Locally Grown Girl

allergens

When I was a kid, I would get hives if I ate strawberries. That went away, and I got hives from eating chocolate. That also went away. I know that these went away because I ate the food again. Then the itchy mouth that I would get from pecans and walnuts turned into anaphylaxis. That has not gone away. Then I ate some amazing oysters, and ended up with violent vomiting for 36 hours and very painful weeklong rash that covered more than half my body. It clicked that an earlier bout of what was thought to be food poisoning might have been a reaction to some cooked mussels. 

I'm careful about such things, but I'm also more informed than most. I've done a lot of research and know that there isn't really such a classification as "tree nut"--there are drupes, like almonds and pistachios (related to stone fruits), and hazelnuts are related to birch trees, while chestnuts are closer to oaks and beeches. Cashews are their own weird thing, as are coconuts. Pine nuts are the seeds from any number of pine tree species. I can eat all of these with nothing but delight. Brazil nuts, pecans and English walnuts send me into anaphylaxis. No idea about macadamia nuts; I've never had one. When I first ate a pistachio, I did so when I had my epi-pen in hand, and a clear schedule for the evening, and the consent of my husband, who was up for rushing me to the ER if necessary. I totally get that I'm the weirdo with this attitude. Life is a gift, and life is also a short-term problem. I wear my seat belt, but I don't live in a bubble. 

I also know a lot of people who lie about allergies. Being allergic is a socially acceptable way to get out of eating something you don't want to; this is not a secret. It's seen as more polite than just saying you don't like something, chefs in particular here it all the time. There are also a lot of parents, some I know well and some I only read about, who claim life-threatening allergies in their kids, when what they really mean is "when I took my kid to be tested, the doctor scared the crap out of me." The kid has never actually had anaphylaxis, they simply had a very reactive test done. Allergies being as changeable as they are, a test when they're 5 could be irrelevant when they are 6; in my experience as a patient, allergists are not always forthcoming about this, because they don't want to be liable in case of a horrible incident.

As a non-parent, there are days when "life-threatening allergies" sounds not unlike "my kid is a genius." Some of what I hear presented as fact--like a kid can't even be in the same room as a peanut--I really wonder about. I find it interesting that I can physically handle walnuts with no problems at all, but any sort of contact between nut juice and those oh-so-absorbent tissues in my mouth has my gums bleeding, my eustachian tube on fire, and my mouth exploding in pain within seconds. An actual piece of nut, chewed and swallowed, equals a visit from an EMT.  Yes, you over-protective parent folks, your kid will also get into Hogwarts, win an Olympic medal and play Carnegie Hall--assuming they're not killed by a nearby peanut in elementary school. When parents get into those absurd one-upsmanship conversations about how special and/or fragile their darling child is--well, as someone who is generally an eavesdropper in those conversations, they sound like idiots. Today's parents tend to be a fearful bunch. And when you combine this fear with the nationwide tendency to dumb down the food our kids eat--chicken nuggets, pre-cut apple slices, mac-n-cheese--well, it looks like another form of helicopter parenting, and as such deserves no approval. 

This sounds like I am a cruel and compassionless jerk, which I am not. I go to great lengths to feed people food they can eat, and that they will like, even though I have friends and family members who are variously low-carb, low-fat, low-salt, low glycemic index, vegan, vegetarian, pescetarian, soy-free, dairy-free, gluten-free and sugar-free--or just run-of-the-mill picky eaters--and it is absurdly complicated to feed them all. I also hope that my cavalier attitude about my own allergies provides a different perspective. Having a food allergy is not like having cancer. It's easy to work around, it's not a death sentence, it's not a "fight" to "win" sort of idea, and for the most part it's not even that big of a deal. It's more like being a natural redhead--you're a bit of a freak of nature, and you should live with it for a while, until your body changes again. And yes, I just called myself a freak of nature, and I do not hate myself or those I know with allergies. It's not a great evolutionary tactic, you know? 

