Or, as some of us often call them, tea towels.

I have a long and complex relationship to dishtowels, which in and of itself is probably a sign that I am, at some level, completely bonkers. On the other hand, the relationship has led to my developing what I think is an extraordinarily good system of maintaining my kitchen at a certain level of order and hygiene; furthermore, my system is nice to look at, which is no small thing.

I didn’t grow up in a family where there was a lot of thought given to dishtowels. My mother was not what you’d call domestic. I mean, she loves being at home, but she doesn’t much care what home looks like; and as for kitchen accoutrements — she has a weakness for looking at things that are tiny (mini cheese graters; tiny cups; tiny bowls) but doesn’t use them, for god’s sake, because that would involve actually cooking, or something.

That said, we had dishtowels; but they were probably bought at the supermarket on an as-needed basis, without too much thought to function or aesthetics.

But when I began to make my way in the world, setting up my own apartment, I went to a store called Cook’s Bazaar, which was on Crown Street in downtown New Haven, and I bought towels for my own kitchen. I needed them. I suppose in retrospect that some of them were really large napkins. But no matter: on sale, every one of them, the dregs that no one else had wanted to buy, thrown into a big wicker basket on the floor for sale at 99 cents each, they were handsome and they worked well and I was very proud when I did laundry and folded the them just so and then stacked them in my kitchen. The first ones I bought were white with yellow and black pinstripes, or purple and black pinstripes. I still have some of them. (They’ve been demoted to the lowest category of towel: read on.) I used them as towels and napkins. I remember the first dinner party I ever hosted: four people sat on the floor and we used my old trunk from summer camp as a dining table (covered with a vintage tablecloth I’d acquired somewhere along the way). We had cloth napkins. The food was probably nothing to write home about, but we had plates and glasses made of ceramic and glass and cloth napkins. There was nothing plastic, nothing disposable. Even at that age, I was determined to have things as nice as I could make them.

When the Mr. and I moved in together, which was maybe three years after that dinner party, we combined our collections of towels. His, he’d bought during his grad student days in Boston. I remember them: thick, meaty cotton towels that were white with fat khaki or black stripes down them. They worked pretty well, but also fell apart quickly. Not so well made, I guess. We no longer have any of them.

When we got married, we registered for things we could use (strictly speaking, we needed nothing, having been shacked up for several years already) and among them were a lot of linens. Bed linens and table linens and kitchen linens. I picked out table and kitchen linens that were red plaid on a cream background. I think Crate and Barrel was the company. They also were available in a cobalt blue and cream plaid, which was handsome. But I felt blue was too pedestrian. It was an odd decision. Our kitchen was painted a bright blue called Bluejay, which we loved, but I couldn’t face having blue linens. Bright blue and bright red together are not my idea of a good time. I doggedly registered for the red things — I thought they were so timeless-looking, I loved them — and we were given stacks of fabric: I think four tablecloths of various sizes, a dozen napkins, and probably a dozen towels. All of these things were very high quality, and handsome, and I used them happily for a very long time.

Over the years, though, I came to realize that I really preferred my kitchen things to be something other than red. Maybe my taste for the fiery and dramatic dulled? I don’t know. Though I still lust after things like shiny red enamel kitchen appliances, I know perfectly well that I wouldn’t buy them. I buy white appliances, when I need appliances. And accessories: I now favor certain shades of blue, pale yellow, and green. Colors I associate with the south of France, a place I’ve never been and don’t really have any interest in traveling to, either. I just like how they look together. And red doesn’t fit in there.

When we moved to a few years ago, we commenced, in a process comparable to pregnancy, labor, and delivery, designing and renovating the kitchen. One thing I promised myself was that when it was all done, I would acquire all new kitchen towels. And they would be blue/white, not red/white (or cream). I did already own a few towels that met the criteria. One was a set of French waffle-weave towels given to us when we bought our first house: these were white with blue and white birds woven into the fabric. There was also a set of flat-weave cotton towels I’d bought just because I thought they were so pretty I couldn’t resist. There were many blue and white striped towels that were a gift from my mother (we’ll get to those in a moment). The kitchen renovation began after we’d been living in the house for more than two years, and it took me a long time to feel the kitchen was ready for the new details, but I did a lot of research and eventually bought, with a great sense of victory, a couple dozen of the fine herringbone cotton towels one sees used as napkins in French bistros. The ones I bought have narrow blue stripes on them (I think red is what the restaurants traditionally use): they are beautiful. These, used in conjunction with the maybe 20 other blue/white dishtowels I already owned, served to completely overhaul how we used towels in the kitchen.

