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Something to Read: Fannie Farmer Cookbook & Baking Book

~ wellfedemily ~ 2 Comments

30days

Yesterday we spent the day in Porteau Cove and it was rainy and everyone ended up damp to their skin but it was fun and Toddler had a fabulous day and when we got home I still had to put Easter together so last night, I didn’t end up posting (I did watch a few cooking shows off the PVR and eat about a pound of Easter candy though, so that’s got to count for something).

Easter prep

I had meant to tell you about the Fannie Farmer cookbooks, which you likely already know about as they’re classics but if not, you should know about because they’re classics. So I might as well tell you about the Fannie Farmer Cookbook and The Fannie Farmer Baking Book, which are two of my most essential kitchen resources (both edited by Marion Cunningham). My aunt had asked for the recipe for Lazy Daisy cake, as she’s celebrating her PhD candidacy and it’s her favourite cake, so the timing is all kinds of right.

The Fannie Farmer cookbooks are pretty much the family cookbook where I grew up; my grandmother used them and I inherited her three copies; my mom has several copies (since I ruined her first one as I’m messy and irresponsible and not careful with things). If I’ve ever wondered how to make anything, even before Googling it, I check in with Fannie. Chances are the answers are all in there, probably with my grandmother’s notes.

Cuddles_FF

The thing I like about the cookbooks is that they’re reference as much as they are books of recipes; there are instructions on selecting cuts of meat and what each cut means, information and recipes for cooking for the sick, and a great many recipes that can be made on even the tightest budget. If you know someone about to move into his or her first home away from home, Fannie Farmer is a great gift.

I have a couple of really old versions of the books, and I keep them because they were my grandmother’s, but also because they’re pretty funny. For example, from my 1973 version which purports to be a facsimile of the original (circa 1896):

Banana Salad

Remove one section of skin from each of four bananas. Take out fruit, scrape, and cut fruit from one banana in thin slices, fruit from other three bananas in one-half inch cubes. Marinate cubes with French Dressing. Refill skins and garnish each with slices of banana. Stack around a mound of lettuce leaves.

I love recipes like these. So gross. So delightful to imagine someone serving banana salad in French Dressing to company.

But seriously, Fannie Farmer.

Here’s the recipe for Lazy Daisy Cake, followed by a recipe for Lazy Daisy Topping, both from the Fannie Farmer Baking Book. “Because this light and delicate cake is so easy to make, it is an ideal dessert for a lazy day. The topping is a rich butter-caramel glaze, and it is good.”

Lazy Daisy Cake

(Makes one 8-inch square cake.)

  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 1 tbsp. butter
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1 tsp. vanilla extract
  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1 tsp. baking powder
  • 1/4 tsp. salt
  • Lazy Daisy Topping (see below)

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease and flour an 8″ square cake pan.

Warm the milk with the butter in a small saucepan over low heat.

Meanwhile, beat the eggs until they are foamy and feel like they’ve thickened slightly. Slowly whisk in the sugar, then add the vanilla.

Sift your dry ingredients into another bowl. Stir the dry mix into the egg mixture and beat until the batter is smooth.

Check that the butter has melted into the milk; if it has, stir into the batter and mix well. If it hasn’t, give it another minute or so.

Pour your batter into your pan and bake until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean, about 25 minutes.

While your cake is baking, prepare the Lazy Daisy Topping (recipe below).

Spread the topping over the warm cake and brown slightly under the broiler for about one minute, paying attention all the while so that it doesn’t burn. Serve the cake from the pan.

Lazy Daisy Topping

(Makes about 1 1/4 cups, enough for one Lazy Daisy Cake)

  • 4 tbsp. butter
  • 1/4 cup heavy cream
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup shredded coconut, toasted if you wish

Combine butter, cream and sugar in a small, heavy-bottomed saucepan. Stir over medium heat until melted. Add the coconut. Pour the frosting over the baked cake; cook under a hot broiler for about a minute, until it bubbles and browns slightly.

Something to Read: American Food Writing

~ wellfedemily ~ Leave a comment

30days

A good story is as good or better than a good recipe, but a good story that ends in a recipe is about my favourite thing, because it means you can take the story with you and re-tell it, in a way, every time you make a dish. I like stories.

