The days right before Passover I began to want pound cake more than anything in the world, and I swore that as soon as Passover was over I was going to start making pound cakes. It took me about a month to bake anything, after Passover was through — I’ve been really busy — but I did finally bake two pound cakes. One of them was a real pain to make (it involved separating eggs and whipping the whites to soft peaks, in addition to everything else) and one of them was pretty easy. One of them was sublime, and one of them was, despite my best efforts, entirely mediocre.

I want to say, “The lesson learned is, good pound cakes require effort like whipping egg whites,” but I know this isn’t the case. The Gourmensch remembers as well as I do that about ten years ago I occasionally made a really excellent chocolate chip poundcake; the recipe was in a cookbook I cooked out of all the time. I used to make this cake every couple of months, a big cake it was, baked in a tube pan, and it would disappear within about three days. This means, by the way, that he and I were eating truly revolting quantities of cake every day. But it was so good, we didn’t care.

Problem is, I can’t remember which of my books had that recipe.

So I’m thrown back to hunting for good pound cake recipes. We will eat up the last of the bad one I made — because my husband and child declared it perfectly good and we have no intention of throwing it out; it has chocolate chips in it, after all (which sank! and they weren’t supposed to sink! I coated them in flour before mixing them in, why’d they sink?), so it isn’t just trash. And when it is gone, I will start working again. I will figure out if there is a way to make a truly excellent poundcake without having to whip egg whites.

There is probably a book somewhere which is nothing but poundcake recipes. If there isn’t, perhaps I should start assembling one.

We normally celebrate Passover by hosting a Seder that’s got anywhere from 10-20 guests, depending on how many Special Guest Stars show up. And we are fine with it; we think it’s fun, though it is admittedly a whole lot of work to make our dining table fit that many people. The truth is, it takes the dining table, fully extended, plus two more tables added on, to sort of be able to squish everyone in. It’s not ideal, but, you know, we manage. This year, however, we had very few guests, and with that in mind, we made a few editorial decisions to alter the menu. Because we were cooking for fewer people, we decided we could make a different entree (one we could never do in reasonable fashion for a lot of people), and that we’d also skip the matzo ball soup. I KNOW how people feel about matzo ball soup, but I think it’s a pain to make. And, all right, fine: I forgot to save chicken broth in the freezer a few weeks ago, when I made a huge pot of it. I used it all up making risotto and Cincinnati chili. So. No matzo ball soup. No soup at all.

We did serve gefilte fish from a jar (as is traditional), and I did (as is also traditional) wonder why everyone grouses about gefilte fish, when, if we called them fish quenelles, everyone would oooo and aaaah over them. Well, it’s fine. Whatever. Gefilte fish for starter, and then, for the entree, we served a braised flank steak (cooked with vermouth, a ton of garlic, tomato paste, and onion, with carrots added in toward the end to lend a tzimmes-like quality to things), roasted asparagus goldenrod (because I had some egg yolks in the fridge and thought it would be fun to poach them — it was fun — but then I had to use them up somehow), and the man of the house, the Gourmensch, made latkes a la minute. I whizzed up a kind of faux chimichurri sauce in the food processor to serve alongside the flank steak; it seemed to me we needed something jazzy on the table, and chimichurri would do the trick.

Dessert was Smitten Kitchen’s chocolate coconut macaroons, which I recommend highly.

Saturday was the kid’s birthday and in lieu of cake (because there is no cake in the world that is both kosher for Passover AND acceptable as a child’s birthday cake, in my experience) we invited the guests to make their own ice cream sundaes. So we had three flavors of ice cream, and a vat of hot fudge sauce, and cans of Reddi-Wip (because, sure, I’m crazy, but I’m not making homemade whipped cream for small children, they don’t care), and about six little bowls of toppings. Reese’s Pieces, Sno-Caps, Junior Mints, rainbow sprinkles…. I did not agonize over whether or not any of these things were kosher for Passover because I have my limits. For more reasonable snacks, pre-game, so to speak, we offered the little ingrates a huge, huge bowl of cheese popcorn (the Gourmensch was in charge of this: we use the cheese powder you can get at considerable cost from King Arthur Flour; no, it is not cheap, and yes, it is worth every penny, because otherwise you’d go broke buying Smartfood in such quantity), and matzo pieces to dip in a tub of hummus (store-bought) and guacamole (homemade).