All the red towels: you’re thinking, “Hausfrau, what’d you do with all the old red towels?”And, “who the hell needs that many dishtowels, anyhow?” I will tell you. As for the red towels: I folded them carefully and put them in the bottom drawer in the kitchen where we keep plastic tubs for leftovers and my daughter’s plastic bowls and cups. Because if something spills, I want her to be able to grab a towel. She knows, she’s been trained: messes, you grab a couple of the red towels.

As for why we need so many towels in the first place: Dishtowels serve many purposes in our kitchen. I mean, duh: We cook a lot (regular readers may have noticed). So. The blue towels are for drying dishes; for covering bread dough while it rises; for setting down washed fruits and vegetables on so they can dry off a bit; and, of course, to dry our hands after washing dishes. Furthermore, I might use a towel to do something like drain whey from milk to make fresh cheese; I might use a towel to hold ice to hold up against my daughter’s scraped up knee; I might use a towel to catch crumbs under a rack of cookies that are cooling. People need towels, dammit.

So our kitchen is a normal kitchen. It’s true that we only acquired a dishwasher about 18 months ago, which means that for a long period of years — I’m almost 45 now — when I washed dishes, when we washed dishes, things were air-drying or being dried by hand. And if you’re hosting a party where you’ve got, say, twenty people being served, and you’re washing dishes, it means you need a lot of towels. My mother mocked me on this point, in fact, until the first year we hosted Thanksgiving. 18 people at our house, as I recall, and we nearly ran out of towels. My mother, who was helping wash the dishes, conceded that she was wrong to mock me, and ordered a stack of towels from Williams-Sonoma (blue and white striped; she thought they would match our Bluejay walls) and had them delivered to me by way of apology.
Now we have a dishwasher, but even so: when I unload the dishwasher, inevitably things are still damp. So I will lay them out to finish air-drying on a clean tea towel.

It is very satisfying to launder tea towels, and dishrags for that matter (and I use a fresh one probably every two days, though it does depend on how much cooking I’m really doing, and what kind of thing I’m cooking), and fold them, and stack them nicely on top of the breadbox, which is right near the sink. Need a towel? Not a problem. There are always more. I have received many handsome tea towels as gifts, and I have kept them all even if they don’t match my stacks in regular use; I reserve them for times when I need something really pretty for serving purposes. For example: when I serve biscuits, I like to pile them into a bowl that I’ve lined with a tea towel, to help keep them warm. A fine linen towel is perfect for this. We have a very elegant tea towel from France in shades of taupe jacquard, a gift from a world-traveling friend: it is used to line the bread basket, when I need one at a dinner party.

As towels get stained and worn out and develop holes — it does happen! — they get demoted. First they go to the spill-rag pile in the drawer (most of the towels in there, mind you, are in excellent condition, because they’re the red ones we received in 2002, not so long ago, as towels’ lives go), and when things get too ratty to be in there, they go to the serious rag pile, which lives in the closet where our washing machines are. From there, when things get too awful, they go into the trash.

When my grandmother died, in 2006, I got to empty out her Manhattan apartment. Among the many things that came home with me were tea towels. Her stash of towels was of surprising size, given how little storage space she had. I went through them all and took maybe ten of them. There were some lovely mid-century designs. Most of these towels have landed in the “ceremonial” category, along with the French jacquard towel. There’s one towel in that category which I find very ugly, though it has a great history: it’s one of those towels with the calendar printed on it. It was made by Vera (you can look up who Vera was — famous fabric designer of her day) and it’s from the year of my birth, 1970. I love that my grandmother saved the 1970 towel all those years, but I have to admit, I wish it were printed in colors I like more. It’s all 1970 earth tones: beige, yellow, orange, mustard…. my least favorite colors. But I have kept it, and I have used it, and it’s actually starting to fall apart. I now keep it at the very bottom of my stash, because if I keep it there, it’ll last longer.

I have not even begun to address, here, how some fabrics are better suited to certain jobs than others. (Which is definitely the case.) I’ve not begun to address how, in order to keep my working towels stacked on the breadbox, I’ve had to develop an insane system of folding the towels so that they all fit there; if I told you about that, you’d really think I was fucking nuts.

