The Trip Begins... (a blog preview)

Barcelona, Spain, March 2010

I exit customs control, laden with little bags because I don’t own a proper suitcase. I’ve got a small, wheeled number, a bulky suede overnight bag hoisted over one shoulder and a computer/book bag slung over the other. My walk is ungainly as I try to tug, roll, and keep my balance. Of course, none of the bags matches: one is royal blue, one brown and the piece de resistance (or the Peep de resistance) is Easter candy lilac. Who let me out of the house like this?! Did I not say I was going to Europe?! Like my mismatched bags, my flow-y yoga pants do not suggest chic but at least they show some planning (unlike the bags) in that they were chosen for comfort. (Gawd: I sound so American when I say that.) I do not look like a world traveler, more like a busker who makes balloon animals. Which is perhaps good because my traveling companion, who is waiting for me on the other side of the barrier, looks like a homeless person.

He sees me as I come through the cordon and smiles that sheepish smile/smirk of his. “I am not going to let on that I am happy to see her,” he is thinking. Somehow to show that would mean he’s given up some emotional control and he is loath to do that. Of course, he could just be laughing at how ridiculous I look. He is your basic twenty-something backpacker who has spent a month working on organic farms in Normandy and Brittany and who has just flown in from a week mini-tour of Eastern Europe. His hair is greasy and his jaw is sprouting reddish tufts last seen in a Dr. Seuss book but which he calls his beard. His clothes have that ground-in dirt sheen and he wears a mustard yellow knitted scarf that, I am later to learn, has not been washed since he got it several months ago and was worn throughout all of his farm chores, including the birthing of a calf. He is my son. And we are about to embark on a two-week journey together.

The next few blogs will be dedicated to my dinners with Andre… in Barcelona, San Sebastian, Lyon and Paris. If you’re thinking about traveling with your adult child, you might want to read these before you hit the “submit” button to purchase those airline tickets.

We Jammin'

“The rule is jam to-morrow and jam yesterday but never jam today.”
The White Queen, Alice in Wonderland

Jam is so cool. I love jam. I love to open a jar of apricot jam and enjoy a too large dollop of it atop my levain toast spread with sweet butter. Sadly, after I put the jar back in the fridge, I tend to forget all about it. It’s sad because jams are so intensely flavorful and so very much the essence of the fruit that I’m really missing out on one of the glories of the breakfast table. And I’m not kidding about the missing out: my breakfast is natto on nori (fermented soybeans on seaweed sheets—kinda like beans on toast, Japanese style). Despite my rather suspect bonafides with regard to jam-eating, I was invited back to the kitchen with Cardinal Baker Nicola and Chef Beatrice on Friday. They had decided to take advantage of the perfect June strawberries offered by Nancy at Middleton Farms (Healdsburg, CA) and make jam.

“Make jam.” Sounds so quaint, so easy. In the old days, they used to say “put up.” I think that is a more apt term for all that jam-making entails. Nicola first bought pints and pints of berries. (At least I think she did. Do I measure? No. So details like this escape me.) Then she bought cute mini-mold Weck jars, the glass and rubber gasket kind with the strawberry stamped into the lid. Mind you, they HAD to be Weck jars. Remember, this is the woman who will not give me any of her recipes because I do not follow the letter of the law. I didn’t know her commandments extended to glassware as well but at least she's consistent. I do admit the jars were cute and jam is a cute food, so it works. Then she spent all evening stemming, hulling and macerating the strawberries. By Friday morning, she was anxious to put them up.

We arrived at Chef Beatrice's midday. Just as she had done with the shortcake trials, Chef Beatrice had the multiple cookbooks out—Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc, Alice Waters Chez Panisse Fruit and some English cookbook from the 70s or 80s; the computer was opened to a site dedicated to trouble-shooting canning problems. This, of course, made me envision the canning version of the Geek Squad--those guys who travel around in their little black and white VW bugs providing computer support: the Out of a Jam Team (or the Pickling Posse) would arrive in a gingham painted Honda Element, brandishing candy thermometers and botulism pamphlets to help you get to the… Jellying Point!