It's sweet and well-intentioned when parents go to lengths to provide kids' classrooms with "allergen-free food" but I wonder--how are the kids who can't eat almonds cleared to eat apricot fruit leather? What about kids like me, who got hives from strawberries, or the guy I know in England who's allergic to pears, of all things, or the kid who thanks to a rough start in life has oral aversion and eating is a real struggle? How do veggies and a bowl of hummus help a woman who can't eat garlic? The made-up term "allergen-free" relieves some parents, but it certainly doesn't mean it's all-inclusive. If the US suddenly got an influx of SE Asian or Japanese immigrants, whose populations have a much higher rate of rice allergies, then suddenly the gluten-free mixes would be a big problem. And meanwhile, Seattle's in the midst of a whooping cough epidemic because we've lost our herd immunity, and I've read that Vashon Island has lost its herd immunity to polio. You don't get your kid immunized against polio, but you worry about peanuts? Your theoretical priorities are utterly fucked up. 

What I would love to see: a culture where medical science helped people cope with fear, rather than inspired fear. Inclusiveness without smugness, and celebratory group activities that didn't revolve entirely around food. A balance of personal responsibility and societal support. A new way of talking about food, so people didn't have to lie about allergies to be served food they liked. An agreement that there is no such thing as perfect health, and that minor ailments like diarrhea, a rash or a headache are both avoidable and not the end of the world if they do happen. 

Baking: A Manifesto

I want to lay out my arguments for something I've been insisting on for years to individuals. The conversation goes something like this:
Friend: I'm intimidated by baking. You have to be so precise. It's not like cooking. Cooking is art; baking is science. 
Me: You are wrong. Stop justifiying your fear and/or willful ignorance. Take this warm, freshly baked cookie and shut up.

Depending on the person, I may be slightly more polite or encouraging, but that's only on the outside. 

This whole "baking is a science, cooking is an art" idea is one of the biggest myths of the food world. They both have absolute rules, and they both have basic techniques that allow tremendous flexibility within a framework. Both are based on chemistry and physics and a touch of botany and biology (microbiology, in the case of yeast baking). Both, in the hands of the right person, are an art. 

What are the origins of this myth? It all got going around the turn of the 20th century, when numerous baking-related shifts were happening in this country, coupled with the world-changing scientific developments of the Industrial Revolution. Between the 1860s and 1900s, the "domestic arts" became the "domestic sciences." As part of the efforts of first wave feminists to have women's work recognized as having equal value with men's work, schools were springing up all over the East Coast, concerned with teaching future cooks and housekeepers about germ theory (first presented to the world by Pasteur in 1864) and how and why to use measuring cups (invented in 1879). Precision was key, and imprecision could be deadly--that's how critical women's work became. Louisa May Alcott fans should recognize these ideas--just think of Rose learning how to make "a wholesome loaf" for her beloved uncle, or the patty pans of Little Men. 

The American Women's Home (1869) by Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe is a great example of this--suggesting that Mother's bread was frequently a blackened and inedible blob, and possibly unhealthy to boot; bread baked by immigrant maids was likely to cause the family to drop dead on the spot. The book refers to "savages" boiling lumps of flour and water and saying "Man eat dis. He no die." In the same chapter, they write "the unknown horrors of dyspepsia from bad bread are a topic over which we willing a veil." By turning to science, poor ignorant mothers and even poorer maids everywhere could spare their families or future employers malnutrition, disease, and those unknown horrors of dyspepsia.

Yes, the insistence on science in the kitchen affected cooking, too--resulting in generations of tough, overcooked meat. But bread was more than half the diet for most of America (the Beechers considered bread to be the fundamental item for their chapters on healthy food and good cooking), and baking benefitted more directly from the use of measuring cups, so science took over baking to a larger degree than in cooking. Good Housekeeping began publishing in 1885, and opened its test kitchen in 1900; I dug up a fine GH lesson in breadmaking from 1912 that manages to be funny, helpful, guilt-inducing and vaguely terrifying all at once. 

In 1906, the Pure Food Act came into being. Today, we think of this as devoted to the meatpacking industry, but there's another broad component: the PFA made it illegal to make, move or sell adulterated food. Today, that means melamine from China--but in 1906, it primarily meant shoddy bakers making their bread cheaper by adding chalk or sawdust or whatever was cheap and vaguely flour-like in composition.

There was plenty of public fury over cheating bakers, but rather than encouraging city riots against neighborhood bread shops, the more general tone tried to be one of education, tied to everyone's favorite teacher, consumer-driven shame. Good Housekeeping created its Bureau of Food, Sanitation and Health in 1913. Today, a word association game would add in the words "meat" and "bacteria"--but again, Americans ate drastically less meat a century ago than they did today. Their word association would lead them to add "germs", "canned goods" and "bread." 

