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

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

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

The Overwritten Recipe: Another Book Edward Gorey Forgot to Write and Illustrate

If you are reading a recipe, and the instructions seem over-written to you, the novice recipe reader, you should bear in mind that the person who wrote the recipe is probably trying to save you some angst by being so precise. Don’t sign angrily and insist that the writer is an asshole or just trying to get your goat. He or she is trying to explain to you why you should take step A before step B, lest you veer in the wrong direction and wind up in the Museum of Tsuris. It is true that longwindedness in recipes can be due to mere literary preciousness, or culinary pretention, but in my own case? It’s really just that I’m trying to convey to my reader, in entertaining manner, the good reasons why something is done a certain way. In other words, I’m not trying to piss you off, I’m trying to be helpful, dammit.

Conversely, an underwritten recipe can be nearly useless. We’ve all seen old index cards tucked into books or found in boxes of random stuff in our grandmother’s junk drawer. The recipe is titled, “Angela’s Spice Cookies — very good!” and it’s a list of ingredients but then there’s no instruction for how to combine them. The card’s text ends, “Bake in hot oven for 12 minutes.” Thanks, Angela.

I’ve also met another sneaky bastard, the Secretly Underwritten Recipe, that you really have to watch out for, because it’s a sneaky bastard that can ruin your day. This is the recipe that comes from a normally reliable source, but that turns out to have some crucial ingredient or step left out. Like, it tells you that you need four eggs to make the recipe, but then doesn’t tell you what to do with them. Ever. Or it neglects to advise you that not only should you grease the pan, but that you should put some parchment paper down before you pour in the batter, otherwise you will never get the cake out of the pan.

I am thinking about all of this because the other day I was doing some online research about madeleines. Specifically, I was wondering, “Can you make madeleines without a madeleine pan? I mean, of course you CAN, but is there any reason to seriously feel bad about not using a special pan?” I arrived at the conclusion that if what you want is little puffy lemon cookies, you should absolutely not feel bad about not using a madeleine pan. But in the process, I stumbled on a website maintained by a young woman who clearly has it in for food writers who use more than one sentence to describe a process.

At http://goutaste.com/a-modified-madeleines-recipe/ we read the madeleine recipe of Deb Perelman (Smitten Kitchen — an exceptionally fine blog, known to everyone who’s reading this, I am sure, except my mother, and, Mom, even you might even like reading Smitten Kitchen, if you were in the right mood, because Deb Perelman’s pretty flippant and sassy about cooking). Goutaste Lady (E. Grossman) feels that Deb Perelman uses too many words to write her recipes, which makes me think of the Emperor who moans that Mozart used too many notes. Grossman pouts, “I finally found one that looked just about right, except that this chef clearly has way too much time on her hands! Who has time to read – let alone WRITE – paragraphs of instruction??”
It makes me think of the Emperor who moaned that Mozart used too many notes.

The reason why Perelman uses those words is to get you to create a thing that is Correct, that is not a Disappointment. There are reasons why she wants you to combine ingredients in a certain order. Like, science reasons.

I can’t always explain them, but I know for a fact that there are reasons why we combine certain ingredients together at certain times. It isn’t just that recipe writers are persnickety for the fun of it.

There are really good reasons why Smitten Kitchen has been such a success: Perelman’s writing is clear and precise and works to make intimidating enterprises less intimidating. She’s following in the footsteps of people like Irma Rombauer and Marion Rombauer and Ethan Becker (Joy of Cooking), and Julia Child — someone who Ms. Grossman should have heard of, what with being such a Francophile and all. Where would any food writer today be without these people, who used a lot of words in their recipes, as role models? It is nearly unthinkable.