With food in particular, I like to know why things are the way they are. I mean, it’s all well and good to find a nice recipe for scones, but why do the scones exist in the first place? Are they the fancy scones your grandmother would always make on Sunday to go with tea? Tell me about tea with your grandmother. The scones will taste better if they are not just any old scones. I want to be biased. I want to believe they are exceptional.

Good writing about food fills most of my emotional voids (the rest are filled with cheesy carbs or over-buttered popcorn). Which is why I was delighted to find American Food Writing: An Anthology, edited by Molly O’Neill, at a local bookstore that was tragically set to close but then was bought/rescued by another local bookstore and then everyone lived happily ever after. The book is a collection of 250 years of American writing on food, from writers as diverse as John Steinbeck, James Beard, Madhur Jaffrey, David Sedaris, and Emily Dickinson, among others. It’s food writing and writing about food excerpted from longer works, and there are recipes.

afwa

There’s a recipe for a clambake to feed 500 people (and 125 workers) that requires 200 pounds of sausage and “1 1/2 tons of stones about the size of a cantaloupe melon;” there are recipes for risotto and chowder and hoe cake and Chicken Marbella. There are stories of “primal bread” and “enough jam to last a lifetime” and “adultery” and “The Toll House Cookie.” It is, as it turns out, both a pleasant incremental read and a reference book, and I am pleased to have it in my collection and to recommend it. I honestly can’t choose an excerpt because I can’t narrow one down. Borrow it from the library; if you agree that it’s wonderful, buy yourself a copy.

Here’s a recipe for Lady Bird Johnson’s “Pedernales Chili,” because this is the kind of thing the book contains and isn’t that fantastic? There’s definitely a story behind it. The recipe originally appeared in a 2004 book by Robb Walsh called Tex-Mex Cookbook. I’ve excerpted it here in its entirety; you can find it on page 711 of American Food Writing: An Anthology.

During the ranch era, the Dutch oven and cast-iron skillet became common cooking utensils. The new cookware made it possible to brown the meat before cooking the chili, which improved the color and flavor. Here’s a classic cowboy chili recipe that Lady Bird Johnson used to give out. (Page 711)

Pedernales Chili

(Makes 12 cups.)

  • 4 pounds chili meat (beef chuck ground through the chili plate of a meat grinder or cut into a 1/4-inch dice)
  • 1 large onion, chopped
  • 2 garlic cloves
  • 1 tsp. dried Mexican oregano
  • 1 tsp. ground cumin
  • 2 tbsp. chili powder
  • 1 1/2 cups whole canned tomatoes and their liquid
  • 2 to 6 generous dashes of liquid hot sauce
  • Salt

Saute the meat, onion, and garlic in a large skillet over medium-high heat and cook until lightly colored. Add the oregano, cumin, chili powder, tomatoes, hot sauce and 2 cups hot water. Bring to a boil, lower the heat, and simmer for about 1 hour. Skim off the fat while cooking. Salt to taste.

Something to Read: Foodie Babies Wear Bibs

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30days

This post is a bit like cheating. I’m telling you about the book so I can share a recipe for muffins, which I feed to my non-foodie baby. I posted a photo of them to Instagram yesterday and someone asked for the recipe, so, since the recipe is for something I feed Toddler, why not also write about a book I read to Toddler as well? It’s a bit of a stretch, sure, but these are pretty good muffins.

My copy of Foodie Babies Wear Bibs was a gift at a baby shower thrown by my colleagues at my old job at the university. At the time, I was expecting to spend much of my maternity leave introducing exciting flavours to a little boy who would surely be thrilled by each and every one. I ended up with a toddler who is not even interested in flavours except the flavours that store-bought pudding comes in, and to be honest I’m not even sure where he discovered store-bought pudding, so my expectations have shifted somewhat. When I got my wisdom teeth out last week, Nick bought me a whole bunch of pudding; what’s left over has been tempting Toddler since.

As I mentioned in another post, he will eat a muffin.

He actually really likes Foodie Babies Wear Bibs, and will enthusiastically pretend-eat any and all food, insects or animals off the pages of his books. He has a Cookie Monster book where Cookie Monster makes and serves a turkey dinner – Toddler pretend-gobbles it right up! Real turkey is, of course, an insult.

