the fridge for not quite half an hour.

When the dough was chilled, but not hard as a rock, I took it out and referred back to Heatter’s instructions. She tells us to roll the dough out on a pastry cloth. Now, this may surprise you, but I had no idea what she was talking about. A pastry cloth? Do I own anything I can use as a pastry cloth? The answer of course was, “Yes.” A pastry cloth turns out to be a non-lint producing, flat-weave cloth you rub flour into and then use as your surface for rolling out dough; it makes it easy for you to move the prepared disc of dough onto your baking sheet. Apparently all pie bakers know this. Since I don’t really believe in pie, I’ve been ignorant, but now I’m converted.

My first thought was to use a particularly cute 1940s era dishtowel of mine as a pastry cloth — the weave is perfect — but I was leery of possibly staining it permanently with chocolate. So I took one of the old cloth diapers I use instead of cheesecloth and rubbed some flour onto it and then began to roll out the cooky dough. Then came the epiphany of the week: Rolled cookies should totally be rolled out on a pastry cloth. I don’t know why or how I never before grasped this, but it was awesome. The dough was so easy to work with; it didn’t stick; it rolled out in about two seconds to exactly the right thickness (1/8″) and was simple to remove from the cloth and put on the baking tray. Had I done this straight on the countertop, I’d’ve had to use so much more flour, and it would have been both messy and I’d’ve risked toughening the dough. It’s now clear to me that, were I a piecrust baker, I’d’ve already known about pastry cloth, but because I never make pie crusts, I had no clue. Well: now I know. And pastry cloth is my new hero.

(Incidentally: Because the very dark dough didn’t mark the cloth at all, not one bit, I’ve realized that I can in fact use my cute 1940s dishtowel as a pastry cloth, and I intend to dedicate it to this purpose from now on.)

So I rolled out the cookies and baked them. It doesn’t take long: 8 minutes, pausing at 4 minutes to rotate the trays of cookies (switching racks and rotating pans, necessary moves). Then you cool the cookies on a rack.

While the cookies cooled, I made the peanut butter filling. As it happened, I still had some leftover peanut butter sauce for ice cream sitting around, and so I felt perfectly confident that (despite the presence of corn syrup in the sauce) I could generate some peanut butter filling in about two seconds. Normally one would take peanut butter, some butter, and some confectioner’s sugar and just whizz that together. Today, I took some of the sauce, about a cup and a half of confectioner’s sugar, and a little bit of heavy cream (maybe 2 tablespoons) and whizzed that together. My husband tasted it and admitted grudgingly it was good. When the cookies were cool, I put some filling onto a cooky, glued another cooky onto it, and beheld my gorgeous creation. “Look at that!” I crowed to my husband. He came and looked and said, “Your mother will be very impressed,” he said, “but no one’s tasted them yet.”

“Oh ye of little faith,” I thought to myself, and placidly continued assembling the sandwich cookies. The last one, I thought, I will serve to my husband and child as a test cooky. I cut it in half — the cooky part shattered; it is a crisp cookie — and brought them to my family, who had varied reactions. My daughter declared them wonderful, with much enthusiasm and longing looks toward the tray of cookies to travel tomorrow. My husband, more restrained, admitted calmly, “They’re good.”

Damn straight they’re good. Happy birthday, Mom.

April 10, 2016 1

Rolling the Leftovers Over, Again: Alfredo Sauce, Peanut Butter Sauce, but Don’t Worry, Not on the Same Plate

The Birthday Party of 2016 left me with some fairly high-quality leftovers to wrangle, most notably whipped cream and sugared strawberries. These were easily converted into strawberry shortcake. Since I also had un-whipped heavy cream to use up, I figured the smart thing to do would be to use it to make the biscuits. To this end, I turned to Smitten Kitchen’s recipe for cream biscuits, which I’d never used before. It read as something of a gamble: this is a biscuit that has no butter or shortening of any kind in the dough. It’s just flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, and heavy cream. You do brush the tops of the biscuits with melted butter before baking, but — that’s it. It’s the kind of recipe I read with nervousness and think, “It could be great, or it could be a disaster.” I was not encouraged, as I set it up, by the fact that the amount of heavy cream required in the recipe did not produce a dough I could work with. I wound up adding water as I went along in order to create the soft, delicate dough. But these things baked beautifully, I have to admit. They were wide and puffy — maybe not as tall as one might like, but very tender and great with the berries and cream. My daughter couldn’t finish her serving, and ate the leftovers for breakfast the next morning before going to school.

