Memorial Day Foodfest

We had a busy Memorial Day weekend, foodwise. I spent more time cooking over the weekend than I think I have in the last four years. And of course, I have some random observations based on my experiences.

On Saturday we attended the potluck 40th birthday party of a friend. This is not how I would choose to spend my 40th birthday (although to be perfectly fair, it wasn’t her actual birthday), but my friend loves potlucks. I do not love potlucks. Call me a food snob, but I don’t like the randomness of asking everyone to bring something. In the first place, you generally wind up with far too many pans of brownies, and in the second place, nothing ever goes.

At this particular event, the hosts provided hamburgers and hot dogs (and vegetarian burgers—we’re in the Pacific Northwest, after all). The guests were asked to bring the sides and desserts. The selection was predictably random. Peanut noodles (made with spaghetti—which I find unforgivable in a day and age when you can buy packages of real oriental noodles at any 7-11, practically), an orzo salad, a green salad, several pans of brownies (see?), a couple of boxes of cookies from Costco, and the birthday cake. Maybe I’m too much of a traditionalist, but if I’m forced to eat grilled food I’d prefer things like potato chips or potato salad or something like that. No, there is no pleasing me.

On Sunday we had my family over for lunch. Since I was cooking, everything “went.” Well, it did as far as I was concerned. We started with spiced pecans that I made. My husband had pooh-poohed these as a dumb idea, but I know my family. Sure, they wouldn’t necessarily be what I craved at lunchtime, but my family loves nuts (insert your own nut-as-synonym-for-insanity joke here). Sure enough, within ten minutes of their arrival, both my aunt and my grandmother had asked me for the recipe.

Then we had a fennel slaw, with shredded cabbage, shredded fennel, and shredded Granny Smith apple. Making this made me realize that I don’t like the bagged shredded cabbage as much as I like the consistency of what I shred myself in my food processor. The bagged stuff is too coarse. I can get it much finer with my food processor. I’ve now decided that if I’m in a hurry, I’ll use the bagged stuff, but that if I have the time, I will certainly shred my own. I actually used the grating disk, not the shredding disk, which is why it was so much finer.

Then I made a gougere pizza. This translates to a pizza made out of cream puff dough. Cream puff dough is butter, flour and egg. This dough also had Gruyere cheese and blue cheese stirred into it, and then blue cheese scattered over the top of it. It baked for about 45 minutes until it puffed up nicely. Originally this was intended as an appetizer, but it made a nice lunch, albeit a pretty rich one.

For dessert we had strawberry shortcakes, with chocolate biscuits. The biscuits were kind of a pain to make, because the directions called for whipping heavy cream to stiff peaks, then stirring it into the biscuit dry ingredients. It’s not easy to stir whipped cream into flour and cocoa powder. The strawberries had a little crème de cassis sprinkled over them, and there was more whipped cream on the side.

On Monday I let my husband do the cooking, although I picked the menu. We had a tomato pie I’ve had the recipe for forever and have always wanted to try but never made, grilled shrimp wrapped with bacon (a concession to my husband, who feels that summer holidays require something to be charred to oblivion on the grill), and for dessert, a cherry cobbler with vanilla ice cream.

The tomato pie provided two lessons—first, anything made with tomatoes is just bound to be watery, no matter how long you let them drain, and second, it’s very hard to roll out short crust pastry without a rolling pin. The tomato pie was good, but the bottom crust got soggy, and I’ve come to the conclusion that that’s just how it is with tomato things. As for the lack of rolling pin, we moved and we’re keeping our unpacking to a bare minimum, since we’re going to be moving again by the end of the year. Apparently, the box with the rolling pin didn’t rate unpacking.

I had this difficulty brought home to me on Wednesday night when I tried to make a plum jam tart for a friend’s birthday (same friend whose potluck we went to, but this was for the actual day). I had to push the dough out with my fingers, which isn’t the best way to handle chilled short crust pastry. The tart turned out fine, but it spread out too far because the dough was too warm. Suffice to say I was the only person who realized this was the case.

Another thing I discovered is that when someone says “Really, don’t bring anything” they need to be taken at face value. I suppose that what I mean here is that anyone who offers to bring something to my house when I say not to bring anything needs to take me at face value. My family knows this, and when they offered to bring something and I said “Nothing, thanks—we’re fine” they listened and didn’t bring anything.

However, on Monday my friend did insist on bringing something, even when I assured her everything was planned. Whenever someone insists on bringing something, I always dread it because what they bring is always a strange addition to my menu, and this was no exception. She brought a macaroni and tuna salad. I was grateful for the gesture, but it was totally unnecessary, and was just plain weird with what we had provided. I guess it’s a fine line you walk with the bring something/don’t bring something dilemma. Some people say “Don’t bother bringing anything,” and what they mean is “You better not show up empty handed and leave all this work to me!” I say it and I mean it—don’t bring a thing because I have it all planned, and I want it all to be a certain way. Practically the whole container of the stuff went in the trash. Not in front of her, of course, but eventually. I guess I’m just more anal about my menu planning than most people, and there's the same issue I have with potlucks, where if there's a base menu and then people bring things, nothing seems to go together. The menu winds up being a mishmash of unrelated items that don't compliment each other and may actually clash.

The weekend cooking didn’t actually end on Monday, since, as I mentioned, Wednesday night I made what was supposed to be a blood plum jam tart for my friend. It turned out to be a regular plum jam tart, because I couldn’t find blood plum jam, and the recipe called for grappa, which I was also unable to find. I used kirsch instead. I don’t think anyone noticed. We had this for breakfast on Wednesday, which was a little disgusting, but everyone enjoyed it very much. I say it was disgusting, because what we were eating was about a pound of butter mixed with flour, almond meal, and heavy cream, at 7 a.m. We all take the ferry together, and I brought this on as a birthday surprise for the friend.

Anyway, I did a ton of cooking, and really enjoyed it, and am now trying to get back into the cooking groove. Today I made zucchini cupcakes (in an effort to trick my children into eating something mildly healthy in the form of their dessert), and tonight I’ll roast a chicken, and some plum tomatoes, and we’ll have salad with that for dinner. All next week I have things planned out to make for lunches to take to work, and for dinners to have at night. We’ll see if I’m able to actually execute against this plan—often my well-intentioned plans fall flat. It’s a case of having to make two meals (theirs and mine), plus putting my lunch together the evening before, and sometimes that’s just beyond me on a weeknight. At least if I do manage it, I know everything will go together.

The Rating Game

Many years ago, when we were first married, something transpired which has since become known as the Chicken a la King Episode. This occurrence prompted us to rate recipes. This past week a friend and I were talking about how we determined which recipes we would make again, and which we would not. She was saying that her husband would often say, “That was great, but I guess we’ll never see it again.” Like me, she has so many recipes that if she started today, and made a different recipe for every breakfast, lunch, dinner, or snack every day, it would take her years to work her way through her whole collection, between books, magazines, and recipe file recipes. I explained how we rate recipes, and if they rate high enough, they’ll get made again (you know, someday).

The episode in question unfolded in this way: I found a recipe in a magazine for a chicken stock that was made using a whole chicken. Once the stock was done, and the chicken cooked, there were recipes for things that used both the cooked chicken and the stock. Several things looked good, including a chicken chili (which I made, and it was tasty), and Chicken a la King. For dinner one night, I decided that the Chicken a la King would be good. It was served over texas toast, and I enjoyed it very much. I thought my husband did too. I asked, “How is it?” and was told “It’s good.”

A few weeks later I decided to make the stock again, and again decided to make the Chicken a la King for dinner. He sat down to dinner, and a strange look crossed his face. I asked what was wrong. “Well,” he said reluctantly, “I don’t really like Chicken a la King that much.”

[Sound of crickets chirping.]

I’ll skip the drama of the few minutes that followed, but the eventual outcome was that, instead of just asking “How is it?” I began demanding a numerical rating of every meal I prepared.

We started with a scale of 1 to 10, but this proved too broad. Most things wound up getting a seven, which wasn’t very helpful. So we scaled back to a 1-5 rating. Now most things get either a 3 or a 4. Sometimes a 2 or a 3 could be changed slightly to get a higher rating. We discuss what we would do differently next time, I make notes in the cookbook (or on the recipe), and we try it again someday to see if it deserves the better score.

The value assigned to the numbers is this: a 1 is just barely edible. It will likely never get made again, and there’s not much to salvage it. A 2 is not bad, but not particularly exciting. Sometimes a 2 could be upgraded by making changes, but often a 2 is just a so-so dish that also probably never gets much attention again. A 3 is perfectly fine, but generally not very inspired. It’s tasty, satisfying, and could be made again, but probably not for quite some time. A 3 wouldn’t find its way into a regular rotation, unless there was some change that could be made to it to up its score. A 4 is really good, and is something we’d eat again soon. Fours are the recipes I fall back to when nothing new looks tempting, but we need to have something planned for dinner for a certain night.

Fives are gems. A five is on the level of restaurant quality. A five is the kind of meal we choose if we’re having a special meal at home (a birthday, anniversary, holiday). So far we’ve rated one recipe a 5, and one was given a “4 rising 5” because it was just served with the wrong sides, and changing the accompanying dishes would improve the overall experience and bring it up to 5 quality. For the record, the one true 5 is a pan seared filet mignon with mustard balsamic glaze served with “parmesan mash” (parmesan mashed potatoes), and the rising 5 was a quince glazed backstrap of lamb (lamb loin), which will get served with couscous or soft polenta next time, and a green salad.

I find the greatest benefit of this system is that it helps me keep track of what we really love. If I see a recipe that looks tempting, and I make it, and it turns out to be a dud, then making a note in the book or on the page in the recipe file that it was only a 2 means that the next time I come across that recipe, I won’t get all excited and remember that this was something I wanted to try and then be disappointed when I make it and it’s still a dud. Granted, if it’s a recipe file recipe that turns out to be less than wonderful, it probably just gets recycled. But in cookbooks, this system is really helpful—it helps me keep track of what’s good and what’s not. After all, if a book has a number of really good things, and one or two “misses,” I’m not going to get rid of the book.

Our stumbling block is the “and a half” recipes. It’s not quite a four, but it’s better than just a three, so how do we rate it? It winds up getting a fractional rating. I think we’re going to have to do something about these—they’re either going to have to be bumped down, or have something about them changed to move them up to the next level.

