Bad Home Cooking

Kitchen Goddess four

This is the third in a series of profiles of the Kitchen Goddesses: Friends who cook and can coax major culinary experiences out of a handful of fresh produce and a few utensils. Each of these women over the years has inspired me in some way. If I can't exactly follow in their footsteps, then they've encouraged me to gimp along behind as best I can.

 A moment etched in time: Early '90s. Christina Bess (nee Thompson) and I, sitting on the porch of her 100-year-old apartment building in rural Hopewell, NJ. It was summer. Sticky, hot and green. Very unlike the summers I grew up with in Southern California. We smoked cigarettes and fretted over loves lost and loves unrequited. When it was time for lunch she took me to her garden in the back and plucked a few plum tomatoes off the vine and gathered a handful of basil. She threw them into a bowl with some olive oil and seasoning. It was perfect. We ate it with the bread she'd baked that morning. And although I've tried several times, I've never once been able to recreate that taste experience.

Chris is a poet, once silencing an entire basement-level bar in the East Village with just a few words written on paper. She is passionate about everything. She has a sprawling, crazy Italian family who fell upon me all at once one Christmas with food and questions and more food and what could I do but eat?  She's lived abroad, in England, Ireland, Italy. She was the one who first said "There are two kind of people: Pie people and bread people." (she pronounced me a pie person.) From her I learned the value of an old iron skillet and the versatility of Haiku.  Before her I hadn't realized that it was possible to make an entire day out of preparing the evening meal. Before her I didn't know about the hill towns in Tuscany or about the Jersey Shore. I didn't know about Michael Ondaatje. I really knew precious little about living well until I'd met Chris Bess.

Never mind that her first comment to me was about my advanced age (I was 27. She was 22.) She's since caught up. She's been nothing but inspiring from the start.

What's the first dish you remember making by yourself?
Cherry pie, the summer I was 11. I had worked on it all day--picking the cherries off my grandmother's backyard tree, making crust, etc. I tried to pass it out onto the porch (through an open window) where the family was eagerly anticipating their dessert, and flipped it upside-down onto the porch floor. Broken glass.  Broken heart/ego. We picked out the shards, ate it anyway, and very soon put a door in where that annoying window had been.

What's your earliest kitchen memory?
Mixing up a batch of cornbread when I was about 4 years old.  I was standing on a chair with my 2 year old brother at the counter. Mom walked away for a moment, and my brother and I elbowed each other to get control of the wooden spoon. I suddenly ended up on the kitchen floor with the bowl over my head, with grainy yellow batter dripping into my ears. Mom returned and my brother instantly began protesting "I didn't do it!" over and over, while she carried us to the tub (bowl and all) and stuck us in there, laughing like a lunatic. Looking back, it may have been then that I learned that no "catastrophe" in the kitchen ever really matters that much. Kind of liberating, no?

Who inspired your love of cooking/baking?
My Italian-American mom and grandma. They really know how to throw together a few ingredients with garlic and olive oil and make people happy. I learned a lot of the nitty gritty  from my mother-in -law who worked in the Nabisco test kitchens and will try any recipe at least once.

What's your favorite dish to make right now?
Hard to say. Once or twice a month my husband and I and our 10 and 8 year old try to make a soup to nuts meal together.  These are always the best, no matter what we make,  but lately  we have been having a lot of fun and great results w/ our ice cream maker..But , if I absolutely have to choose, it would be a pasta sauce made w/ bacon, garlic, Tabasco, white wine and cream.  Heart-cloggingly amazing, and known throughout NY and NJ to make even my Jewish friends taste the pig on a cold winter night. There is never any leftover, which is always satisfying for the home cook.

Are you a bread person or a pie person?
Pie.  I actually know quite a few folks who don't/won't eat pie. I don't get it. Life is far too short not to embrace pie. I love to bake bread too. But bread is deceptively complex, being the staff of life and all. I prefer the sweet simplicity of pie. All kinds.

Describe a dish you botched badly.
A lovely French creamed fish soup that involved creating a rich stock with crustacean shells, multiple strainings through cheesecloth, etc. In the final moments before the guests arrived I added the sherry.  But wait!  It wasn't sherry -- I grabbed the wrong bottle and it was actually the triple sec  that I had set out for that refreshing fruity aperatif!  YUCK.