But I know people are judged by their towels. Even if you’re not conscious of your thinking about it, you’re aware of it, as a guest in someone else’s house: There are few things more disgusting than going into someone’s kitchen and seeing only dingy, old-looking — almost moldy-looking — dishtowels. It doesn’t inspire faith in the cook; it doesn’t make you feel that the meal you’ll be served there is a good one. There are reasons why restaurants use linen services to make sure that towels and napery are white and fresh. It’s not hard to approximate that at home, and I really think it makes a difference to me and to my family and even to my guests. I remember the first time my sister in law, who does not cook and never will, saw the blue and white towels stacked up on the breadbox. She has no interest in kitchens or cooking, and thinks I am a whack job, but she came in and saw the towels and grabbed my sleeve. “I really like that,” she said. “That’s really lovely.”

I smiled and said, “I know, I love it too. Thanks.”

Remember in that Laurie Colwin novel, Family Happiness I think it is, where Polly and her brother (can’t remember his name, but yes, this is in Family Happiness) talk about “building” sandwiches? I know exactly what Colwin means there. I build sandwiches too, and my husband tells me I have an annoying tendency to crow about how wonderful the sandwiches I build are. But I’m telling you: they are so good, it’s ridiculous.

A few years back I got into the habit of making sandwiches that were designed along the lines of a Banh Mi. Since I don’t eat pork products, and don’t like baguettes, I used meats I would eat, and substituted ciabatta loaves (preferably those made by Bread and Chocolate, a bakery in Hamden, Connecticut). I made my own pickled ginger, and would carefully construct these multi-layered sandwiches and then eat them practically moaning with joy. My husband never understood. He clearly thought I was nuts.

Last Friday, I made a truly stupendous brisket. As we ate it for dinner, the three of us in nearly reverential silence, I turned to my husband, “and think of the sandwiches.”
He said, impressed, “The sandwiches!” 

Our daughter said, “Oh, the sandwiches!”
So you can see, we’re interested in sandwiches.

As it happened today we got around to making some sandwiches. For my daughter, I built a simple brisket sandwich on a hard roll with mayonnaise and pickle relish. When digging supplies out of the fridge, though, I noticed a tub of leftover chicken that needed using up. This was from a very good meal I made during the week: a kind of Chinese-style meal. I’d done a brown braise with sliced chicken breast with lots of onion and scallion and ginger and soy sauce and sugar and a few other things. “You know,” I said thoughtfully, looking at the meat in there: three smallish slices, just enough to fill a sandwich nicely. Then I reached for a jar of onion, pepper, and tomato relish someone gave us, and a small jar of leftover Caesar salad from last night.
I took my hard roll, and spread mayonnaise on one half of the roll. Atop that, I spread a thin layer of the relish. And then I moved upward: chicken and then salad. I put the other half of the hard roll on it, pressed it down for a few moments, and sat down to eat a really, and I mean, really, excellent sandwich. But even as I ate it, I was thinking, “This could be better.” I wanted to expand on it. I wanted it to have even more oomph. It was ridiculous. “You know, this is really good,” I said to my husband, “but I feel like it could be better.”

“uh-oh,” he said. He was in the process of building his own (brisket) sandwich.
“I was thinking, with a little bit of avocado slice, some red onion, and maybe some tomato, this would be really over the top. The trouble is, I wouldn’t be able to fit my mouth around it.”

“You know, there’s a lot to be said for simplicity in a sandwich,” he reminded me. “I know,” I said peevishly. “It’s just that I want all those flavors in one thing.”
The good thing about sandwiches is that you can always work on building new ones. You can always make a new combination. You don’t have to have the same ones over and over and over again, if you don’t want to. Sometimes, in fact, often, I wish I could re-eat sandwiches I’ve made, they were so good. But it’s also really fun to think of the new sandwiches we will make at home. My daughter and I often talk about the sandwiches we will make for lunch. (She doesn’t approve of cream cheese on sandwiches ever, but I can work with that.) Onward to tomorrow, when we’ll be making sandwiches on pain de mie I’ll be baking tonight.

Last night, an interesting thing happened.

I baked gingerbread and because the recipe was for a pan that was 9″x2″ (round), a shape I do not have, I wound up baking two cakes, just to use up all of the batter without overfilling one pan. The cakes came out just fine, and we cut into one of them for dessert. My husband and child tucked into it happily, and I ate a slice myself, thinking, “Well, this is fine, but, who cares.” I’m just not a gingerbread person. I love the way it makes the house smells while it’s baking, but then I have no interest in eating it.