I’ve talked to several friends about how they handle this kind of decision—what do we make again? One friend said that they have just a binary system—make again, don’t make again. Clearly, this wouldn’t work for us, because the Chicken a la King recipe was deemed acceptable to make again, just not soon. I know that the test kitchens of a magazine I read regularly rates recipes on a scale of 1 to 3. I think this is too limiting a range. Clearly under this system, a 1 is unacceptable, a 2 is good, and a 3 is great. That means that most things are 2s, which doesn’t sort out which ones are merely pretty good, from those that are really good.

I anticipate that someday our children will be invited to rate recipes, which will serve two purposes. First, it will help us to decide as a family which things we have on a regular basis, so that the kids feel like they have some input in what we have for dinner. Second, it will give me some insight into what my kids really like to eat (other than Toll House cookies, and chicken nuggets), which is always nice information to have so that I can pick recipes that they’re more inclined to like in the first place. And when that day comes, how hard I will laugh if they give the Chicken a la King a four.

Denial (a non-food entry)

I live within spitting distance of Seattle. Most people have an image of Seattle as being rainy and cold most of the year. That’s not entirely true. It does rain quite a bit in the winter, and it can be quite chilly, but I find it interesting that a 65 degree day here feels warmer than a 65 degree day where I came from back East did. However, there is one thing I don’t understand.

Why people in Seattle spend a good part of the year dressed like we live in Florida.

In late February and March, when it really is quite rainy, and in some cases fairly chilly, I see people in shorts and flip flops. Not just kids either. Kids, of course, are notorious for wearing weather-inappropriate clothing just because it looks “cool.” I’m talking about adults. Adults who should know better. I don't remember this kind of flauting of the actual weather conditions back East.

Today, for instance, the temperature is 53 degrees (and might go as high as 55 or 56), and it’s what I would describe as partly cloudy—a little sun here and there, but mostly cloud cover. Although, as I say, this feels warmer than it did where I came from, it’s still not tropical weather, by any means. Yet in my office today there are two women wearing open toed slip ons, and I rode to work this morning with one friend who was wearing shorts.

What gives?

By late June, it will be warm enough for open toed shoes and shorts. In fact, in July and August, it really gets quite hot here, and it barely rains all summer long. In September they have to issue “no burn” orders so that people don’t burn yard waste and risk setting huge tracts of national forest on fire.

But that’s June, July, and August. Right now it’s May, and it’s kind of on the chilly side. Yet I see dozens of people who’ve broken out their summer wardrobes. Women in light sundresses and sandals. Men in shorts and sandals. I can’t imagine they’re not freezing, but at least they don’t complain.

Along with this total denial that we actually have long, fairly cool springs, come a few other facts that people in this part of the world refuse to accept.

First is that there are bugs here. Many houses have no screens on their windows because people seem to refuse to admit the fact that there are, in fact, flying insects here that get into your house and are annoying. There are all kinds of yicky little flying things, including the world’s laziest mosquitoes. These things land on you, and if you notice them, you can easily smack them into oblivion. Where I came from, mosquitoes were zippy buggers that could dart away before you even had your hand raised. People seem unable to accept that we actually have flying insects, so almost no one has any screens. I lived in a house that had no screens and almost lost my mind because it was impossible to open the windows when it was hot.

Which brings me to my second point of denial: that while it doesn’t rain all the time, it also never gets very hot here. Certainly not hot enough to need air conditioning. That’s bunk. It never gets to 100, or even to 95 very often, and the humidity is nothing compared to what it was where I came from, but it can get pretty warm in the summer, and when it does, you need air conditioning. You may only use it for three or four weeks a year, but having it makes the difference between being comfortable and being miserable.

My new house will have both screens and air conditioning. And if you come to visit in February, you won’t find me dressed for a 4th of July barbeque. I can’t say the same for my fellow Seattelites, but their attire generally provides some interesting food for thought about how cold they must be, and just what they were thinking when they picked that outfit. It helps to pass the time on the way to work.

No Regrets

My kids eat a lot of typical kid foods. The other day I was thinking of the ones I wasn’t going to miss when they got old enough to eat other things. This was actually in the context of things I wasn’t going to miss in general about my kids being small: sippy cups, baby gates, pacifiers. Don’t misunderstand me—I know when they’re not babies anymore, I’ll look back and think how cute they were, and wish they could have stayed small forever. But there are some things I simply will not miss about having small children, and some of them are food-related.

Cereal Bars
Right now we buy boxes of cereal bars at Costco. They come in strawberry, blueberry, and apple. My older son will eat only the strawberry ones, the twins eat all the flavors. A cereal bar is their typical “first” breakfast. They also get another breakfast at daycare, and on weekends we often make something else around 9 a.m. or so. They’re really nothing but cookie with jam in them, but they serve their purpose. I’ll be glad, however, to see them go.

Eggo Waffles
Again, something else we buy in bulk at Costco (with four kids, there aren’t many things for the kids we don’t buy in bulk at Costco). My older son likes them cut into shapes with a cookie cutter, primarily Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (which then gets its nose dipped into a little tub of red decorator sugar). He dips the shapes into his syrup. The twins get no syrup. Nutritionally, these aren’t quite as bad as cereal bars (although the syrup is no gem), but they’re still something I’m tired of buying and making.

Gogurt
I had a debate with a friend about Gogurt. Her position was any yogurt was good yogurt. I said I agreed right up to Gogurt. Any of those kid yogurts are fine, but Gogurt is just garbage. There’s so little of it in a tube, and it has so much sugar, that I think any positive effects of active cultures or calcium is completely negated by the sugar. Although we buy it, it stays in the freezer and is an occasional treat. In truth, Gogurt is no friend of mine, and it does not get a Christmas card from me.

Chicken Nuggets
I don’t mean McDonald’s chicken nuggets. I sheepishly admit to kind of liking those. I’m talking about the ones we buy in bulk that are orange, for God’s sake. They’re fast—they heat up in the microwave in 30 seconds or something, and they claim to be made of whole breast meat (not mushed up reformed random pieces), but that doesn’t redeem them completely in my opinion, and I won’t miss them when the last of my kids stops saying she wants chicken nuggets for dinner.

Hot Dogs
We buy Hebrew National all beef hot dogs, and I actually like them, but I’m kind of tired of making hot dogs. Because the twins are under two, they have to be cut up in small pieces, and my older son actually eats his cold (yes, I agree that this is vile). I won’t mind when hot dogs take an occasional role in our diet, but their constant presence is tiresome.

Juice Boxes
I just seem to be down on all the common kid foods, don’t I? Juice boxes squirt when you squeeze them, which little boys think is hysterical. Mothers do not think this is hysterical because they have to clean it up. Yes, juice boxes are convenient, but they’re messy. I won’t miss them.

In general, I will be very grateful when my kids are old enough to eat the same things my husband and I want to eat (although I know it will likely be many years before they’re actually willing to eat things like fennel and lentils). Still, when they stop eating cereal bars and juice boxes, I won’t shed a tear.

Food Rules

Having just finished a somewhat disappointing takeout meal, I wish to share a few thoughts on what the rules of engagement for food and eating should be. This is not, of course, what they are, but the way they would be in my ideal world. Those of you who may have seen the Diet Rules that made the rounds maybe ten or fifteen years ago will recognize some of them—they were good then, they’re good now. Here we go.

If it wasn’t good, it doesn’t count
The lunch I just ate was from my favorite Japanese restaurant, but I think the regular chef was on vacation, because it was not up to their usual standard. I got the seaweed salad instead of the pickled cucumbers that usually come with my lunch (I think they may have run out of the cucumbers, because there was a guy in the bar eating a bento box, and he had the cucumbers, the bastard), and I hate the seaweed salad. It’s too fishy, or something. Then, the grilled beef short ribs I usually get that are supposed to come basted with a kind of sticky sweet soy-based sauce tasted as though they’d been grilled with no sauce at all. In short, the whole thing was a disappointment. But it still had the same number of calories, the same number of fat grams, the same degree of fillingness (if you will) that it would have had if it had been their best. The problem was, it wasn’t emotionally satisfying. Therefore, I propose that if a meal wasn’t good, and didn’t provide a significant emotional satisfaction in addition to filling me up, the calories, fat, etc do not count. I can go eat something that does satisfy and not have to be concerned that I’m eating twice as much.

If I wish I hadn’t eaten it after I finish, it doesn’t count
This is kind of related to the rule above, except that it also includes things that were fulfilling and satisfying, but that I just wish for some other reason I hadn’t eaten. If, for instance, I eat a big plate of amazing something-in-cream-sauce, or an incredible dessert, but later feel remorse over all the bad things that might have been in there and are now in me, doing their damage, I get to not count it. Any ill effects of what I ate are automatically negated.

If I split it with someone, it doesn’t count
If my husband and I split a huge dessert, neither of us has to count the calories, fat, etc. The same diet rule went around years ago as “If you split it with someone, the calories cancel.” Right on.

If no one knows I ate it, it doesn’t count
Again, and oldie but a goodie. This also carries over to Weight Watchers and other weight loss techniques that require a food journal. If you don’t write it down, it didn’t actually count.

Things that are really delicious are automatically good for you
And I’m not saying “I think Stouffer’s Macaroni and Cheese is really delicious, therefore it should be good for me.” It’s that something that is truly wonderful, a really high quality food, is good for you, no matter how bad it actually is for you. Things that fall into this category are really outstanding homemade mayonnaise (and by extension, anything made with it), homemade (or excellent quality bakery-made) cinnamon rolls, a fantastic blue cheese, homemade fruit cobblers or tarts. In fact, anything homemade should automatically be good for you, no matter what’s in it. If I undertake to make French fries at home, and go to the trouble of cutting them, soaking them, and deep frying them on my stove, then by God, they should be good for me. Things in really expensive restaurants, no matter how much cream they contain, should be good for you, too.

Everyone should get one day a month when nothing counts
We should all be allowed to choose one day in a month when we can eat any damned thing we want and nothing will contribute to weight gain, or health deterioration. Wish you could eat three large orders of McDonald’s fries? Wish you could drink five Appletinis and not get drunk (or wake up hung over)? Wish you could eat four fried chickens (bonus points to anyone who recognizes the movie reference)? There should be a day each month when we can do that. We could use it for a holiday—this month, for instance, I might choose one of the days of Memorial Day weekend as my “nothing counts” day, so I can eat everything. Or the month of my birthday, I might choose my birthday (difficult, since I have a November birthday, but I’d have to pick between that and Thanksgiving).

Foods from childhood should not count
Maybe that’s a little much, on reflection, but ok, how about this: We all get to pick three favorite foods from childhood that don’t count. I could pick potato chips, McDonald’s cheeseburgers, and…Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Then I could eat as much of those things as I wanted, whenever I wanted, and they would be completely neutral. The only catch to this one is, you can’t switch to a different childhood food when you get bored with one (or all) of the three. You must pick them and stick with them forever.