Gobble gobble

I guess liking (and eating?) books counts for something, so I shouldn’t complain. So, muffins. I made a dozen yesterday and only have five left, so they must be pretty good (though I’ll admit I did break my own no-white-flour-rule). These are made with pear sauce, as I made and canned a ton of it last September, but you could make these with applesauce and they’d be just fine. I also used maple extract to boost the mapley taste, but if you don’t have that, vanilla will do fine.

And if you need a baby shower gift, pick up a copy of Foodie Babies Wear Bibs; just warn the mum-to-be to never speak her desire for a well-rounded eater out loud because she’ll jinx it.

Mmmuffins!

Bran Muffins

(Makes 12.)

  • 1 cup wheat bran
  • 1 cup white flour
  • 3/4 cup whole wheat flour
  • 1 tbsp. ground flax seed
  • 2 tsp. baking soda
  • 1 tsp. salt
  • 1 1/2 cups pear sauce or applesauce
  • 2 eggs, beaten
  • 1/2 cup dark brown sugar, packed
  • 1/4 cup maple syrup
  • 6 tbsp. melted butter
  • 1 tsp. maple or vanilla extract

Preheat your oven to 400°F. Grease your muffin tins, or use paper liners which I prefer since my muffin pan is on its last legs. If you can find them on sale, the parchment liners are great and peel off easily.

Combine your wheat bran, flours, flax, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl. Whisk together. Set aside.

In another large bowl, whisk together pear or applesauce, eggs, sugar, and maple syrup. Add butter and maple or vanilla extract, and whisk again.

Stir your dry ingredients into your wet ingredients until your dry ingredients are just moistened.

Spoon your batter equally into your 12 muffin cups. Don’t level the batter off it appears uneven; the muffins will sort themselves out in the oven.

Bake for 8 to 10 minutes, then open the oven, turn the pan around, close the oven door, and bake for another 8 to 10 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean. 16 minutes was perfect for my oven.

When the muffins are ready, remove them from the pan onto a wire rack and let them cool. Once fully cooled, you can freeze these in a container with a tight-fitting lid for about a month; they’ll store in a container on the counter for a week otherwise.

Eat them buttered, with a good book. Pants optional.

Muffin, book.

 

Something to Read: An Alphabet for Gourmets

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30days

We put a clean cloth, red and white, over one of the carpenters’ tables, and kicked wood-curls aside for our feet, under the chairs brought up from the apartment in Vevey. I set our tumblers, plates, silver, smooth unironed napkins sweet from the meadow grass where they had dried.

While some of us started to bend over the dwarf-pea bushes and toss the crisp pods into baskets, others built a hearth from stones and a couple of roof-tiles lying loose and made a lively little fire. I had a big kettle with spring water in the bottom of it, just off simmering, and salt and pepper and a pat of fine butter to hand. Then I put the bottles of Dezelay in the fountain, just under the timeless spurt of icy mountain water, and ran down to be the liaison between the harvesters and my mother, who sat shelling from the basket on her lap into the pot between her feet, as intent and nimble as a lace-maker.

I dashed up and down the steep terraces with the baskets, and my mother would groan and then hum happily when another one appeared, and below I could hear my father and our friends cursing just as happily at their wry backs and their aching thighs, while the peas came off their stems and into the baskets with a small sound audible in that still, high air, so many hundred feet above the distant and completely silent Leman. It was suddenly almost twilight. The last sunlight on the Dents du Midi was fire-rosy, with immeasurable coldness in it.

“Time, gentlemen, time,” my mother called, in an unrehearsed and astonishing imitation of a Cornish barmaid.

I read An Alphabet for Gourmets one summer when I was 20 or 21 and working for a place that exported cars to the US, back when the exchange rate was favourable for that kind of thing. It was my first non-retail job; I’d never realized before that how much sitting you could do and get paid for it.

On a good day, I’d drive some nice car down to the Seattle Auto Auction, sit around for a couple of hours, and drive some other car back. On a bad day I’d be stuck in a white cargo van with no rear-view mirrors and a sense of worry, or I’d be in one of those silly giant pick-up trucks when a snow-storm struck and remain stranded on the I-5 with not enough money for gas to get home. There was a lot of driving, but also a lot of waiting, and so in those lulls I’d read MFK Fisher. She always got me through.

an-alphabet-for-gourmets-fisher

While How to Cook a Wolf  is a book for simpler, leaner times, much of the rest of Fisher’s work is lush and decadent, and even when she’s describing something as simple as peas, there’s extravagance in the details. You want to go to there, wherever it is (most likely France). The way she writes, it’s as if the whole scene is set in that late-August evening light that’s so yellow that the shadows are blue, so golden that everything just sort of sparkles. It’s all like that, verdant, even when it’s nighttime or raining. She’s wonderful. Her life is the stuff of paintings and good poetry.