There were other leftovers to deal with. The birthday dinner was — as requested — “pizza with beautiful ricotta and a Caesar salad.” My daughter’s words. (She is our child; this is really how she talks.) Which meant that I had leftover beautiful ricotta to use up (which is no joke: anyone can tell you that a package of ricotta doesn’t last long once opened, and with beautiful ricotta, the life span is really, really short). I’d made a basic tomato sauce to put on the pizza, which meant I also had a tub of leftover tomato sauce. The salad greens got eaten up, thankfully, but still: the refrigerator became a strategic challenge. Elements leftover from Saturday’s birthday party, which were to become part of Monday night’s celebratory dinner, had to become something decent for Tuesday night. I rose to the challenge by taking from the freezer two slices of duck bacon, which I fried in a pan and then used as the base of a fake Alfredo sauce. (This is, by the way, pretty easy. You fry up the bacon, take the bacon out of the pan and set it aside, and then fry a minced onion in the bacon fat. Then you let it sit, and ignore it, while you boil your pasta water. While the pasta itself cooks, you whisk in the ricotta you’re using in with the onions and bacon fat, adding an egg if you have one sitting around, and some grated Parmesan. Cook the pasta and reserve more water than you’d guess to use to thin the Alfredo sauce — as much as a cup of water. Drain the pasta, combine with the sauce. Mince up the cooked bacon to sprinkle on top of the plates once you get around to serving, and serve with more Parmesan sprinkled on top.)

Tuesday night’s Pasta Alfredo was served with the last of the greens alongside it — a very plain salad, just lettuce and some cucumber sliced in with some dressing that I think was a mustard vinaigrette I made about a month ago. Who knows. It tasted fine.

Today it’s Wednesday, and I still have to make dinner. At nine o’clock this morning I found myself standing in the kitchen eating a leftover biscuit for breakfast (I warmed it up first so that it could be chewed — leftover biscuits are sad things) and looking into the fridge thoughtfully. “I’ve got about a cup and a half of leftover Alfredo sauce, and four cups of tomato sauce,” I said to myself. No one wants to have either thing on its own tonight, but: there’s no reason why I can’t combine them to make a new pasta sauce to serve on top of a different pasta shape! I can combine them and put it on some rotini, and with a green vegetable on the side (some broccoli rabe would be perfect), this will be a fine meal. If I am really clever about it, I will not only achieve clearing the fridge of several plastic tubs, but I will have made a sauce that is so good my family will demand to know why I don’t make this more often.

One problem remains, which is, We need to come up with a plan for using up the leftover marshmallow, peanut butter, and hot fudge sauces. I realize that the solution to this is obviously to buy ice cream and serve it with sauces, but what if I don’t want to buy ice cream? What else can I do with them? I have a feeling I could whip the peanut butter sauce into a cake frosting, or maybe a filling to use on sandwich cookies, if I baked a million little sandwich cookies. And I could do that. I’m capable of that. But basically I am soliciting ideas, now, so if you’ve got any, please comment below. (One idea pops up immediately: combine the marshmallow and peanut butter sauces to make a fluffernutter cooky filling! Mmmmmmmm.)

April 6, 2016 0

The Last of the Birthday Parties: A Post-Mortem

I am a second-generation mother who hates birthday parties; that is to say, much as my mother clearly didn’t relish having parties on her children’s birthdays, I too don’t much like holding birthday parties. But I have done it annually since 2009 and I’ve only let it make me totally psychotic a couple of times. It was nice when she was very young: we could invite whoever we wanted, babies can’t do too much damage to anything (and we didn’t have too much stuff to worry about damaging) and we could serve our guests bourbon punch and cupcakes and feel like we’d done a good job.