The PFA also affected flour companies. A 1920s cookbook from Salina, Kansas that belonged to my great-grandmother (it's too fragile to scan, or I would supply images) includes several ads for flour. There's "the old reliable family flour" versus "scientifically milled from select Kansas turkey hard wheat" versus "success in your kitchen is assured if you use Robin's Best Flour". There's also a "scientific rotary fruit and vegetable press" (it's just a food mill)...and in the realm of irrelevant oddities, there's an ad for "milk-fed poultry." These ads laid the groundwork for my last point in the myth building. 

We can't escape baking mixes. The earliest were for custard, followed by pancakes and biscuits; cakes were later, kicking off in the 1930s but not really taking off until after World War II. For comparison, Hamburger Helper--the closest cooking version of a baking mix I can think of--wasn't introduced until 1971! I've read that the removal of bad-tasting powdered eggs were key in making the baking mixes popular, in part because of the taste but also because, supposedly, women wanted to feel like they were doing more than just adding water to a mix. The interesting thing that is tied to these mixes is the decades-long ad campaign targeted towards promoting their convenience and reliability--which nicely followed up on the earlier messages from the flour companies. By the time women began working out of the home in larger numbers (around the time that Hamburger Helper came into being), cake mixes got the missing touch of guilt--you might work, but you can still show your kids you love them with a cake, which is just as perfect and capable as you are yourself. 

What we've got is 130 years of baking-related fear, driven in part by genuine food safety issues, but primarily by advertising campaigns. It's absurd, and certainly not what the creators of "domestic science" schools intended. It's time to get over it. 

I've baked nearly my whole life; when I begged for an Easy-Bake oven, mom told me to use the stove. My brother and I were very early readers, and when I was about 4, we shared his Betty Crocker kid's cookbook--I loved making snickerdoodles. Around the age of 10, we had a discussion about why most of the jars in mom's spice cabinet didn't show up in our cookie recipes; the result was god-awful oregano cookies. The holiday classic Chocolate Crinkles, we still call Chocolate Glop Cookies, because the first time we baked them, we missed the line about "refrigerate for at least 3 hours." They were still tasty--just thin and chewy, and not very pretty. I still have accidents, like the time I used double the salt in my regular (very brown sugar heavy) chocolate chip cookies and everyone went nuts--so hello, salted caramel chocolate chip cookies. 

The rules that exist in baking are no more difficult or stringent than those for cooking. The technique for puff pastry is no more complicated than properly butterflying a chicken. Sauces are flexible, and can be adjusted at the last second for flavor--so can cookies, right up to the point that you put them in the oven. More vanilla or salt? A bit more flour? Not lemony enough, needs more juice and/or zest and/or oil? I do that all the time. Just like cooking, you can't actually undo what you've done, but there's plenty of tinkering. And pie crust? Good lord, it's a little different every time you make it. So is marinara sauce.

The importance of measuring cups has lately been overtaken by people insisting that scales are vastly superior to measuring cups. This is simply a sign that nerds rule the world, not that you can't bake delicious things without a scale. Case in point: I tested a doughnut recipe for a friend, and didn't quite get that her flour measuring instructions weren't the dip/sweep method. What I ended up with had too much flour--more like a deep-fried cinnamon roll. Obviously, this is not a bad thing to eat; my neighbors happily gobbled what my own household couldn't finish. Many people might even prefer my accident to a doughnut; it had a lovely tender crunch rather than the soft, light cushion that is a Pershing. Is it what the recipe developer intended? Not at all. Was I lazy, confused and imprecise? Yep. Was it delicious? Absolutely. 

And really--isn't the goal of all bakers to make delicious things to eat? It's no more a precise science than all cooking. Learn the minimal basic rules, follow a few recipes, come up with your own ideas, and go from there. Just don't put oregano in the cookies. 

why the momofuku milk bar book is the best book ever

On page 85, I stumbled across this line while reading the Pistachio Cake recipe (for the record: pistachio cake, lemon curd, pistachion butter cream). 
"Once all of the egg whites have been incorporated, you will have a snotty green soup in your mixing bowl. Right on."
I already loved the book and thanks to "Right on" I now love it 100x more.  