My bias is showing. She’s one of my favourites.

If you can find The Art of Eating, her selected works, buy it. I picked up my copy in that San Francisco bookstore I told you about before; it was another trip, but I never learn and picked up that book and a couple of other similarly dense, heavy books to lug around until Nick finally got sick of my complaining and carried the bag for me. If all you can find is An Alphabet for Gourmets, that’s fine; you can collect the others as you find them. It’s a good one; that and How to Cook a Wolf will get you started.

Since we’re talking about peas, kind of, here’s a recipe for one of my favourite summer sides; it’s not a Fisher recipe, but it’s a good one and sort of fits the theme I was kind of going for (French, peas).

Peas with lettuce and mint

  • 1 tbsp. butter
  • 1 shallot, minced
  • 2 cups shelled peas, preferably fresh but frozen will do if you get those little baby peas
  • 1/2 head of romaine or green leaf lettuce, cut crosswise into ribbons
  • 1/2 cup chicken stock
  • Salt
  • Freshly ground black pepper
  • 2 tbsp. finely chopped mint
  • 1 tbsp. heavy cream

Melt the butter in a skillet over medium-high heat. Add your minced shallot, and cook until translucent. Add the peas, lettuce, and chicken stock, and cover. Cook for three minutes, until the lettuce has wilted. Add salt and pepper to taste. Sprinkle with mint.

Using a slotted spoon, transfer to a serving dish. Drizzle with cream.

This dish is nice with cold chicken or grilled fish; I quite like it as a side with barbecued Sockeye salmon and buttery steamed new potatoes.

Something to Read: The Sriracha Cookbook

~ wellfedemily ~ 4 Comments

30days

We’ve been a sriracha household ever since Nick first tasted sriracha one fateful night at the 24-hour pho place that used to be at Broadway and Cambie. After maple syrup, it may be my favourite condiment; in fact, when we make chicken and waffles, we use them both together. (This pretty accurately describes how we feel.)

While I don’t allow a liberal dousing of the stuff on my home-cooked dinners, we’ll happily splatter it all over any and all take-out, and it gets well used as an ingredient. It’s a marinade, a salad dressing, a replacement for ketchup, and essential to soups and sandwich fillings. It’s the secret and most important ingredient in our homemade Caesars (for my American friends, a Caesar is like a Bloody Mary but 100 times better because of Clamato, which is tomato juice with clam nectar. Come over sometime. I’ll show you.).

We like our rooster sauce.

We could have lived happily ever after, just pouring our favourite hot sauce on everything. When I discovered you could buy two giant bottles of it at Costco for $6, things started to really get spicy. Then, one day, our beloved friends Dan and Dennis were in Puerto Vallarta and couldn’t find the sriracha they needed (most of our friends are similarly sriracha-dependent). It was then that they happened upon Shark Sauce, the Mexican version of sriracha (pictured below), which turned out to be kind of amazing, and then they bought some for us too. Dan and Dennis improve our lives in many ways, but Shark Sauce has been perhaps the greatest of their gifts to us.

sriracha

Mexican sriracha is everything that regular American sriracha is, but with more garlic flavour. So, it takes one thing we love and can’t stop eating (sriracha) and improves upon it with the other thing we love and can’t stop eating (garlic) to make a thing that is so wonderful we have to ration it because we’re never sure when we’re going to get more of it. You can only get it in Mexico. We are not likely to get to Mexico anytime soon. Dan and Dennis, recently returned from Mexico, confirmed via Facebook that they have Shark Sauce for us and I think I saw a tear of gratitude form in Nick’s left eye.

If you go to Mexico, get Shark Sauce. If someone you know is going to Mexico, get them to get you Shark Sauce. You can get it in Mexican Walmarts, apparently. I’m sure there are other places.