There were a couple of years when I made myself nuts trying to bake beautiful birthday cakes. The last year I did this, I pulled off a butterfly cake which was beautiful primarily because I bought these sugar-paper butterflies online — i.e., the cake was nice but the “butterfly” aspect of things was entirely out of my control — but the cake was, absolutely, a complete success. It was a four-layer cake with a cream cheese frosting and everyone loved it. I was very pleased with myself and had high hopes for how I’d handle cakes in years to come.

The year my daughter turned seven, however, her birthday fell during Passover, and because I refuse to do a kosher-for-Passover birthday cake (I mean, who are we kidding), we opted to do ice cream sundaes for the Big Event. We purchased tubs of good ice cream and I made hot fudge sauce and we bought cans of Reddi-Wip, an item my daughter had never before encountered. We had bowls of toppings — little M&Ms, Sno-Caps, Maraschino cherries. One of the mothers, attending the party with her daughter, volunteered to help squirt the Reddi-Wip, which I appreciated — we really had our hands full — and when all was said and done, the kids seemed happy and there was only one smear of hot fudge on the dining room wall.

This year, I asked my daughter what kind of cake she’d want on her birthday (since it’s weeks yet until Passover, so we could do whatever she wanted), and she asked to do ice cream sundaes again. She obviously felt it was way more of a novelty than any cake could ever be. I admit that I was slightly disappointed by this request — I mean, if there’s one thing I can do, it’s bake cakes that taste good and look decent on a cake stand — but she wanted what she wanted. So my husband and I said, “Ok, ice cream sundaes it is.” But, she added, “I want homemade whipped cream.” My husband, who’s usually in charge of whipped cream, was fast to say that wouldn’t be a problem. We laid in Maraschino cherries, without stems, as requested; mini M&Ms were purchased, as were Sno-Caps; I chopped some strawberries and doused them with sugar. I made three sauces to serve hot: fudge, marshmallow, and peanut butter.

This year’s event was a Superhero Party, in deference to my daughter’s love of the Christopher Reeve “Superman.” (I want to be clear: she loves the movie not only for Reeve, though he’s definitely the primary draw — she also takes great pleasure in watching Gene Hackman be a jerk.) Her interest in superheroes basically begins and ends with Superman, and she accepts only Reeve. Originally, she wanted us to screen “Superman” for all her friends; this was, we explained to her, a great idea, but totally impractical for so many reasons. “What if we just had a lot of superhero stuff around,” I said, “and then when the party’s over, if anyone wants to stay and watch “Superman” we can watch it together?” This was good enough. The challenge for me, then, was to come up with superhero themed stuff that would suffice from both my daughter’s perspective and also from the perspective of her guests, whose ages range from 5 to 9. Considering that keeping children entertained has never been a strong suit of mine, this was a real problem. I Googled “superhero birthday parties” looking for ideas, and found a million ideas that I would never get involved with — “Have your kids make Spidey Webs with silly string!” — NOT IN MY HOUSE.

But I went online and ordered some supplies (satin capes priced exorbitantly, paper masks the kids can color) and then I went to the dollar store downtown. At the dollar store I spent an hour and a half very carefully perusing the shelves and I finally came away with some gear that was, happily, even more perfect than I could have hoped for. Little tiny towels-in-a-tablet things printed with images of Superman and Batman; superhero coloring books with perforated pages so I could make a drawing table for the kids who didn’t want to be raving maniacs (only a couple of kids took advantage, but my daughter turns out to be enjoying them after the fact); and three superhero jigsaw puzzles. The real score, as far as I was concerned, was what I did with the closet up there.