For complicated reasons that will remain entirely unexamined here, it reminded me of a lunch a handful of years ago, when my brother and I were both writing up a handful of short reviews for an alt-weekly's Best Restaurants issue. We were at an excellent barbecue joint, and we started a contest in ridiculous superlatives about how great his sandwich was. He won, or I think it was his line although we both tend to lose track of these things and it's entirely possible that its questionable brilliance half belongs to each of us: "I loved the sandwich so much, I fucked it on the table in front of my sister."  

No, the line was not actually used in print. The alt weekly wasn't that alt. 

packaging

Getting cabin fever with my cold, so I ventured out this afternoon for pho deep in the Rainier Valley. Afterwards, I popped into my favorite Vietnamese bakery--Q Bakery at Graham & MLK (which is not remotely Columbia City, as Yelp claims). I picked up a rather random selection of treats--custard puffs, something like housemade corn nuts, sesame caramel patties, housemade yogurt (which is half sweetened condensed milk and SO GOOD), a couple giant/delicious/preposterously cheap sesame bread sticks (seriously--the size of my arm, for 60 cents). After I was rung up, Cap'n pointed out a case tucked in the corner that had various canned goods--mostly pates of various kinds, and some fancy tins of mushrooms. The weird one was butter. 

The diameter was similar to a CD, and about as tall as a large can of tuna--either 11 or 12 ounce total. It was a sad greyish-lilac color, like a dingy 80s bridesmaid dress, with darker cursive writing on it. The name brand wasn't obvious, but I remember it starting with a B. Basically all I can find online for canned butter is this Red Feather brand, which is from New Zealand or possibly Australia, depending on which web source I trust. There's one Austalian company that seems to make five different brands of canned butter, primarily for the Asian market, but with at least a small clientele of survivalist weirdos from around the world. I hesitated at the $11 price--my fancy farmers market butter is about 65 cents per ounce and this stuff is about a buck an ounce. I'll pick some up on my next trip just to try it--a few bloggers mention that they tried other brands on a whim after a trip to an Asian grocery store, and were surprised at the high quality. 

Finding it feels a bit like finding milk in a vacu-bag. It's perfectly reasonable for that food to be in that packaging, and it could be totally common in other regions--but it's not at all what I'm used to seeing.  

The Cookies

I don't know how many years I have baked this cookie recipe. Pre-recipe, I did a lot of tinkering, trying with little success to get what Cook's Illustrated figured out so methodically. I like a chewy cookie, with a thin, crisp edge, and lots of flavor in the actual dough. A few adjustments have been made by me over the years (dark brown sugar, the urging to use Mexican vanilla, a slight increase in flour), but essentially it belongs to Cook's Illustrated. The variation at the end that takes them stupidly over the top, is my own.
Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies
1/2 cup white sugar
1 1/8 cup packed dark brown sugar
1 1/2 sticks butter, melted
1 egg
1 egg yolk
2 1/2 teaspoons Mexican vanilla or the scrapings of a 6" Mexican vanilla bean
2 1/4 cups Washington White all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 to 1 1/2 cups chocolate chips
Preheat the oven to 325, and line two big cookie sheets with parchment or foil. Combine the sugars in the mixing bowl of a stand mixer, and blend using the paddle attachment on low speed. Add the butter, and beat until well blended. Add egg, and beat until fully incorporated. Add egg yolk and full quantity of vanilla or vanilla bean and beat until full incorporated once again. With the mixer off, pour in the flour, salt and soda. Turn the blender on low, and blend, using a spatula on the sides or bottom if need be.
Add the chips by hand with a spatula. Mix in enough that you're satisfied it's the right amount.
Drop in lumps on the baking sheet, aiming for a lump about 2.5" across (or about 2 tablespoons of dough). Leave an inch or two between lumps; these cookies will spread and flatten somewhat.
I judge they're done by the look and feel of them--light brown, set edges, and soft, puffy centers. My current oven bakes all 24 cookies at once, in 12 minutes.

For a milk chocolate variation: Add another tablespoon of brown sugar, up the salt to a total of 1 teaspoon, and use milk chocolate chips in place of dark. It's like a salted caramel cookie, and it's just delicious.