Deb Perelman doesn’t talk down to her readers and she doesn’t dumb recipes down needlessly or pointlessly. She assumes that someone wants to make something and then says, basically, “Ok, is this easy? Is it hard? Can it be done in a tiny kitchen, possibly an ill-equipped kitchen?” Then she goes about and explains how the thing can be made, whether it’s churros (which she had assumed were a pain to make, but assures us are totally easy, but even so, I’m not gonna bother, well, maybe someday) or babka (which is a pain to make, no matter how you do it, but it is worth doing, and the SK recipes are a good way to go). It seems clear to me that she assumes a certain level of competence in the kitchen, but it’s also clear from the comments that if a novice baker has a question, she’ll answer it, no matter how obvious the answer may seem to her or her more experienced-cook fellow-commenters. Many, many of the comments on Smitten Kitchen are written by people who would never have tried to bake or cook at all, if not for her website. Even I — I’m pretty comfortable in the kitchen, but when I am daunted by the prospect of baking a particular thing, I will turn to Smitten Kitchen for reassurance that I can do this.

Ms. Grossman’s recipe for madeleines may work; I don’t know, and I never will, because I don’t want to make madeleines. I know that her attitude is amusing. But I also know that there are recipes where if you get too flip about method, the product will fail. The end result will not be what you want. There is, for example, a real difference between “folding in” an ingredient and “mixing in” an ingredient. God help Ms. Grossman if she ever decides to make something involving whipped egg whites. If she decides to just mix them into her flourless chocolate gateau, instead of carefully folding them in, she is going to wind up with a very, very fallen cake. And there will not be enough whipped cream in the world to make up for the fact that she didn’t respect the ingredients and how they have to be handled.

So, missy, don’t get all high and mighty about those overwritten recipes. Because, come the day when you really, really fuck something up in the kitchen, and you’re crying and screaming, “Why did this happen to me? Why does God hate me?” you will seek out that overwritten recipe, and it will calmly explain to you, “If you are not careful with this step, your cake will fall/your butter will taste burned and you will have to start all over/your beef will be tough and stringy and you will want to just throw it to the dog rather than serve it to your loved one on your anniversary.” Ms. Grossman, be flip. But respect the people who’re doing the heavy lifting, to whom you will run crying like a baby in times of trouble and sadness.

In the meantime, I will keep a light on for Ms. Grossman in a small room in the northern part of the guest wing (where visiting scholars may rest their weary heads) of the Museum of Tsuris.

March 18, 2016 0

You Don’t Need Mise en Place Bowls: or, There isn’t Much Virtue in the Prep Process Being Beautiful

Don’t get me wrong. It is all well and good to have mise en place bowls — which are the little cute bitsy-size bowls made of glass or metal, usually, that cooks use to organize the stuff they’re going to use in small amounts while they are cooking. Online recipes, especially those little video ones you see on Facebook all the time, always show all the ingredients for something lined up in mise en place bowls. Here is one bowl with your teaspoon of cinnamon, another with your teaspoon of cumin, another with your tablespoon of coriander, another one with your half teaspoon of salt. Sometimes you see these presentations of mise en place bowls and it’s so pretty you just have to hold a scented hanky to your eyes, it’s so affecting, it’s like a painting, it’s so lovely. But it is also true that using mise en place bowls makes for a hell of a lot of little bitty bowls to wash.
Look at this, for an example. This is a link to a Blue Apron recipe. https://www.blueapron.com/recipes/chicken-cacciatore-with-fettuccine-pasta-mushrooms

Blue Apron is a service that charges you a bunch of money so that you can have delivered to your door a box of ingredients, pre-measured and ready to go, as I understand it, so that you can cook a nice homemade meal without having to go grocery shopping. I know a woman who is a subscriber to this service but observes, “It’s still a pain. And I don’t have all those little bowls.” I screech, “You don’t need the little bowls to cook the meal!” but she doesn’t care. Somehow, in her mind, she has to have the little bowls to have things Work Right. Because that’s how Blue Apron shows you how to use their product. I pointed out that she could buy mise en place bowls, and that they are, indisputably, cute and would be fun to buy; or that, alternatively, she could just use whatever little bowls she has around, and it would still work fine. “But then you have to wash all those bowls!” she moaned. Well, it’s true: if you dirty a bowl, you have to wash it. But the thing is: most home cooks aren’t doing anything that really requires the use of mise en place bowls. It is useful to have them in a photo essay describing how a recipe is put together, so that the visually-minded novice home cook has a mental image of what they need (“oh, so that’s what a tablespoon of cinnamon looks like”) but it’s not like you get arrested if you don’t use mise en place bowls.

