Beverage news and memories

You may (or may not) recall that last October Ami and John brought over three affordable bottles of wine for us to drink and decide which one they should buy a case of for their bonfire.

I have some excellent news: my favorite of the three they brought
is on sale at a ridiculously cheap price at Arbor Farms. They have it for $4.99 a bottle plus you can get another 10% off if you buy 6 or more bottles which makes it $4.50 a bottle. That's cheaper than some bottled water! So I went and bought a case and now we have a house red that will help us get through the rest of the gloomy months. It's a punchy Syrah, not terribly complex, but able to stand up to common fare like, spaghetti with red sauce or, Mexican chocolate cupcakes...

On another beverage front, Jam Faced's recent post about tea got me thinking of my own addiction. Go look at his post for a beautiful photo of what looks like my ideal cup of tea. It is in a lovely bone china cup, to start with. It also looks strong and milky and has a perfect tea biscuit to nibble on while you sip.

The photo and post hit a raw nerve since for the past two weeks I've been out of my favorite tea and have been trying to find a substitute. Unfortunately I'm addicted to Peet's English Breakfast blend which I can only get via mail order. I order it a pound at a time (and a pound is a LOT of tea) but somehow I thought I was on my second to last tin rather than the last one so I went through a period in limbo land. If I was more organized I would have placed the order right away but in between the chaos and, oh, let's see, the chaos of my life with the two rug rats I would forget daily to order the tea and then remember daily at tea time when I was faced with inadequate substitute brown brews. Finally I propped the empty tin on the keyboard of the computer so I would remember to place the order the next time I got on-line.

Thankfully, this week the tea arrived and this afternoon I sat down to this:

The ingredients for a happy afternoon Kate

In the Peet's-free interval I tried two teas that I don't remember being as bad as they were: Taylors of Harrogate Imperial Tea Room (loose leaf) and Twinings' English Breakfast (in--ugh--tea bags). I was not a girl raised on snooty tea; "tea" when I was growing up was plain old Typhoo tea leaves. We stuffed boxes of the stuff in our suitcases (along with many packets of McVities Plain Chocolate Digestive Biscuits) every time we visited the relatives in England. I thought Typhoo was downright wonderful stuff compared to the Lipton that was served everywhere else.

The Taylors was strong, it had that going for it, but there was no bouquet. And the Twinings tea bags--weak brown water. Yes it had some caffeine, but no taste. I really don't remember becoming such a tea snob, but I think Peet's has ruined me--their tea is whole leaf (not the broken crumbles of Typhoo) and really has a flowery bouquet. It isn't super strong but that can be dealt with by adding an extra spoonful to the pot.

Now that I have the Peet's in hand, I have been attempting to come close to my memory of drinking the ideal cup in front of my Granny's coal fire in her 18th C farm house up on the Yorkshire moors. I know, this is a vain quest since there are so many elements of my daily life that lack the atmosphere of the memory, but a girl has to dream and I dream of tea.

I even bought some Thomas Organic Creamery Creamline Milk the other day (once I got my Peet's supply) which is from local pasture-fed Jersey cows, is non-homogenized and low-temp pasturized--about as close as I am like to get to the milk my Granny had delivered every morning. It helped, but I fear that the ideal cup is beyond me simply due to the vividness of my memory. So I'll keep looking back at Jam Faced's post and keep on dreaming.

I did experience a positive memory moment this week by re-reading Joan Aiken's The Wolves of Willoughby Chase; it was a quick and pleasant trip back to the past. After the first few chapters it became abundantly clear why I loved this book as a kid: there is a headstrong heroine who can't keep her temper and there are nice descriptions of food.

By page 17 I was seduced by "a box of chocolates about a foot square by six inches deep, swathed around with violet ribbons" and a little further down the page "a confectioners' paste board carton filled with every imaginable variety of little cakes--there were jam tarts, maids of honor, lemon cheese cakes, Chelsea buns, and numerous little iced confections in brilliant and enticing colors." Mmmmmmm. Must go track down little cakes to go with tea.

Kid-Lit

In the past two days, I've read two of Kate DiCamillo's kid books and the one pictured to the left is fabulous.