For a Dear God Won't Somebody Make It Stop variation: Preheat the oven to 300 degrees. Pat half the dough into an unbuttered 9 x 13 pan. Bake for 7 minutes. While still hot, pour 1 1/4 cups of caramel sauce over the pan. Use the remaining half of the dough to crumble over the caramel sauce. (It doesn't have to be done perfectly, don't burn your fingers in attempting to make it so.) Return to the oven and bake until totally firm and slightly crisp-looking at the edges, and set in the middle (18-24 minutes). Let cool, and cut into fairly small squares; these are (obviously) rich.

My preferred caramel sauce for this very homestyle American cookie bar is one from Borden: 2/3 cup evaporated milk and a bag of Kraft caramels, melted together over medium-low heat. Stir so it doesn't stick and so it melts evenly. It's a richer version of bottled caramel sauce, but the Mrs. Richardson's brand is approximately the same.

Burned Tongue

I am impatient. Not always with people, but always--always--with food. Pizza is the most damaging, I think--that boiling cheese is really painful--but certainly that long chest-burn that happens when gulping a hot drink is also really unpleasant. I know better, but I don't care.

At this moment, I have a pan of bubbling-hot jam crumble bars cooling on the counter. I used this recipe (with alternations you'll read in a moment) and the house smells like warm butter and sugar and the actual pan of cookies smells like butter, sugar and the homemade cherry jam I used and I can't stand it. I know they'll just fall apart if I cut them, so here I am. Pretending to be patient.

Ever since I made the cherry jam last weekend, I've been thinking how good it would be in one of those classic crumble bars--no oatmeal, no nuts, just butter, sugar, flour and jam. Every version in my cookbooks seemed to involve either oatmeal (I just wanted a jam delivery device, no oat flavor) or seemed more like a jam-topped butterscotch brownie, with brown sugar and an egg. Bleh. I'm also just not in the habit of cooking with nuts--I'm no longer allergic to hazelnuts, but my experiments haven't progressed past nutella.

So with that link as a starting point, I went with this:
Ouch That Hurts Cherry Crumble Bars
2 cups flour
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1/2 tsp lemon zest
3/4 cup cold butter, cut into 1" chunks
1 cup sour cherry jam

Preheat Oven to 375.
In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, powdered sugar and lemon zest. Using fingers or a pastry knife, cut in cold butter chunks until the mix is pale yellow and crumbly, but will clump together if you squeeze it. (Think pie crust or biscuits, before the water's added.)
Pour about 2/3 of the crumbs into an ungreased 9 x 9 pan, and pat down into a flat cake. Don't press too hard--you just want it to hold together, not become one with the pan. Pour and/or spread the jam on top, going almost (but not quite) to the very edge. Sprinkle the remaining crumbs in an even layer on top of the jam.

While the original baking time in the link says 25-30 minutes "or until crumbs are golden", mine were a delicous golden brown at 22 minutes.

They're still too hot to cut, but to hell with it. I can't wait another minute.

Buttermilk Biscuity Biscuits

This morning, the brother came to join us for one of the world's great (and very unhealthy) breakfasts: biscuits and gravy. We have something of a sausage surplus, so I used up a pack from Wooly Pigs and made a couple dozen buttermilk biscuits. The sausage and gravy were great (hard to go wrong with that sausage), and I was even happier with the biscuits than normal (and normally, my biscuits make me pretty damn happy).

I'll post the recipe in a moment, but first I want to rave about a product. First, the packaging is all cutie pie; I do love a cartoon chef. More importantly, it does exactly what buttermilk is supposed to do: Provide richer flavor and color, a finer crumb and create a more tender overall biscuit. Check the label of a carton in the dairy section labeled "buttermilk" and it's gross--mostly skim milk and seaweed, and it's never added anything worth noting to any recipe of mine. I noticed years ago that powdered buttermilk was actually an improvement (John Thorne mentions actually buying buttermilk culture online in one of his books; he also says that the powder beats the liquid, which made me feel all proud), but the powder I had was pretty clumpy/cakey and hard to dissolve properly. The flavor was there, but it was subtle, and it didn't do much to texture or color. I finally used the last bit, and Cap'n grabbed the new brand at QFC (it was the only kind he saw). It's got noticeable tanginess, and it also dissolves quickly.

So now to the biscuits. I like a biscuit with edges that are crisp and a little crumbly, and then some nice flaky layers in the middle section. I want 'em so tall they tip over a bit, and I want 'em easy to make--these take me about 10 minutes, and they bake just long enough to throw together some gravy. If all you have is salted butter, scale back the salt amount to just a dash, or they're too salty to work with jam.