I created a Fortress of Solitude in the large walk-in closet on the third floor — which is so badly designed that I turned it into a reading nook for my daughter — by covering the cedar blanket chest in there with tinfoil, hanging signage, and installing blue lights so it seemed “icy and cold” in there, instead of just “dark and stuffy,” which is how I’d normally describe it.
The kids showed up and zoomed immediately to the room on the third floor I’d set up as the playroom. (I want to emphasize: this room is not actually a playroom, and it never will be. We don’t have a playroom. We have a room with our stuff in it that happens to be big enough to function as a playroom, sort of, once a year.) The children launched into decorating their masks with varying levels of interest; all donned capes excitedly, except for one little boy who seemed to find the idea of a cape and mask offensive. When everyone was suited up, my husband came upstairs with a CD of Superhero music (i.e., the John Williams’ “Superman Theme”) and a game of musical chairs was played. I, in the meantime, worked to set up the sundae bar. We had three kinds of Ashley’s Ice Cream on hand: cherry vanilla, marshmallow Peeps (no, really), and Oreo. While I dealt with the food — which involved a noble attempt to rescue the marshmallow sauce, which had separated upon being ever-so-gently reheated, and could only be rescued at a fraction of its original volume — my husband started the kids on the Superhero Jigsaw Puzzle contest. The kids divided into three teams, each was given a 100 piece puzzle to solve, and the deal was, whoever finished their puzzle first would be first in line for ice cream.

The children came charging down to the first floor and I began to serve ice cream as quickly as I could. Another parent manned the hot sauces station at the stovetop, where we’d jerry-rigged several double boilers; another parent handled whipped cream. When all the children had eaten, my daughter cried, “AND NOW: HIDE AND SEEK!” I thought, “uh, no,” but it took me a few minutes to be able to distract them into a slightly less treacherous activity. The Twister set was pulled out. As expected, my daughter’s best friend, a little one who loathes all activity requiring motion, said, “Can I be the one who calls the spots?” and I handed her the spinning board. She settled herself happily on the rocking chair and began to boss the more physically vivacious children around. I picked up half-drunk juice boxes and recapped magic markers and put jigsaw puzzle pieces back into their boxes. Soon enough, it was four o’clock, and the wee guests, still wearing their satin capes, were bundled up into their coats. Carrying their masks, and holding Superman or Batman washcloths, some asked me if they were going to get goody bags. “You’re wearing your goody bags,” I told them all, and the parents whisked them away, probably all praying that the kids would calm down once home and maybe eat a good supper that night. I don’t know if any of them did. At our house, though, things were astonishingly quiet, once the nine wee guests were gone. My daughter opened a few of her presents: she hugged and kissed the Calvin & Hobbes books from her grandparents. My husband ordered some takeout pizza for dinner, god bless him, and the event was quiet. Pizza. Christopher Reeve in Superman. Bedtime.

There’s good news out of all of this. My daughter had a great time at her birthday party. The house was restored to order within a few hours. The Fortress of Solitude will remain present for months to come, and I expect it will continue to entertain us all even after the sign comes down. But the best thing is, we have enough leftover whipped cream and strawberries that I think I can make strawberry shortcakes for dessert tonight.

April 4, 2016 0

The Hamantaschen Chronicles: 2016

Once again, we began our Hamantaschen enterprise this year full of good intention, tons of thought, and feeling ready for the challenge. And at about nine in the morning, I got a message from my friend S., who said, “I’ve never baked hamantaschen before, but I really want to do it. Can I really use whole wheat flour to make hamantaschen?”

This, friends, is not how a hamantaschen novice should start out, by worrying about whole wheat flour. As any experienced hamantaschen baker knows, one of the biggest challenges about baking these cookies is that most recipes — and I really do mean about 90% of them, in my experience — produce a dough that bakes up into tough, tasteless things that you really have to suffer through to before you get to the good part (the filling). This is just wrong. It’s not how it’s supposed to be. In an ideal situation, both the cooky and the filling are both delicious and a pleasure to eat.

I fell to all caps and said NO NO NO NO WHOLE WHEAT FLOUR FOR GOD”S SAKE DON”T DO IT.

I explained to S. that the tenderness of the cooky is an Issue even under the best of circumstances, and that whole wheat flour is never, ever, going to make matters better. I then spent about an hour at the computer, sifting through recipes I’d emailed to myself, through old blog posts about hamantaschen, looking at websites, side by side with S.

“I think I’ll do the Smitten Kitchen recipe,” she said.