If you love sriracha like we love sriracha and put it on and in all the things, get The Sriracha Cookbook. Endorsed by David Chang (of Momofuku fame), The Sriracha Cookbook will help you incorporate more sriracha into your diet with recipes for every meal. (Maybe you already have sriracha with/on every meal. This will help you use sriracha in fancier, possibly more socially acceptable ways.) It’s not a long book, but the recipes are solid and the photos are nice; it would be a good gift for a bridal shower or a Secret Santa exchange.

I figure a cookbook is worthwhile when it contains at least three recipes that produce reliable results and that I’d make again and again. I’ve made at least three recipes from the book, and have made them multiple times, and people have not gagged when served the food I made from the book so I figure it’s a hit. It’s a fun book.

My favourite recipe from The Sriracha Cookbook is the tropical fruit salad. I think papayas taste like decaying bodies, and Nick thinks he’s allergic to pineapple, and we don’t eat bananas for complicated banana-hating reasons, so I use watermelon and a couple of avocados and it works very well. I also add more soy sauce because 1/4 teaspoon is much too conservative for my liking; adjust the seasonings to your taste. This dish is great for brunch, or as a side-dish for a summer meal; it also keeps well in the fridge (up to three days) so it’s kind of nice to make ahead for weekday lunches.

Tropical Fruit Salad with Sriracha-Sesame Vinaigrette

(Serves 8.)

  • 1/4 cup toasted sesame oil
  • 1/4 cup seasoned rice vinegar
  • 1/2 cup honey
  • 2 tbsp. sriracha
  • 2 tbsp. toasted white sesame seeds
  • 1/4 tsp. soy sauce
  • 1 medium pineapple, peeled, cored and cubed
  • 2 mangoes, peeled, cored and cubed
  • 1 papaya, peeled and cubed
  • 2 kiwi fruits, peeled, halved lengthwise, and sliced
  • 1 pint strawberries, hulled and quartered
  • 1/2 cup sweetened flaked coconut, for garnish
  • Fresh mint, cut into ribbons, for garnish

In a medium bowl, combine sesame oil, rice vinegar, honey, sriracha, sesame seeds, and soy sauce. Whisk everything together. Taste it. Does it need more of anything? Adjust seasonings to taste.

Put the fruit into a large mixing bowl. Pour the dressing over top, and toss gently, using your (clean) hands.

Serve with a garnish of flaked coconut and mint chiffonade.

And seriously. Get someone to get you Shark Sauce. It will change your life. I’m probably not exaggerating.

Something to Read: The New Purity Cook Book

~ wellfedemily ~ 5 Comments

30days

The New Purity Cook Book alleges, on its cover, that it is the complete guide to Canadian cooking. I’m not convinced that this is true, though it remains one of my most beloved books, though I only make one or two things from it.

My parents had the book when I was growing up – apparently Purity is a brand of flour? – and that’s where our waffle recipe came from. I got my copy of the book at a thrift store for a dollar, which is actually pretty reasonable – there are gift coupons in the back of the book, and for $1.25 (cash or money order), you could, in the 1980s, have a copy of the cookbook mailed anywhere in Canada.

Purity-Cook-Book

It’s actually a pretty reliable book, with solid recipes for the kind of home-cooking you might have grown up with. There are the usual things – Pineapple Upside Down Cake, Enchiladas, and Salmon Casserole – as well as a handy guide to freezing, defrosting, and boiling the living hell out of vegetables until all that’s left is a weepy grey mush. There are also some pretty good recipes for breads and loaves, especially the Old Fashioned Porridge Bread, which you can make with leftover oatmeal. If you can find it for a dollar, it’s worth it. There’s a recipe for something called Chop Suey Cake, which seems to be a kind of inappropriately named fruit cake, and I want someone to make it so I can try it (but I don’t want to spend $20 on candied fruit to do it myself).

I use the Purity waffle recipe, because it makes the waffles I was raised on, and, therefore, The Best Waffles. If you make too many (I always do), you can stack them between sheets of waxed paper and store them in a bag in the freezer; they toast up pretty nicely so you can have waffles even on weekdays.

Waffles

  • 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 tbsp. granulated sugar
  • 3 tsp. baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp. salt
  • 2 eggs, beaten
  • 1 1/2 cups whole milk
  • 1/4 cup butter, melted

Sift together the dry ingredients. In a separate bowl, whisk together the liquids.

Heat the waffle iron according to your waffle iron’s instructions. You may need to lightly grease the iron before heating, depending on what kind you have or how old it is.

