something like this

1 interesting thing that’s happened lately is that we’ve had 2 game nights with 3 families in a span of 4 nights, playing 5 different games – and we haven’t had a game night in about 6 years. Crazy! Here’s how it happened – the first night was with some friends we’ve had since we first moved out here. We were signed on for dessert, and we thought it might be fun to make ‘game night cupcakes.’

 Basically this turned out to be buying and making candy toppers that either looked like or loosely resembled games we could think of. (How awesome are the lego candies that you can build with and eat?!) 

When we set off to the candy store that morning we saw the girls across the street and told them what we were up to. Later that afternoon, as we were assembling cupcakes, the girls stopped by with something they’d found in the city – a long, rectangular, pink marshmallow! It was a lavender marshmallow that they thought might work for some kind of decoration. Next thing we know, the girls (no fools) were thinking that we should have a game night at their house as well. 

So on Monday, they came over to our house and we had Game Night Cupcakes Round 2. 

This was particularly good, since on Friday we weren’t able to use the ridiculously beautiful marshmallow they brought over, and so we were able to cut it into cubes and make dice out of it. We went with a pink and white theme – pink dice, white chocolate (diced!), coconut, peppermint sprinkles, a couple of red skittles and chopped red vines. It was like Valentine’s in July. The girls and Hot Wheels did a terrific job decorating, as you can see:

YUM. We made the Moosewood vegan chocolate cake, which is ridiculously delicious.

It may sound like the games were taking second fiddle to all this cupcake preparation, but they were super fun. It was entertaining to play with a spread of ages and abilities in the room – that’s where games like Cranium shine. There’s something for everyone – although I have to say that every time Hot Wheels did a charade, it looked like the exact same thing, regardless of the word. Kind of a rabid race car thing. Very confusing. We’d all sit there shouting stabs in the dark – Cheetah! Bagel! Sofa! Global warming! That was challenging, but at least it made the rest of us feel a bit more confident in our acting skills. 

Always problematic.

On Sunday, I really wanted to try out a recipe for Lemon Cheescake Squares that I saw on Martha Stewart. Check out the recipe – it looked so nice and straightforward. I’m sure Dopey could have pulled this one off, but not Sleepy. I crunched up the graham crackers and put them in a bowl to make the crust. Then I measured out 3/4 cup sugar. Now, if you look at the recipe, you’ll see there aren’t many ingredients to begin with, and this sugar clearly goes in with the filling. But no, not here in our kitchen. Hot Wheels was baking with me and he asked if he could mix the sugar in with the graham crackers and I said sure! In it went. 

Only then did I realize that we were only meant to put 2 tbsp sugar into the crust. Hmm. I’m really, really depression-era reluctant to waste any type of anything, so I put it all in a zip lock bag and figured I’d deal with it another day. Meantime I had enough material to make the crust, but I’d used up the last of the sugar. Neighbors to the rescue – Tom was dropping one of our daughter’s friends off at home, so I just called the house and asked if they might be so kind as to send 3/4 cup of sugar back with him. One problem solved.

There was another problem with these bars that I can’t chalk up to sleepiness, just inexperience. When I was buying the cream cheese I thought I’d be a tad more healthy and make one of them fat free. In the back of my mind I thought it might not whip up nicely, but what the heck. Well, no one seemed to mind all that much, but these really would have been better without the fat free cream cheese. It’s hard to make it behave.

The next day we had a couple of kids over to play. It was time to experiment with the graham cracker blend. We mixed up somewhat basic chocolate chip cookie recipe, only this time I was out of white flour (seeing any patterns here?) so we had to make do with wheat and barley flour – at this point I was just throwing things in there. (A little cocoa powder? Why not?) By some miracle they came out just fine.

Shall we? This is all about my quest for perfect chocolate chip cookies. Now, those who know me well are full aware that for me, chocolate chip cookies are like pizza – even the bad ones are still good. But.

It’s been bothering me for a while now that no matter what I did – different recipes, different butter temperatures, more and less sugar – my chocolate chip cookies just came out the same way every single time. Completely flat. Let me reiterate – that didn’t stop us from eating them. But it bothered me. What was the secret to cookies of substance? Would I ever make one that I felt was bake-sale worthy? 

Then in July, the New York Times ran a great article by David Leite, who gives a bit of history and talks to some chefs about what they think the secret is to truly spectacular cookies. The end result is a recipe – they daringly titled it Chocolate Chip Cookies (adapted from Jacques Torres), but I think they should have called it the No Utensil Left Behind Cookie. Someone really didn’t want all those poor infrequently-used measuring utensils to waste away in the kitchen drawer any longer. Come out, 1/4 teaspoon! We still love you! You too, 1/3 cup – we see you in there!