There are appealing characters who are remarkably complex especially when you take into account the economy of the writing. But the prose isn't simplistic in the least and does not talk down to kids. The author uses words like "perfidy" and tells you if you don't know the word to go look it up. And the plot moves along quickly but also knows when to slow down so that the experience of reading it isn't breathless.

The illustrations, by Timothy Basil Ering, are also beautiful. I can't say I'm the greatest fan of having illustrations in books that aren't strictly "picture books" because often they don't jibe with the prose (I read a horrible edition of some Trollope novels last year which had the most hideous illustrations and completely ruined the spell the prose would cast) . But Ering renders DiCamillo's story perfectly; it is a treat to turn the page and see one of his beautiful, smoky drawings.

I also read DiCamillo's first book, Because of Winn-Dixie. It was ok. The southern voices were done well and again, there was an economy to the story, nothing superfluous or excessive. But I can't say that I found the plot or characters that interesting. I'll definitely be reading The Tale of Despereaux to my kids (I think Ian is almost ready for it) but I doubt I'll read them Winn-Dixie.

DiCamillo's books might be directed at a slightly younger audience than I have been craving so next up I'm going to revisit a favorite children's author: Joan Aiken. I loved her book The Wolves of Willoughby Chase when I was a kid--I must of read it 10 times. It turns out that this book was the first in a series dubbed The Wolves Chronicles so I checked out the next book in the series Black Hearts in Battersea. I am hoping that a re-read of Wolves and this next book turn out to be as good as I remember. I just noticed that Nixie Knox has Wolves on her recommended books side bar and since I like (or, let's be honest here, love with an unreasonable passion) many of the other books on her side bar, maybe my adolescent self had decent taste (in books at least) after all.

My favorite cupcakes

We have a three year old in the house now and yesterday we had a plate full of these to celebrate:
One of the great things about having kids is the many opportunities for cupcakes. I hate baking traditional cakes, but love making cupcakes--there's no anxiety about whether the cake will stick to the damn pan, stacking layers, or doing an elaborate frosting job. If you asked me to make a traditional birthday cake I'd be pissy. But make a batch of cupcakes? Sure!

My enthusiasm for cupcake making is helped by the fact that I happen to have found the best chocolate cupcake recipe in the world. These cupcakes are extremely easy to do and I love the fact that the batter is made in a saucepan. They are so good that you don't need frosting. They are actually better without frosting--once I made them with a bittersweet chocolate pecan frosting and it totally overwhelmed the cake. I prefer to just dust a little powdered sugar over them and if you want to spruce them up, use a stencil. (The "3" above was printed out in a big font on the computer and then cut out with scissors.)

The recipe calls these Mexican Chocolate Cupcakes because there's a little cinnamon and quite a lot of vanilla that punch up the chocolate. These flavor enhancers are lovely, but what really makes these cupcakes great is the moistness of the cake: they aren't dry or heavy. Just terrific moist cake. And in the spirit of full disclosure, I must also state that these cupcakes go pretty well with red wine. Not that I served the small creatures any wine with there cupcakes (tempting), but there were a number of moms who looked just about as tired as I felt (Friday, 4 PM, go figure) and we all washed down our cake with Shiraz...

Mexican Chocolate Cupcakes
adapted from Rebecca Rather's recipe printed in some food magazine (I can't remember which)
makes at least 24 cupcakes--I made 24 and still had a good amount of batter to eat raw while they baked.

2 sticks (1 C) unsalted butter
1/2 C Dutch-process unsweetened cocoa powder
3/4 C water
2 C granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1/2 C well-shaken buttermilk
2 T vanilla
2 C all purpose flour
1 t baking soda
1 t cinnamon
1/4 t salt

1. preheat oven to 350. Put cupcake papers in your muffin tins.
   
2. melt butter in a large heavy saucepan over moderately low heat, then whisk in cocoa. Add water and whisk until smooth. Remove from heat.
3. Whisk in separately sugar, eggs, buttermilk, and vanilla.
4. Sift together flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt into a bowl. Then sift again into the cocoa mixture and whisk until just combined (it will be a little bit lumpy).
5. Fill cupcake papers to about 2/3 full. Bake for 20 minutes until a skewer or toothpick comes out clean. It's a moist cake, so don't worry if a few crumbs stick to your tester.
6. Allow cupcakes to cook and then dust with powdered sugar.
   