Your favorite cookbook of all time?
Julia's Kitchen Wisdom by Julia Child. Slim yet generous (what I constantly strive to be.)  But I am addicted to my Cook's Illustrated subscription, too.

If you could be anywhere in the world, eating anything you wanted, where would you be, and eating what?
At the top of Monte Morello, a few miles outside Florence, at the Vecchio Ranch, eating a Pizza ai 4 Formaggi. Think farmhouse in the woods with a view over the Tuscan countryside, stone fireplaces big enough to stand in, long family-style scarred wooden tables and pitchers of cold beer to go with pizza that has the thinnest crust, and richest cheese you can stand. 

Kitchen Goddess Three

This is the second in a series of profiles of the Kitchen Goddesses: Friends who cook and can coax major culinary experiences out of a handful of fresh produce and a few utensils. Each of these women over the years has inspired me in some way. If I can't exactly follow in their footsteps, then they've encouraged me to gimp along behind as best I can.This is the second installment of Kitchen Goddesses; Interviews with friends who can cook who have inspired me.

They say sex sells. And this is indeed a very saucy pic of my friend and Kitchen Goddess Audrey. She doesn't always dress like this, but this one of her in her Halloween costume does sort of sum her up nicely. 

I met Audrey only a few years ago when we moved back to SoCal, but in that time she has influenced me greatly with her skill in the lost womanly arts.

I admit that I didn't hold cooking, baking, sewing and other householdry arts in the highest esteem until I became a mom myself. Now I find myself in awe of them, mostly because now I know what they entail.

Audrey can not only bake a cherry pie, she will can you some persimmon jam, design and execute a renaissance faire costume for your kid you'd pay hundreds of dollars for elsewhere and keep a troop of girl scouts engaged for years at a time. She's also a fully-trained artist and designer. The Gap needs to hire her now.  I've always described her to folks as Martha Stewart, if Martha had gone to art school and was cool and funky. I admire her every ability. Audge is always encouraging me, sending me new recipes, watching my back. When I cook something she loves, I am elated.   When she invites us over for a meal, we drop everything and get there as fast as we can. She's also the gold standard when it comes to mommy-ing. "Audrey makes her kids pancakes during the week," say my kids, throwing down the gauntlet. Oh yeah?...

My favorite food memory with Audrey? That would have to be last summer, when she invited me over for her home-made, garden-grown gazpacho and crostini on her sunny, flower-covered deck. All I needed was a foot massage and it would have been Spa Audrey.

What's the first dish you remember making by yourself?
Seasoned grilled hamburger patties.

What's your earliest kitchen memory?
Writing and drawing in my journals, and making ABC books while Mama cooked dinner. I also remember my mom teaching me how to eat "like a lady" by serving me a slice of sweet potato pie and instructing me in the proper way to use a knife and fork at the table.

Who inspired your love of cooking/baking?
My mom loved to cook "Gourmet-style" meals about 10 times a year. The rest of those days were usually "diet" food. I was not a big fan of those special meals as they typically included cooked mushrooms, wild rice (which I hate to this day) or wine sauce, blehh! The baking she did on these special occasions was highly anticipated, primarily because they included fats and sugar. I completely lost control when the ingredients for these items were in the house, seeing as I was deprived of things like butter, cream, chocolate, and real table sugar 350 days out of the year.

What's your favorite dish to make right now?
I still love to bake desserts. It makes my husband feel pampered and appreciated, and I can't help but feel that he is slightly proud of himself for hitchin' up with a woman who can cook.I also love a good soup too. nourishing, warm comfort food. Served with lots of warm and crispy bread or homemade rolls... yummy!

Are you a bread person or a pie person?
Like making pies, love eating bread.

Describe a dish you botched badly.
One Christmas when I was 9 or 10 my mom gave me a book filled with crafts, games and recipes. It was illustrated with reproductions of Victorian pen and ink Christmas images. Among the recipes were how to add pizzaz to an ordinary sandwich. My mistake was trying to incorporate all the suggested ingredients at once. Ham, cheese, onions, and mustard on raisin bread just wasn't too good.