Pour batter into waffle iron, drop the lid, and cook until waffles have stopped steaming, and are golden and fluffy. Don’t lift the lid during cooking, or else they flatten out and don’t work as well for syrup-sopping.

Serve with tons of maple syrup. Like, an obscene amount. (That’s the whole point of waffles anyway.)

Something to Read: Eat, Memory

~ wellfedemily ~ Leave a comment

30days

It’s been five days since I had my wisdom teeth out and my mouth still throbs with a dull, insistent ache. I haven’t eaten a satisfying meal in what feels like forever, and nobody is interested in indulging me as I whine about it. These are the worst of times. I am not exaggerating, I don’t care what Nick says. Also we have ants. And I’m almost out of pills.

I am having a hard time mustering a kind word or the slightest enthusiasm for anything, so I’m phoning it in tonight, and leaving you with a poem and a recipe for Sole Meunière, a wonderful thing and a meal I could probably eat if someone else would make it for me. The poem and the recipe both come from Eat, Memory, a book of culinary essays from the New York Times, assembled and edited by Amanda Hesser.

eat_memory

The Fish, by Billy Collins

As soon as the elderly waiter
placed before me the fish I had ordered,
it began to stare up at me
with its one flat, iridescent eye.

I feel sorry for you, it seemed to say,
eating alone in this awful restaurant
bathed in such unkindly light
and surrounded by these dreadful murals of Sicily.

And I feel sorry for you, too –
yanked from the sea and now lying dead
next to some boiled potatoes in Pittsburgh –
I said back to the fish as I raised my fork.

And thus my dinner in an unfamiliar city
with its rivers and lighted bridges
was graced not only with chilled wine
and lemon slices but with compassion and sorrow

even after the waiter removed my plate
with the head of the fish still staring
and the barrel vault of its delicate bones
terribly exposed, save for a shroud of parsley.

Sole Meunière

  • 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
  • 2 tbsp. oil, such as canola
  • 2 fillets of sole
  • Salt and freshly ground black pepper
  • 4 tbsp. unsalted butter, diced
  • 2 tbsp. white wine
  • Juice of 1/2 lemon
  • 1 tbsp. finely chopped flat-leaf parsley

Place the flour in a wide dish, such as a pie plate. In a large skillet, heat oil over high heat.

Season fish on both sides with salt and pepper. Dredge through flour.

Cook in the oil for two minutes, the flip and cook the other side a minute more.

Pour off the oil in the skillet and wipe clean with a paper towel.

Place the pan back on the heat, and add the butter. Cook the butter until it has melted and turned golden. It should smell faintly nutty. Add the wine, and boil for 20 seconds. Add the lemon and parsley, and cook another 20 seconds. You’ve just made a beurre blanc. It is fabulous. Pour it over the sole and eat immediately. Serves two.

Something to Read: Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant

~ wellfedemily ~ 2 Comments

30days

I’ll admit that most of the times I end up cooking for just me, I eat weird food. Last time Nick was away, one night for dinner I ate a whole purple cauliflower, roasted with olive oil and garlic, and three eggs, scrambled medium-rare in probably more butter than was necessary with a lot of black pepper. Not something I’d make for a family dinner, it was a meal that I enjoyed intensely probably in part because I was all by myself.

Eating alone is a secret joy, the kind of thing I recommend everyone give a good solid try. It’s important to be able to enjoy one’s own company, and some people need a bit of practice dining in silence, alone but not lonely. Start with brunch; the most wonderful way to spend Sunday morning is sitting at a table alone in a well-lit dining room with cold white wine, a bit of fruit, a poached egg and some toast, and a stack of magazines you haven’t yet gotten around to. If you go a little while after the lunch rush, you can sit undisturbed for a good long time, and the serving staff will be kind to you and generous in topping up your glass. Tip well. But that goes without saying.

You can practice at home by cooking for yourself and then not eating that meal in front of a screen. Books and magazines are allowed, but iPhones, computers, and televisions are not. Even if you just roast yourself a whole bunch of cauliflower, you must do yourself a favour and eat it at a table, with nice music playing and something manual to distract yourself.

eggplant

And while you’re practicing, read Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone, a collection of essays by brilliant people on the topic of dinner for one.