Adolescent Lit

I suspect that the reason I've been feeling fed up with the adult fiction I've been attempting has nothing to do with the books themselves. I think, at this point in February, I'm simply fed up with being an adult.

So as an attempted antidote, I checked this out of the library:

We'll see if this Newbery Award book has the desired effect of taking me back to the many hours I spent as a kid curled up on the couch in the wintertime reading and escaping. I don't have any memory of being bummed out by winter back then, mainly because I lived many of those dark, cold days in imaginary landscapes rather than the one outside my door.

This is the kind of book I should be reading out loud to my kids in the evening (which means the librarian didn't give me a funny look when I checked it out). I've been trying to get them into chapter books, but it is a hard sell for Ian--he'd much rather look at an anatomy textbook or read a book about electricity. The kid is into facts. I suspect Fiona will be a good candidate for this kind of book when she gets a little older since her imagination is always going full steam ahead. Most of the time I have to guess where the hell she thinks she is. Often I am reminded of Claudette, the tiny little secretary of the Department de Pays Anglophone at the University of Bordeaux. She regularly would utter the following phrase after a confusing encounter with one of the spacier of my fellow lecteurs: "Je ne sais pas quelle planete il habite, mais ce n'est pas le meme" (roughly, "I don't know what planet he's living on, but it isn't the same as mine.") That is Fiona in a nutshell.

Rippin' mood

Yesterday, I baked a batch of Fimo buttons...ripped out the failed zipper/awkward hook and eye band on this:

And reknit the band to be wider and with button holes. And I sewed on the buttons:
Hopefully this means I will actually start wearing the damn sweater. Yes, I have managed to stretch the shoulders out so I don't feel like someone is grabbing me under the armpits all day long. I don't think the button band looks quite as nice as the zipper version of the sweater but as I am completely incapable of sewing a zipper on a sweater (even after referencing numerous tutorials and on-line photo demos) it'll have to suffice.

On other knitting fronts, I have decided that I hate this sock:
so I ripped it out. Too bumpy and fussy for me. I think I'm in a rippin' mood right now so watchout rippables, here I come!

On a more positive note, I started this:
My first toe-up sock knit in the Regia yarn I brought back from Germany. If ever there was a colorway that served as an antidote to winter, this is it. The ridiculous thing is that this yarn comes from a series called "Canadian Colors" where each colorway is named after a different Canadian province. Did you know that Manitoba looks like a tropical sunset? Me neither. I also have the Toronto colorway.

And my feelings about toe-up socks? Neeeeeh. I found the increases on the toe far more awkward than the decreases one would use with top-down. I had read that people liked toe-up because you could try it on at any time and make changes, but the first time I knit this toe (yes, there were a number of attempts before getting it even halfway right) I couldn't tell that I was making a mammoth sock until I had finished all the increases. Then I realized that it might fit a bear paw and had to rip it back (luckily I'm in that rippin' mood, eh?). Unless someone can give me a better sales pitch on the benefits of toe-ups, I'll be a top-down sock maker from now on. Besides,"toe-up" doesn't have much linguistic alure and "top-down" sounds like I'm riding in a red convertible with the sun shining. That's a nice image to have when you are stuck inside because the weather is so cold that it will freeze your snot if you dare to breathe.

I've been memed

Ed tagged me and since this is a fairly painless and amusing meme, here goes:

4 Jobs I'’ve had in my life:

1. lab tech (what else do you do with an English degree except go and count the number of mice who die after being injected with various strengths of botulism toxin?)
   
2. lecteur d'anglais
   
3. arts education manager
4. mommy
   

4 Movies I can watch over and over:

1. The Big Lebowski
2. Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
3. Persuasion
4. Best in Show
   

4 TV Shows I love to watch:

1. (Back in the happy days when we had HBO) The Wire and
2. Curb Your Enthusiasm
3. (Now that we are HBO-less) 24
4. and Arrested Development (I know, I know the series finale just ran so I won't have this little corner of televised comfort to flee to anymore, damnit).
   