The fact is, there’s a learning curve to cooking that doesn’t perhaps get discussed as much as it should. The novice cook doesn’t have to start with a book or recipe labeled “E-Z Italian Recipes” and assume that he or she is doomed if they look at Marcella Hazan; at the same time, expecting the novice cook to, as Laurie Colwin says, waltz into the kitchen with a copy of Edwardian Glamour Cooking Without Tears and expect a decent meal to result is sure to result in at least an emotional disaster. Cookbooks and online recipes are, whether or not they expressly say so, targeted toward different skill and interest levels, and these should be assessed and respected.

I remember clearly when, in 1988, as someone who had zero interest in cooking, someone who had a deep love of cooking and entertaining told me that I must buy The Silver Palate Cookbook. I was just missing out if I didn’t make Chicken Marbella. And I remember sitting down in the bookstore and looking through it and going, “Are you kidding me?” I saw all these references to creme fraiche, an ingredient I knew I would never buy, and demands for the use of pieces of kitchen equipment I didn’t own, many of which I don’t own to this day, mind you. It was all so ludicrous. The idea that this was someone’s idea of a 101-level cookbook was madness — and yet, thousands and thousands of well-intentioned people gave this book as a gift to young people setting up their first apartment, as a wedding gift…. and I imagine that thousands and thousands of people attempted Chicken Marbella, made some tough chicken with weird mushy prunes, and said, “Fuck this,” which is why in the 1990s, working in a used bookstore, we were always being offered barely used copies of The Silver Palate Cookbook. It’s a useful book if you are already comfortable in the kitchen. For the novice? It’s just painful and intimidating and annoying. A much more reasonable gift would have been a copy of The Joy of Cooking, which is a book that contains recipes both insanely complicated and ridiculously simple. There is, literally, something in it for everyone. And they never make you feel bad for not having mise en place bowls.

These days, because so many people rely on the internet for their recipe searches (i.e., they’re getting their recipes from photo-heavy blogs, not like this one), and so many cookbooks have elaborately staged color photographs of the recipes being laid out, prepared, and served, we have an over-ambitious, unrealistic sense of what our cooking should look like, in terms of process and result. The people who maintain beautiful, inspiring food blogs (I don’t mean me; I mean, people like Mimi Thorisson or whoever is out there that has a nice supply of mise en place bowls) are in the business of making sure that the images of their cooking process are perfect. That’s part of the point. It’s not just about “This would make a good meal.” It’s that all of these are, at some level, lifestyle magazines. And I guess it’s nice to look at, sure, but it can have a dampening effect on the reader/viewer who innocently went online to figure out how to make chicken cacciatore or salade Nicoise, things that aren’t in fact hard to make, at all, but are easily presented in such a way that a novice cook might be scared right into calling for some Indian takeout.

You don’t need mise en place bowls. You can cook very good meals without laying out your spices and herbs in seventeen perfect little bowls around your big mixing bowl. Your mixing bowl could, in fact, not be a bowl at all, but be the stock pot you also use when you cook your 89 cent box of totally un-chic spaghetti. How do I know this? Because — while it’s true I own a lot of mixing bowls, all given to me as gifts — the “bowl” I use to bake bread (where I mix the dough initially, and then let it sit and rise) is also the 7 quart pot I use for making spaghetti. It’s just a big metal pot with a lid. It’s not fancy. It’s just there, and it works. My mise en place bowls, when I feel called to use something like that, are the same bowls I serve ice cream out of on lazy weekend afternoons when we all need a treat. They’re just little bowls I have around. And in the days before I had no dishwasher, I swear on all that is holy, it wasn’t a big deal to wash them; now that I have a dishwasher, it’s even less of a big deal.