I can’t tease, though, because this was the recipe I’d been waiting for. One of the most interesting techniques was chilling the dough for 36 hours, to fully incorporate the wet and dry ingredients. It also calls for a sprinkling of sea salt on top, and I’m crazy about salt on sweet. So it had to be done, and the other week I’d invited a few friends to come over for an arty/crafty night at our house, and I figured it was the perfect time to test a new recipe.

We had 9 adults and 11 kids test these cookies (I made them smaller than the recipe suggests, so instead of their 16 I had about 40 and they still seemed huge) – and they got a unanimous thumbs up. None of the kids disliked the sea salt, and some really loved it. And cue the Hallelujah chorus – they weren’t flat!!! They actually had integrity, beautiful flavor and superior texture. The next day, they were still chewy. The day after that… well they didn’t make it that far. 

Yay, New York Times! You should be getting a thank you note any day now from my friend Amy, since I’ve been whining to her about my lack of chocolate chip skillage for years now. She’ll be so relieved. 

Tom’s birthday continued till Saturday and we had a big barbeque with a bunch of great friends. Birthday + party = cupcakes. Right??

This year, we got all fancy with our party and actually hung decorations!

We love having a barbeque at this time of year, not just to celebrate our hope for Tom getting wiser, but to give our friends a chance to see Tom’s parents. They usually fly in from Adelaide some time around the end of May. It’s a nice time for a visit because the school year is wrapping up and there are such great events – picnics and open house and dinners in the park.

I absolutely love this time of year. I still get the same old thrill when I realize that summer vacation is close enough to touch. Just thinking about the last day of school brings a wash of memories to my mind – the hum of lawn mowers and the tick tick ticktickticktick of sprinklers, the smell of rain on warm pavement and the prickle of grass under bare feet. Summer was always such a broad, slow smile. I hope our kids will have the same feeling about it as they grow up.

After our barbeque on Saturday, we all trucked up to the Book Passage in Corte Madera, where our dear friend Lissa Rovetch was having a book signing with her mother, Gerda. They just teamed up to create a wonderful book titled

There Was a Man Who Loved a Rat  

And Other Vile Little Poems

Hard to beat a title like that. They gave an inspiring and entertaining presentation that no one wanted to end. Here they are:

Aren’t they stunning? You should have seen them – smart, funny and gorgeous. (And check out how Lissa’s dress matches the circle on the cover of their book. She’s brilliant and coordinated.)

So it worked like this – Gerda wrote all the vile little poems, and Lissa did the vile little drawings. The result is far from dull. Here’s one of my favorites:

There was a cunning little mobster

who kept a large and lively lobster.

He aimed the beast at people’s ears,

and some remembered it for years.

Gerda was a treasure chest of stories – rare and glimmering and abundant. From her family’s narrow escape from Germany under Nazi persecution, to her years as a draftsman during the war (she mentioned in an aside that “trigonometry is really nothing to sneeze at – it comes in very handy when you’re called to do war work”) to meeting her husband when she was a potter at Oxford and he was there on a Fulbright – every story had the entire room laughing and in awe. Lissa is an incredible story teller as well, and it was a treat to hear them play off of each other. What a gift.

We’ve always liked making pizza. Ever since my sister made it in 7th grade home ec, she and my brother and I would bake pizza religiously on Friday nights. We always made it the same way – thin crust, tomato, cheese. I’d be hard pressed to think of a better way to start the weekend.

Some time after college, I tasted a super thin crust pizza that had been baked in a wood oven. Cooked so hot and slim that the dough bubbled and the bottom was slightly crunchy…. it was perfection. Over the years, Tom and I have tried to make it that way at home. The fact that we didn’t have a wood burning oven didn’t deter us in the least. We had a pizza stone, dang it, and we were going to make that pizza one way or another. Well we tried the one way, and then another, and another, and another, but it never quite worked out the way we hoped. (Poor us – we had to eat all those failed pizzas. It was a tough job, people, but we struggled through somehow.)

Recently I came across this recipe over at Apartment Therapy and it looked promising. So we gave it a go – and it’s delicious! Here’s one of ours from last week before baking…

We put tomato, olives, sundried tomato and basil on for the first bake, and added some fresh mozzarella and a sprinkling of aged gouda for the final few minutes. Since they’re cooked at 500 degrees, they’re done before you know it! And here’s one after baking…

This one has sauce and fresh mozzarella. It can’t quite replicate the hot wood-fired taste but it’s pretty close! They’re fun to make, and our kids are crazy about the taste – double score. Ok, now I’m hungry.