So I went onto Facebook last night and posted, “Who lives nearby who likes gingerbread?” My thinking was that I would deliver the “spare” cake to whoever dibsed it first. Within ten minutes, there was a long thread, and within a couple of hours there were about ten people who made it clear that they’d be more than happy to take any superfluous gingerbreads off my hands.

Today, thinking this over, I have formulated a question, a pondering, really, about my baking. Because — if you want the truth — I don’t think I’m a particularly good baker or cook. I don’t think my results are reliably stunning; I know for a fact that they are seldom handsome. (My family knows that my cakes always taste better than they look.) So why do all these people I know clamor for my spare cake?

I think I know the answer. I think we’ve reached a state where, as a culture, anything that is homemade is perceived as being better than the same thing, storebought. Or bakery-bought. Or made from a mix. And that’s just not fair: many excellent bakeries out there, folks, and they could probably turn out gingerbreads about a thousand times better than the ones I made yesterday. But most of us don’t want to find the great bakeries; we don’t want to pay for the great bakeries, even if we find them; and we really, really don’t want to spend the twenty minutes it would take to assemble a gingerbread and then the hour it would take to bake the cakes. And: we’ve been trained to believe that Betty Crocker and Duncan Hines are ok in a pinch, but they can never be truly great. (Which may be true, but even so — isn’t a Betty Crocker birthday cake as loved as a homemade from scratch cake? Sure it is.)
So my cakes don’t have to be Platonically wonderful. They simply come off as better than Betty Crocker because they are not Betty Crocker or Duncan Hines, out of some kind of weird snobbery.
It’s kind of not fair to Betty Crocker or Duncan Hines, to be honest. I love Duncan Hines brownies. Love ’em. Or, I did, the last time I made them, which was probably twenty years ago. Maybe I should buy a box and try them again.

I’m now thinking about vanilla cake frosted with Biscoff spread — why can’t I whip Biscoff with confectioners’ sugar and maybe some cream? No reason. This will, I am sure, be excellent. And I will get to work on it, as soon as the gingerbread is all gone.

I do believe that tastes change, despite the fact that we all know someone who’s reached the age of 47 and has yet to eat a green vegetable, something we all assume children will outgrow. I believe that tastes can change because in my own little life, my tastes have changed. For example, as as child I did not like:

the taste of alcohol plus chocolate; the taste of fruit plus chocolate; rum; lima beans; bananas; plums; oranges; cilantro.

This is just off the top of my head. And I am sure you’re thinking, “what kind of child is even aware of consuming rum? what the hell kind of childhood did you have?” But the answer is, rum was a flavoring in a lot of baked goods I remember from my childhood, and… I never liked those desserts. It was always a real bummer, because, you know, here’s some rich, dark, chocolatey looking thing, mmmmmm yum, but then NO: something was WRONG, and that something was: RUM.

In the last few years — say, the last five years (and I’m about to turn 45 this year, so I’m quite an adult now) — I’ve noticed that many of the things I would or could not choke down are things that I will in fact cheerfully buy and cook. For example, I will buy and even eat bananas. I will buy and eat lima beans. I like plums, on a hot summer day especially. Cilantro, I will go out of my way to come up with a meal gilded with some lovely fresh cilantro, if I notice a particularly hearty bunch of it in the grocery store. But there are other flavors that I still cannot handle. Orange, for example. I don’t know how people get up in the morning and drink orange juice. It would make me cry.

A serious stumbling block for me is alcohol in desserts. Rum in particular turns out to still be a real thorn in my side. I discovered this the other day, when I made a lovely birthday cake for my husband.

When prompted to tell me what kind of cake he’d like for this birthday, he suggested a very moist chocolate cake with some kind of rum flavoring involved, frosted; I decided to interpret this by making a dark chocolate cake and then sandwich the layers together with a rum-flavored caramel frosting. I put all of this together, and it looked lovely; I made a very clear, plain rum sauce, too, to serve, warm, with the cake. And my husband was quite pleased. I, on the other hand, found the frosting and the sauce just terrible with the cake.