If it’s a beverage, it doesn’t count
Beer, wine, soda, shakes—they’re liquid, for pete’s sake. They shouldn’t contribute to weight gain. They shouldn’t be bad for you. They go with food. They’re necessary. They shouldn’t count. I remember in high school I truly did not believe that Coke could cause weight gain. How could it? You drink it, you don’t eat it. Ah, youth [takes sip from can of Diet Coke next to computer].

If I don’t realize I finished it, it doesn’t count
Despite the countless warnings and cluckings from diet gurus, I insist on reading while I eat. Sorry, I just do. Reading contributes to the pleasure of eating, and eating contributes to the pleasure of reading. The majority of the time it’s not a problem. While I might not be “eating mindfully,” I do derive sufficient satisfaction to feel full when I’m done with my meal. However, every now and then I take the last bite of something, and realize that, hey, that was the last bite and I didn’t get that “last bite” feeling after taking it. When that happens, the whole thing I just ate gets zeroed out. This is kind of a companion to the rule about things not counting when they’re not good, or when I change my mind about having eaten something, but it applies even when the thing was good.

If the jury is out on the detrimental effects of a food, it doesn’t hurt us
There have been so many swings of the pendulum as regards what foods are good for us, bad for us, totally neutral, that I feel like if they haven’t determined with an absolute certainty that something is bad for us, it shouldn’t have a negative effect on health or weight. Butter, for instance. We started out with butter being good for us; I remember the old “four food groups” and butter counted as a dairy product. Then butter was horrible, horrible, horrible for us. You might as well eat rat poison as eat butter. In fact, rat poison was probably better for you, because it didn’t have any cholesterol or saturated fat. Then someone started poking around in the margarine formula (which I’ve read is one molecule removed from plastic, but that could be an urban legend), and realized that margarine had trans fats, and that those trans fats were way worse than anything in butter. So the word went out that maybe butter wasn’t the Antichrist after all. I say, if the experts can’t decide, it just doesn’t hurt, period. And naturally, as far as I’m concerned, “they” haven’t actually proven that any one thing is bad for us. So guess what?

If I eat one “bad” thing along with a specified number of “good” things, the good things cancel the bad one
This is kind of the “good behavior” rule of food consumption. If I eat a big salad, loaded with vegetables and low fat protein, but eat it with regular Ranch dressing, the positive aspects of the vegetables and low fat protein cancel the negative ones of the dressing. This rule could apply to elements within a meal, or to the overall meal. If I eat a small, lightly dressed salad as my appetizer, then have grilled fish over sautéed spinach, and then finish off with a buttery slice of lemon tart, the first two “good” components negate the “badness” of the dessert.

I think that’s a pretty good start. I might add on to this in the future, but I think this set of rules, if adopted by…pretty much everyone, would serve to make my life much happier and easier. So, let’s eat!

Why I Buy

Today’s topic is why I buy a cookbook. I know everyone cares very deeply about what motivates me to buy a cookbook, so I’m sharing this with you now. There are lots of reasons people buy cookbooks, and I just read interviews with several chefs in which they agreed that they buy a cookbook for the pictures. This couldn’t be further from my reasons.

I would never buy a cookbook solely for the pictures. I know people who insist on a cookbook with a picture of every recipe, and people who like the pictures because they give an idea of what the finished product is supposed to look like (I admit to falling into this latter category). But pictures are not the only thing that drives my purchasing decision.

First and foremost I buy cookbooks based on my current interest. With the recent admission of my Japanese food addiction, I’m now picking up Japanese cookbooks. I like to understand what it is I’m eating, what ingredients are common, and the fundamentals of preparation of foods I like, even if I’m never going to actually make them, although if I buy the cookbook, I usually do wind up making something from it. I don’t find I have to have a picture of every recipe. I like that, of course, but it doesn’t drive me to make the purchase.

I also buy cookbooks based on a specific need. As I’ve discussed before (and no doubt you have committed my earlier postings to memory, so you know this too), I sometimes get into a rut when it comes to what to have for dinners. One thing that will jolt me out of a rut is buying a new cookbook with lots of good things to make for weeknight dinners, or even weekend dinners.

There are authors whose cookbooks I just like to have, to collect, if you will. Many of these are Australian cooks—Donna Hay, Bill Grainger, Jill Dupleix. I don’t follow celebrity chefs much (you’ll find only one Rachael Ray cookbook on my bookshelf, and that was a huge mistake, since her recipes are both bad and annoying at the same time). The books by people like Donna and Bill I do cook from. I’ve recently found a few books I want that may or may not be anything I ever cook from, but that I want anyway. The two that spring most readily to mind are the two that were written by the chef of a local restaurant called The Herb Farm. They just seem like the kind of thing I’d like to have in my collection. As well, I have a bunch of books by people like Julia Child, which I don’t think I’ve ever cooked from, but they’re the kind of thing no cookbook collection is complete without.

Which brings me to the next reason I buy a cookbook—because it’s a classic. I’m still sorting out in my mind what exactly makes a cookbook a classic, so that’s a topic for another time, but suffice to say there are books I feel are “must haves.” New books are always being added to this category (or at least, the version of this category that’s a running list in my mind). Most recently I bought The Silver Spoon cookbook. It came out in this country last Christmas, and is, according to the publisher, the definitive work on Italian cooking. At over 1000 pages, I would hope so. In any event, there are lots of obvious classics—Fannie Farmer, Joy of Cooking (ugh), Betty Crocker. And then there are the more recent classics—the Silver Palate cookbooks, the Dean & Deluca cookbook, How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman.

And then there’s the fantasy element of a cookbook. Some cookbooks have recipes that I like to visualize myself making, even if I never will. I like the idea that one day I will make Warm Terrine of Sausage, Peppers, Polenta and Mozzarella and serve it as an appetizer at a dinner party. Will I ever do that? Maybe, maybe not, but I like to buy cookbooks that fuel that kind of fantasy. In fact, the first cookbook I read was one of the Silver Palate ones, and I read it because it had that dream element to it. I was in college and it provided fuel for my imagination and what it would be like when I “grew up” (something I’m still waiting on, by the way). Sometimes that fantasy element takes the form of pictures—beautiful table settings and floral arrangements—but other times it’s the recipes themselves that pull me in.

So pictures may be a driving factor, but there are so many more important reasons to buy a cookbook. If it serves a purpose, even if that purpose is only to encourage a certain amount of daydreaming, then it’s a book worth having. Of course, one could then argue that any cookbook is worth having, and I wouldn’t dispute that, although there are cookbooks I’ll never bother buying, simply because they don’t interest me. I will probably never, for instance, bother to buy the Pillsbury cookbook. I already have Fannie Farmer and Better Homes & Gardens. Chances are I probably won’t ever buy any of Jamie Oliver’s cookbooks either. Never say never, of course, but Jamie doesn’t appeal to me much. The only case in which I really can safely say never is with regard to Rachael Ray and her books. I really can say I’ll never buy another of those. One is actually one too many.

Pack Rat, part 2

I finished packing the kitchen, and in doing so found a couple more things not unlike the Liquid Smoke (which, excuse me, was $1.19, not 89 cents), and the Molly McButter (which I actually have two of, as it turns out—“What? You were afraid the one would be lonely?” my husband asked. Also interesting to note—in a dull sort of way—is that one bottle claims that it has 4 calories per serving, and one claims it has 5). I found a bag of fenugreek seeds that I think we’ve owned for about nine years, and two small tubs of colored sugar that appear to have been purchased during the Carter administration (red and green, if you’re wondering).

I thought about why I didn’t just throw this stuff out. The Liquid Smoke and the Molly McButter are clearly candidates for the garbage, and the fenugreek is probably totally flavorless by now. I guess I don’t throw them out because they don’t really go bad, per se. They’re not like milk or meat, which actually spoil. They’re not even like canned goods, which have an expiration date on them. They don’t instruct you—either through printed dates or just by stinking—that they’ve outlived their usefulness. And by the time I realize it should probably go out, I've kind of gotten used to seeing it in my cabinet and can't bear to part with it. I believe I have mentioned before that I am very weird.

When I do find something with an expiration on it, even if it’s something that clearly doesn’t deteriorate over time, I will toss it. Jello pudding, canned pumpkin, baked beans—if the date has passed, I get rid of it. And really, how could Jello deteriorate? I’ve read before that often the dates on things like canned goods are “best before” dates, and you can use them after that date with no risk to your health, but their quality won’t be what it was prior to that date.

But I know I’m not alone in this apparent unwillingness to toss things that are useless and/or past their prime. Not everyone may have the colored sugar from 1977, but I’d bet everyone has a jar or two of spices that they bought for one recipe, never found another use for, and just haven’t gotten around to tossing. In fact, I often read letters to the editor in cooking magazines that complain about recipes that use an unusual spice—people complain that they’ll spend the money on a whole jar of something they’ll never use again.

But I have a plan for all these culinary artifacts that I’m clearly so reluctant to get rid of. As a decorative element in the kitchen of our new house, which will be ready sometime the end of this year, I’m going to make a shadowbox and feature a couple of these gems. After so many years I just can’t bring myself to throw out that Liquid Smoke. I’ve clearly got a mental block against using it (and not just because the idea of Liquid Smoke is completely revolting), but the trash isn’t an option either. They’ll be forever immortalized as decorative elements. If nothing else, they’ll be a conversation piece. So that, as someone else once said, people can come into my kitchen and say “Why do you have a bottle of Liquid Smoke and a shaker of Molly McButter in a box on the wall?” and I can reply “So I can have this conversation over and over.” At least it keeps me from having to throw the stuff away.

Rats & Weevils

We just moved yesterday, which is why I haven’t been posting much lately. Too busy packing. We still have most of the kitchen left to pack. Mostly the food. The pots and pans are all moved.

Two things came out of this move—first, we discovered we had a weevil infestation. We’d had one, but thought we’d cleared it out. Then I started finding things with little weevils in them, and pasta dust here and there (that’s a sure sign). I read something once about how if you had flour that was weevil infested, you could freeze it for some amount of time, and then sift the weevils out of it and use it. I find the idea of that to be so disgusting that I can’t even fathom doing it. Anything we found that was even remotely suspect went in the trash. After about three shelves of icky little black bugs and packages with little teeny bullet holes in them, I was so creeped out I had to ask Alex to finish the job. I’m not usually girly like that, but this was just too much.