Your favorite cookbook of all time?
Fanny Farmer

If you could be anywhere in the world, eating anything you wanted, where would you be, and eating what?
Sadly, I have not traveled enough to have a satisfactory answer. Give me another 30 years and maybe my experiences will be able to compete with the fantasy meals floating around in my imagination. Although for 20 minutes I wouldn't mind going back in time to that kitchen counter and enjoying a slice of sweet potato pie with my mom.

Kitchen Goddess Two

This is the first in a series of profiles of the Kitchen Goddesses: Friends who cook and can coax major culinary experiences out of a handful of fresh produce and a few utensils. Each of these women over the years has inspired me in some way. If I can't exactly follow in their footsteps, then they've encouraged me to gimp along behind as best I can.

I met Julia in The Courtyard. For a select few who were there, it is understood that the Courtyard refers to our student family housing complex at UC Berkeley. There were many courtyards at UC Village. But ours was the best one. Fifteen families, all graduate students. All with small children. Potlucks were rampant. We had neighbors from all around the globe (and Utah). Julia hailed originally from L.A. We bonded instantly.

My fondest cooking memory with Julia? The one that springs to mind first is our gazpacho factory. Our plots in the village community garden were overflowing with zucchinis and tomatoes. She taught me how to make the stuff, tasting continually for the best combo of tomato and green. Our student family kitchens were way too small for two people to actually cook together, so more usually one of us would cook while the other sat and monitored the proceedings, filling the wine glasses frequently.

What's the first dish you remember making by yourself?
"I attempted a very complicated butter cookie with strawberry jam filling at five (including reading the recipe from the cookbook).My mom found me bawling in a dark kitchen with the ingredients out and flour all over the place. I had never even helped her cook before so I think she was surprised."

What's your earliest kitchen memory?
"Being bathed in the sink"

Who inspired your love of cooking/baking?
"My step-mother among others (my sisters would probably be angry with me that I didn't say my own mother but I just don't remember her being that interested in cooking and my step-mother really was. I was her sous chef. We worked seamlessly together for hours in the kitchen. We really bonded over cooking together.)"

What's your favorite dish to make right now?
I like simple recipes. I love thinly shredded zucchini in a lemon/garlic vinaigrette with parsley and shaved parmesean.

Are you a bread person or a pie person?
I don't consider myself a pie person or a bread person, even though I've made successful bread and I've made successful pie. Because I think those were both flukes. I'm good at sauces, I'm good at soups. I'm good at vegetables.

Describe a dish you botched badly.
There have been so many - usually it's because I'm not really wanting to be cooking or not paying attention.

Your favorite cookbook of all time?
I don't have one, yet.

If you could be anywhere in the world, eating anything you wanted, where would you be, and eating what?
In Mexico, eating hot "elotes" slathered with cheese, lime and chile from the street vendor.

Date me

Ever do something and not quite believe you've done it? I like to think of myself as the type who lives by that credo. Yet in reality, all I've ever craved is the comfort of the known and the safety of the un-ventured.

Unless someone has my back. Then almost anything, apparently, is possible. Luckily, my friends seem to believe that I'm capable of impressive feats. They think that I can not only finish my novels but publish them, sell screenplays, knit my own sweaters, grow successful tomatoes and dance flamenco before a paying audience. And maybe with their help these things will come to pass. Or not. But it was a sort of thrilling moment when Julia looked up at me last week and tapped the cookbook she'd been perusing for Seder dinner desert ideas.

"Date and almond truffles."

"Excuse me?"

"Date and almond truffles," she said. "For desert."

"...we can probably buy them from the Lebanese restaurant..."

"We can make them, silly."

We stared at each other for a few beats.

"Can we do that?" I squeaked.

She started laughing.

Things involving food processors tend to scare me away. I had a food processor once, an early '80s-style Cuisinart I inherited from my step-mother. It was huge and unwieldy and resembled a space station, with all that plastic and all those mysterious attachments. And indeed it did take up a lot of space. It took me several months to screw up the courage to try it and when I plugged it in it didn't work. With relief I now use my blender instead. I'm sure it's not as functional as a proper food processor, but it's unlikely I'm going to be getting to those advanced functions anytime soon.