4 cups flour
2 Tbsp brown sugar
2 Tbsp white sugar
2 Tbsp baking powder
4 Tbsp buttermilk powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup cold unsalted butter, chopped into 1" cubes
1 1/3 cups water
First, preheat the oven to 450 degrees.
Combine all the dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl. Using either your fingers, a pastry cutter, or two knives, mix the cold butter chunks into the dry ingredients, until there aren't any chunks left and the dry mix is more like fresh breadcrumbs or damp sand. Make a well in the middle, and pour all the water in at once. Mix together with either a large fork or a silicone spatula (it'll stick if you use a wooden spoon); beat it all together for about 30 seconds. Turn the dough out onto a large board or counter top, fold it and knead it about a half-dozen times, and pat it into a rectangle (thickness is the important dimension: you want it about 2" thick and fairly even all the way across). With a large, sharp knife, cut the rectangle of dough into squares about 2.5" across. Transfer to a baking sheet, leaving about an inch between each biscuit. I bake these for 11 minutes, but with such a hot oven, you'll probably want to set a timer for about 9 minutes and peek until they look brown enough on top. Serve lava-hot, with just about anything. More importantly, feed them to me. This makes about 16 biscuits, sized so two per person is about right for a breakfast.
A minor note on the baking sheet: I prefer baking these on an non-insulated sheet. The bottom seems to crisp up a bit more, but it's subtle. If insulated sheets are all you've got, those will work almost as well. And--I learned this from my mom--I always line my baking sheets with tinfoil, not parchment. It's not really necessary, but it does save me some washing, and I do reuse the foil if at all possible so it doesn't feel like some kind of eco-nightmare.

Cookies

I purchased the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion about a month ago; even though I already own several cookie-only cookbooks, this one has all kinds of treats I've never even thought of before, let alone seen in print (utterly brilliant: pumpkin-molasses whoopee pies). It's also an excellent source of baking science, including a clear explanation of why some recipes benefit from shortening (which has to do with butter having a higher water content and thus creating more spread). Plenty of fun, plenty of fact--it's what I like in a cookbook.

And then there's this problem, which is much more about me than it is about them: In their "essentials" section, there are multiple versions of the basic, popular American cookie varieties. Each version has a single adjective, like "chewy chocolate chip cookies" or "soft oatmeal cookies", and in some cases this is enough to establish which version will be preferred in this household. But what happens--as did today--when I want an oatmeal cookie that is both soft AND chewy? I end up making an educated guess based on the content of the recipe's introduction and the ingredient list. As I have never made any oatmeal cookies that required corn syrup (the "chewy" version), but the "soft" ones sounded like undercooked oat-lumps in the introduction, I based my choice on the intro. They certainly are chewy--almost more like a warm-from-the-oven lace cookie; I now get what the roll of corn syrup is. The results are quite good (I made 1/3 of the batch with chocolate chips, 1/3 with chocolate and coconut, and 1/3 with chopped, dried apricots).

In comparison, my previous default cookie book is the baking compendium from Cook's Illustrated. Their recipes have an introduction that's longer than a few sentences, so it's easier to establish what to expect from a given recipe. They're quite clear about what they set out to do, whether it's a brownie that's midpoint between chewy and fudgy or a chocolate chip cookie that has the same fat goodness of the ones sold at chain bakeries. If they include something unexpected, like corn syrup, there's a paragraph explaining its purpose.

So: I've learned that I'm Ms. Picky, and Cook's Illustrated has only encouraged that about me over the 15 years or so that I've read the magazine that the books are compiled from. I've also learned that when baking a "basic" cookie, I'll stick with CI, and pull out the King Arthur book for the fun, elaborate goodies and special twists (like the salty oatmeal cookies) that CI doesn't usually cover.

In other cookie news, I want to report the general deliciousness of a cookie I haven't made in many years, which appears in the Fannie Farmer cookbook under the name "Linzer Schnitten". It's a rich dough, seasoned mostly with cloves and lemon zest, filled with jam (I use raspberry) and brushed with a sweet egg glaze; it's not like other linzer cookies that are a cookie version of the classic torte (ground almonds, no spice, lattice-topped), but more of a spicy jam thumbprint cookie. I found an identical recipe online at hindustanlink, of all unexpected places to track down an Americanized version of a very Euro cookie.