4 Places I have lived:

1. Berkeley, CA
2. Bordeaux, France
3. Evanston, IL
4. Ann Arbor, MI
   

4 Places I have been on holiday:

1. Lake Superior Provincial Park
2. The Jelly Belly Factory, thanks to the lobbying efforts of two small sugar-crazed creatures
   
3. London: theatre, theatre and more theatre
   
4. Cayo Costa, FL (the anti-Florida, an island where the only thing you can buy is ice)
   

4 of my favorite dishes:

1. A really good Greek salad (not authentic Greek--I want lettuce too)
2. Grilled Corn with Cheese and Cilantro
3. Vietnamese Beer Snack with a cold beer
4. Cold whole-grain toast with lots of butter, good preserves or marmalade and a strong cup of black tea with a splash of milk
   

4 Websites I visit daily:

1. Bloglines (the only way to keep track of new posts on blogs)
2. Cute Overload (a substitute for sunshine in this northern clime)
3. Flickr
4. New York Times
   

4 Places I would rather be right now:

1. A clean, well-lit place with a comfortable chair and no one asking me for a beverage, or crayons, or for help going to the bathroom.
2. Talking with a friend, sitting on her deck in Berkeley, with a cold beer.
   
3. Watching a really good play.
4. Hiking in some non-snowy mountains.
   

4 Bloggers I am tagging:

1. Annie
2. Julie
   
3. Lynne
4. anyone else who wants to reveal a little (not a lot) about themselves--go for it.

Ugh and then, the Un-ugh

If, like me, you were tempted to make the Pho recipe in the January issue of Gourmet, do yourself a favor and get the car keys and drive, however far, to a Vietnamese restaurant. If you live too far from any source of Vietnamese food to be able to get there in, say, 2-3 hours, then suck it up and wait until you can visit an appropriate Mecca of Vietnamese cuisine (D.C. sounds good about now or lots of places on the Left Coast) because I am here to tell you that making your own Pho is NOT WORTH THE EFFORT.

(Yes, I know that all caps is the equivalent to shouting at you. I'm in a shoutin' sorta mood this morning, watch out small people and don't piss off mommy.)

I'm not going to go into all the flaws in the recipe and the disappointing result that I served as "dinner" last night because I'd only do that if I thought the recipe could be redeemed with a little tweak here and there. From now on when I crave Pho I'm not going to head for my kitchen, I'm going to get in the car.

On a happier obsession front, my Pho-grumped out mood has been lightened by reading this:

I can't read David Foster Wallace all the time. But sometimes his distinctive style is just right and after slaving over a pot of what turned out to be scummy grey brown soup, I happily escaped my current surroundings and armchair traveled to where ever he was writing his enormously entertaining essays, be that the "Academy Awards" of the porn industry, John McCain's primary campaign bus (in 2000), or in front of the TV in his neighbor's living room in Bloomington when the twin towers were falling.

Despite wincing throughout his essay "Authority and American Usage" since I am one of the criminals he is complaining about who may love language but never learned any grammar, (which I suspect is like the scorn I may feel for a person who loves food but who doesn't even know how to make toast) I can't help but love the fervor of his rant and the fact that he uses vocabulary like "euphemism," "corollary," and " rhetorical" side-by-side with the word "wedgie" and the phrase "Molotov-tossing anti-pants radical." I also could not stop thinking of my Blue Pencil friend Deb and what torture daily conversation must be for her (Deb, if you are reading this, you must request this book from the library now). I remember Deb once breathed a sigh of relief when I said "I feel nauseated" rather than "I am nauseous", not because she was happy that my stomach was upset, but because the latter sentence means that I, myself, am the thing that would cause nausea in others. I didn't have any clue what I was saying and I am just as likely to say the latter and unintentionally refer to myself as a pool of green vomit, but clearly Deb's linguistic awareness causes her to suffer expressions of such ridiculousness so often that hearing something expressed correctly is a rare occurrence.

