Oh, Chauncey, The Ramps Are In Season!!!

Ramps are, to me, the quintessential food-snob vegetable. 99% of Americans think a ramp is what you use to get on and off the interstate; the other 1% resides entirely in New York, Northern Calfornia, and Farmers Market-blessed Madison, the Berkeley of the Midwest. When the ramps are in season, we are all supposed to descend on the market, trilling and clucking like guinea hens as we snap up the ephemeral veg. I've resisted ramps precisely because they seem like such a food-dork thing to seek out. This year, I got over my damn self and bought some ramps. What followed was RampFest 2009, which will become an annual event if I can stand my smug food-snob self when the dust settles from the Fest.

When I describe this meal as a "Fest," what I mean is that I cooked two ramp dishes and served them in one meal. Both were from Bon Appetit. You see above the ramp and cracked coriander biscuits (during and after) and the ramp-and-sausage risotto. The meal was a bit starch-heavy but good. Ramps are part of the onion family, of which every member is adored by me. Leeks, garlic, onions sweet and spicy - each hold a special place in the culinary pantheon. To go with the "Family" analogy, not the Jacksons (one obvious favorite, Janet) but the Redgraves (so much talent, how do you pick?). Onions are my favorite veg, and the ramps did not disappoint. Their presence in the biscuits was too subtle to make me want to repeat the recipe again. The risotto was delicious and even better as a leftover, a lovely balance of rampiness, Parm-iness and sausagocity. I've found risotto tricky in the past but this one was texturally spot-on. If anybody knows a better way to showcase ramps, hook me up. In the meantime, I am done for the year with both the ramps and the bourgeois ramp-related self-loathing.

I've Got A Luvverly Bunch of Coconuts

The whole coconut is one of the few high-maintenance gourmet items I remember seeing in the IGA growing up in the culinary wasteland known as the Seventies. The little pile of hairy balls (YESS!) in the produce aisle was a perpetual source of fascination and mystery, an item so beyond the pale of my mother's grocery list that the purchase of one was as likely as my getting a pony for my birthday (THANKS FOR NOTHING, mom and dad). It's difficult for me to imagine any Carter-administration housewife, even one as industrious and skilled in the kitchen as my own mom (ponyless childhood notwithstanding), doing anything with a whole coconut aside from using it as part of a centerpiece at a "Trader Vic's" party. Maybe they cracked them in half and served blender drinks in them? I doubt there was a secret authentic-curry subculture fomenting in suburban Connecticut that I was unaware of, and which the Danbury IGA was supplying.

So I'm trying to be the coconut-buying type of mom, if not the pony-buying variety. My kids usually request a small treat in exchange for good behaviour at the grocery store, which is only fair. The grocery store was the site for many of my long dark midnights of the mothering soul when the boys were babies/toddlers, so the stress-free trips we now enjoy are worth a little lagniappe for the dudes. I love it when they choose something food-adventuresome. We recently brought home this coconut and dismantled it according to the useful and detailed instructions in my battered copy of Joy of Cooking. You can see the many implements of destruction involved in its demolition. The boys were far more intrigued by the process than by the slightly-lame end product you see in the bowl above. Unsweetened coconut is. . . meh. It tastes best consumed on a ramshackle barge in the West Indies along with copious rum drinks. If I had been feeling WonderWoman-ish I could have gone on to make my own coconut milk by grating the meat, boiling it and squeezing the results out of the gratings with cheesecloth and blah blah blah. . . coconut milk from a can is one of the best pantry items there is and one of the only canned goods I do not begrudge the Watergate-era housewife one whit. Perhaps I will crack a coconut for non-experimental, non-child-amusement reasons when Barack Obama and his family come to my house for dinner and I make them an authentic Thai meal, an event my boys are dead certain is going to take place any day now.

Taste 10, Looks 3*

The dish you see pictured above, that mound of mystery-meat-looking brownness sitting in a puddle of its own leacheate (a dandy term learned in Environmental Law class, and which my ignorant spell-checker does not recognize) is in fact one of the most delicious things cranked out of my kitchen in many a moon. Vegetarians can skip this post. It's a slow-cooker barbecued beef brisket, and the juice in the bottom is the delicious sauce, two cups of which were served on the side and are not pictured here. Now, I have a notorious and snobbish dislike for any type of cookery that includes the word "country." I lump it in the same category as cookbooks full of reader-submitted recipes, most of which tend to include canned cream of mushroom soup or are topped with a crunchy layer of breakfast cereal. And don't even get me started on mayonnaise.