In the course of things, come Saturday evening, we were too exhausted to think about dinner, and so we got Indian takeout. Sunday night, we had stuffed baked potatoes, prepared from the recipe in Honest Pretzels, one of the kid’s birthday presents (and more on that later). Monday night, though, I was back on duty, and when I opened the fridge today and had to decide what I was going to feed us today, it was absolutely crystal clear what had to happen:

1. I had to use up leftover food; 2. I had to make something that would last us through two dinners; 3. I had to make something with the avocados still in the fridge (three perfectly ripe avocados, because I’d bought seven and only used four for the birthday party) — avocados, once ripe, last a while in the fridge, but not indefinitely.

The solution was clear. Chili with leftover flank steak; guacamole made with avocados, lime juice, and chimichurri sauce; to be served over rice. The chili was assembled in about 15 minutes; the chili simmered while I did the rice in the rice cooker and made the guacamole; and It Was Good. Furthermore, the dishes were done and the kitchen cleaned up by 7.45, which has to be a kind of This Old Hausfrau record. (Normally, we’re not done until 8.15, by which time we’re ready for bed, because we are Sad Old People.) With that extra half hour tonight, the three of us played a few games of Uno and made fun of the cat for a while.
The beauty part is, there’s enough leftover chili and guacamole, we can have this for dinner tomorrow night too. That’s right: I barely have to do anything to get dinner served tomorrow. Hallelujah.

My daughter is almost seven. I wouldn’t call her an omnivore, but, in broad terms, she likes eating, she’s curious about trying new food, and there aren’t many things she won’t eat. We’ve never had to really fight with her about food. Which is good, because I don’t know what I would have done if we’d had one of those kids who was all “texture sensitive” or had allergies or whathaveyou. Well, I imagine we’d have managed to deal with it, the way everyone does, but it would have been really really annoying.

All young children mispronounce words with funny results when they’re little: how many children have asked for “pasketti and meatballs,” for example? My child used to ask for “cucumbums” instead of cucumbers. The older she gets, the less this kind of thing happens, but recently we had a humdinger of a food/language issue that caused major confusion in our household.

It began a few months ago when I bought a jar of Biscoff spread. I’d never had the stuff before, but friends of mine were crowing about it on Facebook and I felt very out of it for having no idea what they were talking about. Evidently in Trader Joe’s they have their own version of it called Speculoos, which I find distinctly off-putting because it makes me think of a speculum, which is something I don’t want to eat, but thanks for asking. Anyhow, when I was at P&M, a favored grocery store on Orange Street, I saw a jar of Biscoff spread and thought, “You know, I”ll buy it. I probably wouldn’t like it, but others in the household will.” I thought my husband, in particular, would like it. It turned out I was wrong: he had no interest in it. So the jar sat in the drawer, dabbed at but unappreciated, for several months. Then one day I offered to make my daughter a treat with it: I had some graham crackers and said, “What if I put some of this stuff on it? It looks like peanut butter but it tastes like cookies.” “What’s it made out of?” she asked warily. “Well, it’s cookies, actually,” I said. “They mash up all these cookies and turn it into cooky spread.” She nodded eagerly, and when I gave her the graham cracker with cooky spread, she gobbled it down.

Then she got into the habit of, when asking for a treat, asking me for something with cooky spread on it. Piece of bread; apple; whatever. With cooky spread. This didn’t happen every day, but maybe once a week, she’d remember the jar, and ask. And I would always give her some, because, well, someone has to eat this stuff up.

Eventually I told her that the real name for the stuff in the jar is Biscoff spread. She absorbed this information and then moved on with her life.

A few days ago, the three of us were sitting around debating what we might cook for Passover and it was suggested that we might do a brisket this year. (I should call the butcher at P&M to see if he can get me one.) This prompted my daughter to announce that she felt hungry and could use a snack. My husband asked her what she’d like, and she said, “Brisket spread.”

“Brisket spread?” he repeated. I laughed.

“She means Biscoff spread,” I explained. He didn’t know what it was. I said, “It’s that cooky spread you don’t like.” “Oh,” he said. “Okay.”

But now I’m thinking about brisket spread, and thinking, If you had a little bit of leftover brisket, not enough to make a meal out of, but just a few slices of meat, maybe it’d be good to remember Peg Bracken, and make a brisket spread. I must remember to do this. Into food processor, I’d put the meat, a little bit of mayonnaise, and some dry mustard, and then I’d whizz it until it formed a nice gloppy paste. Then I’d fold in, by hand, some pickle relish. I have a feeling that would be a really good thing to eat on a sandwich. Brisket spread. And for dessert, shortbread with Biscoff glaze? There’s potential here.