And I was crushed, because in recent years, I’d really begun to warm up to rum. When making a pot roast, I will sometimes deglaze the pot with dark rum. I’ve come to really like a couple of rum drinks, even. So what went wrong? I had such hope! But no: rum is not for me, I have come to realize, when combined with fruit or chocolate. In other words, it isn’t merely the thing itself that my mouth finds upsetting , it’s the combination of the thing with some other thing that I may or may not love. In the case of chocolate: no fruit or alcohol should be combined with chocolate. I will be upset. I will eat a Chunky bar, but that’s about as close as I get to wanting chocolate and fruit together. (And, incidentally, that’s one of the few times I’ll accept raisins at all.) Rum and chocolate is, for me, non-negotiable. (Orange and chocolate is my worst nightmare, though: my mouth puckers up just thinking about it.)

Clearly, my daughter feels as I do, too. She was so excited to eat the birthday cake, but her face fell when she dug into the frosting. She asked me, very politely, but very sadly: “What kind of frosting is this, Mama?” I couldn’t lie to her. “It’s rum and caramel, sweetie… if you don’t like it, you can scrape it off.” She ate it, but unhappily, saving the cake for last.

I realize that it’s unsophisticated-seeming of me to not like these things. But we like what we like, we don’t like what we don’t like. So, ok, I’m never going to really enjoy Bananas Foster. It’s all right. I’ve made real progress on cilantro and lima beans. I like rice pudding! I even like tapioca, a foodstuff that, when I was a child, just…. scared me. I mean, tapioca is freaky, freaky stuff. But I’ll admit it’s good… so long as it’s not cooked with, say, rum… or orange….

In the last few years I’ve arrived at a conclusion regarding chocolate cakes, which I cannot prove scientifically, because I am not science-y, but it goes like this:

The best chocolate cakes all call for boiling or at least hot water. Could be hot coffee. Could be plain water. But there is liquid in the cake (not just milk or buttermilk) and it is hot.

Several times now, I have made recipes that call for this. Inevitably — and in every single case, I am not exaggerating — the resulting cakes are rich and moist (sorry, those of you who hate the word moist, but it’s called for here) and very, very chocolatey. They are perfect chocolate cakes.

The first cake I made a lot that called for boiling water was Aunt Velma. Aunt Velma is, as has been written elsewhere (https://longspaghettinight.wordpress.com/2013/03/01/aunt-velma-the-little-black-dress-of-chocolate-cakes/), is a perfect chocolate cake. It looks like a pain to make, but is in fact easily assembled in about fifteen minutes. I made it for various birthdays, for miscellaneous celebrations, and for no reason at all. It went well with every kind of frosting I ever had an interest in making, and was even lovely all by itself, unfrosted. It also keeps astonishingly well, not a normal or expected quality in a chocolate cake.

Then there’s this: http://theenglishkitchen.blogspot.com/2009/06/blog-post.html

This sour milk chocolate cake is one I turn to when I have sour milk in the house, which happens maybe once a year. Every time I bake this cake, I wonder why I don’t bake it more often. It’d be worth it to reserve some milk and let it go sour, just to bake this cake. (I think it’s silly to “make sour milk” by adding vinegar to milk, but I don’t mind the idea of making good milk go bad for baking purposes; this is insanity, but never mind.) And yes, the recipe calls for a small amount of hot water.

I am convinced, convinced, that what makes these cakes so good isn’t anything in particular except the addition of the boiling water. There are other recipes I’ve used that call for boiling water, too — these are just the only ones I can remember off the top of my head — but I’m telling you: If you are seeking a superlative chocolate cake, and you don’t have a fuckload of time to mess around with complicated processes but want something really rich and good, the thing to do is keep your eyes peeled for recipes that call for boiling water.

You will always want to remember to line your cake pans, if you plan to remove the cakes from the pans to frost and serve (these will be delicate cakes; you cannot remove an Aunt Velma from a 9×13 pan by just turning it out; you’d have to create a sling for it with tinfoil or parchment, and be very very careful). But I’ve done the sour milk cake in a nicely buttered Bundt pan with great success. These are flexible recipes, in terms of pans, as long as you are sensible and don’t do anything too crazy.

So remember what the Tante says. Boiling water. Someone else can talk science. I’m talking taste, and I’m not messing around. The JoC can keep its Cockaigne; I’m standing by Aunt Velma.