“Which one?” I asked. “I have three different SK tabs open now.” Proof that any hamantaschen baker worth his or her salt is always, always hunting for The One. If Deb Perelman is still looking, we’re all still looking.

S. thought that the big issue was going to be folding them so that they stay folded. I said that this is a big issue, and that failure is very frustrating, but that I’d learned that doing an egg wash on the cooky rounds before folding makes a huge difference. I emphasized that producing hamantaschen is a giant pain in the ass, and tedious, and full of tragedies. “You have to be prepared for the results to be ugly,” I said. “You have to NOT MIND THIS. You have to be ZEN AS FUCK about it. And you have to hope that the cooky part at least tastes good, not dull and floury.”

We then went to our respective kitchens and began baking. In my case, I discovered quickly that I had sorely miscalculated how much butter I had in the house. While I thought I had at least a pound stored away in the freezer, and several sticks left in the fridge, it turned out I did not, and I had to cobble together ends of various bits of butter (including using the hideously expensive Arethusa Farm Dairy butter I bought a while ago, which I was saving for Something Special) to come up with a scant pound. I got out my kitchen scale and weighed and re-weighed. No matter what I did, I had not quite a pound of butter. “No matter!” I said. “I can still do this.” I then put the butter I had into the Kitchen Aid bowl and put on the paddle attachment with the silicone edges — a handy thing because it scrapes the sides of the bowl for you as it beats the butter. I turned the machine on, and immediately heard a nasty crack. The butter was not as soft as it perhaps should have been, and I broke my paddle attachment.

I went to Facebook and typed, “This is a sign of some kind.”

Then I got out my old metal paddle attachment and started over. Cream the butter, I thought placidly. Double the recipe, cream the butter. Not quite a pound of butter, I’ll just do a little less flour, everything should be fine. The butter was creamed, and so I smoothly added sugar to the mixer bowl. I looked again at the recipe I was using, which was from a blog post I had written myself a couple of years ago. And then I caught my breath. “Double the recipe,” I’d been reciting in my head. But the recipe called for four ounces of butter, which was one stick. And it said to use a little more than a cup of sugar.

I’d managed to get myself messed up about whether a stick of butter is 4 ounces of 8 ounces. It’s four ounces, friends. Not eight.

I hadn’t doubled the recipe, I had quadrupled the recipe. If I had almost 16 ounces of butter, that meant I’d have to use significantly more than one cup of sugar. And more of…. everything.

I thanked god that I had two cans of poppyseed filling, because I was going to need them.

And then I took my own advice, and got Zen as fuck.

Because I realized that the instructions I was so carefully following were about to mess me up again, I stopped everything and tried valiantly to think hard. If I doubled the recipe, I would be using…. eight cups of flour. Which was impossible. Eight cups of flour is what I’d use to bake a couple loaves of bread, not to make hamantaschen. Not even a LOT of hamantaschen.

So I got even more zen, and I took a deep breath, and I carefully measured out three cups of flour and brought the flour canister over to the counter where I was working. “You can always add more, but you cannot take away,” was my mantra. I added the three cups of flour to the mixture and while it clearly was not enough — the dough was so soft as to be completely unworkable — I had no idea how much more I needed. I began to take flour from the canister in small quantities and work them in gently with a wooden spoon. The mixer was getting tired and the dough was crawling up the neck of the paddle. I didn’t count how many more cups I added, but it was probably a little over five cups, total, that I used. I then very smartly put the mixing bowl into the fridge to let the dough rest and chill (because it’s impossible to work at room temperature, but when it’s cold, it’s very easy) and began to prepare the baking trays. Four trays with four sheets of parchment paper were readied and stacked nearby. I floured the countertop heavily, pulled a hunk of dough out of the mixing bowl, and gingerly began to work with it.

The dough rolled out beautifully. It cut perfectly. I added the scraps back to the mixing bowl, so they could rest and re-chill, and I focused on brushing on the interior egg wash. (One jumbo egg took care of all the egg washing, inside and out, that all these cookies required.) Cut; wash; fill; fold; wash; make sure folds are sealed. The cookies — a dozen on each tray — went into the hot oven, and I let ten minutes go by before I looked nervously through the glass door to see how they were doing. This is the moment when you really have to steel yourself for disaster. There is no guarantee that what you’ve put together will, in fact, work.