The second (and relatively less disgusting, although as I say, it’s relative) thing is that I realize I keep certain foods for a very long time. Mostly for no good reason. I knew I had a container of Liquid Smoke from about 1971. We’ve been toting that thing around for years. My mother bought it, and she’s been dead for 14 years, so that gives you some idea of just how old this stuff is. And I would never use it. Never. Even if I had a recipe that called for Liquid Smoke (and I’ve seen some lately, which makes me wonder what’s coming back next—dehydrated minced onions? MSG? *Shudder*) I’d go out and buy a new bottle of it. So why, I wonder, do I keep this thing?

The same question occurred to me when I found a little shaker of Molly McButter. That would have been from my early 90s low fat days. So again, we’re talking about something that’s pretty darned old. And because I have this major aversion to using chemicals for cooking (except for Diet Coke cake), I would never use Molly McButter. So why not throw it away? Why have I moved it from East coast to West, and between three houses in the East, and two houses (and counting) in the West? WHY? This is something I can’t fathom about myself.

I’m not particularly frugal, I don’t have sentimental attachment to these things (OK, maybe to the Liquid Smoke with its 89 cent price sticker on it, but definitely not the Molly McButter), and I know I’ll never use them. So why not bite the bullet and get rid of them? Can’t answer that.

Since I have to go over and clean out the rest of our former house, I’m going to end here, but I’m sure I’ll find several other things that we’ve been dragging around for years that I’ll never use. But I still won’t throw them out. Maybe I’ll spend the time packing thinking about why it is that I'm such a culinary pack rat, and have an actual answer for another post.

My Addiction

I have a confession to make. I am an addict. Yes, I admit it. It’s a recent development, but one that I wouldn’t have expected, so I didn’t have any defenses prepared against it. It just snuck up on me. I have this (somewhat) new job, and everyone here is into it, so I naturally got dragged along once or twice, and I figured I’d go, but it would be harmless. I’d just be enduring this, not really participating.

Boy, was I wrong. I’m hooked.

If you’d told me two years ago, or even a year ago, that one day I would have to admit this addiction, I’ve have laughed in your face. But now I have to confront it.

I love Japanese food. There, I said it.

And I don’t mean sushi either. I’m still not caving to the call of sushi. It doesn’t call that loudly to me, and it doesn’t appeal. I love the idea of those delicate little rice roll things, but frankly there are just too many things in there that I’m not really interested in. My weakness is the bento box.

It started innocently enough. Some coworkers were going out for “all you can eat sushi” at the local Benihana. I was assured I could order from the menu, so I agreed to go. I got a salad and tempura scallops. The dressing on the salad was a wonderful slightly creamy (in texture, not in content) ginger flavored one. “Not bad,” I thought. Of course, the scallops were great—hey, deep fried anything, right?

A couple of weeks later, a friend suggested a Japanese place up the street. Only what she suggested was “a curry.” I had visions of Indian, which I adore. It turned out to be a Japanese place that serves a curry noodle soup (I had no idea the Japanese used curry powder), so I figured I’d just deal. I got a bento box with chicken yakisoba, and tempura. Of course it came with all the usual accompaniments: miso soup (I’m still not a huge fan of this), a salad (again, tasty dressing), rice. It was surprisingly satisfying for what seemed like not a ton of food (there’s plenty of rice, but I try to stay away from rice, and the primary offerings are in somewhat delicate portions).

Last week, after a lunchtime trip to get my hair cut, my husband suggested that, in the interest of speed, we just order take out from the Japanese place on the ground floor of our office building. I got a chicken and a beef component in my bento box. I couldn’t tell you what they were called (the beef sounds something like kohlrabi beef, but that’s not it). The chicken was a sautéed dish with lots of cabbage (I love cabbage), and the beef was grilled short ribs. The salad had a slightly sweet dressing on it that was more vinegar-and-oil like than the one at Benihana, but was still wonderful. These boxes come with six pieces of sushi (I just ignore it), and the ubiquitous miso soup.

Since then I’ve had two more bento boxes from the place in the lobby. I’m sadly hooked. The worst thing about it is that a bento box costs a minimum of ten bucks, and that’s $50 a week for lunch, minimum. Really, I can’t afford that (my monthly daycare costs are somewhere in the range of the national debt, so eating out every day really isn’t an option for me).

What’s an addict to do?

I suppose I could do the other thing that would have caused me to laugh in the face of anyone who suggested it a year ago: I could buy a Japanese cookbook and learn to make the beef, the chicken, and the salad dressing myself. This is what I normally do when I find a new kind of food I like, although I wouldn’t have ever expected to be actually mulling over the idea of buying Japanese cookbook.

I guess the cookbook option is probably the best way to go. It’s a single expense (minus the cost of the ingredients, which I don’t really count, because we have to buy food anyway, so to buy a Japanese ingredient, instead of a can of enchilada sauce or some other ingredient, is negligible), plus I enjoy the thrill of the hunt in finding the cookbook that has the majority of what I want in it, and then I make a mental list of other cookbooks that I might pick up at a later date that also look good.

This really took me by surprise. I’m still a little shaken and having trouble accepting the truth. There must be a support group for people like me. There seems to be for everyone else, after all. And just wait—in another year, I’ll have to confess to being a sushi addict. Where will it all end?

Christmas...um...Treats

Even though it’s nearly Spring, something the other day happened to remind me of Christmas. Actually, it was the bag of red, green, and silver foil wrapped Hershey’s Kisses I found that were plainly left over from Christmas. I tend to buy the holiday wrapped candy a week or so after the holiday at half price. A Hershey’s Kiss wrapped in green foil is still a Hershey’s Kiss, after all.

This discovery reminded me of some of the more memorable holiday foods I’ve come into contact with over the years. The holidays are typically a time of indulgence, of course, and I’ve done my share of indulging, I admit. Interestingly, the things that stand out most in my memory are not the really wonderful things I’ve had, but the less wonderful, or even very awful ones.

When I was small, my grandmother used to send us boxes of baked goods every Christmas. There are only two things that she sent that really made an impression on me, and again, it’s because they were both fairly horrible, in retrospect. At the time I thought they were pretty good. The first was a variation on Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and the second was Twinkies. I think my grandmother knew how much I liked junky foods like those, and in an effort to save money (always a top priority for her) she decided to make them for me, rather than buy them.

The Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup things were chocolate covered peanut butter balls. If you don’t know this, peanut butter gets grainy when it’s refrigerated. I don’t mind that texture, but chocolate gets waxy when it’s refrigerated, and I do mind that. Also, my grandmother always put raisins in her peanut butter balls. I don’t like raisins plain to start with, but I sure don’t like them in things. So to sully perfectly good peanut butter and chocolate with raisins is just downright wrong in my book, and then to refrigerate it on top of that renders the whole product totally inedible. Since she was sending the stuff out of the kindness of her heart, I didn’t very well feel like I could complain (not that I’m not complaining now, but I would never have hurt her feelings by saying anything to her).

The Twinkies were just kind of weird. I really have no idea what she used for “creme” filling, only that it wasn’t white frosting (which is pretty much what Twinkie filling is—white frosting, probably made with pure lard and sugar, likely with some titanium dioxide tossed in for good measure and whitening and brightening purposes). She made a simple sponge cake, and then cut it into rectangles, which she layered together with this “creme”. I remember eating them, and liking them fairly well, but today I have to agree with my aunt. At the time she remarked “Who would bother to make a Twinkie?” (and the question wasn’t posed as to why you wouldn’t simply go buy them, but more why anyone would want to have anything to do with a Twinkie in any form at all).

Since then I have actually seen "Twinkie" pans for sale through the Williams-Sonoma catalog. Clearly there are people who feel that homemade Twinkies are a good idea. It takes all kinds, I guess.

My husband’s grandmother was also a seasonal baker. She made mostly cookies—chocolate chip, Mexican wedding cakes, and the like—and fudge. He said they were great when he was a kid, but last batch that was inflicted on me was pretty terrible. The cookies were either hard as rocks or flavorless, or both, and the fudge was like eating chocolate plastic. He agreed that it was all horrible, and we sewed all of it at intervals along the Taconic State Parkway as we drove home. I’m not sure if her offerings were always so terrible, or if they just deteriorated as she aged. It’s not the sort of thing I can gauge because I never tasted anything until it had gone past awful, and he might be remembering the flavor in the forgiving glow of childhood nostalgia. She has now grown too old for holiday baking, for which we are all somewhat guiltily grateful.

I think the person who provided the most repulsive holiday “treat” was Aunt Stevie. Aunt Stevie was married to Uncle Mike (before he died, of course), and was my husband’s great aunt. Aunt Stevie lived in Sacramento or something, and every Christmas she would send a “tower o’ treats” thing to my husband’s grandparents “for everyone to share.” This was a very kind gesture, but the tower consisted of Aplets and Cotlets. Aplets and Cotlets are the most horrid candy every made (I use the term “candy” loosely, since I’m not sure they're not actually made of melted-down rubber bands). Interestingly, I recently found out that they're made not far from where I now live. That doesn’t improve their flavor or texture, but now I’m grossed out by something made locally. I feel I’m contributing to saving the environment, somehow.

During one holiday celebration, my husband’s grandmother (nickname Grammy), kept insisting that we take some with us. My mother-in-law, sister-in-law and I protested that we didn’t want to deprive them of Aunt Stevie’s gift. Grammy kept saying that Stevie had sent them “for the family to share.” Finally, in an effort to get out of there before St. Patrick’s Day, I grabbed the smallest box and said “OK, thanks--well, we’ll be on our way.” On the way out the door, my mother-in-law asked me low in my ear which box I’d taken. “The smallest one,” I hissed back. Needless to say the box was promptly consigned to the trash compactor (still in its cellophane wrapper) the minute we arrived back at my in-laws’ house.

My husband says my in-laws used to get a fruitcake from his grandparents every year that was fairly nasty. But fruitcake is so clichéd that it doesn’t even get a mention in annals of Nasty Holiday Treat Gifts. My preference is for unusual disgusting holiday treats. If I have to eat something yucky and pretend i like it, at least I want it to be something yucky and interesting.

Spring Fling

Spring is on its way (although I know my friends on the East coast, being threatened with one of those last-ditch, dammit-it’s-still-winter, this-will-kill-all-my-daffodils-that-have-started-to-come-up snows that hit the DC area don’t necessarily think so). But here in the Pacific Northwest the daffodils, crocuses, and primroses are blooming away. It’s raining, of course, but things are blooming. And chefs are starting to talk about “spring food” ad nauseum.