A few days back — at the tag end of December — I was preparing to assemble a birthday cake for a friend. I had a caramel-based frosting in mind, which should have been (you should excuse the expression) a piece of cake, but unfortunately, I burned the caramel. I was trying to do something I am probably not qualified to do: I was trying to make what I think the chefs call a “dry caramel,” which is to say, I was starting with plain, dry sugar in a pot — no water added. I’d’ve pulled it off, too, except I let it go a little too long, because I kept thinking, “surely it’s not time yet? not time yet?” and by the time I thought “oh, shit, it’s time” — it was past time.

Nonetheless, I doggedly proceeded to add my butter and cream and the result was a beautifully colored pot of bitter caramel, which I could not bear to throw out, of course. Sighing, I poured it into a jar and set it into the fridge to ponder what might come of this.

As it turned out, I was able to use it to great effect in the caramel cake frosting — confectioner’s sugar will, of course, cover up a lot of errors — but I still had about 12 oz. of caramel left in the jar. What to do, what to do? I mean, I bake a lot of cakes, but not enough to use up that much caramel in the foreseeable future. A friend of mine who bakes a lot, when I asked her, “what can I do with this stuff?” said she’d once used some burned caramel to make a pot roast, and I instantly thought, “Oh, yeah.”

The two things I use most often to deglaze a pot I’m making a pot roast in are rum and sweet vermouth. Both of these have obvious affinities to caramel. It was, therefore, a no-brainer. Here, friends and strangers, is what I did:

1 large onion, sliced; four fat cloves of garlic, cut into chunks: these were sautéed until golden in olive oil. I then put in a pot roast (weighing about 3.5 lbs., but you could use whatever size you wanted) and seared the roast on all sides. I removed the meat from the pan, set it aside, and deglazed the pot with about 1/4 cup of dark rum. I let that cook away, until the onions and garlic began to form a kind of sludge, and then I splashed in another 1/4 cup of sweet vermouth, and let that cook away as well. Then I put in three hefty tablespoons of the burnt caramel and some water and stirred it to melt the caramel into a sauce. When everything seemed nicely blended, I put the meat back into the pot, added water to about halfway up the roast, and brought it to a boil. Once boiling, I cover the pot and put it into the oven, which I’d preheated to 250°.
The meat stayed in the oven for about four hours. I turn the meat over, once an hour or so, if I remember — definitely twice — and by the time it’s done, I’ve got an hour before dinner is ready.

Last night, when I did this, after removing the cooked roast (which was falling apart and savory and wonderful), I made the effort to cook carrots in the pot as well. I poured out the cooking liquid — which is VERY fatty — and defatted it as best i could with ice cubes (messy, but faster than any other option available to me) and left a little of the oily broth in the pot.  I put about a pound and a half of carrots (peeled, cut into big chunks) into the pot on a fairly high flame to let them fry a little; when they were starting to smell good, I poured the de-fatted beef/vermouth/rum/caramel broth into the pot, and simmered the carrot on the stovetop until they were VERY done. Soft. Not falling apart, but soft. Then I turned off the flame, put the meat back into the pot (so it would have time to gently warm up again), and, in another pot, boiled up some egg noodles. Because in my kitchen, you should serve egg noodles with pot roast. (Some do potatoes. Not me.)

I served this for Shabbat dinner with a cucumber salad (dressed in sour cream blended with roasted garlic, two items I happened to have in the fridge). There were no complaints, and I’ve used up a significant amount of that burnt caramel. I am now thinking about using it instead of brown sugar or molasses in my fake-barbecue chicken, which is something we love and which I could play with pretty endlessly and no one would complain. There are four chicken breasts in the fridge, and a cold Sunday afternoon, waiting for me.

Yesterday was New Year’s Day, and my husband and I were expecting company: three couples, some old friends, some new friends, and the plan was that the adults would laze about the living room and dining table and eat and drink while our children crashed around upstairs. To achieve this goal, we set up a basic menu of options and then guests brought items to add as they saw fit. One of the things I prepared for the party was a birthday cake, because, as it happened, one of the guest’s 50th birthday was December 31st, and I was fairly sure it hadn’t been formally acknowledged.

So the cake. My friend’s wife provided me few clues to go on, and I’m not even sure how accurate they were, but I figured I couldn’t go too far wrong. “He likes vanilla,” she told me. “I know, it’s weird, but — vanilla.”