To my considerable joy, the cookies looked great. A little puffier than I’d expected, somehow, but better they be puffy than that they look hard and sad. These were big, happy, fluffy kittykats of hamantaschen, and the filling was staying exactly where it was supposed to.

I let the trays bake for 25 minutes and then took them out. They were perhaps a little less golden than I might have liked, but to leave them in longer would mean risking burning; so onto the cooling racks went the cookies, and I slammed the next round in.

I spent the next few hours breathing calmly. I cut, washed, filled, folded, and washed again. And in the end I had I think 67 hamantaschen, and only two of them weren’t quite perfect little triangles. (One of them had four corners. I don’t know why it happened but when I started folding it, somehow I couldn’t get it to do what I wanted, and it turned into a square, and by then I didn’t want to fight with the dough anymore, so I let it bake as it. The other imperfect one was made with the last scrap of dough, which I pressed into a circle by hand, and since I was by then quite tired, I just curled up the edges a little and put filling on top of it and said, “Baker’s treat.”) In the end, 65 hamantaschen worthy of being served to family and given to friends. I took a picture and sent it to my husband, who was impressed. When the cookies were all on the racks and cooling, I then turned around and baked the two loaves of bread I’d been working on, which had waited with great patience in their pans on the kitchen floor right in front of the fridge (don’t ask). (One glory of the Pullman loaf is that, since it is tightly covered, you can do things like let it rise on the kitchen floor and it’s totally fine.) All of this was achieved, mind you, before I went to pick my daughter up at school at 4 p.m. (later than usual because of a special event), which is nothing short of a miracle.

Bread and hamantaschen: one way to spend a long morning

That night my husband ate several cookies while my daughter and I attended services at a nearby synagogue. “They’re perfect,” he said after we got home. “It’s very impressive. Your hamantaschen success rate is about 60%, but these are perfect.” The cooky was a sweet, crumbly, soft shortbread-like cooky — it was so good that, in fact, my daughter asked if I could make the cooky again but without the poppy seeds. Could I bake it with, say, sprinkles on it instead? The filling was wonderful because, of course, it came from a can, and I had nothing to do with it. I claimed victory all over the place, and we delivered a couple dozen cookies around the neighborhood feeling triumphant.

Late that night S. checked in with me. She’d made her hamantaschen, and sent me a photo. They looked perfect, and I told her so. “The cooky is tough,” she wrote sadly. “Tough hamantaschen are endemic,” I said. “Next year, you’ll do better.” I can say this because I know from experience. I told her she did great and not to worry.

As for my perfect hamantaschen: If I can pull this off again next year, it’ll be a miracle, but on the other hand, I really think I can do it. I think I’ve got it licked. (Famous last words. Tune in, in mid-March 2017, for the next episode of the Hamantaschen Chronicles.)

March 28, 2016 1

Feeling the Burn, After the Fact. Days After the Fact, in Fact.

Today is Saturday. On Wednesday, I spent several hours engaging in Hamentaschen Mishegas (on which more in a separate post). I produced about six dozen beautiful, delicious cookies, by the way.

But today, Saturday, as I was getting out of the shower this morning, I noticed on the inside of my forearm a nasty scratch and a little flap of skin. It didn’t look infected or unusual in any way, but I had no memory of hurting myself right there. “Holy crap!” I said loudly. My husband, in the next room, asked, “What’s wrong?” I said, “I got this nasty scratch on my arm and I don’t even remember doing anything bad!”

No one seemed concerned about my arm except me. It didn’t hurt much, but it did sting a little when I poked at it. I decided that after I got dressed, I would roll up my sleeve, put on some Neosporin on it and cover it with a Band-Aid.