Sometimes Wallace's essays focus on the absurdity of daily life, but thankfully they aren't all irony and witticisms, which can become tiresome. There are some authors who are regularly lumped into the same general category as Wallace but who never, ever drop the corrosive sarcasm. Wallace knows when to employ his wit and when to just be honest and the effect is to make the moments of honesty feel more honest. If you need an example, look at the last sentence of his essay about the twin towers: beautiful, sad and without any irony. I'm not going to quote it here because it really does need the force of the rest of the essay behind it to give it its impact.

So, go get the book. I suspect that you will find at least one essay that resonates with you. And you can also breathe easy knowing that you have in the house the mood antidote for any labor-intensive-yet-completely-disappointing-food-experiment you may have the bad luck to attempt.

Some thoughts on reading and writing

I just finished reading the Best American Short Stories 2005 collection and there are a number of fantastic stories in it. There were three that I absolutely loved. Joyce Carol Oates' story "The Cousins" had me crying by the end of it. I love epistolary stories and this one revealed details about the characters letter by letter in such a heartbreaking way. That sounds trite but I can't think of a better word than "heartbreaking." Kelly Link's "Stone Animals" blended the fantastical and the totally relate-able in a way I haven't experienced before. It wasn't like any of the magical realism I've read before (Rushdie, Marquez) because it didn't feel dreamy at all; most magical realism makes me feel like I'm underwater looking up at a warped world. And my final favorite was J. Robert Lennon's "Eight Pieces for the Left Hand," fragmented prose bits that reflect on each other. I need to get his book of 100 stories Pieces for the Left Hand .

One of my favorite things about all of the "Best of" books in this series is the Contributors' Notes at the end of the book. After reading a story I always go back and read what the author says. Some are brief explanations of where they got the idea for the story, which is fine, but other comments really get at the process of writing.

From this collection my favorite commentary (and I like the story it was associated with, too) was George Saunders' notes about his story "Bohemians". His note is hilarious and insightful and, in my case, completely applicable. Here is his note in its entirety:

I started "Bohemians" in 1994 and got stuck in 1995. There the story sat, stalled at what is now Paragraph 58, through the O.J. case, the rest of the Clinton administration, the Bush election, a change of jobs, the astonishing recession of my hairline, etc., etc., victim of Writer's Error 4A: "Knowing Too Well What You Are Doing." I was sure the story was about The Lack of Relation Between Hardship and Moral Virtue. The story was going to show, rather suavely I hoped, that someone who had Suffered Greatly (Mrs. H.) could actually be a kinder person than someone (Mrs. Poltoi) who had suffered much less! The fact that this idea would be totally obvious to anyone who had ever actually lived in the world did not stop me from periodically brushing off the story, failing, and putting it away again. Finally I noticed that every time I got to Paragraph 8 ("So Mrs. H. told again how she'd stood rapt in her yard...") I got nauseated. It's not uncommon for me to feel nauseated after reading one of my paragraphs, but this was a special kind of nausea, related to how overwritten this paragraph was, how full of a youngish writer's desire to invoke exotica about a part of the world he had never been to. It sounded like Isaac Babel on stupid pills, as if Babel had also taken some dishonesty pills, then decided to write about an Omaha, Nebraska, he had invented in his mind in order to serve a secret moral purpose, then taken some inefficiency polls. Suddenly, after eight years of becoming nauseated after reading this paragraph, a light went on: it wasn't I who was a dishonest posturing braggart, it was the character. And in this way the story came to be about something entirely different from what I thought it had been about all those years, thank God, and could finally be finished.

What Saunders wrote about being nauseated when reading something he'd written and in particular, the reason why ("a youngish writer's desire to invoke exotica about a part of the world he had never been to") is just about the perfect description of how I felt when I went on my writing retreat with Ami and Sarah last autumn and worked on the novel I started, oh let's see, almost 8 years ago! Overwritten? Yup. Dishonest? Yup. Inefficient? Resounding yup. Luckily I have a very strong stomach so reading my own prose didn't put me off the terrific food we had. But it did make me think about chucking the whole damn novel in the trash.