I found a rich-sounding vanilla cake recipe and banged out two layers, thinking, “I will make a caramel frosting to go with this.” I gave myself plenty of time to work on this. I made the cake layers on Monday and put them in the freezer. Tuesday morning, my daughter announced she wanted to have three egg yolks on toast for breakfast, and I said I’d give them to her if she’d help me make meringue in the afternoon. She didn’t agree to help, so I didn’t cook three egg yolks for her, but I made brown sugar meringue anyhow: a pan of cookies, sure, but also a nice layer 9″ across, in a cake pan, to use as a middle layer in the birthday cake. I also made the caramel on Tuesday afternoon — a bad idea; I’m never really at my best by late afternoon. I decided to overshoot my skills significantly and make a dry caramel — that is, start with plain sugar and no water in the pan — which led (predictably, I suppose) to my burning the stuff, but I forged onward anyhow, believing that the slight bitterness would be offset by the vast amount of sugar that would be involved with making frosting. (I turned out to be correct.)

Equipped with the basic components of the cake, on Thursday morning I assembled the cake. My husband watched with a combination of horror and awe as I got to work. I put four pieces of parchment on my cake stand and unwrapped one (thawed) cake layer and placed it just so. Then I creamed butter and added caramel and sugar and heavy cream to make an intensely caramelly frosting; half of this, I spread on the first layer of cake. Then I sprinkled on the frosting some leftover cooky-crumb streusel I had sitting around (chocolate cooky crumbs, brown sugar, pecans, ground together). I placed the meringue layer, crackling-apart top side facing DOWN, atop the chocolate streusel. (To put the crackly side up would have meant that putting frosting on it would be a fucking MESS; the smooth side, though, would be a piece of cake, and it was — the second half of the intense frosting in the mixer bowl was spread atop it, and more streusel applied; and then the final cake layer was put on top of that.

At this point, the cake was already, let’s say, a little ongepotchket. My husband, a man who will gild a lily as soon as hand you a kleenex, said, “jesus christ, what is going on here?” By this point, I was already working on the next batch of frosting, which would cover the whole shebang. “What,” I said. “It’s a birthday cake.”

But even I could see this was a little insane.

I doubled the amount of frosting this time around. An entire stick of butter. I don’t even know how many cups of confectioner’s sugar. Probably 3/4 of a cup of caramel. Cream. All whipped together. And then I started slathering it on. I thanked god that my aunt had given me a cake stand back in September, because I don’t know how I’d’ve got this job finished without being able to turn the cake constantly. (Seriously, why did I not acquire a cake stand fifteen years ago? So much agony I could have saved myself.) The finished product, which I put four meringue cookies on top of, simply because I HAD them sitting around, was stupidly tall. It looked like something you’d find at a county fair in Alabama. It had no dignity whatsoever. “I think I may have overdone it a little,” I said cheerfully as I carried the cake to the counter from which it would be served.

“I don’t know,” my husband said. “I think it needs something. A little duck bacon, maybe? Some peacock feathers?”

Well, folks, people ate the cake. It wasn’t as hard to cut as I’d feared it might be, but there are only about three small slices leftover, and I fully expect those will be gone daddy gone by the end of Friday night dinner tonight.

http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/golden-vanilla-cake-recipe
is the vanilla cake recipe I used, by the way. I recommend it highly and plan to bake it again. Oh yes.

— can be a haphazard affair, to put it generously. Also complicating matters: when you help create the shopping list, but then are not the one who does the marketing. Things can go awry. For example, the man who has written down on the list “white rice,” and who needed to grab only a simple, inexpensive bag of good old American white rice, like a cheap bag of Carolina, or even store brand rice, has come home with a tiny little box of hideously priced, completely ill-suited to the recipe, arborio rice.

You don’t use arborio rice to make rice pilaf. But the man driving to Stop and Shop didn’t know that, clearly. I am sure he thought, “Well, this costs more, so it must be what she [my food-snobby, overly obsessed with cooking daughter-in-law] would buy.” But he would be wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

So while I’d planned to make a nice, simple rice pilaf with white rice and orzo and a little bit of shallot, I was suddenly forced to reconceive my plan. I made a risotto, with orzo thrown in for the hell of it (and to bulk up the pot, because the 12 oz. of arborio was not going to cut it).

The dinner was a birthday dinner for my father in law’s lady friend, a nice woman with a good sense of humor and, I had been told, a certain level of skill in the kitchen. Would my husband and I be willing to cook a dinner for her? Father in law was certainly not capable of it. Husband and I agreed immediately to do it, and began to wonder what the menu should be. We arrived at the following: roast chicken with lime and garlic (to use up ingredients my husband had added to our Christmas stockings — yes, he put limes, garlic, shallots, and artichokes in the stockings); rice pilaf; a green bean casserole; blondies for dessert. I would be in charge of the blondies.