I think of “spring food” as those things that are available (or are only supposed to be available) for a short window during the spring months, and that chefs clutch at because they’re sick to death of coming up with new ways to serve Hubbard squash and parsnips. Some of them are kind of yucky, frankly.

Exhibit A in the yucky category is morel mushrooms. These things look like partially shriveled sponges with a stem. I actually like mushrooms (cooked, anyway), but I can’t get past the appearance of morels. They’re considered a big treat, and restaurant menus offer all kinds of things with and under morel mushroom sauces, but their appeal just eludes me.

Fiddlehead ferns run a close second to morel mushrooms. I suppose after a winter of near-starvation, little curled bits of fern might look appetizing, but I’m not sure of that, even. I think I can’t get past the idea that I’d be eating fern. At no other time of the year do we seriously consider eating something that many people keep as a houseplant (unless you’re into eating cactus, which I am not). Yet these are considered a rare delicacy, and many people rush to farmers markets searching for them.

My West coast friends won’t recognize the shad as a spring food (or maybe even at all), but I’ve known perfectly normal East coast people who go berserk when the shad are running. Once when I was about 12 we were invited to the house of some friends of my parents for a shad dinner. As far as I can tell, shad is just fish, and I’ve never been one to get particularly excited about fish. The truly awful part of this dinner was the shad roe. I know some people like fish eggs. I know some people like Yani, too. I didn’t like shad roe (or really, any roe. I don’t much care for Yani, either). Part of it may have been a texture thing—I had braces at the time, and I took one bite of the stuff and it all squished up into my braces and felt…really gross. I’ve never really been inspired to try it again.

Many people I know are crazy for asparagus. It’s this great indulgence. I don’t like it. I’ve eaten it a couple of times, usually in a situation where I’m a guest at someone’s home and it would be rude not to, and I just can’t warm up to the stuff. I find it bitter and metallic tasting. I get really tired of the magazine articles this time of year that gush about fresh asparagus and how wonderful it is and all the fabulous things you can do with it. I just don’t get it.

Lamb, on the other hand, I do get. I love lamb. I know it means the demise of cute cuddly little creatures, but it’s so good that I overlook that. In this country we mostly eat either leg of lamb or rack of lamb, and I’m OK with both of those, but I also would like to see some more variety in what’s available to us. Lamb steaks, lamb backstrap—these things are hard to find. I’ve read recipes for lamb neck that sound pretty decent, although I understand it’s not an easy cut of meat to cook. For many people, Easter dinner is lamb. My grandmother has been known to serve it for Christmas dinner too. I find it a little odd at Christmas, and its constant availability takes something away from it.

Often the Easter lamb is served with new red potatoes. The problem with “new” potatoes these days is that there never seems to be a time when they’re not available, so it’s hard to get excited about them just in the spring. There are recipes all year long for “new” potato salad and the like. This is actually similar to the problem I have with lamb, and asparagus too (except that I actually like new potatoes): it just seems to be available all year long now. People serve asparagus for Christmas dinner (my grandmother actually did last year—along with the leg of lamb). It’s the “vegetable” with entrees in restaurants all year long. Things lose their specialness if you just serve them all the time.

That’s the complaint I have with ham at Easter. I like ham OK. It’s not my favorite, but it can be pretty tasty. The thing is, it’s available the whole year around. I can walk into my local Honeybaked Ham store any day of the year and get a ham. So again, I’ve started to not identify it with spring because it’s so universally available.

However, I do like the longer days, the fact that it’s often warmer (except when those unexpected snowstorms hit), and the fact that more and better fresh produce is coming my way. What I seem to have issues with is the food that’s available right now. It seems like I either don’t like it, or that it’s not unusual or rare enough for me to get excited about it in the spring. Clearly, that’s my own problem to deal with. At least I don’t have to figure out something interesting to do with a Hubbard squash for the 63rd night in a row.

To Buy or Not to Buy

In almost every cookbook I read, there is a section on equipment. The content varies only a little from one to another. They talk about pots and pans, baking equipment, knives, miscellaneous utensils, and sometimes, small appliances. In almost every case, these missives urge you to buy the best of everything that you can afford. I would say that’s partly true, and partly not true. And so, because I sometimes disagree with the generally published standards of kitchen equipment expenditure, I offer my own guidelines, based on my own experiences with things that have lasted forever, and things that have fallen apart within two weeks of purchase. I’m sure I won’t cover every possible item available. Some things just aren’t worth discussing (I personally use jarred grated ginger, so although I have a ginger grater, I never use it and my advice on ginger grater purchasing is “Don’t.” Buy the jarred stuff and save yourself the trouble).

Wooden Spoons:
I’ve bought really cheap wooden spoons, and I’ve bought the ones that cost more than five bucks apiece and I honestly can’t tell any difference in their performance (if you will). One cooking equipment site offers olivewood spoons for $7.99 each. Their promotional text assures you that they have “more depth and durability than you can find with average wooden utensils.” Their description talks only about the aesthetics of said spoon: “a pleasure to use,” “distinctive grain and color variations,” “one-of-a-kind.” What I gather here is that while they’d like you to believe that olivewood at 8 bucks a pop is somehow more long-lasting than whatever crap wood they use for the spoons you buy in the grocery store in three packs with brand names like “Chefs Friend,” the truth is that all you get for your $8 is a spoon with a distinctive wood grain pattern. $8 for wood patterning sounds pretty steep to me. My advice is go with whatever is available unless you’re really out to impress your friends with what beautiful spoons you’re capable of buying.

Some people may say that stainless steel is the only way to go. I agree and don’t. I have stainless steel spoons, and they’re nice. They’re also expensive. And if, like so many people I know, you have nonstick cookware, you can’t use them to stir things while cooking. Wood is cheap, can be used on both regular and nonstick cookware, and can be affordably replaced when it wears out. As for the argument that wood harbors food particles that grow bacteria, I have a single word: bleach. If you’re that worried about bacteria, use a water and bleach solution to wash everything in your kitchen. Problem solved.

Knives:
Do I even need to say it? Spend the money on knives. Then spend the money and the time having them professionally sharpened. Again, I’ve bought cheap, and I’ve bought expensive, and I can tell you that it really does matter. Cheap knives have handles that fall off, have blades that don’t stay sharp, are hard to sharpen, actually aren’t worth sharpening, and so you really just wind up tossing them and buying new cheap knives and the cycle starts all over again. I won’t bore you with the “Buy these three knives if you can only afford a couple” advice. Buy any basic cookbook and read what’s already been written 900 times.

There’s a company that shall remain nameless, that promotes its wares via annoying “Come to my house and buy crap” parties, that sells what are probably the worst knives in history. Although they may have upgraded since I last saw them, when I was introduced to them they were inexpensive stainless steel, with a glued on handle. If you asked about things like quality of the steel used, handle attachment method, or anything remotely related to the quality of the product, the sales person would carefully steer the topic of conversation back to the self-sharpening sleeves—aren’t these handy? You’ll never sharpen your knives again! What they didn’t say was that they weren’t worth sharpening. The company did offer a lifetime guarantee, but I’ve never seen the use in that—you promise me that if your product fails for whatever reason, you will replace it with the same crummy product?

Anyway, the long and short of it is, buy the best knives you can afford, and upgrade as soon as you can. Oh, and never use your good chef’s knife to try to pry apart two partly frozen bone-in chicken breasts. Just another in a long line of opportunities for you to learn from my mistakes.

Spatulas:
Spatulas used to be a little more hit-and-miss, but since the advent of high temperature resistant silicone, it’s really easy to get good not-too-expensive spatulas. While I won’t pay $8 for a wooden spoon, I will pay $6 for a spatula. This past Christmas I bought my husband three or four with cute designs on (really more in) them—gingerbread men, snowflakes, hearts, pumpkins. They ranged in price from $3 to almost $7. You can get them for $2, but they won’t have the heads that withstand temperatures up to 7 million degrees Fahrenheit or whatever it is. For a couple of bucks more, you can get the ones that will. Since spatulas aren’t really a major purchase to begin with, get what you can afford at the time. You’ll have to replace them eventually anyway. And when you do, maybe you can find cute ones with pictures of little cherries in them.

Measuring Spoons/Cups:
First let me say that it’s worthwhile to have as many sets of measuring cups and spoons as you feel comfortable with (some people feel their space is overwhelmed by three sets; I myself have four sets of cups, and five of spoons). Metal is better than plastic in both cases. For about twenty years my mother had a set of plastic measuring cups in a sort of olive-y green. The half cup measure had a handle that looked like you’d walked in and caught the cup in the process of spontaneously turning from a solid to a liquid—there was even a big drip, frozen as it oozed away from the main part of the handle. That’s because it fell on the heating element of the dishwasher and was, in fact, in the process of turning from a solid to a liquid when the cycle stopped and the element cooled down. So I say metal is better, because you don’t have that risk.

Other than that, my only personal prejudice is against gadgets that have fancy leveling devices on them. Some measuring spoons come with a sort of plastic plate that slides out over the bowl of the spoon to level off whatever dry ingredient you’re measuring. Weight Watchers promotes these as being helpful in achieving really accurate measuring results. Aside from thinking this is for unbelievably lazy people who can’t use the back of a knife to level, I find these little things hard to clean. Food gets trapped under the little plate and it’s just downright unsanitary. Those measuring cups that have a plunger in them so you can adjust the amount by pushing up on a plunger are in the same “lazy person’s tool” category in my opinion. If you’re too tired to use a simple cup to measure an ingredient, go take a nap.

I also have glass measuring cups for liquids. At this point I have only a single one cup measure, a single two cup measure, and a four cup measure. I want one more of each. I happen to have an as-yet-unnamed fear of washing out measuring cups in the middle of a recipe (modern psychology is working on a name for this phobia—my husband calls it “laziness.” Is there an irony in my criticizing people for not being energetic enough to level off a measuring spoon with a knife, yet being unwilling to take the 90 seconds to wash out a liquid measure mid-recipe? Probably). OK, perhaps it’s not so much a fear as an aversion to doing it. In either case, I want more glass liquid measuring cups. You can get perfectly good Pyrex ones at the grocery store, which is exactly where mine come from. Don’t bother with high end kitchen shops for these.

Mixing Bowls:
I actually collect old Pyrex mixing bowls, mostly because I think they look cool. The fact that they could also go in the oven is just kind of an unnecessary bonus for me. I never actually put them in the oven. I don’t think it’s worth it to spend double digit dollars on sets of mixing bowls. Glass ones break, plastic ones will warp and distort in the dishwasher, ceramic ones will also break, metal ones get dented. You really can’t say that one particular type is better than another. I have some of each kind.