We’ve had an unusual spell of incredibly summery weather around here, and it put me in the mood for some key lime pie. There’s something about key lime pie that makes me think about beaches and sunshine and bare feet – I just love it.

Usually I go for my brother in law’s recipe, which is quick and tasty and trustworthy. Since I didn’t have an occasion for this pie, it seemed a good opportunity to experiment. The recipe came from Joe’s Stone Crab, in Miami Beach. It’s a non-meringue version, as you can see, and the filling was quite good – fluffy yet full of tangy lime flavor. Yum.

I made a simple graham craker/butter crust since Hotwheels can’t have store bought crusts or nuts in the crust because of his allergies. Maybe it’s the type of graham crackers we have to buy for him, but the crust was disappointing. It didn’t hold together all that well. We managed to eat the whole thing, however, so it can’t have been that bad!!

The extra nice thing about this recipe is that because it calls for egg yolks, that means you have egg whites leftover, and that means you can have… 

mmmmeringues. Everybody in our house likes these. Ever since Hotwheels got cleared for eggs (he had to avoid them for 2 years because of the old allergies), we’ve been having such a fun time introducing him to all these great egg-based treats! He’s crazy about meringues now.

Here’s a question for all my baking friends… why are my meringues oozing a bit like that? Does it have to do with the beating time? Or how long I bake them? I’m open to any ideas. The taste is great, and they’re not super sticky, but I’d love to know what I’m doing.

Here was my daughter’s teatime the next afternoon:

Looks like a still life for Wayne Thiebaud!

Finally. Let’s talk about food.

Before I flew to Peru, I read a bunch of books and blogs about the country, and they all had recommendations regarding local tastes and treats. “Have a Pisco Sour!” they said. “Ok!!” thought I. “Definitely try some ceviche,” they advised. “You got it!” I promised. Once I arrived, my husband was dying for specifics. “What have you eaten?” he wanted to know. “What do you have for breakfast?” Food has to be one of the most exciting immersions into a different culture. So I started taking some pictures.

Here’s one of my meals courtesy of Perurail – on our Machu Picchu trip. We were in First Class, baby. We’re talkin’ table cloths and real dishes and even lap rugs for that cold early morning departure. This was Carmen’s fifth trip to Machu Picchu, and as we rode along in luxury, she thought back to her first trip, which she took with my Beautiful (and intrepid) Aunt Mary. On that particular train ride (8 hours round trip now, probably a bit longer then) the seats were wooden, and there wasn’t much in the way of amenities. Carmen was thinking that Mary might not believe the lovely ride we were having – we joked about calling her later and telling her that now they provide food rubs and aromatherapy and read to you while they feed you bonbons… very civilized indeed. 

Having been spoiled silly on the ride to Cusco, our only real option upon arrival was to order room service.

Turns out neither of us has all that much room service experience, so we were pretty giddy when the ‘light chicken soup’ and the sandwich ended up looking like this. Or maybe it was the lack of oxygen. Either way, this soup was ridiculously good. And you can see how they stacked the fries – very nice. You can also see our coca tea on the table there as well. Carmen taught me many things on this trip, and one of them was the altitude-adjusting diet; eat light, eat mild, and drink your coca tea. Very good advice.

Up at Machu Picchu, we saw some of the natives having their lunch:

Tasty!

Back in Lima, I was loving breakfast. We had this delicious fresh cheese from Cajamarca – it looked a bit like a tall block of feta, but wasn’t crumbly. It was moist and mild and addictive. Plus buckets of fresh grapes that tasted just like the Concord-style grapes I grew up with in the back yard in Massachusetts. Fresh fruit and a wheat roll and a cup of tea made it a breakfast I could wake up to happily any morning. One morning, though, I came down to see this on my plate:

Now that’s a breakfast of champions! 2 chocolate eggs, 1 real egg (with the promise of being cooked any style), a Reese’s, and smile of grapes. Look where the cheeks are – those are piles of dried corn from the mountains – crunchy, light, amazingly good.

Then, on one of my very favorite days in Peru, a gorgeous group from Carmen and Martha’s parish came over with lunch. (Another note for the possible one non-family member here – Carmen and Martha are Sisters of Charity in Chorrillos, Lima, and they belong to a truly brilliant parish there.) The Vicentinas, as they’re called, are mostly women, with one great guy in the group, who look after pretty much everything and everyone in the parish. One of them basically was the parish, back when it was starting up. Many of them have grown children, they all have jobs and families and are the kind of people who give and give and give. I was one of the lucky recipients that day.