This morning my daughter asked me what I was going to make for Shabbat tonight. Since I was in the middle of serving her breakfast, I felt this was really a case of her jumping the gun, but it’s true, it’s the kind of thing I usually have sort of planned out by seven in the morning. “I was thinking chicken,” I said, “and, um, potatoes? Sliced up potatoes, roasted in the oven?” I know everyone likes it when I do potatoes, because I hardly ever cook them and it’s regarded as a Big Deal.
“MASHED potatoes,” she said.
“I’m not making mashed potatoes, it’s a pain in the ass,” I said. “MAYBE potatoes.”
But she didn’t ask, you’ll note, what method I would use to prepare the chicken. So she doesn’t know that I’ve got something kind of weird in mind. I am going to go buy some boneless breasts of chicken and then cook them very simply and serve in a vermouth and vanilla sauce.
I guess I better come up with a really good pot of mashed potatoes, ’cause this could be pretty bad.

Last Wednesday’s New York Times has an article in the food section about the latest thing is to use your food and kitchen materials absolutely to the maximum so as to avoid putting scraps and unnecessary waste into landfills. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/dining/efficiency-in-the-kitchen-to-reduce-food-waste.html?_r=0 is the article, and it’s chockablock with good intentions, sensible advice, and sanctimony. The idea is easy to grasp: the more thoroughly and efficiently you use up things you use and produce in the kitchen, the less waste will be generated, and the less trash will go into landfills. Now, I am not someone who goes to great lengths in any particular way to do good for the Green Agenda. I don’t drive, which I feel exonerates me from the get-go. I do other things that are not Green, but, you know, Not Driving is such a big thing that I basically feel my little (size 8.5) carbon footprint is smaller than average, so it’s ok. I may be wrong about that, but I have a friend who is entirely rabid on the subject of global warming and Green Green Green everything and she has assured me more than once that I am, compared to most Americans, a paragon of environmental virtue, which is really quite comical because all I want to see in my environment is good sidewalks, little cafes and bookstores, and very little in the way of shrubbery, at least, shrubbery I have to think about or maintain at all. My dream house has a backyard that is paved in herringbone brick, with maybe an urn or two for growing rosemary bushes in. And someone else will tend those.

This Old Hausfrau does not compost, but I’ve been paying attention to how much garbage our three-person household generates, and basically, we produce about one white Hefty bag of trash per week, assuming a normal week (i.e., we don’t have anything like Passover or Thanksgiving going on, nor a birthday party for the child, or any big social event that would throw us out of our routine).

Anyhow. This article, “Starve a Landfill,” has a little photo chart called “Extending That Shelf Life,” and I read it eagerly. It shows a loaf of sliced bread, a carrot (with green tops), and a chicken carcass, and lists ways for you to make the most of these items. I read happily and then grew depressed as I realized that I already do probably 80% of the things they’re advising us to do. I do cook with scrubbed-and-not-peeled carrots, as I find the outer skin of a carrot is unfailingly awfully bitter, and that peeling is simply necessary. What’s more, since I don’t buy carrots with tops on them, I never have to think of what to do with the tops. I would never make a mayonnaise substitute out of carrots, because I am perfectly happy using mayonnaise. But I do take vegetable scraps and save them in plastic bags in the freezer for making stock. This goes for carrots, for onions, for parsley…. any vegetable I’m working with that I regard as “neutral,” the scraps get saved for stock. Corn cobs get saved in special bags all summer long, because corn stock is, truly, one of the best things in the world to keep in the freezer. (To make that, you don’t really have to add anything: you just simmer the corn cobs in water for a while. The smell is heavenly. And then you freeze the stock in little bags or ice cube trays or whathaveyou and this is stuff you can use all winter long as a base for wonderful things like Chinese-inspired velvet corn soups, or chicken corn chowders made with frozen corn kernels. Just take my word for it.)

Bread: I hoard ends of bread in the freezer and periodically take them all out, thaw them, and whizz them in the food processor to make bread crumbs. Once in a blue moon I will make croutons, because my husband and child enjoy them very much (I’m not really a fan). Bread crumbs are used regularly here: made into a panade, they are the base of my meatloaves and meatballs. They go on top of casseroles. I might dust a cake pan with them. Sometimes I make a separate bag of seasoned bread crumbs, by adding, say, a small onion and a clove of garlic and some black pepper into the food processor. As long as you label the bag (don’t use those seasoned bread crumbs for dusting a pan you’re about to make a chocolate cake in), you’re golden. (While we’re talking about crumbs and cake pans: I do, yes, have a bag of chocolate cake and cooky crumbs that I use in the pans when I’m baking chocolate cakes. This is the kind of crazy I am. So be it.)