Glass, in addition to breaking, is also pretty heavy. This is fine if you’re mixing, but not so great when it comes time to pour something like batter. Also, glass bowls more than any other seem to have a very distinctly conical shape to them, making them much wider at the top than at the bottom. It’s harder to mix evenly in this shape of bowl, I find, especially if I’m using a handheld electric mixer. The one exception to this rule that I’ve found is the sets of nesting bowls you can buy that come in sizes from huge mixing, to single egg yolk.

Ceramic or pottery bowls also tend toward a conical shape, and also are pretty heavy. Unless they’re actually dropped flat out on a ceramic tile floor, they don’t necessarily break, but they do tend to crack, which I find more disheartening somehow—it looks like it should still be functional, but it really isn’t. The nice thing about them is that they’re usually prettier than glass bowls. They can actually be used as serving pieces if necessary, and can also be bought to match your kitchen’s color scheme, if you’re one of those people. I’m not.

Metal bowls are lightweight, don’t crack or break, and usually have rounded bottoms that make it easy to stir and mix. They aren’t particularly attractive, but if you’re into that food service I’m-a-serious-cook look, they’re for you. They do conduct heat, so they’re not the best thing for mixing up hot liquids. And while they don’t break, they do dent. Some people may look at the dents as a kind of badge of distinction, showing the world that not only are they a serious cook, but they are a serious cook of long standing. The only metal mixing bowl I have is one that will hold a triple recipe of bread dough during rising. Only a metal bowl will work in this capacity, because any other material would be so heavy that it would be impossible to carry around. Plastic would work, but it would be too flimsy, unless it was pretty heavy plastic, in which case it would probably also be pretty heavy.

Plastic mixing bowls are inexpensive, but if you run them through the dishwasher enough times, they’ll eventually melt. They also are prone to staining by things like tomatoes. Sometimes, however, the plastic bowls will come with a rubber gasket of sorts around the foot of the bowl, which makes them nice for making things that require two hands (one for stirring, one for pouring something while stirring). They won’t scoot all over the counter. And like metal bowls, they tend to have pretty well rounded bottoms. They’re not very pretty, but they have their uses. Having bought one set, I’m not sure I’d seek them out again, but if I were given a set as a gift, I wouldn’t take the trouble to exchange them.

Pots & Pans:
Another area in which I’m not going to repeat what’s already been written a thousand times. Cheap is cheap, expensive is good. There are a number of cookbooks that talk about the efficiency of heat conductivity of various materials. If you have a pot that always seems to burn whatever is cooked in it, it’s probably because it’s a cheap pot. My father in law has what must be the world’s worst 8 quart saucepan. I made spaghetti sauce in it once and it burned the daylights out of it. His girlfriend told me it does that to everything she cooks in it. “Then WHY,” I asked her “don’t you throw it OUT?” Answer: (I received none, I’m just guessing here) because they couldn’t think of anything better to replace it with. It seems to me they could use a dinner plate and it would be just as functional as that stupid pot was. Yes, I’m a little bitter that it ruined my spaghetti sauce. Does it show that much?

Appliances:
I try to stick with reasonable brand names for appliances. It’s been my experience that things like a $16 Sup-R-Mix blender by Ampco doesn’t really last long. I also try to stay reasonable. While I might want the Cuisinart 14 cup food processor, I don’t really need it. Of course, the 14 cup is only $50 more than the 7 cup, and the same price as the 11 cup, so there’s a sort of dilemma there, but I try not to go overboard. The short version is, it’s worth it to spend the money on a brand you know and that has a good reputation. Otherwise you’ll just end up replacing them over and over again.

General Gadgetry:
Some things are wonderful and absolutely worth buying (and are generally pretty cheap into the bargain). Those slicers that cut an apple in wedges, a cutter that will make square fries out of a potato, microplane graters, the new silicon pastry “brushes” (no more little pastry brush fibers in your food).

Some things, however, are just more trouble than they’re worth. Batter dispensers, waffle stands, mushroom slicers, ice cream sandwich presses (really!), cookie presses (I have never been able to get one of these things to work), and breading sets (three rectangular pans that fit on a frame and hold milk, egg, and breadcrumbs).

The other day, however, I saw the ultimate in worthless gadgets. It looked very complicated and it took me awhile to figure out what it was. It had a five things that looked like pizza cutters, separated by adjustable dividers in an X shape. Finally it occurred to me that it was used to cut rectangles of dough into even strips of varying widths. It was called an Adjustable Dough Divider. It was recommended for cutting puff pastry, shortcrust pastry and other doughs. I realized I already had a set of tools that would do this. I call them “a knife” and “a ruler.” I have a plastic ruler that I bought at the drug store and use only for measuring things while I’m cooking (the diameter of a circle of pie crust, the width of a strip of puff pastry). I think the ruler set me back about 65 cents. I can use the knife for dozens of other tasks as well. The Adjustable Dough Divider was $64.95.

Please Mr. Postman

I have long said there’s nothing you can’t buy on the Internet. This is what I love about it. When a friend was getting married, and everyone in our office had chipped in to buy her a Kitchen Aid mixer and sausage making attachment, someone speculated about how the friend was going to make sausages: where on earth would she find sausage casings? Testing my theory, I did a quick search and found sausagesupplies.com. Synthetic, or natural?

One of the reasons I love that you can buy anything on the Internet is because I do buy all sorts of weird things on the Internet. Beyond Christmas and birthdays—for which I naturally do all of my shopping on the web—I buy all sorts of ingredients and food products online. I don’t mean premade food products from places like Williams-Sonoma, or Fruit of the Month Club offerings from Harry and David. It’s a little stranger than that.

First of all, I mail order eggs. Because I make mayonnaise from scratch, and I don’t want to be afraid to let my children lick the spoon when I make cookies, I used to buy pasteurized eggs at the grocery store. When we moved, I found that they didn’t carry them at any of the grocery stores near us. It is possible to make mayonnaise with egg substitute, which was a suggestion I read in a cookbook, but it really doesn’t taste very good. I found the company that sells the eggs online, and discovered that they would mail order them to me. I pay almost as much in shipping as I do for the eggs, but it’s worth it. I also have to buy five dozen at a time, but since they last pretty much forever, that’s not such an issue.

The first question that most people ask (after “Are you nuts?”) is “Don’t they arrive all broken?” The answer is, once. I had placed two orders with the company, and both had arrived with nary a shell cracked. Then this past Christmas, I realized I was running low, and should order a new box. My word of advice to anyone thinking of buying eggs via mail order is to avoid the holiday season. More than half of the eggs were broken when I opened the box. I emailed their customer service, and they sent me out a new shipment of eggs at no charge (which meant I had seven dozen eggs). While one or two of the second batch were broken, it was certainly not an unreasonable state of affairs. I happen to know from a college professor I once had, who worked in a UPS warehouse during grad school, that the people at UPS treat packages atrociously and it gets worse over the holidays. Evidently they’re hostile and angry because they get paid peanuts, but rather than buying assault rifles, they take out their aggressions on a bunch of innocent corrugated cardboard boxes full of My Little Pony dolls, Matchbox cars, and (in my case) pasteurized eggs.

Over the years I’ve bought one-off oddball things via mail. The King Arthur Flour Company sells all kinds of useful, hard-to-find items in their Baker’s Catalog. One year my husband decided he wanted a Malted Milk Ball cake for his birthday. I had seen the recipe and offered him a choice of several cakes, and he picked that one. The only problem was that the recipe called for malted milk powder, and I couldn’t find that at any of the specialty shops near me. Something sent me to the King Arthur Flour Company website and there, lo and behold, along with things like pretzel salt and cheese powder, was malted milk powder. I ordered it (again, the shipping was outrageous—this is the only drawback to mail order, I’ve found), and it arrived in time for me to make the birthday cake. I did learn a lesson, though: if you’re going to put crushed malted milk balls on top of a cake as a garnish, do so just before it’s served. They’ll melt if they’re scattered over the moist frosting and sit there overnight.

Once upon a time when I believed that Dr. Atkins held the solution to my weight loss problems, I ate bunless hot dogs by the pound (along with bacon and chicken salad). Normally I eat my hot dogs with yellow mustard, but for some reason this just didn’t cut it with the bunless version. Somehow I found champagne mustard. It made my hot dogs wonderful, and I soon went through a whole jar. I don’t remember where I got it, but for some reason I couldn’t get any more at any of the stores near me. In my protein-induced insanity, I was desperate. Enter the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum. This place sells every kind of mustard you’ve ever heard of (and about nine thousand kinds you haven’t heard of). Sure enough, my champagne mustard was one of their offerings. I promptly ordered several jars. Although my experience with Atkins was a bust (let’s face it—there is no silver bullet for weight loss), the mustard was a success. I don’t order it on a regular basis anymore, but I have ordered people gifts from the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum.

Then there are things that I’ve often considered buying, but haven’t yet got around to it. The one that I think of most often is Pierce’s Pit Bar-b-que. Pierce’s is a little dive outside of Williamsburg, VA, where my husband went to college. Actually, it’s in a town called Toano, which is just about as charming as its name makes it sound. In order to get there, you drive for about fifteen minutes along an access road that parallels the highway before you come to a yellow and orange building with lots of picnic tables and lots of cars in the parking lot. “What’s this?” you think the first time you see it, “And why are all these people at this dumpy place?” I’d add that you might even be able to say that to the person who brought you there and get your questions answered, because the likelihood that you’re going to find Pierce’s on your own is pretty slim. There are a couple of highway signs directing you to it, but unless you’ve heard that it’s great and you’re dying to try it, you’re going to give up your quest after the first mile or two and just go for the McDonald’s at the interchange.

Now that I no longer live anywhere near Pierce’s, the only way for me to get it is via mail order. And they do take orders. You can get their great bar-b-que by the pound, and you used to be able to buy packages of their squishy rolls, sent to you overnight. If only all the places I loved that I was no longer close to would ship me their food. The only downside is that you can’t get their coleslaw shipped too. Their coleslaw is too sweet on its own, but you need that sugar to cut the heat of the sauce they use. It’s not excessive, but it’s hot enough that it needs a little tempering. In fact, my husband may get Pierce’s for his birthday in a couple of months.