This book has a little bit of something from everyone, from Nora Ephron and Laurie Colwin to Haruki Murakami and Marcella Hazan. From her own piece called Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, from her book Home Cooking and from which the book takes its name, Laurie Colwin writes:

Dinner alone is one of life’s pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest. People lie when you ask them what they eat when they are alone. A salad, they tell you. But when you persist, the confess to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches and bacon sandwiches deep fried with hot sauce, or spaghetti with butter and grape jam.

Be your weird self. Cook for just you. Enjoy the silence. Eat a whole head of cauliflower, if that’s what makes you happy.

Roasted cauliflower

  • 1 x 2 lb. cauliflower, cut into florets
  • 1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
  • Zest and juice of 1 lemon
  • 1 or 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • Salt
  • Ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 400°F.

In a large bowl, drizzle the cauliflower florets with the olive oil. Zest the lemon over top the florets, then drizzle them with the juice. Add the garlic, salt and pepper, and mush the whole thing together with your hands until the cauliflower is well coated.

Place the cauliflower on a large, rimmed baking sheet.

Roast for 25 to 30 minutes, turning occasionally, until the cauliflower is tender and golden. Sprinkle with a little bit of additional salt, then eat with your fingers out of a big bowl with a plate of scrambled eggs, a glass of cold white wine, and a novel you’ve been meaning to get into. Don’t answer the phone if it rings – it’s me time.

Something to Read: The Williams-Sonoma Cookbook

~ wellfedemily ~ 4 Comments

30days

Williams-Sonoma is ridiculous and I love it.

Our last apartment was about half a block off Granville Street, and three blocks away from Vancouver’s only Williams-Sonoma. It was a weird place to live, because the rent was very affordable and many of the apartment buildings were very old, but all the stores were for the fancy rich people who lived up the hill in Shaughnessy. There was a Restoration Hardware, an Anthropologie, and a lot of expensive art galleries. Occasionally I would see an outfit I liked in a shop window and wander inside to look, discreetly search for a price tag, and then high-tail it out of there because who can afford $800 jeans?! Also most of the restaurants in the neighbourhood sold only bland food because rich people don’t like to taste flavours.

But I’d go into Williams-Sonoma a lot, mostly to fondle the expensive enameled cast-iron and copper pots. I rarely bought anything, though occasionally some of their cookbooks would be on sale, and once I bought this great vinaigrette mixer-spritzer that I later broke because I am not gentle with things.

When we were first married, I didn’t have the impressive cookbook collection I now fill an obtrusive shelf in our dining room with, and I wanted to have a few reliable books I could refer to. I happened to be in Williams-Sonoma, and was delighted to discover that The Williams-Sonoma Cookbook (you can buy it for less here) was actually very reasonably priced for a big, fat, hardcover cookbook. The cover price was $40, but it was (miraculously) on sale for only $20. The recipes are easy to follow, even for a beginner cook, and they don’t call for unusual or expensive ingredients. I later acquired a copy of Williams-Sonoma’s Essentials of French Cooking (I think when my aunt was thinning out her cookbook collection), which has also turned out to be pretty good.

wscookbook

It’s been well used, and certainly worth more than what I paid. One recipe in particular has proven itself invaluable, as it turned out to be Nick’s favourite dessert. Nick doesn’t eat much dessert, and didn’t eat much dessert even pre-diabetes (I do not understand this). But this one pleased him so much that he insisted I bring it to his parents’ for his birthday one year, and his family loved it and now it’s in the family cookbook and we have it almost anytime there’s an occasion that calls for dessert.

Panna Cotta

  • Butter (for greasing six ramekins)
  • 1 1/2 cups whole milk
  • 2 packages, or four teaspoons, unflavoured powdered gelatin
  • 1/2 cup granulated sugar
  • 1 vanilla bean (you can use 1 tsp. vanilla extract if that’s what you have in your pantry)
  • 1 1/2 cups heavy cream (whipping cream)

Lightly grease six ramekins with butter. Set the cups on a small baking sheet.

Pour one third, or 1/2 cup of the milk into a small pot. Sprinkle the gelatin over top, and let sit for about three minutes.

Add the rest of the milk and the sugar and heat it until the sugar and gelatin is dissolved, then take the pot off the stove and stir in the cream and vanilla bean. Whisk everything together, then pour the mixture into ramekins. Cover ramekins with plastic wrap, then place in the fridge to set, which should take four to six hours.