Little did I know that we might need such a team. Beatrice and Nicola chose a strawberry jelly recipe from this obscure English cookbook. It promised a clear, jewel-like jelly with the fruit tantalizingly suspended. The comrades in cuisine were practically in a reverie, entranced by the idea of holding the jelly-filled jars up to the streaming sunlight and seeing a cranberry-colored Chartres pectin window dotted here and there with a perfect, barely cooked berry. They cooked the berry juice to a syrup, removing and reintroducing the whole berries (in order to quickly remove the berries’ moisture and allow each berry to retain its shape). The time came to bring the jelly to 105 degrees Celsius. 10 minutes later, the candy thermometer still registered 98 degrees. Another 10 minutes and no mercury movement. More time passed, and with each degree of centigrade unmet, the comrades’ hopes began to fall: the color of the jelly turned as the winedark sea. (Or a glass of Zinfandel if you haven’t read The Odyssey lately.) Cardinal Baker Nicola turned up the heat but quickly turned it down again as foam formed on the top, threatening the clarity of the syrup. Nicole began to frown and pace but tried to show that all was under control. After all, she had made many jars of jam. Chef Beatrice turned to the computer looking for answers, and then she re-read the recipe. “Rapidly boil. We need to rapidly boil!” It was like the ER surgeon realizing what would save the trauma patient. The heat went to high. The syrup boiled vigorously and—hallelujah--came to the jellying point. As the jelly rested for the requisite 10 minutes, we retired to the living room, Nicola's and Beatrice's frayed nerves calling out for a glass of wine. But the jam was not done.

Back into the kitchen we went to put the hot jelly into the sterilized, hot-out-of-the-oven jars. The jelly was clear but dark, dark like oxblood, with the berries clustering like platelets. I thought the jars were beautiful but the comrades were not pleased. The jelly didn’t look like how they imagined it. Uh, but how does it taste? We each dragged a finger across the sticky puddle left in the pot. “Too sweet,” Beatrice announced. “Like a Popsicle,” Nicole offered. Not what they were going for. Beatrice made notes in the margins of the recipe and both Beatrice and Nicole thought the recipe, by not indicating that the syrup must be boiled rapidly, had let them down. The author had let them down, and she would not have their trust so easily the next time. “Next time we make the apricot jam,” Beatrice announced in her get-back-on-the-horse fashion. “But we’ll use another cookbook.”

And, so, it came to be that it was jam tomorrow but never jam today.

Short on Shortcake or the Triumph of the Stove

I have two friends who have recently formed their own Cook’s Illustrated alliance. That is, they are cooking in search of the best recipe for... whatever. One week it was for a galette (which later morphed into quiche) and another it was for vegetable stock. Both are wonderful cooks but different in temperament. Nicola is an artist by training and profession. She loves the details. Once she gave me a chocolate chip cookie recipe. I made it with lots of substitutions because I couldn’t be bothered to get the exact sugar she recommended or let the dough sit for the exact amount of time. The cookies came out good but not great, definitely not like hers. When I told her about the substitutions, she was aghast. I had just committed heresy in the Church of Saints Butter, Eggs and Flour. She excommunicated me, telling me she would never give me another recipe as she could not trust me to follow it AS IT WAS WRITTEN. And, yes, she did use capital letters when she wrote me this, just as I am sure Moses did when he was carving out the Commandments. My other friend, Beatrice, is a bit more like me in temperament in that she doesn’t sweat the small stuff. Well, at least she didn’t before she went to the Cordon Bleu. Now she is into measuring and weighing. She even got drawer organizers when, for ten years prior, the whisks and spoons and graters and ravioli molds all lay together in a tangled mess of steel cuneiform. Anyone who doubts the life-changing impact of education clearly has not been schooled at the Cordon Bleu. Beatrice was always an amazing cook but now she has become a chef by anyone’s account.

So, last week, Cardinal Baker Nicola and Chef Beatrice decided to test shortcake recipes for strawberry shortcake. Even though I’m not much of a shortcake fan—-too dry, too bready, just gimme the whipped cream—-I went over to see what these two kitchen sisters were all about. Cookbooks crowded the countertop, kitchen island, and dining room table, each opened to a shortcake recipe (and, unaccountably, a Pavlova recipe?). Nicola was bent over some pages, her glasses perched at the end of her nose, her gaze unwavering--she reminded me of an apothecary concentrating on the formulation of a secret elixir. Beatrice was already rolling and cutting her first batch of biscuits made following the Tartine recipe. Zoe, Nicola’s daughter and baking novitiate, was reading a Dorie Greenspan recipe aloud while her boyfriend Steve ceremoniously emptied the dry ingredients--plop!poof!-- into a stainless steel bowl as each powdery substance was intoned.

Daunted by all this baking, I busied myself with cleaning up. All those measuring cups and measuring spoons! Sheesh. Flour everywhere. Not a knife or a sauté pan to be seen. (As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, I am not a chef. I cook, yes. Sometimes pretty well. But really my forte is the eating department.) I was a bit unsure of how to make myself useful amidst all that cutting, rolling, flouring, oven-opening-and-closing. Then Chef Beatrice mentioned that the Tartine recipe had a caramel sauce that went with the shortcake. Music to my ears! Butter, sugar, heavy cream and a stovetop, you say? I’m there, baby. You don’t really think I would enter into the competitive foray of shortcake making, do you? Unh, unh. Do the thing no-one else is doing, do it relatively well and you are, like the caramel, golden.