These days I also buy kind of strange food items as gifts. This past Christmas one of my uncles, who also happens to have a taste for oddball food products, almost got Steen’s Pure Cane Syrup as a present. He didn’t because the shipping to get it in time would have cost me too much (I didn’t think to get it for him until pretty late in the game), but he’ll probably get something like that next year. I found a book called “Food Finds” that breaks out by category all kinds of small producers of usual and unusual foods. Whatever kind of jam, beverage, cookie, bread, meat, or vegetable you’re looking for, someone somewhere makes it. You can get things like Nut Goodies shipped to your door (these are a marshmallow, caramel, chocolate and peanut candybar-ish thing sold in the South), you can buy Cherry Wine soda, Cajun flavored potato chips, and frozen grouse. Whatever you crave, it’s all there on the Internet. What a wonderful country this is.

Alpha-Beta Cooking

“Men have gotten better at cooking, and that’s all positive. But men can’t share. If you can find a man who’s OK with a woman being in charge in the kitchen, tell any woman to marry him immediately.”

So says Alan Richman, the well-known food writer, in an article for the New York Times on alpha and beta cooks. The alpha cook is usually the woman, or used to be back in the days when he was the breadwinner and she the bread maker. These days, as men are cooking more and more, they now feel themselves in charge in the kitchen, and there’s a struggle. Many women (including Richman’s own wife, from whom he is now separated, although she says the kitchen struggles had nothing to do with it, and it was an amicable parting) are now taking a backseat to their male partners, who are more and more often responsible for whipping up dinner, either on Tuesday night, or Thanksgiving night.

In our house, we have the problem of dual alpha cooks. We’re each inclined to watch the other and think “You’re doing that wrong.” God help us if I plan the menu, and let him execute it. He’ll put dinner on the table and I’ll say, “Well, this is very nice. Thank you. Of course, I was planning to roast the green beans with shallots, instead of sautéing them with bacon, but its’ still nice…and I was going to make a béarnaise sauce for the filet mignon, instead of a mustard sauce…but it’s OK…and I was going to run these mashed potatoes through the ricer…but it’s fine.”

Ungrateful, you say? It’s part of being an alpha cook. It’s not that I’m ungrateful, it’s just that I had a meal planned and when, for one reason or another, he winds up being the one to cook it, he doesn’t always do it the way I would have. Even if I tell him how I was planning to do it.

That’s where the “This is nice but…” comments come into play. I say “Here’s what we’re having and I’m thinking this, this, and this.” He says “OK” and then proceeds to do what he wants, regardless of my instruction.

Don’t think the reverse never happens either. I’ll be making cookies, and he’ll come out and say “I was going to make Toll House bars.” I’ll say “Well, you’re getting oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.” I can see the thought as though it was in a bubble over his head, “But I wanted Toll House bars.” The bubble over my head is smaller: “Tough.”

We’ve known from the beginning that we were both alpha cooks, and that things were not going to be sunshine and roses as far as our cooking together went. I knew it as soon as I tasted his white sauce (I have no idea when he figured it out; maybe when I opened my mouth and criticized his white sauce). He didn’t salt it. Do you know what white sauce with no salt tastes like? It tastes like flour and butter with some kind of liquid in it. It tastes like hell, that’s what it tastes like.

This put me in a position of superiority in my mind (arrogant, you say? Maybe, but I can make good white sauce). You can’t make sauces, I thought. I can. In this way, if no other, my cooking skills are superior to yours. Why did I feel the neurotic need to assure myself that my cooking skills were at least as good as, if not superior to, his? Because he’s very critical, that’s why. If something burns, sticks, or otherwise doesn’t turn out, he’ll say “I thought that might happen. I noticed you weren't stirring it frequently enough.” Well, thanks.

His feeling of superiority comes from his belief that his methods are more professional than mine. “I clean as I go,” he insists, “I learned how working in restaurants.” His tone, I might add, is smug. I too learned to cook in a commercial kitchen, and I know how to clean as I go. I admit I don’t always, but then in a commercial kitchen, you have 40 gallon sinks in which to put dirty pots and pans. We don’t yet have these at home. Also, the kitchens we’ve been working in for the past 13 years have all been atrociously designed, which makes cleaning as you go a challenge (our next kitchen will be designed by us, so if the design is poor, at least we have no one to blame but ourselves). Still, he feels that his process is superior to mine, therefore he must be a better cook.

Then too, we constantly fight over how much salt goes in our food. He barely salts. I salt to a degree that he sometimes finds overwhelming. We argue about this. Salt, I say, needs to be added while you’re cooking, not afterwards. In some cases, salting after the fact is useless. He maintains that everything can have salt added to it at the table and be fine. So when I cook I salt my way, and when I ask how it is, he responds, “A little salty, but it’s good.” When he cooks he salts his way and I add extra salt at the table. He notices.

I’ve read articles in cooking magazines that give menus that couples can make together. Most of these offer both organizational structures: one person is in charge, while the other is a prep or sous chef, or each person takes a dish or two and is solely responsible for preparing those components. Really we work better with the latter model. If one of us is in charge, s/he is just too bossy and the other person winds up either pissed off or with hurt feelings (or sometimes both).

Part of my problem is that I feel like I really “own” the kitchen. I make the menus, I make the grocery lists, when we move into a new kitchen I’m the one who dictates the organization of the space. Therefore I must be in charge, right? Not as he sees it. I think he feels like I’m the kitchen manager, and he’s the executive chef. I’m responsible for making sure he has everything he needs to work his magic. I do the drudge work of deciding that we’ll have chicken, buying the chicken, making sure we have ingredients for turning the chicken into something delicious (including having all utensils and cooking implements in convenient locations), and then he steps in with his expertise and, voila! Dinner.

Despite all this, we actually do pretty well together in the kitchen, provided we have our own workstations and don’t have to cross paths too often. We’re building a new house, and the kitchen is quite large, and I will see to it that we have things like measuring cups, measuring spoons, and knives on both sides of the kitchen. The truth is that I like that he can (and will) cook. I have a friend whose significant other wouldn’t make himself a peanut butter sandwich if he was starving, but feels free to criticize anything she makes. My husband is OK with me being in charge in the kitchen, just so long as he doesn’t have to be in there at the same time. Or if he is in there, he can sit there with a drink and kibbutz my process and technique. It’s only fair—I do the same to him. I always remind him to add salt. He always ignores me.

Candy Fix

I didn’t get a box of candy for Valentine’s Day. That’s OK—I don’t really need it. This candy- and flower-centric holiday got me thinking about candy in general. I love candy. I have a serious sweet tooth and have even been known to eat brown sugar straight. Not directly from the bag off a spoon or anything, but if a little clump happens to fall on the counter while I’m making cookies, I don’t have any hesitation about blotting it up with a finger and eating it. My husband cringes.

I’m mostly a milk chocolate gal, although I’ve been slowly converting to dark chocolate of late years. Right now I can go either way. I’ve tried that oft-recommended dieters’ tip to eat a single piece of very high quality dark chocolate and savor it slowly. I frankly think it’s bull. I’ve done it, but all it does is make me think “That was fine. Now, what’s for dessert?”

As with all children, I started eating candy as a pretty young kid (except some people I knew who were the neighbors of a family friend, who never gave their kids refined sugar—my friend’s son came home from an afternoon spent there one time and, when asked if he had fun, replied in a tone of painful disdain “Mom, she gave us granola for a snack.” I had to agree with him that that pretty well summed up his experience). I got my candy bars at Higger’s Drug Store up the street from my house. They cost a dime. Having heard repeatedly to my disgust and boredom as a kid about when candy bars cost a nickel, I always swore I wouldn’t use that line: “They cost a dime.” How great the divide sometimes between theory and practice.

For some reason when I was younger, I always bought Chunky bars. Except that they weren’t bars. They were cubes of chocolate. Really more of a bizarre trapezoid shape. They looked like pyramids that had had their top two-thirds whacked off. I’m not sure why, because I was perfectly adept at reading, but I could never manage to remember which one did, and which one did not have the raisins in it—the silver wrapper or some other color wrapper. I hate raisins in chocolate bars. It’s an outrage.

I also remember buying Marathon bars. I seem to be the only person who ever did because 1) they no longer make them and 2) I’ve never found anyone else who even remembers them, much less also ate them. They were long braids of caramel covered with milk chocolate. The ads on TV had an image of the “braid” going past and past and past….clearly intending to convey the message that the “Marathon” bar lasted a long time. This characteristic of lasting a long time seems to have been a big feature to promote in candy bars during the late 70s and 80s. The Charleston Chew and, I think, Sugar Daddies and Sugar Mamas, made the same claim. In the 90s they seemed to move to more of almost a “meal replacement” strategy. Snickers bars, as I recall, ran a campaign promoting a Snickers bar as a way to fill you up, and carry you until your next meal.

I always wanted stuff in my candy bars. Peanut butter, peanuts, caramel, nougat (whatever the hell that is), or that fluff in a Three Musketeers bar (whatever the hell that is). I went to Dublin on business once and spent about 50 bucks in a newsagents buying candy bars that we didn’t have in America. I noticed that they had an awful lot of offerings with raisins (ugh), but an equal number with caramel. Fortunately none of them seemed to sully the glorious caramel with the vile raisins. Caramel is my favorite candy bar filling, followed by peanut butter as a close second. Actually, hazelnut anything is my favorite candy filling, but very few of the “big” candy makers offer a candy bar with hazelnuts in it. Too expensive, I would guess.

In high school I went to Australia and was there introduced to three kinds of candy bars that I’d never had before, two of which are now available at my local grocery store. There was the Violet Crumble, which was kind of a grainy sugar, flavored with essence of violet (which sounds gross and weird, but was actually OK). The Flake bar was nothing more than very, very thin leaves of milk chocolate that would have been pretty good, except that they were so delicate that what you wound up with was a candy wrapper full of chocolate shards. You just kind of “drank” the chocolate out of the wrapper, which you opened at one end to form a tube. Then there was a honeycomb concoction the name of which escapes me. I’ve since seen this in Australian cooking magazines called generically “honeycomb” and recommended as being used to top ice cream when smashed to smithereens. It was very crunchy, and did have a distinct honey flavor. Its disadvantage was that it really stuck in your teeth. All three of these, if I’m not mistaken, were manufactured by the Cadbury company.

Cadbury is much bigger overseas than it is in this country. In this country we have Hershey’s, and M&M Mars to pretty much own the candy market. I remember reading that in the 1940s Hershey’s representatives used to go to elementary schools and hand out candy bars to all the kids. The taste of chocolate is (as you no doubt have read), like so many food products, subject to its recipe. A little more of this, a little less of that, and you’ve got a completely different taste, even though it’s still “milk chocolate.” Hershey’s idea was that kids would get hooked on Hershey bars at a young age and would come to think that the flavor of Hershey’s milk chocolate was what chocolate was “supposed” to taste like. Any other recipe would taste odd to them, and they would (in theory) find it to be inferior to the flavor of Hershey’s.

