Becca's Blog

L'idiote dans la cuisine.

So I was just in my second sauce class at Kitchen on Fire, which focused on sweet sauces. (Jane gave me a couple of classes as a Christmas gift.) I said to Chef Olive, "Bon soir, chef." He said, "Bon soir. Ca va?" And then my 10 years of French classes failed me. I stared and grinned like a dope and couldn't say a word. "Bien, et vous?" would have done fine...

But I learned what a sabayon is supposed to taste like, what a gastrique is for, and why I keep fucking up my white sauce. I think I'll do better now, and I won't be afraid of cooking sugar anymore. I didn't try making crème anglaise in class, but I will do it soon.

The great thing about cooking classes is that you can dirty pots and other cooking gear with abandon, and you don't have to clean up after yourself. Want to use a blender to puree strawberries? That's what you're there for, and the dishwasher or class assistant is there to do the cleanup.

My Christmas spirit's not quite dead yet.

I'm still making holiday goodies and thinking I'll get those last New Year's greetings into the mail. And knitting a gift scarf. It'll be an MLK Day gift, that's all. I had most of this week off and got to spend it mostly how I chose, so I just kept on with the holiday baking. And I bought another Christmas album this afternoon and listened to it all the way through.

I went to Down Home Music in El Cerrito this afternoon to pick up a birthday gift for an almost-3-year-old whom Jane and I know, and found a Sarah McLachlan holiday CD. I love her voice, and some of her songs, and this CD contains a bunch of  carols that I'm sentimentally attached to from childhood. So I was happy to buy both records there, and do my tiny bit to support an East Bay institution.

And then I took a moment to remember another East Bay institution. The Ivy Room reopened on December 15--I drove by that evening and noticed that it was open and (horrors!) looked well-lit and way too schmancy. So tonight I stopped in on my way home to check it out up close. On the plus side, the bartender is perfectly nice (he took my shit about whether they had instituted a dress code with good grace), and they have an intriguing drink menu. The drinks aren't cheap anymore, but I can deal with that. On the minus side, if the decor is any indication, they seem to be angling for a none-too-sophisticated crowd of 22-year-olds. One side of the bar is decorated in almost passable thrift-store lounge chic. The other side, where the *bar* is, looks like a living room out of a Sears catalog. As a result, I felt perfectly at home whipping out my knitting. I don't think they plan to book bands anytime soon, if at all. I'd have to stop by later in the evening to get a sense of the crowd--the bartender said it's mostly the after-work crowd, plus some locals.

The buyers of the Albatross were able to clean up the grime without killing the character of the place. Why couldn't the new Ivy Room owner do the same? Damn.

A guilty, guilty pleasure.

My ass is parked on the sofa, and I'm about five episodes into a Top Chef marathon on Bravo. (I just came off finishing a big assignment and Jane's out of town for the weekend. I have every right to spend several hours watching TV and restarting a top-down turtleneck several times. Leave me alone.) I've only seen about 20 minutes of this show before--and I'm utterly engrossed.  The fact that this season has been set in San Francisco only adds to the appeal and suspense: Hey, they're on Valencia Street! They're shopping at the Berkeley Bowl! They're trying to give away food at the 16th Street BART station! Yes, I'm sure that I'm the last foodie in the Bay Area to know about this, but it tickles me. And it's sooo gay--they made them cater a party at a leather shop, and certainly about half of the contestants were well acquainted with the place beforehand (and man, was Elizabeth Falkner rockin' the black eyeliner in that episode...).  They have to cater a gay wedding, and one of the contestants said the Q-word on camera, referring to herself.  And that Lee Anne is cute, cute, cute--but I don't think she's on the bus.

Granted, Tom Colicchio doesn't have the gravitas of Tim Gunn on Project Runway, but he's intimidating enough. There's a clear-cut villain in the group that you love to hate, it's all delicious. Jane can have "The L-Word," really.

Unfortunately, I need to hoist myself up and into action very shortly--I actually made plans for the evening in the city--and I haven't even made sure that the outfit I've planned is clean.

Have food processor, will travel.

So no dinner guests Saturday evening, due to a sick kid. It was OK, though, because it took the pressure off to have the house spotless and dinner ready by 4 p.m. We rented Saving Face, which turned out to be a sweeter, simpler movie than I thought.

I went ahead and made the menu I planned, the centerpiece of which was homemade pizza from the Cheese Board cookbook. I have finally found the pizza dough recipe that works for me, in A New Way to Cook.  I dunno why this one works better than others I've tried, but I'm guessing it has to do with the volume of dough. And I'm all over using a food processor to do the kneading now.  I used to prefer the tactile connection of doing it by hand, but pizza dough tends to be sticky, and the food processor saves tons of time, not to mention pressure on the wrists.

However, I minced the basil, sun-dried tomatoes, and garlic for the pesto with my chef's knife and used a mezzaluna and wooden bowl to mash it all together with olive oil and romano cheese. Way fun to pound and smash it all up.

And for dessert I made another Roman cherry tart--this time with bottled whole cherries and the dough recipe from Joyce Goldstein's Cucina Ebraica. The dough was sweeter and stickier than the pasta frolla recipe I've used before; I'm not sure which I like better. This was a bit harder to handle but ended up tasting very good.

I could do the smart thing and repeat exactly the same menu when I do have dinner guests, since practice always helps, but I found an intriguing recipe for pistachio cake in the paper on Sunday. Maybe I'll do that instead.  On the other hand, when we do see them it will be very close to the baby's birthday, so maybe I should make a plain-vanilla birthday cake. And a roast chicken, and asparagus.  Yeah, that's it. Do one-year-olds eat chicken?

What's for dinner tonight:

Either red-lentil or yellow split-pea dal, using one of the few recipes from Still Life with Menu that would make me occasionally miss that cookbook if I were marooned on a desert island. This dal cooks down to a salty, wickedly buttery, garlicky sludgy porridge, and it has toasted mustard seeds and a pinch of cinnamon(!) which makes it deliciously aromatic as well. You want to eat the whole pot in one sitting.

And because we have nice cauliflower and potatos and I have just one deadline breathing down my neck today, we'll also have Aloo Gobi, from Madhur Jaffrey's World of the East Vegetarian Cooking, my go-to book for cooking Indian food at home.  Hmm... there's recipes here for cauliflower in cashew-sesame seed sauce and steamed cauliflower with whole spices.  Now I can't decide. Dang.

There's a rather big Thai grocery store around the corner where I can pick up fresh ginger and almost anything else I don't have stocked (I wish they had a better selection of western dairy products). I'm tempted to buy some baby globe eggplants and grill them, but I think I'd rather have some grilled salmon or halibut chunks.

I'd better get the writing done pretty quick...