I tell you all this because Tmar Kweerat (or Fatima's Date and Almond Truffles) requires grinding almonds and chopped dates into a paste. Right away I was terrified. Julia took it calmly.

From Kitty Morse's: The Vegetarian Table: North Africa, p. 148

1 1/2 cup slivered almonds, toasted.

1 cup pitted dates, chopped

1 tablespoon orange flower water (Ah! This is how Seville smells, they say)

1 tablespoon honey

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 cup shredded coconut (we used unsweetened)

Put half the almonds and dates into the blender and grind into a paste. Do the same with the other half. Transfer to a medium bowl.  With your hands, blend in the orange flower water, honey and cinnamon. Shape into 1-inch balls. Roll them in coconut.

We found these cute miniature paper cups at Marukai, and we put the balls into those to chill overnight.

Were these hard to make? Not at all. But I would never have ventured them on my own. Silly, really. These, eaten with sweet mint tea and the end of the Seder meal, were a huge hit. Alas, none survived, and I'll have to make some more if I want to experience them again. Which I will, because now I know I can. Thanks be to Julia for laughing at my panic.  Maybe I'll knit a sweater for her.

Stay tuned for details about the Seder entree...lamb tagine with a thousand spices!

Julie and Julia

In preparation for my second-night Seder, Julia and I visited the Santa Monica Farmer's Market. This final day of March was sunny and bright and not too hot -- the perfect day for spending several hours perusing organic vegetables and obscure greenery.

"Oh look," said Julia. "Ramps."

"Ramps?" I looked around for the wheelchair ramps, thinking to myself, how cool of Santa Monica to make sure our nation's disabled have full access to organic fruits and vegetables.

She pointed to a box of weeds. "No, ramps. These." She picked one up. It was thin, with long green leaves and an anemic white bulb at the end. Dirt still clung to its roots. It really did look like something I'd pull out of my flower garden. I've never heard of ramps before. But then I don't read my Gourmet magazine very closely.

The vendor smiled brightly. Surely these two women would be buying a nice supply of ramps, priced at only (cough) $16 a pound. They did have a powerful, peppery taste. Maybe we could incorporate these into our planned "bitter herb salad."

Julia and her daughter are staying with us for a few days, and she is the primary reason I'm going ahead with my insane plan of hosting a Pesach Seder for nine adults and seven children next week. She's a foodie who cooked for a Parisian family in Corsica for a few years in her '20s, and continues to live a bountiful, delicious life. She's a woman I can bounce my half-baked ideas off of, someone I can watch and learn from. Best of all, she's someone who can take all the stuff about to go over in my refrigerator and make something marvelous from it.

I got home today and she's cooking up a compote. "I'm making apple sauce out of those five apples that were about to go bad in your fruit dish," she says, maddeningly matter-of-factly.

"Thanks," I say. "And why is the oven on?"

"I'm roasting those beets you forgot about in the crisper."

Later on she sliced the beets and zested some lemon over them. I stood watching her in awe.

I'm so glad Julia is here. She makes my kitchen happy. We spent several hours last night pouring over my cookbooks, and we're gonna have a kick-ass Moroccan-style seder. We're gonna make a tagine! We're even gonna make date truffles. Stand back!  It's going to be the kind of dinner party I've longed to have...which is to say, it will be a dinner party that will actually feature edible, nay, exceptional food. Because Julia is here to oversee.

We didn't buy any ramps in the end, because we figured such a gourmet ingredient would be lost on our audience. We did buy $10 worth of heirloom potatoes to roast, however, because they were colorful and presumably tasty, and because I figure that if I can utter, "These are roasted heirloom potatoes," then my transformation from bad home cook into sophisticated foodie will have begun.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Kitchen Goddess One