That said, the latest arm of the America's Test Kitchen empire (namely "Cook's Country" magazine and the affiliated show) is an endeavor for which I'm willing to carve out an exception. The basic gist of CC combines the exacting, scientific approach of "Cook's Illustrated" with a more, for lack of a better term, family-friendly approach. The thing is, CI recipes are usually intensely delicious, faultless and reliable versions of familiar but perhaps slightly fancy foodstuffs - nothing terribly outre - but CC takes a simpler, "weeknight meals" approach to comfort food and dishes appropriate for a potluck. I still avoid the reader submissions - they strike me as sketchy - but I had to try this recipe for brisket.

The grill is my Achilles' heel, and I don't mess around with smokers (hoping to change that this summer). This brisket was rubbed with various red spices and canned chipotle peppers in adobo sauce (my new favorite ingredient), sat twiddling its meat-thumbs in the fridge for 24 hours, and then took a day-long sauna perched atop an inverted mini-loaf pan inside my slow cooker. Beneath said loaf pan was a tasty little mound of sauteed onions and more of the aforementioned adobos. At the end of the process, the recipe assured me that I would have two cups of liquid with which to gin up a sauce. At first, it looked like I had only a meager puddle, but raising the inverted loaf pan resulted in a mini barbecue-tsunami. The resulting liquid measured PRECISELY two cups. And THAT is how America's Test Kitchen ROLLS.

The meat was so tender that it essentially fell apart. The mess you see above is what happened when I attempted to cut it into slices. It was just about too spicy for the boys but perfect for me and the huz. I am considering making a few of these and serving the meat on buns at a Fourth of July bbq - what else, if anyone cares to suggest, would you put on such a sandwich? And since I have no patio furniture, would it be socially awkward to host a BYOC party, the "C" standing for "chair?"

*Mini- CWTD contest- name this pop-cultural reference! Prize: bragging rights. Maybe I will bake you something.

On Letting Them Eat Cake

Making a birthday cake is the second-most high-pressure baking assignment there is, second only to the wedding cake (which is once-in-a-lifetime, as opposed to annual). To those who think birthdays are important, the cake is the esteem in which you are held by friends and family expressed in pastry form. If your loved ones buy you a Wal-Mart cake and write your name on it with the ossified candy letters they sell at the grocery store, well, you might as well just curl up and die. I realize that my moral universe vis-a-vis baked goods is warped, but when I step up and offer to make a b-day cake it's going to be PROPER.

Above is the cake I made for my niece Nora's fourteenth, on somewhat short notice. Her desire was for an intensely chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, which was delivered as ordered. Unfortunately, her expectations for greatness have been permanently and unfairly raised by the replica Titanic cake we designed, built together and delivered to her class at school several years ago, a flour-and-butter monstrosity that was heavy enough to have served as an anchor on the ship in whose image it was baked. Compared to that one, this cake was fairly pedestrian in appearance, but it tasted OK. I always beat myself up over the gulf in textural moistness between scratch cakes and box cakes. The latter tend to be designed for pure deliciousness rather than the ability of the cake to stand up to vigorous decorating. Box cakes taste awesome but tend to tear and fall apart if you try to spread real buttercream on them. What can you do? If we can put a man on the moon, you'd think this troubling conundrum would be solvable. Maybe Obama can throw some TARP money at cakes.

Pizza: Homemade vs. Delivered

I've been making my own pizza for a long time- more than ten years. This isn't because I'm a crazy-ambitious home cook who makes everything harder than it needs to be (I am) or because I like to look smugly down my nose at others with less time and kitchen-savvy as they funnel their dollars into the pizza-industrial complex (I do). It's because I took a cooking class at a local shop on the subject of pizza, a class that empowered me to DIY the pie from then on. This is principally due to cheapness. Pizza is one of those foods that is, I suspect, marked up astronomically, and that orderers are charged a premium for the alchemical combination of flour, yeast, tomatoes and cheese and the subsequent delivery of same. Factoring in travel time, homemade pizza (with dough made from scratch) doesn't take that much longer than delivered.