I got dressed and went and showed my husband my arm. “Look at this,” I said. “What the hell?” He glanced at my arm and said, “It’s a burn blister that burst,” he said, casually. And I instantly remembered: Yes, I did tap my forearm against an oven rack, briefly, when I was baking on Wednesday. So how come I didn’t notice any problems before the blister burst? I mean, why didn’t I notice the blister on, say, Thursday? No idea.

I put some salve on the wound, slapped a big, wide Band-Aid on it — the kind I use on my daughter’s knees when she takes a nasty spill — and have gone on with my day. I expect everything to be fine. This war wound definitely snuck up on me, but I have to say, with these Hamantaschen? It was so worth it.

March 26, 2016 0

The Disappointment of the Polyester Cloth Napkin

You might not expect Paul Fussell, the literary critic and belles lettrist, to’ve been a source for any useful information regarding running a household, but in fact, his book Class let slip a few related thoughts on the matter that I somehow absorbed (pun intended; you’ll get it later) and have found more and more true as the years have gone by.

We’re going to talk, here, of the polyester napkin, which Fussell abhorred. He hated polyester napkins, I think, because he viewed them as low-class, but also because, as much as you can ascribe a moral quality to napery, I think he felt that they were morally bankrupt. A polyester napkin is a thing that is pretending to be a thing it by definition cannot be. (He felt the same way about polyester towels, by the way, which is completely correct and reasonable.)

You may be asking, “Jeez, Ms. Hausfrau, why are you being such a snob?” A fair question, but one which has a fast answer. The napkin (or towel) has one job: to absorb schmutz and water. Polyester does neither. Hence, a polyester towel or napkin is literally useless. Furthermore, a polyester towel or napkin doesn’t feel as good to use as cotton napkin (or linen, but who has linen napkins anymore? almost no one) or towel. So there is really nothing gained by using a polyester napkin. On the contrary: it lowers the quality of one’s dining experience. A polyester napkin feels oddly greasy when you hold it, when you press it to your mouth to dab at sauce at the side of your lip, and it inevitably falls from your lap to the floor because the fabric is so slippery. And a napkin that has slipped off your lap and landed on the floor by your feet is something you don’t want to put up to your mouth or try to clean your hands with.

There is no point to these things. People buy them because they are inexpensive, but it is a false economy, because a cheap product that doesn’t perform well is an item you have wasted money on.

Cheryl Mendelson gets this, and as I recall, she explains at some length in one of her home management books why polyester towels and napkins are a farce. I mention it because I realize that some of my readers may not really want to trust Paul Fussell’s opinion on the matter, but would give Mendelson a little more weight. Which would be fair enough.

You are possibly wondering, “Hausfrau, why are you all bent out of shape about polyester napkins? Who cares?” I’ll tell you: I’m all bent out of shape because I occasionally am in a situation where I have to use polyester napkins, and I don’t like it, and it makes me angry sometimes, but it really makes me angry when I’m in a fancy restaurant, paying ludicrous sums of money to dine out, and the restaurant is using polyester napkins. If we’re looking at appetizers in the $10-20 range, and anticipating spending upwards of $100 on dinner (which is a real splurge to the Hausfrau, something I take seriously, because believe me, it doesn’t happen real often), I expect napkins to be absorbent. Seriously. I don’t require cotton or linen napkins, I really don’t. But I expect a napkin that will function. I’d be happy with ‘good’ paper napkins (Paul Fussell may scoff, but I know what people mean when they say that, and it makes sense to me), I really would. But polyester napkins, to me, say: “We wanted it to look fancy here but we weren’t willing to actually think it through.”

My husband and I had occasion to eat at Tarry Lodge a few nights ago. This was a big deal. Tarry Lodge is a restaurant in New Haven (and other places, I gather) owned by Big Star Chef Mario Batali, about whom I know almost nothing except that he’s a Big Star Chef and I’m supposed to pay attention when he does stuff. This Tarry Lodge restaurant opened on Park Street in the fall of 2014, and I was interested in it for a few reasons. One, it was billed as a pizza restaurant, and if there’s something New Haven doesn’t need, it’s some fancy pants chef coming here to open a pizzeria. I mean, New Haven already has a lot invested in pizza, and we don’t need help from Mario Batali or anyone else in that department. Another reason I was interested in this place is that it is located on Park Street, which is not exactly a high-profile location for any restaurant, and certainly not where one might expect a famous chef to open a business. At some level, I thought, “Ok, so, this is interesting. There is a challenge being made here, on more than one front, a dare being taken. I wonder what the place will do.”