Saint Colwin wrote about kitchen equipment, and how people get all worked up over having just the right gear, but that most of the time, there’s really no need for such agonies. It’s really true. There are certain pieces of equipment you have to have to achieve a few specific goals; it is, undeniably, hard to make true madeleines without a madeleine pan. But if you just want a madeleine-flavored cooky, you could make them in muffin tins, or as drop cookies, if you wanted to. No one is stopping you. You don’t need mise en place bowls to make Cincinnati chili, the recipe I make most often that calls for more than three spices. And you know how I handle organizing the spices, which do have to be added to the pot in a fairly organized manner, to be sure that they cook properly and don’t burn?

I do this.

I look at the list of ingredients, which is long:

1 Tbsp canola oil
2 cups diced onions
1 clove garlic, minced
2 Tbsp tomato paste
2 Tbsp chili powder
1 Tbsp dried oregano
1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp salt
3/4 tsp black pepper
1/4 tsp allspice
2 cups low-sodium chicken broth
2 cups tomato sauce
2 Tbsp cider vinegar
2 tsp dark brown sugar
1 1/2 lbs lean ground beef

And then I do this: I cut up the onions and I put them into the pot. While they sauté, I prep the garlic, and add it to the pot.

Then I get one of my ice cream bowls and in it I put the chili powder, the oregano, the cinnamon, the salt, the black pepper, and the allspice.

I squeeze the tomato paste straight from the tube into the pot. I dump the entire bowl of spices into the pot. I pour the vinegar straight from the bottle into the pot. The brown sugar is spooned directly into the pot from the plastic box where I keep the brown sugar, usually with a soup spoon, not a measuring spoon, because it really doesn’t matter. Then I add the tomato sauce (i.e., open a can of crushed tomatoes and dump it into the pot) and the ground beef (i.e., unwrap the package of meat and put it into the pot) and the chicken broth (or water, as the case may be), which is probably poured from a measuring cup, but who knows, I may just pour it from the teakettle or the tub where I’ve been storing the chicken broth in the fridge for the last week. I can eyeball two cups of liquid. It’s not that big a deal.

This means that the prep equipment to be washed, after setting up the Cincinnati chili, is this: a knife; a cutting board; a soup spoon; an ice cream bowl. Four objects. The only one of them that can’t go in the dishwasher is the knife (you don’t put knives in the dishwasher, period. Got it?). If I used a measuring cup for water, I just set it in a rack to dry. Painless.
If I used mise en place bowls and showed you how to do this a la Blue Apron: there would be a knife, a cutting board, several measuring spoons, and possibly as many as 14 mise en place bowls. Which is a lot of little bowls. I’d be annoyed if I had to clean up 14 little bowls (ok, the meat would admittedly require a larger bowl). But it’s just not necessary! What is necessary, to cook efficiently, is to read the recipe and really absorb what steps you have to take with which ingredients, and when. Cooking is a flow chart, and a well-written recipe will be clear and explain in concise terms which actions you take at which junctures in the cooking process. No cookbook is going to seriously insist that you have mise en place bowls. And no one should be intimidated out of the kitchen because they don’t have such things.

Forget the mise en place bowls. Just read the recipe carefully, put a pot on the stove, and start cooking. Don’t worry about pretty, don’t worry about not having a mandoline. Just put the pot on the stove and start cooking. Then you’ll get to be all smug about not paying for takeout, and about how you cleaned up the kitchen in ten minutes. As someone with a fancy website or two has said, “And that’s a good thing.”