To serve, remove the panna cotta from the ramekins by sliding a knife gently around the circumference. It should come out easily, but you can serve it in the ramekins too if you want. It saves dirtying more dishes, which counts for a lot around here.

Serve with fresh berries and whipped cream. In the winter, I warm frozen blueberries with a bit of maple syrup, then let the compote cool to just about room temperature before spooning over the panna cotta.

Something to Read: I Like You (Hospitality Under the Influence)

~ wellfedemily ~ Leave a comment

30daysTomorrow I’m going in to have my wisdom teeth removed. I was supposed to do it ten years ago, when they first poked through my gums, but I didn’t have dental coverage or very good dental coverage – I can’t remember – and also I’m a big fat chicken. So, I let them hang out in there, in the back of my mouth, becoming increasingly inconvenient and now it’s a decade later and the oral surgeon is using phrases like “older than would be ideal for this” and “fused to your jaw.”

The worst part is that I’m not allowed to eat for six hours before the surgery, and the surgery is at 10:45 tomorrow morning.

I don’t know when I’m going to get to eat again. This is the part I’m most nervous about.

(I’m lying. I’m pretty nervous about the tooth-to-bone fusion thing, but I’d rather you think I’m tough.)

Anyway, it’s day three of my little plan to tell you about a new book every day for 30 days, and it’s 11:00 p.m. and I’ve already nearly failed. I had planned to tell you about this book I bought on a whim one day at a used book store and it turned out to be a rare edition of a Hungarian cookbook from the 1970s, and that it turned out to be worth $250 on AbeBooks, but I need a little levity today. I needed a Sedaris.

Have you ever read anything by David Sedaris? He’s wonderful, a bona fide freak of nature and I love every word he puts down. If there is darkness in your heart and you love a short story, pick up Me Talk Pretty One Day and laugh until it hurts.

But this is not about David.

This is about Amy.

ilikeyou

I bought I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence off a clearance table some time after it had come out thinking it would probably be funny and it only cost five dollars so I had very little to lose. I brought it home, cracked it open.

jackpot

It’s like she was singing my life. Photographing it, at least.

This book manages to be a lot of things all in one – comedy, cookbook, DIY for the half-assed and DIY-disinterested. The recipes are pretty reliable, and seem to come from actual recipe boxes; many of the recipes are just scans of hand-written, food-splattered recipe cards. Like real life! I’ve made a few of them, and I don’t know why I am pleasantly surprised each time. Of course they’re good. Amy can do anything!

Anyway, I liked the book so much I went out and bought a copy for my mom for Mother’s Day, and by that point it was no longer on the clearance rack and I had to pay full price. As far as I know, it’s only available in hard-cover. That’s serious commitment.

You cannot read a section without finding something bizarre and potentially useful. The section on alcoholic punches is followed by a section on pantyhose crafts, which is handy as you may not think to do pantyhose crafts without having had a large amount of punch first. I have been led to believe that I will be sedated and then sent home with a baggie of pain-relieving prescription drugs after my surgery tomorrow, and I have a drawer full of snagged pantyhose I always forget are full of runs and holes; maybe I’ll brighten my afternoon with a pantyhose plant hanger (page 268).

If you won’t be heavily sedated, why not grab a copy of the book, a couple of cans of juice concentrate, and make yourself a bowl of punch? Surely you have some well-worn hosiery kicking around. If not, I’m sure you could find some pretty easily.

Amy Sedaris’ Rum Punch Dazzler

  • 1 x 12 oz. can lemonade, frozen concentrate
  • 1 x 12 ox. can limeade, frozen concentrate
  • 1 pint rum
  • 7-Up (or alternative)

Create a ring mold out of some 7-up or water. Put it in the freezer. I don’t have anything to make a ring mold, but you can make one by lining a bundt pan with plastic wrap, pouring your liquid in, and freezing it that way. Just pop the ring of ice out when it’s frozen solid, and put it into a punch bowl.

Add the ring mold to a to a bowl with the ingredients listed above, and some maraschino cherries if you have them.

No time for a ring mold? Ice will work, but drink quickly so as not to water down your punch.

Wish me luck tomorrow. My life insurance policy is through work and not very good, so I’ll need to survive at least until I’m in a management position.