I don't know if a dishonest character will be the key to saving what is decent in what I have already written (though it very well might be--the book is loosely based on a person who wrote 4 autobiographies in which many of the same events are told 4 different ways, so honesty is really not a feature of her character). But at least I'm going to try and face down the nausea to find the thing that will (hopefully) release what is good and help me get rid of what is crap.

A Blogger's (Silent) Poetry Reading

Grace's Poppies started the idea.

So here is a poem I read recently on the Writer's Almanac and printed out and stuck on my fridge. It is short enough that I can read it every morning while heating up the milk for my coffee in the microwave (one minute and fourty seconds thank you very much for asking).

Father's Song
by Gregory Orr

Yesterday, against admonishment,
my daughter balanced on the couch back,
fell and cut her mouth.
Because I saw it happen I knew
she was not hurt, and yet
a child's blood's so red
it stops a father's heart.
My daughter cried her tears;
I held some ice
against her lip.
That was the end of it.
Round and round; bow and kiss
I try to teach her caution;
she tries to teach me risk.

Ugly, but Tasty

This is one of those dishes in which half way through preparing it you take a look and think "Damn, I really f***ed up this time. That is so ugly I wouldn't feed it to my dog."

But sometimes ugly food tastes really good, and this pork loin cooked in milk, Arista al Latte, looks a lot worse while cooking than when it finally comes to the table. It will never win any awards for its looks, but the finished product isn't so ugly as to make anyone flee. And once people taste it, trust me, they'll stay and they'll probably ask for seconds.

Another major benefit--it is easy! The gist of the recipe is take a pork loin, cut little slits in it, stuff garlic, strips of lemon zest and some fresh rosemary in the slits, brown it in a saucepan with a little olive oil, then dump some milk over it. The pork poaches in the milk (which keeps the pork tender). The lemon zest makes the milk curdle and the curdled milk cooks down into caramelized curds which, I grant you don't sound too pretty (and aren't) but which make a great sauce.

Here is a step by step photo essay of the process:

The pretty, pink pork loin browning in olive oil. Ugliness coming soon!

Dump quite a lot of milk over the pork loin (about 1 C per pound of pork) and cook for at least 1.5 hours with the lid OFF. The milk will evaporate leaving some curds like this:

ooops, shoulda' used a non-stick pot...And some really homely looking pork.

Wow, that is some ugly pork, but once it is sliced...
it doesn't look quite so bad.
And when you top it with some of the caramelized, garlicy curd-sauce and put it on a plate with some roast potatoes and broccoflower, it looks decent enough. And trust me, it tastes terrific.

Pork Loin Cooked in Milk (Arista al Latte)

1.5 lbs boneless pork loin
zest of one lemon (not microplaned--in strips)
sprig of rosemary, leaves stripped off of twig
2 cloves of garlic, sliced lengthwise into slivers
1.5 C milk (whole is preferable, but I made it with 2% and it turned out fine)
2 T olive oil
salt and pepper

Cut slits in the ends and along the grain of the pork and slip in bits of the garlic, lemon zest and rosemary. Sprinkle with some ground pepper and a little bit of salt (yes, for once I am recommending you go light on the salt. At least till the end. When you cook the milk down it concentrates the flavor and you risk making it way too salty so go light now and you can always add some more at the end.)

At this point, if you want, you can use cotton twine to tie the meat into a more roll-like shape (I've done it both ways and it does look a teeny bit nicer rolled up, but I'm not sure it is worth the extra hassle of wrestling with the meat).

Heat the oil in a saucepan big enough to fit your pork loin but not too big (otherwise the liquid won't rise high enough on the pork for it to poach and stay moist). Brown the pork on all sides, then pour the hot milk over it.

Heat the milk to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer uncovered until the pork is done (1-1.5 hours) turning it occasionally and scraping the bottom of the pot to keep the curds from sticking too badly.

By the time the pork is done, most of the liquid should have evaporated. If the curds still look a little watery, take the pork out, slice it thin (take off the string first, if you used it) and raise the heat under the curds to get the curd sauce to a thick enough (but not too thick) viscosity. Keep stirring so the curds don't scorch. Taste the curds now and see if you want a little more salt.

Serve slices of the pork topped with some of the curds. And if you think it still looks ugly, shut your eyes and take a bite.