March 16, 2016 0

You’d Think It Wouldn’t be Hard: Peanut Butter Brownies

I suppose that out of my couple thousand cookbooks I probably have at least thirty different reliable recipes for peanut butter brownies, but the other day when I decided on a whim that I had to bake peanut butter brownies, I did not turn to any of my utterly reliable cookbooks, but instead went to the internet. I found a recipe that seemed plausible and, after making sure that I in fact had all the ingredients on hand, I set to work. I had this idea that I would make peanut butter brownies and put some chocolate chips in them.

But when I stopped to think for a moment, I realized that I had in the refrigerator a little tub with leftover chocolate babka filling, and that, instead of using chocolate chips, I should swirl the babka filling into the brownie batter. So I melted the chocolate filling in the microwave (because that stuff hardens to rock in the fridge) and poured it atop the brownie batter. My daughter watched me. “Mmmmmmmmm,” she said approvingly. “Yeah,” I said. “But you know what, this was dumb of me, I should have put half the batter in the pan, then put the chocolate, and then put the rest of the batter on top of the chocolate.” “Well who cares,” said the wise one. “I do,” I said, “but never mind, I can do it next time.”

I baked the pan of brownies and they came out…. fine, but not at all brownie-like. They were more like peanut butter cake, and rather dry peanut butter cake at that. We ate them, but none of us loved them. I was disappointed, but immediately grasped the problem. Too much flour, by 50%. “I will fix this,” I said to everyone, and everyone paid no attention at all.

The other day, having baked a lovely loaf of chocolate bread, I then returned to the peanut butter brownie problem, which sounds like it would be a really good episode of Peg + Cat, except probably peanuts aren’t allowed on PBS shows. This time, I revised the recipe, cutting the flour dramatically. So now it went like this:

1/2 cup peanut butter

1/3 cup butter (original recipe called for margarine, but get real)

2/3 cup white sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar

2 eggs

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 cup flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

You cream the peanut butter and butter together in a mixer and when it’s smooth you add the sugars. Then you add the eggs and vanilla. Whip it all up so it looks fluffy. In a separate little bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients and add them to the butter/sugar/eggs.

Prepare an 8×8″ baking pan by taking the wrapper from a stick of butter and lightly rubbing it on the bottom of the pan. Then make a sling of parchment paper and lightly coat the paper with butter, too. The grease on the wrapper will be enough to achieve this, you don’t need to slice any actual butter or get your hands messy to do this; you just need a microscopic film of butter on the pan and paper.

Put half the batter in the pan, then put most of your chocolate filling (or chocolate chips) over the batter. Cover the layer of chocolate with the rest of the peanut butter batter, then add the rest of the chocolate to form the top layer. Swirl with a knife until it looks however you think it looks best, then bake at 350° for about 30 minutes. I kept thinking 20 minutes would do the trick, but it didn’t, and I kept adding time, six minutes at a time, and I think I wound up at 30 minutes. Let cool a while in the pan (about 20 minutes) on a rack; then remove from pan using edges of parchment, and place the brownie, still on the paper, on the rack. It needs to cool all the way before removing the paper and slicing.

This peanut butter brownie is far superior to the one I made the first time around. “Much more chewy, peanut-buttery,” said one reviewer. “Mmmm, really good,” said another reviewer. It was felt that chocolate chips would be preferable chocolate element over the leftover babka filling, so when I work on this again, I’ll be doing it with chocolate chips.
However, there is an argument to be made for making babka again, and, again, making too much chocolate filling, and starting this vicious cycle all over again, because some of us like the chewy, rich, chocolate sludge…

Much better. Peanut butter swirl brownies, and half a loaf of chocolate bread for good measure.

March 2, 2016 0

Laundry Competence: or, This Time it was My Fault

I’m not going to say which member of our family has a tendency to leave little paper-wrapped bits of ABC chewing gum in their pockets, but I will say that more than once I’ve had the unhappy experience of laundering things with such items left in the pockets, and it would be fair to say that no one benefits from this process.

As such, I’ve gotten pretty good at making sure pockets are empty before be-pocketed articles of clothing go into the washing machine.