I was skeptical, to put it mildly. But since we don’t often eat out, I really had nothing to say on the subject of Tarry Lodge for a very long time. In the meantime, many of my friends went to eat there and came out crowing over how delicious, what service, just amazing. There was also a small group of outliers who said they found it, to be polite, lacking. Poor service; food not cooked properly (one guy said his pasta wasn’t merely al dente but was actually crunchy, a very undesirable quality in a pasta dish); food over salted, too greasy, and on and on. It seemed clear to me that it was a place that inspired strong feelings one way or another. People would either dine there once and never go back, or instantly have it be their Number One Favorite Restaurant in town, and return as often as possible.

Then my husband got to go there with his co-workers for lunch one day. He came home raving about it. “This pizza,” he said. “It sounded weird but it was delicious.” Something about truffle honey and pistachios. “We should really go sometime,” he said. “Yeah, let’s go!” I said cheerily, but we never went. Until last Friday night, when we were trying to think of a place to go before we attended a party at eight o’clock. “Let’s go to Tarry Lodge!” he suggested, and I thought, “Brilliant!” Since Yale is on spring break, it meant we’d have a shot at getting a table at 6.30, which normally, I am sure, is out of the question unless you’ve made a reservation in advance.

We got to the restaurant and while it was busy, there were plenty of empty tables; we were seated immediately. On sitting down, we took our napkins from the table, and my husband and I looked at each other. “Tarry Lodge,” we were thinking, “You have just lost 100 points.”

The napkins were polyester.

Mario Batali’s restaurant — a place where, presumably, the money existed to invest in cotton napkins — uses 100% cheap, sleazy, polyester napkins.

Which means that when I wanted to dab some spicy olive oil from the corner of my mouth, all I could do was use the napkin to massage it into my skin. It meant that when I got my hands dirty eating the pistachio, goat cheese, and truffle honey pizza — which was delicious, and had a crust very different from what we usually think of as pizza crust, here in New Haven — the napkin was utterly useless. My husband, who had tagliatelle bolognese, had to be extra careful with his meal, because, let’s face it, bolognese is the kind of thing you just assume will result in disaster of some kind. (He got lucky.) It meant that when we were served our Valrhona chocolate and olive oil ice creams (with honey on top, no goddamned fennel pollen — why do I want it on ice cream?), we were very, very careful with each spoonful we took from the dish at the center of the table, because if we spilled any on ourselves, there was sure to be no good way to blot it up.

I feel like I should be allowed to expect more from Mario Batali and Tarry Lodge. Tarry Lodge wouldn’t have lost any points with me had they just been forthright and set the tables with heavy paper napkins. Hell, we were once in a restaurant, a casual pizza place, where they avoided the whole napkin issue by simply putting rolls of paper towels at every table, and I thought it was an ingenious solution to the problem of how a pizzeria should deal with napery. Eating pizza is a greasy, messy operation, no matter where you are. Even if you’re the kind of person who insists on using a knife and fork to eat it, you’re going to want a napkin. And we all know those little narrow tri-folded paper napkins are terrible; we tolerate them in inexpensive restaurants and diners, but we all know they don’t work that well. At a place like Tarry Lodge, though, I want a napkin that works, that will not slide off my lap and land on the floor, that will serve me well in my time of need.

So I will dine at Tarry Lodge again, I imagine; I do want to try the ravioli filled with beef short ribs. But if I don’t go back — well, it won’t be the end of the world.

I hope you’ll excuse me while I go fold laundry. I did three loads of laundry this morning, including the kitchen towels and, yes, the cloth (100% cotton, as God intended) napkins. Anyone at my house who needs a napkin will find themselves supplied with something soft, handsome, and effective. At Tarry Lodge? Bring Your Own Napkin.

March 22, 2016 0