This week: Peppermint chocolate chip meringues, ginger meringues, almond orange biscotti, cinnamon chocolate chip biscotti, gingerbreat, challah.
Mark Bittman, I know you are a genius. I am grateful that you have helped so many people conquer their fear of ingredients and allowed them to make actual food. I appreciate that you do not pander to the preciousness of foodies, and that you have presented extremely sensible (one of my highest compliments!) opinions about cooking and consumption. But why, why, did you unleash the no-knead foolishness upon us? How is a gloopy mess that takes 20 hours or so of thought an advance? What is so bad about proofing some yeast, mixing it up, kneading for a few minutes, letting it rise and then putting it in the oven? This is not a big deal, really.
4 eggs
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup flour or a gluten-free flour mix (which I've been doing and, surprisingly, it works just fine)
2/3 cup milk, 2% is what I'm using but I suppose anything is perfectly OK
2 tablespoons soft butter
Preheat oven to 400°F.
Butter or spray two 9-inch cake pans.
Mix everything together; don't worry about the order.
Bake for 20 minutes, then reduce heat to 350°F and bake 10 minutes.
Serve from the pan or put on a serving platter.
Also, it turned out the crazy Dutchman has his charms.
are ranunculus. But if you ask me in person what my favorite flowers are, I will say peonies, because I can't get my mouth to say ranunculus.
I must have been obsessed with food (nothing new) during a recent library visit, because somehow I came home with 10 or 11 books about food- cookbooks, food-related memoirs, histories of ingredients (including one called, with refreshing simplicity, Milk). My favorite in the pile is Heat, an account by a New Yorker writer who, after bravely inviting chef Mario Batali to dinner (a mutual friend was having a birthday, and our author was cooking), began what turned into a 2 year adventure with Italian food. He works in Mario's kitchen for more than a year (this was supposed to be a 6 week assignment-can you imagine what his wife thought? You'd be right), growing competent in basic kitchen skills, moving up to line cook, pasta cook, and, most successfully, the meat cook (probably there is a more elegant word for it, yes?) and finally takes several increasingly lengthy sojourns to Italy where he apprentices with Mario's first pasta teacher, then a world renowned butcher. Heat is best when talking about what people- farmers, butchers, chefs- go though to get the best to people who may or may not appreciate it, and the seeming hopelessness of the Slow-Fooders against massive ag-giants from all over the world, but also when the writer himself has a food epiphany. One such aha moment comes when he is making polenta, and realizes that the difference between what everyone thinks is polenta- a pretty quick though labor intensive cooking of cornmeal on the stove- and real polenta is that, although the traditional polenta takes hours (!), it does not need you after a certain point, apart from an occasional stir, and that it was a far superior polenta, indeed.
This is a photo of a piece done by local artist Eva Ball called "Balloon Ladder" done in '04 for the Park of Roses. It's so expressive- such lightness. Makes me long for summer, too.
This is the house my grandmother grew up in, just off Flatbush Ave in Brooklyn. My great-grandmother (known to my mother and her brother as OtherMother because she could not bear to something as old-sounding as Grandmother) , an interior designer who went to Pratt, was forbidden by her husband to work (it was common, you know) and so instead moved every year around New York (so she would have new places to decorate) until they fell upon this brownstone in Brooklyn, where they stayed for years, selling only after my Grandmother left to get married (eloped, actually, with her mother and in a lovely lavender suit from Saks). This house is legendary in our family; I have pictures of the kitchen and bathroom from the '30's- spectacular subway tile with black trim and a black pedestal sink, with just astounding black, white and wallpaper on the upper half of the wall, featuring the most cunning goldfish, and the kitchen with it's wonderful enamel appliances and gleaming white surfaces. I'm happy to say most of the decorative accesories visible in the pictures are with either me or my mum to this day, as is much of the furniture that fills our houses. My great-grandparents weren't rich, exactly, but they had occasional years of prosperity that allowed them things like the "Big House", as it was called.
| You Are a Semi-Colon |
 You're very smart (and you know it), but you don't often showcase your brilliance. Instead, you carefully construct your arguments, ideas, and theories – until they are bulletproof. You see your words as an expression of yourself, and you are careful not to waste them. You friends see you as enlightened, logical, and shrewd. (But what you're saying often goes right over their heads.) You excel in: The Arts You get along best with: The Colon |
You were my favorite. Ever, actually. I knew things were not going well for you, and I was bracing myself for the day when you would no longer greet me at my mailbox. All the other recent shelter magazines who've shuttered, Country Home, Cottage Living, House and Garden, O at Home, told the story of a struggling economy and changing reading styles. Design bloggers* have been gossiping for some time about your expected demise. And you did stumble a little with all the celebrity stuff, although we know it was just to help the magazine survive (and actually, Drew Barrymore's office was great, but the Katie Joel spread was tasteless). But still, to have this month's be the last, to shut down your website? So sad. Thank you to everyone who worked on the magazine, and to everyone whose homes were profiled. I am saving all my copies, and your vision(s) will be missed.
I do so love Maria Kalman. Her occasional blog for the NY Times has a new posting, with poetic, thoughtful images inspired by the inauguration*. She first became known to us through her children's books, and then did things like New Yorker covers, and the Times blog, and then famously illustrated the new version of Strunk and White's Elements of Style. Once when E and I were in New York we went for a visit to the Children's Museum of Manhattan (so many nannies!) , the whole top floor was an installation of her drawings, including, randomly, all kinds of things about the Beatles. Of course I am very pleased by the drawings themselves, but her observations are so intriguing, I just want to have her over for a cup of tea. Or, better, go to the opera together and talk smack about everyone during intermission.
"I am tired," he went on, "of seeing ministers who will preach homophobia by day, and then after they're preaching, when the lights are off they go cruising for trade...We know you're not preaching the Bible, because if you were preaching the Bible we would have heard from you."
Sometimes, I just fucking love Al Sharpton.
What does one make when a) there is no money, b) there is no time and c) there is no inspiration? To the (bare-ish) cupboard I go.
All I really wanted for Christmas was to paint my living room black (why did I have to wait for Christmas, you ask? Because I could not justify spending $30 frivolously, but reasoned that Christmas money didn't count. Reasoned might not be the right word.) . As soon as we got off the plane from our trip (it was lovely, that you for asking), we went straight to Lowe's, came home, and started painting. I even sacrificed going out on New Year's to get it done (note to A, who graciously let us crash her family thing down down the street- thanks, and I hope that strange man was gone when you woke up.). So up went the paint, and after rearranging things literally a million times I think I know where I'm going with everything. I'm kind of being angsty about putting fresh holes in the wall, but I'm sure the feeling will pass.