If you make them, know that if you follow the "make the groove" directions for the jam tunnel it will cause the jam to pour all over your oven. One way or another, make sure that the jam is fully contained within four edges. The cookies are fine if you cut them out and make a little spoon (or thumb) divot for the jam, or you can just fiddle around with the short edges of the strips (per the recipe directions) and create a jam-containing dough lip (which may be the most unappealing image I've ever created).

Special Bonus

I hope the Duncan Hines marketing folks enjoyed repackaging their lava cake as much as I enjoyed reading the box. What other dessert can you name that includes "20 Percent More Lava"? Lava: it's what's for dinner.

Two Kinds of Food

First Kind of Food:
I've made enough batches to report that making filled cupcakes is, in fact, a piece of cake. And universally thrilling for the people who eat them, which is fun: A cupcake always brings a smile, but a cupcake filled with thick chocolate pudding brings squeals of delight. The technique I've been using is in no way difficult, but on the fiddly side of the dessert spectrum. Because of the extra bits of work, I started cheating with cake mixes (and even instant pudding) with no change in the degree of squealy delight from the eaters. Part of that, I think, is that I add real flavorings to the cake mixes--extra cocoa, instant coffee and vanilla to chocolate cake; lots of extra vanilla to yellow cake; fresh lemon zest and juice to lemon cake. Adding a tablespoon of cocoa to the chocolate pudding makes a great difference, too. (I always use Pernigotti cocoa, by the way.)

So the technique: Let the cupcakes cool to room temperature. Using a small, non-serrated and very sharp paring knife, cut a circle of cake out of each cupcake. Don't cut all the way through to the bottom of the cake, and leave enough cake around the perimeter so it won't tear. Once you've cut all the way around the top, you should be able to gently lift off the section you've just cut. Take the "plug" you've just removed and slice off the center part of the cake, leaving a thin disk of cake. Fill the cupcake's hole with chilled instant pudding or pastry cream, lemon curd or fruit puree, leaving a space at the top that is approximately as thick as the disk of cake you have waiting. Place the disk back on top of the filling. Once they're all done, chill them for a bit before frosting--the filling will set to hold the disk in place (and once you've frosted the cupcakes, the seam isn't visible).

You'll have little knobs of cake left over from all this--the plugs that you removed from the cake and sliced off from the lid. I'm sure you could do something fancy with them, involving custard and cream and fruit, but I have just been pitching them into a tub and dabbing them with bits of buttercream when Sweetie or I want a snack--it keeps us out of the cupcakes, and really, it's the very best bite of cake.

Second Kind of Food:
I just finished a remarkable book called The Language of Baklava, by Diana Abu-Jaber. It's a memoir-with-recipes format, which, when it's done well, is just about my favorite book--and in this case, it's really, really done well. Partly, I think, that's because I know depressingly little about Jordan (where her dad's from) and she manages to politely gloss over my own ignorance and educate me without being bewildering or condescending. As I kept reading and learning and enjoying, I was struck by realizing that the two restaurants I like in my neighborhood that are "Middle Eastern" do not define an actual country (Ali Baba and Mediterranean Kitchen Express)--which, when you think about it, is like having a "European" restaurant instead of a French or Italian one. Yet at last in Seattle, it's unthinkingly accepted.

Perhaps this odd definition is because the borders of the countries are so recent and were all defined by westerners; perhaps it's simply marketing, because people in Seattle know that "Middle Eastern" food means falafel and baklava and hummous and pita and spinach and lentils and lamb, while very few (relatively speaking) would know what exactly Jordanian food or Iranian food or Lebanese food would be. The book talks some about this, indirectly, and has sweet, often hilarious stories about her uncles, that mash up culture and immigration and family issues into one big, delicious stew with rice and tomatoes and eggplant. I can't wait to try some of the recipes--there's a simple marinade for grilled chicken that looks far better that grilled chicken has a right to.

I feel compelled to add that when I was searching for a link to paste in for Med. Kitchen Express, I stumbled across some fairly ignorant user reviews on a few sites; I chose what I thought least bad. Sweetie and I typically share a single $8 entree, which comes with a cinnamony lentil soup or a garlicky salad, a pile of the best rice in town, a mound of hummous and a loaf of pita. It's a bargain--and everything is about half the price for the same portion as across town at the official Mediterranean Kitchen, which is only slightly prettier inside.