Originally published in May 2006

I must tell you about Leah, a girl I roomed with just after college. A girl I shared almost nothing in common with except a great, grinning love of food. Leah was a half-Chinese, half-white twin. Born and raised by artist parents in San Francisco’s North Beach, Leah's most interesting element were her looks. She was a sexy creature, with her long black hair and cinammon skin and indecipherable heritage. Ten units shy of a degree in theater from San Jose State everyone but her knew she'd never finish. A cocktail waitress. A party girl. Men swirled around her: pretty men, older men, playboy bachelors. She was uninterested in anything that wasn't shiny and exciting. She had hundreds of shoes, a mini-skirt in every hue and texture, and not a single book. She came home one afternoon to find my boyfriend and I on the living room couch engrossed in our novels and laughed all afternoon as if she’d never seen such a sight. For a while, we had the perfect living situation – she would get to bed about the time I’d get up in the morning for work, and when I returned home she’d be putting on her makeup to get out the door for her shift at a local nightclub. Sometimes I’d hear her return in the wee hours, often with friends, or a man or two, and they’d quietly take their bong hits or have their final drinks before retiring to her bedroom on the other side of the bathroom from mine. I was just out of college, working part time as a receptionist at an architecture firm and part time at an art magazine. I was madly in love with a man I’d met on the student newspaper, a man with a baritone voice and a 67’ Chevy Impala who wrote like John Steinbeck. This was back before everything. Back when I fretted about whether I’d ever really be a working writer. Back before I even wanted children. Back when $300 in the bank was cause for relief and back when I bought what is still my most valuable possession: a six-inch-thick 1923 Oxford Dictionary, found at a garage sale around the corner for just $10. Leah and I had nothing in common, and, truth be told, we didn't particularly like each other. But she was neat, and considerate in her message-taking and bill-paying. And with our schedules, we never had to spend more than an hour in the same room with each other. We didn't need to be best friends, we agreed, as long as we were good roommates.
The only thing we did share was a fascination with eating. Every month or so we’d meet at a Chinese restaurant somewhere downtown and we’d dine, both of us practically dancing a jig with anticipation. She’d order dishes on the very edge of my Caucasian ability to ingest. And except for the sea cucumber adventure, I went through every door she opened and never looked back.
At home, Leah concocted wild hybrid Asian meals out of ingredients I’d never seen or heard of before. She’d make a giant pot of rice every morning, and use it throughout the day as her staple, over which she’d throw all manner of curious things. She hipped me to kim-chi, that spicy, fermented vegetable glop that graces every Korean table. She’d crumble ground beef into an iron skillet and fry it dark brown and crunchy, almost always setting off the smoke alarms, and on top of that she’d scatter a handful of some dark, mystery ingredient pulled from a dark earthenware jar with Chinese lettering that she kept covered in tinfoil. Then she’d throw the whole thing over a bowl of rice and hand me a pair of worn wooden chopsticks and bid me dig in. Delicious. Smoky. Tangy. I developed a taste for kim-chi over rice as well. She made her own brown rice green tea. Her steamed white rice was always perfect. She kept coral-colored persimmons in her hanging basket by the kitchen window and every so often she'd stop and lean over and snatch one up to hold it to her nose to determine its ripeness.
One day Leah’s waitress shift changed and she started hanging out more during the evenings when I was home, and not surprisingly, we clashed. Soon thereafter I got my first “real” newspaper job and moved up the peninsula and out of her life. We spoke only a few times after that, mostly to argue over the phone bill. We never broke bread together again.
But to this day I remember her. I use chopsticks regularly. My love of kim-chi has surprised and delighted Korean friends met much later. The mystery ingredient she threw into her ground meat was preserved turnip, which you can buy at any Asian market, although I haven’t seen the keen little jar with the lettering for many years. Maybe Ranch 99 is too upscale for that sort of thing. Yes it looks a little funky to white eyes, I suppose, but it's really adds a delicious smoky, tart flavor to meat or rice.
I think of her every year when the persimmons come to market, and I buy them for no other reason than because I love their color and shape on my table. Funny. I bring them home and set them out, and every now and then I snatch one up and hold it to my nose, even though I don't particularly like them.
And Leah’s secret to rice is this: wash the rice first to release its spirit. Drain, spread flat on the bottom of your pot and fill with water so that it reaches the top of your thumb nail, if your thumb is just on top of, not buried in, the rice. Bring to a boil. Cover tightly and simmer for 20 minutes.
Thanks, Leah. Wherever you are.