Over the years, my recipe has acquired a few tweaks, most notably the substitution of specialty pizza flour for bread flour (which works fine, but yields stiffer/less elastic dough). But it's essentially the same recipe I scored over a decade ago at Orange Tree Imports. I use 6-In-1 ground tomatoes straight from the can as my sauce and top it with whatever appeals - here, pepperoni. I had to splash out for a baking stone and wooden peel which paid for themselves very quickly in conserved 'za expenditures. It makes for a very easy and interactive dinner party at which guests are easily impressed by homemade dough. All would be dandy in the pizza department chez dudes if only the dudes themselves would abandon their fixation on "delivered pizza", their conviction that it is superior in every way and that the sight of a beat-up 1992 Accord with a light-up delivery sign on the roof pulling into our driveway is cause for delirious celebration.

Vegetables On Parade

When I was a kid, a "balanced meal" included one of each of the following:

A Meat/Protein: some of my mom's standards included oven-baked chicken, filet mignon wrapped in bacon (watch out for the toothpick!), meat loaf, burgers, kielbasa, and the occasional beef stew.

A Vegetable: salad, or some frozen or boil-in-bag. When fresh, broccoli or brussels sprouts (which I liked as a kid - SO???), corn on the cob, nothing too exotic. And the final and most controversial category in my household:

A Starch. That would entail some kind of rice or noodles or potato, generally. My husband insists that this is NOT a category of food, but I think that most kids growing up in regular Seventies families are familiar with the notion of the Starch Course. His own parents were quite young and hippie-ish and he actually got to eat things like fresh beets as a kid. I've recently been trying to re-calibrate my meal paradigm so that the meat is not the main event, for nutritious and environmental reasons. I'm finding myself preparing meals like the one pictured above, in which one or two fairly elaborate vegetable dishes take center stage. What you see here is a cabbage gratin made with Gruyere cheese, shown on the plate alongside some sauteed kale, a standby in our diet. My kale is not perfect - I make it with two slices of bacon - but I like to think the overall result is more halo than devil-horns from a dietary standpoint.

I'm actively looking for good vegetable recipes. It's all too easy to just saute or roast with olive oil and salt and just let the variegated flavors of the vegetables stand out in their delicious simplicity. Okay, that doesn't sound so bad, right? But a little variety never hurt anybody, and my CSA box is going to start arriving one of these days. So if any of my numerous readers have good veg recipes to share, please do. I'm particularly looking for a vegetable curry that will rock my socks off.

Easter Baking: The Only Acceptable Use for Pastels

The poorly-focused snap above depicts the cupcakes I was requested to bring to my in-laws' family Easter gathering. I have a well-documented (by me) love-hate relationship with the cupcake. I love it as food, I hate it as pop-cultural phenomenon replacing chocolate/kitty cats/painful shoes as the go-to emblem for Things That Make Women Act Irrationally. When assigned the cupcake project for Easter, I naturally made things more difficult than they needed to be by (a) making the cakes from scratch, (b) frosting them with a cooked Swiss meringue buttercream, and (c) decorating them in a floral theme with lots of colors. Frosting flowers get a pass from me when it comes to my general dislike of food that's been manipulated to look like something else. Maybe because one is exposed to the icing flower at such a young age that it seems only natural that sweetened butter should be extruded through a metal tip and made to look like the sexual organ of a plant. Why not?

Pastel colors are one of the spring phenomena that irritate me. Notwithstanding the fact that the brown of mud and earth is the real predominant color of spring, clothing and other retailers seem to think that rising temps will cause us all to take leave of our senses and want to wear things like pale-yellow pants and baby-pink sweater sets. For the love of Pete, I just want to wear grey and aubergine all year long. Is that so much to ask? That said, pastel makes a dandy color scheme for cake frosting. A light touch with the food coloring is, I think, leaps and bounds more appetizing than the alternative, and has the added advantage of not discoloring one's teeth. These cupcakes were a modest hit. The centers of the sunflowers are made with wee chocolate chips. Only one guest REFUSED A CUPCAKE, claiming she "doesn't like chocolate cake." What next? She doesn't like puppies and sunshine? Puh-leeze. I've got your number, great-grandma Lois. You WILL eat one of my cupcakes. (cue sinister laughter)