Now we also have Godiva chocolates, which used to have an air of exclusivity about them, but are now sold in every possible outlet, including gas stations and nail salons. I still think they’re good chocolates, but they’re mainstream now. This move in America to make mainstream what used to be luxury items I think is a large part of what contributes to our dietary problems. Things that used to be special occasion dishes—Fettuccini Alfredo, elaborate desserts made with pastry cream, rack of lamb—are now so commonplace that they’ve lost their impact and we don’t appreciate them anymore. As a result, we consume them too casually. Of course, the antidote for that may well be a return to the days when we ate Hamburger Helper (which of course comes in an Alfredo flavor in the form of Chicken and Tuna Helpers) and Betty Crocker Au Gratin Potatoes for dinner, which I really can’t see as a win-win situation for anyone (except maybe General Foods). Sure, it would make “special” meals much more appealing by contrast, but it would mean we’d be eating dehydrated potatoes three hundred plus days a year, and I don’t know if I could handle that, myself.

As usual, I digress. So instead of Godiva as our exclusive chocolates, we now have “artisanal” chocolates made in small batches by hand. Often these chocolate makers have an unfortunate tendency to try jazz up (as I’m sure they see it) plain old boring chocolate, and they mix in just plain weird stuff like chili powder, black pepper, paprika, and (yes, I’ve seen this) curry powder. I really don’t think that I can think of a more disgusting thing to do to perfectly good chocolate than stick curry powder in it. I love curry powder, but it doesn’t belong in chocolate.

The big candy manufacturers have their own tricks to try to lure us into buying more candy. They’ve created countless variations on old favorites. Where we used to buy Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Crunch bars, and M&Ms, we can now buy Caramel or White Chocolate Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Crunch bars filled with caramel, and M&Ms filled with peanut butter. All of these are perfectly fine, but we’re spoiled with choices. I kind of wish we could go back to the days when my most perplexing candy problem was remembering which color Chunky wrapper had the raisins, and which did not.

I’ve always had a kind of affection for the niche candy bars. I went through phases as a kid (in the post-Chunky era) when I was attracted to Zero bars, Fifth Avenue, Zagnut, and Clark bars. With the exception of Zero bars, all of these are variations on peanut butter flavored candy. The Zero bar is a chocolate nougat, covered with something that I wasn’t clear on—it was white, but it wasn’t really white chocolate. White chocolate is an abomination, and should be outlawed. It’s not chocolate, and it just tastes like very sweet wax. In fact, I’ve found by checking the Hershey’s website (thank you, Internet) that the coating is “white fudge.” Maybe that’s just a fancy way of saying white chocolate, but in any event, there’s so little of it in a Zero bar that it manages not to offend.

In the 80s, when we all became so ludicrously afraid of fat in anything, several companies introduced reduced fat chocolate. For some time I was a devotee of Sweet Escapes candy bars, and we all started buying Three Musketeers because they were “low fat” (which translated, really, to “high air content” but that concept seemed to either elude us or not matter, so keen were we to be able to have our cake and eat it too, or in this case, to have our chocolate but not the fat). Most of these reduced fat offerings seem to no longer be available, as many people have come to their senses. Or at least switched to low carb candy bars, which I think must be pretty disgusting, so I’ve never bothered to try one. Now you can also buy chocolate bars that are enhanced with “nutrients.” This seems the most ridiculous concept of all to me. The idea of eating chocolate and soothing the guilt by reminding oneself that the candy contains calcium, or vitamin A, or something. I say, if you want vitamin A, eat a carrot. If you want chocolate, eat chocolate.

The chocolate I eat these days tends to be mostly in things, rather than just solo. I make things like chocolate chip cookies (with Toll House morsels—no overpriced Sharffen Berger shards for me, thanks). Although I love chocolate, I don’t really like chocolate ice cream, as I think the aftertaste is too strong, and if they put chocolate bits of any kind in ice cream, the effect of freezing on chocolate makes it waxy, which I loathe. I’ve also just discovered chocolate covered Altoids, which they’ve been handing out as free samples as I walk to work every morning. Doubtless these are just Altoids that are in some way deficient—chipped or otherwise deformed—that they coat with dark chocolate, but they’re really not bad. Four of them are a little mouthful, they give me a quick chocolate fix, and offer a little breath freshening bonus. The chocolate softens the usually overpowering peppermint of the mint itself.

Of course, the health reporters of the world keep assuring me that chocolate (dark chocolate, anyway) is good for my heart, and that a little bit won’t hurt me and may even be good for me. While I find this interesting information, I’m not eating chocolate because it might be good for me. I’m eating it because I like it. Even though I didn’t get any for Valentine’s Day.


P.S. For those who live close to a Godiva store, or a Barnes & Noble, and want to stock up, the day after a “chocolate” holiday (Valentine’s Day, Easter, Christmas), Godiva stores and BN sell the boxes of chocolates that have holiday-themed decorations at half price. My husband and I used to go and buy twice as much candy as we could have bought two days earlier, and then hang on to it, eating it a piece or two at a time over the next few months. In fact, I think we still have a box up on a high shelf from one of these buying binges. If you like Godiva chocolates, but are squeamish about the idea of paying 25 bucks a pound for it, this is the way to go.

Just Plain Yucky Food

Something got me to thinking about unappealing food tonight, and I started thinking about the worst foods or meals I’ve ever had or heard about. Thankfully, most of them are just things I’ve heard about, rather than actually been forced to eat and be polite about. Most of them seem to be the creations of relatives. I’m not sure if this is because I eat more of my relatives’ food than I do of other peoples’, or if it says something about my relatives’ cooking.

The only unappealing food that I thought of that I’d actually eaten was pre-cooked bacon that had been microwaved. I don’t mean the packaged stuff from the grocery store that’s intended to be heated up in the microwave. I mean bacon that has been cooked by conventional means, put into a baggie in the refrigerator for a day or two (or more—I don’t even want to know), and then reheated in the microwave.

Interestingly, I’ve not only heard of this being done, but actually been forced to eat it. My friend’s mother in law does this and she told me about it. My own mother in law did it, as does my grandmother (or did—I’m not sure she really makes bacon anymore, since she really only cooks for herself now). The thing about bacon that has been subjected to this treatment is that it becomes bacon bits. On both occasions I was served it, it was really more a pile of dark brown crumbs than anything resembling strips of bacon. I can understand if this is the way you serve bacon occasionally, but in all three cases, this was their standard. They would cook off a package of bacon one day, then store it until they needed it, and reheat it in the microwave, whereupon it would dissolve into the aforementioned crumbs.

I think my grandmother did this because she bought a microwave back in the early 80s when they were still novel and interesting, and she was testing out its capabilities. When she discovered that she could have bacon in 15 seconds, well, she was thrilled. My mother in law did it out of a need to eat quickly. When hunger overtook my mother in law, there was no waiting. She was going to eat the first thing that came to hand, and if that was microwaved bacon, fine. If it was a box of graham cracker crumbs, or a raw onion, fine.

I think my friend’s mother in law was motivated by a total lack of caring about food quality. She was the type of woman who claimed that she’d provided meals for her family for twenty or thirty years or whatever it was, and she was “retiring.” Hanging up her apron, thanks. I’ve found that most women who claim they’re going to stop cooking because they’ve been doing it for so many years were never very good cooks to begin with. They turned out barely edible, largely uninteresting and unmemorable meals for all those years. Generally their families applaud (if silently) when they announce their retirement from culinary responsibilities.

Beyond that, I’ve mostly been treated to descriptions of unappetizing meals.

My husband came home from a visit to his cousin/godmother’s house one year with a horror story. First let me say that his cousin knows she’s a dreadful cook, and doesn’t try to do it often. They eat out every night. They’re an interesting combination: non-cookers, but cheap. As a result, they only eat at restaurants that are all-you-can-eat buffets, or for which they have a buy-one-get-one-free, or early bird coupon. On the occasion of my husband’s visit to their house, she decided to try to cook.

She served ham left over from Easter (it was only a week or so after Easter, so that’s not as bad as it might sound). It was a purchased ham, so there wasn’t much she could do to screw it up. The side dishes she made were Au Gratin Potatoes from a box (actually OK with my husband, because he kind of likes those), and green beans. It was the green beans that were notable. She made them in the pressure cooker. They were, according to my husband, grey. She couldn’t figure out why he didn’t want seconds.

My father in law has a stock of revolting recipes that he pulls out every now and then. He’s since moved to a small condo, but we used to go visit him when he lived in a larger house, and for some reason our visit always inspired him to have a “cookout” or a “family dinner” (depending on the season, and despite the fact that we’d already seen everyone who was invited at least two other times on any trip there). My husband and I always cooked for these gatherings, with superfluous menu input by my father in law. We’d set the menu, and he’d spend the 24 hours leading up to the event trying to add things that were unnecessary, unappetizing, and unwelcome.

“What about a cake?” he’d suggest at breakfast the morning of the party, “I have one downstairs in the freezer.” What he failed to mention was that the cake was a fully frosted cake (generally not the sort of thing that freezes well) that had been frozen since my mother in law had passed away two years earlier. We’d decline.

Always, without fail, he would suggest the addition that I found most vile, and to which we responded in the negative most vehemently. This was canned ham cooked in the slow cooker with pineapple juice. It seems this was kind of a specialty of his. Canned ham is disgusting to start with, but cook it in the slow cooker with pineapple juice and I think you really would have the most revolting concoction known to man.

My family has come up with a few winners too, most memorably a meal my grandmother offered to cook my husband when I was in the hospital after the birth of my first son. She’d come to stay and help out, and she offered to make my husband something along the lines of oriental tuna served over a baked potato. I’m not sure he how, but he managed to decline politely and without offending her.

As I say, somehow I managed to dodge most of these bullets one way or another. I’m sure when my children grow up and get married, their spouses will complain about my cooking for one reason or another. However, it won’t be because I’ve served them canned ham or microwaved bacon. They’ll have to find something else to complain about, I guess.

Status Update

Ho-kay. Here we go again. I got a job offer, and the job starts Monday. SO. Once again, I may be a little quiet until I can get into a regular groove and start posting one to two times a week, as I had always intended.

The job, btw, is with my husband's company, so that'll be convenient. For the most part we can commute together, which is kind of nice.

I'll try to get something posted in the next three days, and then see what I can do from there.

Happy Groundhog Day!