But this weekend, I missed something. And when the laundry emerged from the dryer, I noticed these odd little cinnamon-red smudges all over the laundry. I thought, “What the hell?” For one thing, how had I managed to put these smudged items into the dryer before I noticed the smudges? But more importantly: what had made these marks?
It was after I dumped all the ostensibly clean, and actually dry, laundry onto the hallway floor that I found the culprit: a now-empty tube of Burt’s Bees Tinted Lip Balm. In other words, the fault was mine. What I think is that the lip balm was in a pocket (or, possibly, it got knocked off the top of the dryer into the washing machine, when I was putting the laundry in), and that it made it through the washing process all right, but that in the dryer, it melted and oozed through the seam at the cap and got all over everything. Because the cap was still on, you see. But the tube of lip balm was shockingly empty.

I laundered that load of laundry two more times, with massive doses of Oxy-Clean. One undershirt is still marred, as is a vintage Peanuts bed sheet I’d given a household member as a gift. The new white washcloth I’d had in that load is stained a nice, even pink (but the pink is fading, I noticed today, when I laundered it a fourth time). Why it was even in a load of dark laundry is beyond me, but these things happen. That, I’m taking philosophically.
But the fact that I let this happen annoys me even two days later. When I discovered the problem, I swore so loudly that my daughter went downstairs, where my family was getting ready to go out together on a little errand, and she said to them in a low voice, “You better just go out to the car; Mama’s about to get really angry. Trust me, I know.” (This was reported to me, later, by my husband, who was amused by her skill at reading her mother’s moods.) I’ve apologized to my husband for pock-marking one of his undershirts, but added that because I’m fairly good about separating the lights from the darks, the worst-possible scenario did not come to pass. This would be the scenario in which all of our white towels, white undershirts, white kitchen linens, and white bedding is all smudged with Burt’s Bees Red Dahlia Lip Balm, a product I fully endorse, though I don’t recommend running it through the laundry.

I did two more loads of laundry today (the aftermath of having family visit from out of town) and there were no disasters. Tomorrow, I’ll buy another lip balm, and this time I will make sure it never goes in a pocket or on top of the dryer.

February 1, 2016 0

Kitchen Competence: The Update

This is the result.

Last night I took care of the last steps to prepare this dough to bake. I kneaded it one last time — very sticky stuff, I had to use a dishrag to get my hands clean — and I set the dough into a pot to rise overnight in the fridge, as per the King Arthur Flour directions for their No-Knead Harvest Bread, which was one of the recipes I was taking as a model. This morning, when I went to make the coffee, I took the pot out of the fridge and set it on the counter to come up to room temperature (or closer to). When I was back home after taking my daughter to school, I did as King Arthur said: I put the pot, covered, in a cold oven, turned the oven to 450 degrees, and baked it for 45 minutes, after which point I took off the lid. I baked until it registered 205 on a thermometer (actually, it said 206°) and then I tried to get it out of the pot.

Well, here, we ran into trouble. This thing did not want to leave its house. It was a like taking a cat to the vet. “I know what’s happening next, and I don’t like it, and I’m staying here.” In the end I had to take a plastic knife and shove it all around the edge of the bread to separate it from the pot, and when I turned the pot over to shake out the bread, it came out, but, as you can see, it left the bottom crust of the bread behind in the pot.

So this isn’t a complete success. It’s not a very handsome product. However, it occurred to me immediately that this bread would make a fabulous stuffing, and so if we don’t want to eat a mangled, ugly loaf of cranberry-sunflower seed bread, we will happily consume it alongside a roasted chicken.

I’m now eating a slice of this bread with some butter. It’s pretty good. I think the solution to baking this is one of two things: 1. line the bottom of the baking pot with parchment paper, don’t just rely on the pot being greased to do the trick; or, two, bake it as a messily-shaped loaf on a big cooky sheet, again with parchment underneath it. Because I can already tell this is worth making again, even if I messed it up this time.

January 27, 2016 0