After multiple batches made from four recipes—Michael Mina’s, Edna Lewis’, Tartine’s and Dorie Greenspan’s—we sat down to evaluate. (Oh, did I mention I also made a strained berry sauce of blackberries and strawberries flavored with drizzle of balsamic vinegar and a splash of Cointreau? Again, done at the stovetop; no measuring spoons were de-nestled for the making of this.)
We all had a different favorite depending if we were looking more for flavor from the shortcake or a particular texture to go with the berries and cream. We decided the Edna Lewis biscuit really needed to be slathered with honey butter (or the Apricot Vanilla Butter from June Taylor) rather than serve as the stage for berries. (Aside: have you noticed how often "slathered" is used to describe butter on a biscuit? And rightly so...) The Tartine shortcake was the hit flavor-wise; it's the one we could have eaten on its own, though Chef Beatrice also really liked the Michael Mina recipe for that. A few of us put the Dorie Greenspan dropped (rather than rolled out) shortcake recipe to the top of our list as its crumbly texture and crunchy tops provided a nice foil to the loftiness of the cream and juice of the berries. There was, as Chef Beatrice noted, no clear winner. Well, not with the shortcakes, anyway.

One thing everyone agreed on: the caramel sauce was the best.

Sometimes you don’t need to go with four recipes. Just do one and execute really well. No-one will even bother going to look for the competition.

La Vie en Rose (Macarons)

I just got back from seeing “Julie and Julia.” As a self-professed foodie of a certain age, how could I not? The film provoked many questions, like

-How did low level diplomats get such fab Parisian lodging?

--Why does a dinner party in 1950s Paris--with wasp-waisted women and sharply suited men swilling martinis and taking drags on cigarettes-- look so damned appealing?

---Where are the loving, incredibly supportive (indulgent, doting) men of food-obsessed women to be found? (Sign Me Up!)

----What kind of blogs and bloggers get book deals???

Mostly, though, the film took me back to the beginnings of my own love affair with French food.

The first restaurant meal I can remember was at a French (or, in those days, Continental) restaurant where I downed an entire plate of escargot. This was at age two and a half. My first proper cookbook was not Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking but a slim volume on French food that was part of a series on world cuisines. I loved making the crème caramel recipe and, as a pre-teen cook, it quickly became my “signature” dish. (I had looked at the Italian volume but it didn’t speak to me they way the recipes in that French volume did; those recipes alchemically transformed eggs and cream into unctuous manifestations of the lick-the-plate divine.) By age 10, my favorite cheese was Camembert. My sister would curl her nostrils when I took it out of its box and tell me it smelled like “death,” but, then again, her favorite cheese was Velveeta.

By the time junior high rolled around, I knew I had to take French rather than Spanish language class. I endured three years with M. Summer-- an oversized Hercule Poirot, his chubby nail-bitten fingers methodically combing his 70’s ‘stache as he thought of how best to insult you for your ‘ideous pronunciation or stupid! ridiculous! grammatical mistake. But I endured that soul-squashing language teacher because I knew that, one day, I would speak my language of love: the language of la cuisine francaise.

My parents, as with all things gastronomical in my life, are to blame for this obsession with French food. We didn’t have much money when I was younger and as I got older it came in great hailstorms punctuated by long droughts. No matter what, my parents spent their disposable income on going out to eat. We went almost exclusively to French restaurants. I cannot remember the restaurant’s name but I do remember a place in the eastern SF Valley, its exterior painted with the tri-color scenes of Paris, and driving back happily sated in the warm night air of an LA summer. (That my father had a 1959 white convertible T-bird that we drove slowly down "The Boulevard"—a.k.a. Ventura Blvd, the main artery of the San Fernando Valley—is a good part of the memory as well). Then there was René’s and the Seashell and, later, La Serre. At René’s I was introduced to pâté au compagne and those gorgeous, addictive pommes soufflés—airy and crisp and salty. At the Seashell, I ordered fish--which I never ate at home or anywhere else, because it was bathed in butter and sometimes butter, cream, AND shrimp. At La Serre, I always started with the Feuilleté aux Quatres Champignons (and so my love of morels began). Somewhere I was introduced to Oeufs à la Neige. Clearly I was child cream addict. Beyond that, though, is what I really loved about French food: its ability to balance in perfect Taoist contradiction the extremes--rustic and earthy was also refined; luxurious was also delicate; simple was complex.