Ms. Severson of the New York Times advises us on how to handle a chicken carcass, and, again, what she recommends is precisely what the Balabusta does. Freeze the carcass until you are ready to make the stock. Easy peasy. The one thing she suggest doing with leftover chicken meat and bones that I don’t do: I have yet to render the fat and skin to make schmaltz. But something tells me there will come a day when I break down and do this. It might be next winter; our winter seems to finally be ending, here, and I don’t expect to be inspired in this direction for quite some time. But I take her point: if I were a perfect person, I’d be utilizing the skin and fat of the bird to a greater degree.

Reading this article made me feel, at once, very thrifty, in a good way: I’ve always known that it was stupid to just throw out stale bread, and that bread crumbs were useful. But it also made me feel really…. trendy, in a stupid way. I mean, it seems to me that this kind of way of running a kitchen is merely sensible. It is, I am sure, how housewives of the 1930s would have run their kitchens, assuming they were comfortable enough to have sufficient food to begin with. I suppose I should just accept the mantle of “trendy” and get on with my life. But my readers should know: it’s not that I do this stuff merely because I am a whackjob. It is part of a circumstance that, actually, Ms. Severson writes about:

“Eating better may cost more, but an efficient cook can make up the difference.” It’s true. If I spend $15 on an organic chicken to roast for dinner, you are damned straight I want to get my $15 out of that bird. So the meat will give us two or maybe three meals, depending on what I do with it; and the stock I make with that carcass will flavor at least two or three more meals, again, depending on what I do with it. That is efficiency.
I worry about my kitchen habits and whether or not they make economic sense. Is it saving us any money at all, the fact that I bake the majority of the bread we eat? I am confident, but not sure, that the answer is “No.” On the other hand, my husband (who is far more the economist than I am) advises me that over time, yes, there would be savings. I’ve not purchased a Pullman loaf in about six months now. We used to go through a little more than a loaf a week, and it could cost anywhere from $5 to $2.50, depending on sales and coupons and so on. I’m picky about what brand I’d buy, so I got stuff as good as I could get, but frankly: the bread I bake is a lot better than the best of the grocery store brands, which, for a Pullman loaf, is (in our opinion) Pepperidge Farms. I mean, a LOT better. So if each loaf winds up costing us about $4 to bake…. and I’d be astonished if it did cost that much in terms of ingredients….  its being intrinsically of such higher quality has to count for something. It’s clear to me that if I were able to purchase a freshly made Pullman loaf made from the ingredients I use, it would cost me at least $7 in a store.

The caramel I make for the hell of it now and then, and store in the fridge in old Bonne Maman jars — it is perfect stuff. The other day, I was at a fancy teashop in Hamden, Connecticut, a nearby suburb, and saw for sale there little jars of caramel. I initially assumed it was made at the teashop, but no — it’s made by some company in Maryland. Mouth Party. A 10 oz. jar of their caramel sells for $9 online — at the teashop, I think they wanted $9.50.

It’s astonishing, then, that I could make a comparable product — and one I’d almost certainly prefer, because it has no weird ingredients. Here’s what’s in the plain Mouth Party caramel sauce: INGREDIENTS: CREAM, SUGAR, CORN SYRUP, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, BUTTER (CREAM, SALT), VANILLA EXTRACT, SALT, CARRAGEENAN, MONO-DIGLYCERIDES, CELLULOSE GUM, POLY SORBATE 80.

I don’t want mono-diglycerides or carrageenan or cellulose gum or polysorbate 80 in my caramel. Here’s what I want in my caramel: cream, sugar, butter, vanilla, and maybe some corn syrup, depending on what I’m doing. (Sometimes you do need some corn syrup in your cooking to get the texture just so.)
So it’s clearly more efficient for me to make my own caramel. I suppose that it is, given my quirks, less efficient for me to bake my own bread, but I’m able to do it, for now, and I’m good at it, and I’m mostly glad to do it.

My fear of kitchen waste, you may recall, the reason why I made a pot roast flavored with a caramel sauce I’d ruined by burning it. Maybe Kim Severson should interview me on how to make the most out of kitchen disasters. Pot roast is expensive, no matter what, but damn, that was a hell of a pot roast.