I’ll never forget the sight of them all walking into the house in a line, arms filled with baskets and dishes and wine and glasses and flowers and the biggest ceramic baking dish I think I’ve ever seen. They embodied that group of women (the one man didn’t arrive until just before lunch) from the village that you remember from old stories; laughing, preparing, correcting, knowing, providing and just being the very heart of a place.

Here’s what they made for us -

It’s called Papas a la Huancayina – a traditional potato dish with a cheese sauce. It’s one of Carmen’s favorites, and now I know why. Lovely. We also had a chicken and rice dish from the magnificent clay pot they brought with them – the rice had been cooked in a light puree of cilantro and spinach, so it was green and crazy good. The chicken was also so tasty I’m glad there were lots of people there or I would have eaten it all! That meal was memorable not only for the tastes but for the laughter and conviviality – the Vicentinas were so warm and welcoming and we had some fun trading recipes around. 

Martha’s stunning nieces, Romina and Roxana, run a tour company called Highland Peru Tours - I couldn’t recommend them more if you’re headed to Peru. They set us up with our brilliant guides in Cusco and Machu Picchu, and they managed all our arrangements with absolute ease and efficiency. It was a gift to meet them. As if that weren’t enough, they also treated us to a beautiful buffet lunch in Miraflores. Oh, yum. I finally had my ceviche – it was perfect. In fact, I could have eaten nothing else. But I did. It was so good! At the top of the photo, you can just see my glass of chicha morada, which is made from purple corn and in this case was not fermented (I had serious food to attend to and needed my wits about me) and the flavor was mild and sweet.

This lunch was wonderful and varied and at the end of it I figured I was set for the rest of the week. But oh, no – we had a birthday party that night at one of the Vicentina’s homes and they brought out an enormous dish of chicken and potatoes with super spicy delicious sauce. I explained, or rather Martha explained, that we’d already eaten – so they disappeared into the kitchen and brought it back to me, minus one small piece of meat. It was a tough job, but someone had to eat that beautiful meal. I have no regrets.

What an abundance of wonderful tastes. I wish I had photos from the markets – bags and bags of every possible color and size of potato. Spices, grains, cheeses, fruits – all beautiful and varied. I wish I had some shots of the dishes that Martha made for us – her father was a chef, her mother an amazing cook as well – and she put together the most beautiful soup, wontons, chicken and potatoes… oh la la I wish I could intern with her! I did get a shot of one treat she made for me:

That’s my Pisco Sour in there!!! What’s hard to see in this picture is that the bottle on the left just has a piece of tape stuck to the front with ‘PISCO’ handwritten on it. Bit dodgy for a Sister of Charity, don’t you think?

It was delicious. 

Some of my fondest memories are wrapped up in tasty packages. In fact, not that long ago some friends of mine started listing their favorite food memories, and I quickly realized that my list was embarrassingly long. It was also wonderfully rich, though, since the items were all paired with specific people. When I dream about the Nime Chow from Apsara’s in Providence, I hear my best college friends laughing and talking all at once. I’m still amazed by the perfect walnut meringue that finished a gorgeous dinner with my husband and parents-in-law at Greens in San Francisco. When I think of favorite specific foods, they always fill my memory with favorite friends as well.

Dominating the taste memory hierarchy, however, are my childhood foods of epic proportions. These are the ones I loved, but only had on special occasions. Mind you, we had lovely things to eat all the time – kids at school would always want to trade for my homemade cookies. There was just something big about those apple pies or dinner rolls that graced the table less frequently. You can count on it that all the cousins on my mother’s side still dream about our Nana’s incomparable chocolate chip cookies. I still remember sitting at my grandfather’s kitchen table, eyeing my Beautiful Aunt Mary’s killer Irishbread and waiting for the moment when I could have a piece. These memories are interwoven with anticipation and celebration, which makes them heavy hitters.

 At Easter I make some of the foods from these childhood memories, to share them with my friends and my children… because otherwise I’d eat them all by myself in about an afternoon.

Our first allstar Easter Item in today’s review is Mum’s cinnamon rolls, batting a stunning career average of .400. These rolls are crazy good. Here they are, progressing from dough to first rise, to second rise, to mostly eaten:

This year I proved to myself that you can, actually, start these rolls at 8:30 pm the night before. Something in me thinks that you shouldn’t begin working with yeast after about 4, unless you’re making pizza dough. 