I finally made it to France at age 36 or 37. It did not disappoint. The apple pastry from Poilane, its crust so rich in butter that the paper bag was soon stained with a Rorshach of ecstasy. At the gilded Laduree, the sublimely delicate rose macaron filled with rose ice cream. In Normandy, the vergers and their simply perfect farm lunches of duck rilletes, goat cheese, salad, and cidre. And, of course, there was the CHEESE. (Next up will be a blog-ode to Vacherin de Mont D'Or!) In Dijon, at Restaurant Jean-Paul Thibert, I had the most memorable meal of my life: a 12 course culinary narrative that lasted four and a half hours. On my return to Paris, I immediately called my mother to tell her about the meal, mouthful by surprising mouthful. I knew she would understand my giddy reverie.

Perhaps I will make it to France next year. I hope so. Almost as good is that my son heads out to France next week for a four month stay in Lyon. I cannot wait for that "guess-what-I-just-ate?!"phone call.

My SF Crush

You know the guy you start finding yourself liking more and more, rather unexpectedly and against your better judgment? The guy who, at first, you liked casually, fraternally but the more you got to know began to feel a giddy affection for?

Well, I found that guy. Only it wasn’t a guy. It was a bakery.

I just spent two weeks apartment-sitting in SF, one block away from Tartine Bakery. I have many friends who have spoken highly of the place, some fanatically so. They showed me their Tartine cookbooks with reverence, touching each glossy photo as if their fingers could lift meringue or powdered sugar into the third dimension. I liked the treats they brought: the cocoa nib or toasted almond Rochers, the gougeres, the lemon bar. I even found the banana cream tartlette to be worthy of, well, hiding and having a sort of proprietary relationship with later. Mostly I enjoyed these pastries with appreciation for the art but I could never quite achieve the quasi-sexual reverie they had. I knew my food type fell mostly in the category of large, meaty and, preferably porcine.

Because of all the hype, I decided I had best make a trip to the bakery itself. After all, I needed coffee and it was a short walk. A half a block away it hit me. A wonderfully familiar yet also idealized smell. Not just the yeasty-sugary smell that wafts out of every bakery. This was different. It transported me back to a childhood place where baked goods smelled REAL. Too many bakeries these days smell overly redolent of sugar such that the air takes on a kind of sourness. I could smell yeast (but not like when I used to ride the RTD in LA past the Anheuser-Busch brewery—now that’s yeasty and a whole other story…) and sugar and almonds and vanilla and a hint of citrus—all in perfect proportion. I was excited but a little skeptical: could it really be as good as its smells foretold?

I stood in line. A very long line. Internally I harrumphed—what pastry can be worth such a line? A camembert, a vacherin mont d’or, or even exquisite gorgonzola—now those command devotion. I'll admit: everything did LOOK good. I ordered an almond frangipane croissant and, because I was on re-con, I also ordered a piece of quiche. To go back to the guy analogy, it’s like getting to know both his soft, sweet side and his more practical, logical self. If you just like one, it’s maybe good for a dalliance but you need compatibility with both for a relationship. I needed to know if this bakery was going to be worth my time (and serious amounts of cash: $3.75 for a croissant, $4.75 for a piece of quiche) or if we were destined for only an occasional fling. After all, bakeries really aren’t my thing (a.k.a he’s not my type). I actually think I’m a little allergic to yeast. And, besides, if I have to choose fat calories, wouldn’t I rather get them from something that also had a little more nutritional value, like salami?

Ready to dismiss all the hullabaloo and stick steadfastly to my not being one of “those” girls (i.e. those who stereotypically ooh and aah over things chocolate and bread-y), I was poised to be unimpressed. The quiche, however, was a revelation: soft yet sturdy custard that was an excellent foil to the salty ham, all enveloped in a buttery, decidedly unsoggy, brioche dough. The croissant was a big-hearted sandwich of a thing. It was split in half and spread with frangipane-- the frangipane sweet and aromatic but not cloying, the dough buttery yet just a bit brittle. I was more than pleasantly surprised. I was intrigued.