Cooking at my father in law’s house is always something of an adventure. His kitchen is not very well organized, which is fine, if sometimes a little scary. He does not cook, but has a tendency to purchase ingredients nonetheless without any real sense of how they should properly be stored, or how long they might last (especially given their storage). In other words, it’s quite possible you might open the fridge to find a bottle of Frangelico in there (which needs no refrigeration) along with a can of breadcrumbs (ditto), and then, on the door of the fridge, a bottle of mango juice with mold growing in it that makes it resemble nothing so much as a tasty bubble tea drink. I can assure you: that is not tapioca in there. It is mold.

We preheated the oven, which had no thermometer in it, and has probably never been calibrated since it was installed when the house was built in 1963. “It doesn’t really feel that hot in there,” I mused, when I opened the oven to see what I thought. “But I’ll put the blondies in first, and then we can turn it up so you can start the chicken at high heat.” Husband agreed this was a reasonable plan. I opened the cabinet where, I knew, the white flour should be kept, and measuring cups. The first thing I saw when I opened the door was an open box of D-Con.

I closed my eyes for a moment, reached in, and took out the flour and the measuring cup. After I’d washed the cup, I measured out the flour (it looked like a reasonably recent purchase) and put the rest of the bag away in its protective (that’s sarcasm, there) Ziploc bag.

The bag of brown sugar had a cobweb growing around the wire tie closing the bag. But the sugar felt soft. I was in good shape.

I assembled the blondies and baked them; they came out beautifully in about 20 minutes, so the oven was, presumably, reliable enough. While the sweets cooled, my husband got to work on the chicken. He’d already set up the béchamel for the green bean casserole. I surveyed the kitchen: we were in excellent shape.

At six thirty, the meal was served. It was as good as anything we’d’ve cooked at home, though we had improvised on a lot of little details, and were working with decidedly inferior cooking equipment. (For example: the handles of saucepans are supposed to be attached to the saucepans, not come off as soon as you try to lift the pan of hot liquid from the heat.) No one reacted to the food by vomiting profusely (indicating to me that the box of D-Con had not tainted my blondies). Will my father in law ever understand that he is, in fact, capable of roasting a chicken? That nothing we did was difficult at all; that it all merely took some time and effort — and not even much effort, at that (it is not hard to pull a dead chicken from a bag, put it in a pan, and shove some garlic and lime into its cavity and then bung the whole thing into a hot oven). I don’t know. I don’t know. I know that he’ll never really appreciate that meal, but the birthday girl did, and for that, I am grateful.

I am also exceedingly grateful, today, to be back at home, where the pot handles are all firmly attached to the pots; where I know how to clean things properly; where there are no smelly sponges that I’m supposed to use to clean the dishes; where the knives aren’t so dull they are going to hurt me; and where, most of all, I can cook what I want and only worry about pleasing myself, my husband, and my child. They are easy to please: if it’s good, they’re happy. Home is where the food tastes right.

Last night, around 10.30, my husband was eating a very late dinner and I was sitting on the couch, nearby, thumbing through the new Rose Levy Beranbaum cookbook, The Baking Bible. It is filled with recipes for things I’d never make, and has a few things I’d probably make once in a while when feeling exceptionally energetic. One such thing was called Meringue Birch Twigs. I’ve been on a meringue kick lately, so it seemed like a plausible thing. Also, the recipe mentioned that serving them in a vase is very festive-looking, which also seemed likely to me.

“Look,” I said to my husband, bringing the book over so he could see the glossy photo.

“What happened to you?” he asked.

“What?” I said. “Wouldn’t this be fun to serve to guests on New Year’s Day, when we’re having people over?”

“You know, I remember you when you didn’t cook at all,” he said. “And now look at you. I remember when you would have looked at a recipe like this and said, “What is this twee bullshit?”

I started to laugh. “I don’t know what happened,” I admitted.

“You used to make fun of stuff like this,” he said.

“I notice you don’t mind eating stuff like this when I make it,” I countered.

“That’s true,” he said.

“Your internist said you should eat more cookies,” I reminded him.

“It’s true,” he said.

I might be making Meringue Birch Twigs for New Year’s Day. We’ll see.