The second (and last) item in this year’s review: Lena’s Ricotta Pie. This treat is legendary in our family. Every Christmas and Easter morning, without fail, we would visit our next door neighbors. They were remarkable Italian cooks; when we walked in to their kitchen on those mornings, the house would be filled with the aroma of the 900 lasagnas and dishes they were making for the family dinner. It would be about 10 am, and they would place before us on those holiday mornings an arrangement of a dozen different types of cookies. COOKIES. 10 am. And as if that were not enough, people, they would ask us if we would like a glass of ginger ale. Have a heart attack.

Easter was super special, though, because they would make Ricotta Pie. It’s a pastry that really looks a lot more like a calzone than a pie, and they’d cut it into 1 inch wide slices of pure heaven. They only made this on Easter – we’d have it that morning, and sometimes they’d give us one to take home. We’d savor it, and then settle in for the long year’s wait till the next Easter. It was inconceivable to have it, say, in July. Something terrible would happen.

Here’s what it looks like in the process:

Before my first California Easter, I called Lena to ask if I might be able to get her recipe. She said sure – and within a week she’d FedExed me not only the recipe, but two of the ricotta pies as well. On the recipe she wrote out the measurements for the sweet ricotta filling, and then just wrote “use pie crust mix,” and the temperature. Well she had a little too much faith in me, because I wasn’t sure what that meant, so I used a pie crust mix and filled it, and boy! was that ricotta pie chubby. The proportions were all wrong. So I called her again and told her what I did. She nearly cried laughing and choked out, “Laura – that recipe makes 12 pies!!” Ah yes. So here’s the finished product:

It is a thing of beauty.

Now why do I write these posts at night? I really have to go to bed, and I’m starving. 

Some things get better with age, and a good cookbook has got to be one of those things. I always fall for an old cookbook that’s worn, has a few stains, and is filled with notes on the pages like ‘double the spices’ or ‘less sugar’ or ‘blech!’ (I know what you’re thinking – ‘less sugar??!’) At some point the cookbook almost becomes a journal, and I often wish I had cookbooks like that from my grandmothers. I would just love to know which recipes they relied on and which seemed crazy to them. It would be such an interesting glimpse into their lives.

About ten years ago, Mum gave me a King Arthur cookbook (the 200th anniversary one) and it is one of my go-to books. I appreciate the approach they took; really delving into ingredients and methods to help the reader develop beyond the recipes into a more intuitive baker. My copy is certainly well loved – a few of the pages are threatening to pop out, and there are certainly plenty of stains and notes and bookmarks. I may not be a truly intuitive baker yet, but I’ve certainly learned a great deal.

One of my favorites is the basic scone recipe, which is widely open to interpretation.

These are Saturday morning orange raisin scones. The change here is that instead of buttermilk, I sour the milk with half a cup of fresh squeezed orange juice and half a cup of milk, with an egg mixed in. Doesn’t that sound delicious? With orange zest mixed in as well, it gives the scones a great flavor.

Also on deck for the weekend was my first foray into a light and lacy kind of knit scarf. Here is a silhouetted picture of questionable quality:

The recipe is from Joelle Hoverson’s Last Minute Knitted Gifts, and although I didn’t get a shot of the final product, it has a great cobwebby feeling to it when it’s done. For some reason, my brain constantly misfires when I try to refer to a knitting pattern. I always, always say recipe first and then think, hmm that’s not quite right. But what is the difference, really? They both give you ingredients and instructions and timing. I’m a fairly new knitter, so I’m wondering if people’s knitting books ever end up like their cookbooks, with notes and creases and loose pages? Maybe less crumbs – although there’s a knitting group that meets at the Starbucks up the street from us, so the crumb factor might be pretty much the same for them!

This weekend, my lovely neighbor Joan gave me some lemons from her tree. These lemons were gorgeous. Please see Exhibit A:

(Let the record show that my above statement refers only to the gorgeousness of the lemons with no stipulation as to the quality of the fingernails.) The lemons were so lovely, I thought long and hard about what would do them justice. Then it hit me – I would make lemon bars to take to the superbowl party we were attending that afternoon. Excellent! It would be a no brainer – I’ve made lemon bars, oh, at least 18 times before and they were always perfect.

Well, it pays to brace yourself for the worst. I grew up right outside of Boston, so this comes as second nature to me, although it never seems to sting less just because you knew better. I thought they were a little wiggly looking when I finished baking them, so I gave them an extra five minutes. Plus I let them cool completely in the pan – just took the whole thing over to the party and cut them there. Well, the word ‘cut’ is a little bit of a stretch in this case. I scooped a couple out and left the rest in the pan in dismay. Here’s the thing, though – lemon pudding is pretty tasty!

(If this bar doesn’t look soupy to you, it’s just because it has had two days to try and get its act together.)