I returned to the bakery just about every day and I learned new things, each more enticing than the next. The dense suppleness of the almond teacake. The complex heartiness of the cake aux olives. The lusciousness of the tres leches cake. The I-have-never-had-a cake-so good-as-this lemon meringue, caramel layer cake. While the slice of that cake may have sealed the deal—-oh, yeah, I was now in serious “like”—-it was something more humble, more quotidian (as it usually is) that cemented this relationship. One Saturday, after 5pm, my son and I walked in. He was the third or fourth person I had brought to the bakery, extolling and enumerating the bakery’s virtues to each of them as if the bakery were a new beau (and face it, it was). We had just bought more than a few pastries when I noticed they had just taken the bread out of the oven. Add a loaf to our tab, please. Back at the apartment, my son set out plates for the pastries while I tore into the still hot loaf of perfectly crusty country bread. I set a small knob of salted butter on top and watched it melt into the airy interior. This was THE BEST bread I had ever had. I have never, ever been so smitten by a baked good. I was positively giddy. Dammit: if you can do a perfect loaf of bread AND a sublime lemon cake, you’re the man,I mean, bakery, for me.

I’m back at home now. No more Tartine just down the street. I think wistfully upon it, not wishing to replace it with another local bakery but just reliving the excitement of a spring fling. But I did learn something. Sometimes right in front of us, or down the street, there is something you can dismiss as not your type. But if you allow yourself to follow your senses, you may find he’s your type after all. Of course, whether you’re his is another matter entirely.

Growing Distance

(In honor of mother's day, I thought I'd share a poem I wrote on my adopted son's 21st birthday.)

Underneath this
great-boughed tree, its
branches low, needles arc-ing
over us in fountain sprays,
we share
a picnic table,
my son and I.

Folding his limbs
to fit
upon the narrow bench,
he stretches out,
falls into
an easy sleep.
A thin strip of belly
between waistband and shirt
gently rises
and falls.

I watch
to see that he is
still

breathing. He rustles,
pulls the woolen cap over his face,
makes
his explanation:
To stop the chestnuts
from hurting
if they fall.
That’s not
going to protect you, I say.
But it will
ease the blow.

I look to the woods
wishing for
Lilliputians to emerge, come
to bind him
to this moment. For

what will ease the blow,
I wonder,
when I can no longer
watch him sleep,
when I no longer
see the six year-old boy
in the man’s face?

"In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts..."(or the Diagnosis Part II)

I live in a stunningly beautiful place. Surrounded by madrones, manzanitas, and vineyards, the property on which I am lucky enough to live also affords me glorious views of the oak-studded California hills, a sometimes-rushing-sometimes-dry creek and, particularly spectacular at the moment, three dogwood trees covered in ivory, four-petalled blooms.

In the mornings I walk down the road, past lizards sunning themselves, to the vegetable garden. Here, the farmer’s constancy is aided by the alluvial soil and everything grows brazenly, from the springtime favas and rhubarb to the summer’s sweet corn and tomatoes. In the afternoons, when I take the dogs out gopher hunting (they catch nothing but definitely enjoy the dig), quails traverse the road unsteadily, like besotted dowagers in party hats. Driving home on a moonless night I must be attentive to the jackrabbit zigzagging across the road; the foxes are faster so I only catch a glimpse of a bushy tail being sucked into the brush. Occasionally, a pointy-eared bobcat lopes across the driveway. Frogs sing me to sleep and coyotes disturb that sleep with high-pitched cries no different from the ululating wails of women in grief.

As the determinedly hot days give way to unhurried breezy nights, the uncluttered, certain sky becomes a layering of Braille on an indigo page. It is easy to breathe deeply here, to find one’s angle of repose. But as much as the beauty of this place brings me a contemplative stillness and unquantifiable gratitude, I am restless.

I remember this feeling from many years ago. I was living in another rural, wonderfully beautiful place: the Pocumtuck Valley in western Massachusetts. Farmland, rolling hills, a river, plus the New England seasons. After two years living there, I had to leave.

Now, as I did then, I realize that when I live so close to nature, I am overwhelmed. As I should be: Nature is profound in its beauty, power, mystery. Here I have fallen into an intoxicated stupor of submission. It is exactly what the poet Rumi writes about: that drunken love one experiences upon meeting G-d. All there is for me to do is luxuriate in this beauty. And so, prostrate before Nature’s magnificence, I do nothing. I feel too small, too insignificant. What can I possibly do to contribute to THIS?

Knowing my smallness in all of this makes me ready to leave Eden. But not out of a sense of inferiority, rather out of an understanding. Yes, in the grandness of Nature I am small. Just as a single jackrabbit or oak tree or creek is. But small and solo don't mean insignificant.

I don’t know that I will ever live in a place as beautiful as this one again, but I have been given an inestimable gift to have lived here for six months. I have been embraced by Nature--indeed by G-d--and shown the grandeur of this world to which I am not merely a witness but a bonded actor. And now strengthened by that embrace, I must go do my part.

(Note: Blog title from Wordsworth's poem "A Few Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey")