Muse

Inspiration has become something of a favorite catchphrase for foodies of every kind.  We’ve all discovered or re-discovered our creativity through media bombardment – recipes on TV, online and everywhere you look, gorgeous, gorgeous photos, cookbooks with fresh new slants, and budding chefs with bold outlooks (and tattoos). The flip side of food as mundane practicality is food as grand theatricality. The difficult thing about the Foodie Revolution is that rather than inspire, it can perversely overwhelm when it comes right down to the day in day out realities of home cooking.

I love food, I do. But more than anything, what I really want is to know how to cook food that I like, that makes sense to my palate. I want food that neither falls victim to canned and processed convenience nor a slavish allegiance to “seasonal” eating. Cooking should be easy and simple, but not air-headed and thoughtless. Yet I also don’t want to feel like I’m competing with a world of alarmingly productive food bloggers and celebrity chefs every time I step into my totally not Top Chef kitchen.

I just want to cook and eat in a way that feels good to me.

A Muse then, is the food person – among the many, many food persons – who gets me in the kitchen to do just that. Inspiration is an intimate, personal thing – and sometimes I find all the noise rather too exhausting than inspiring. But then, there are the voices that quietly beckon in a way that cannot be ignored, which seem to subtract from the noise rather than add to it. In an age where information is plenty, but inspiration still rare – the Food Muse has left her footprints on my kitchen floor through the following souls.

Graham Kerr

Way, way back in the early 90′s, when I was living in Bangkok and a cooking show was a rare thing to find on television, the first TV chef that got me in the kitchen was the fittingly named Galloping Gourmet. What I remember was his hyper-crazy yet somehow endearing presentation, his quite frequent use of asafoetida, and that the very first time I ever made brownies was from a recipe I jotted down from his show. (No box mixes in Bangkok back then, and we were a family more likely to be eating rasgulla and kalo jam than brownies). I still have the little slip of paper on which I wrote down the recipe.

Emeril Lagasse

In college, I moved out of the dorms and into my own apartment, solo, in NYC (not recommended for someone young and recently transplanted from a foreign country). The only way I could console myself from feeling so desolate and displaced was by tuning in, every night, 8 p.m. sharp, to Emeril Live. It’s not news that food is comforting, but I had no idea how to cook it. During those bleak food days, I dreamed of “smell-a-vision”, gahr-lic and cooking impossibly delicious food like Emeril. He never actually got me in the kitchen, but he was the first ray of hope.

Rachael Ray

In this era of food snobbery it has become something of a national sport to sneer at RR’s brand of hyper-bubbly cutesie food. But if anyone remembers RR- The Early Years, before anyone knew what a food blog was, and the only other people on Food Network were established chefs like Emeril, Tyler, Bobby, Mario and Sarah Moulton – her contribution to the novice cook and the eventual rise of the celebrity chef culture (and I would argue even the foodie culture) – is indispensable.

Back then, I had no idea how to grocery shop, what the hell fresh rosemary or thyme or Italian flat-leaf parsley was – how to use it or how to store it. Her real time demonstration made things seem immensely doable – a skill, that the other chefs though culinarily more talented than she, didn’t have.  The “chop and drop”  deftly demystified the mise-en-place that was standard on the other shows. Everything from EVOO, to the large cutting board, to shopping for a knife, to how to de-seed a bell pepper, to cooking with wine, to the often mocked garbage bowl (“the ol’ GB”) and innumerable other small tips that no one else had mentioned before really formed the backbone of my kitchen habitation. I finally got how to cook with ingredients found at the typical American supermarket and explored new-for-me ingredients like smoked paprika, capers and Gouda cheese. So I’ll always have her back, no matter how snobbish the Snooty-Foodie Brigade gets.

Joanne Chang

As the Food Revolution swelled on and things began repeating themselves on TV, I discovered baking. Baking, I find, puts you in a whole new zone – it’s a different world. Cooking is intelligently winging it; every dish is a first date. Baking requires precision and yet is somehow meditative, demanding the attention and patience of a long-term relationship. When I was living in Boston, I found Flour, owned and operated by a Harvard graduate who had ditched a career in financial management  to pursue her dream of opening a bakery. (Who doesn’t love that story?) I read an article about her in Fine Cooking and was bowled over by the dedication, thoughtfulness and love for her craft which was later more thoroughly showcased in the blog she wrote while recipe testing for her cookbook.

“Flour” is possibly the best name for a bakery ever and is apt for her philosophy of simple American baking but to exacting standards of perfection. What resonated with me the most was learning that because her family is Chinese, she didn’t grow up eating chocolate chip cookies and brownies par course. In the interim period, where you get to dream about those goodies before you ever actually taste them, you’ve elevated them to a level in your head that is very difficult for the real-life prototypes to match. I know that feeling. I have yet to find MY perfect chocolate chip cookie. That’s why her baked goods are not fancy, but they are So Good.

Nigella Lawson

If Rachael showed me the how-to cook, Nigella has given me why-to cook. With her, I learned the magic of  food writing. No one expresses the deep interconnection of how we live, cook and eat as applicably as she does. On the first episode of Nigella Bites, she makes a gorgeously smart Deconstructed Pesto Pasta, and proceeds to eat it the way most of us normally do – on the sofa, in front of the TV, with a bowl, stuffing her face. What’s not to love? Plus – this:

“Real cooking, if it is to have any authenticity, any integrity, has to be part of how you are, a function of your personality, your temperament. There’s too much culinary ventriloquism about as it is; cooking for yourself is a way of countering that. It’s how you’re going to find your own voice.” – from How To Eat

That, in a nutshell, is my whole philosophy on cooking, baking, eating and living. Plus, her British palate, somehow more connected to a side of the world I so miss, works for me. I’ve yet to find a recipe of hers that I haven’t repeated several times.

Laurie Colwin

And then there are the ones who inspire you in a way that cannot even be put in words.  No recipe formulations are needed, nothing fancy is required. It pierces right into the very heart of what it means to cook. It’s ineffable. All I can say is – I don’t like eating fish. But -

“But there on the counter of the kitchen, was that beautiful big striper, cleaned, scaled and ready to bake. It was stuffed with scallion greens, garlic and some shreds of lean bacon, doused with a little white wine, dotted with butter and then swaddled in tin foil and baked in the oven. [...]In a small pan, we made a reduction of chopped bacon, butter, white wine and garlic, strained it and dribbled it over the fish when it was cooked.” – from A Writer In The Kitchen

It made me want to eat fish right away.

Sugar Break

Gosh, it has been a while since I posted but by I wasn’t intending to slack off on this blog. It’s been totally fun and really rewarding so far but there are a few things holding me up.

A) I’d like a better camera for better pictures. Because right now it’s totally hit or miss whether I come up with a halfway decent shot. And lovely pictures are half the fun of a food blog. I am trying to borrow a digital SLR camera from a friend but it seems I haven’t bribed him with enough cookies yet.

B) I am trying to work out the inverse equation between cookies baked and calories consumed. Let me tell you, a single girl in a kitchen filled with baked goods is a recipe for disaster. I know, I know, share with friends, neighbors, blah, blah. They’re all on a diet. Even the aforementioned one with the camera.

C) Energy. I want this to be a good blog. Meaning I want to devote my total creative energy to it when I am working on it, and not just half-assing it out of a sense of obligation. Right now, life is calling my energy towards other things, so I’d rather leave this be for a little while and get back to it when the creative energy is available.

D) But, I will be back because there are so many goodies I want to bake and so many thoughts I want to share. So please keep watching this space. I may not be able to post as often right now but this blog is by no means dead.

Splurge

They say we’re in the middle of a recession. I say it’s a good time to splurge.

What’s that, you say? That makes no sense?

Well, hear me out. Sometimes, when we’re feeling the pinch of an economic crisis, we start living our lives in limitation. We’re clipping the coupons and saving the pennies, putting back the filet mignon and grabbing the can of beans. But start living in too much limitation, and that becomes your reality.

So I think it’s a good idea to give your little life project a jolt now and then. Yes, we need to hold on to some of our dwindling cash right now. But wouldn’t it be a bold, audacious, daring little adventure in the midst of all this limitation-doom-is-upon-us thinking that is swirling through the ethers, to splurge a little? To look limitation in the eye and say, no way dude, not today. This is my life and as long as there are options, I will take my chances.

So I splurged a little even though perhaps maybe I couldn’t really afford to. I took my first pastry class at ICE. And let me say, it was one of the best experiences of my life. Whatever doubts I may have had as to the wisdom of spending a couple hundred dollars on a baking class right now, the experience paid for itself a thousand times over.

In my pastry class, over the course of three days, we tackled three different doughs – pate sucree (sweet pastry dough), pate brisee (flaky pastry dough) and pate a choux (that stuff you make eclairs with). It was quite a sensation to be around unlimited quantities of butter and chocolate, to work with high quality stovetops and ovens and of course the beloved Kitchenaid standmixers which I still do not own. And to be around a group of people as excited about flour and butter as myself.

We made Chocolate Hazelnut Tarts, Banana Walnut Tarts, 2 types of Apple Pie as well as Tarte Tatin, Blueberry Pie, Frangipane Fruit Tarts, Pastry Cream with various flavors, Coconut Custard Pie, Lemon Cheese Tarts, Eclairs, Cream Puffs and Paris Brest. I also learned how to really get flaky pastry dough to be flaky (repeat the mantra: DO NOT OVERWORK THE DOUGH). And I can actually make those cute mini-tarts at home now – they are so much easier to make than I thought. It was totally glorious.

So I say, go ahead, splurge a little. Give your system a jolt and follow your heart. Because as they say, you can’t put a price on happiness. And happiness is energy that permeates your life, and the lives of others. There are more things that make the world go round than how much cash is in the bank. It’s true.

Sweets From The Sweet Life

If you’re a foodie of any calibre at all you’ve heard that The Great David Lebovitz has just released a book called The Sweet Life in Paris. My advice on reading the book: do so in the privacy of your living room. Because if you happen to be eating potato chips at the same time? And you end up laughing so hard when least expected that you spray half chewed potato chips all over the place? Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

If you read the blog, you’ll be taken right in with the trademark prose, but the recipes are pretty great too. One of the first that caught my fancy was Ile Flottante, or Floating Island – a classic fancy French dessert that incorporates 3 very basic pastry elements that I find kind of intimidating: creme anglaise (or cooked custard), meringue, and caramel.

Regardless, I was so high from all the laughing that I got right over my fear and gathered up the very very simple ingredients required for this fancy dessert – eggs, sugar, milk and some vanilla. It’s pretty crazy what you can make with this stuff.

First – the creme anglaise.

Here’s what you need to know about creme anglaise. Do not, under any circumstance, try to make creme anglaise while you are simultaneously texting a friend who is asking you for advice on how to save his marriage. Okay? Bad idea. I couldn’t ignore his desperate text-cries-for-help so I had to tend to him. Meanwhile, my milk was warm and I had already tempered the yolks, and there was no way I could tactfully extricate myself from either the heavy duty texting or the demands of the time-sensitive custard.

So I offered some advice that I hoped would give him a 5 minute pause, and poured the entire yolk-milk-sugar mixture back into the pan to thicken. Instinctively I could tell, my body could tell, that this was the moment of truth. I was “stirring constantly” as advised and watching my custard like a hawk but my mind was on my friend (and terrified that I would hear the ping of my Blackberry before the custard was ready).

And, you know? It’s like the creme – which had yet to decide whether it would become anglaise or sweet scrambled eggs – knew that my focus was elsewhere. It took a split second, a split second, for it to go from luscious and silky to ugly and curdled.

Do not mess with the custard, okay? It needs your undivided attention. I made it the second time around (in a text-free environment) and like a madwoman kept testing my spatula for that telltale clean streak that says the custard is ready and immediately set the bowl on some ice. Mission accomplished.

The meringue was much easier and very forgiving. Nothing is more magical than watching measly every day egg whites turn into this lush, thick, glossy mass of fluffy goodness. We were going for a soft meringue here, hence we baked it in a water bath, then you flip it over onto a platter, so the clean white side is facing up, until you’re ready to serve.

Then it was time for the caramel – and it came out great!

Okay, I lied. I burned the caramel. At least I think I did, because it looked okay but tasted awful. It’s amazing what sugar will do with heat, but now I understand why chefs are so stressed out all the time, man. It literally takes a nanosecond for things to go from great to….burnt.

Even without the caramel the result is a total OMG moment – the meringue disappears in your mouth, literally – it just vanishes into a a little *poof* of perfect sweetness. Yum.

Note: I’m not printing the recipe here because a)I’m lazy and b)it’s a boring task. If you’d like the recipe, please do purchase the book, you won’t be disappointed. Or, you can simply google Ile Flottante, and you’ll get like a gazillion recipes in the vast fairyland that is The Web.

Kitchenware Confessions: Pricey Measuring Cups

Okay, yes I did it. I bought the Pricey Measuring Cups.

Okay? And I’m not doing so much fanciful baking that I could justify buying the Fancypants Measuring Cups. So why did I buy them?

Here’s the thing with the measuring cups. I already own two sets. The first set was missing the 1/4 cup measure. Did you know they sold measuring cups in sets of 3? Why would they do this? More importantly, why did I buy them? I was in a rush,  I got them in the grocery store baking aisle, it’s all they had, and in a moment of baker’s amnesia I must have reasoned, “Well, who uses the 1/4 cup measure anyway?”

Uh, everyone, practically. I soon found out that nearly every recipe in every cookbook calls for a 1/4 cup measure of something. And it gets really annoying after a while to do the 4 tablespoons thing. It just feels, I don’t know….like you’re not really a baker. Plus, every time I pulled out my measly set of 3 measuring cups, I thought – you guys are missing a member of the family. I am seriously not exaggerating when I say it really did take some of the joy out of baking.

To compensate, I bought a complete set of 4 measuring cups for a great deal – a steal! – at the dollar store! C’mon, a set of measuring cups for a buck? Sounds tempting, right? Except they were plastic. Cheap plastic. And I think the people who made them in China? They weren’t really too concerned about the accurate measurement of the measuring cups. Because the 1/4 cup measure on my El Cheapo Plastic set appeared to be suspiciously the same size as the 1/3 cup measure of my Incomplete Family set.

Sigh. Was I ever going to get this right? What was going on with me and finding a reliable 1/4 cup measure?

In my desperation I took to my preferred mode of self-therapy, otherwise known as Amazon.com, and came across these extremely professional looking, chef-approved set of seven, seven, measuring cups. Not only did they have a proper 1/4 cup measure, they even had an 1/8 cup measure. And the ultra convenient 3/4 cup measure. Because isn’t it so annoying to have to do the 1/2 cup, plus 1/4 cup to get the required 3/4 cups of sugar? Or am I just exceedingly lazy?

Is it a bit strange that I can go on for so long about measuring cups? Well, I’m not done yet.

Plus, the Fancypants Set is made by MIU France. Now I don’t know a whole lot about MIU France but I can tell they’re French and well, the French know approximately everything about baking. And measuring things. And being fancy.

So. There you go. Now – here’s more. I think it is necessary to reserve a set of measuring cups for the sole purpose of baking. Because if you’re like me, you always need the cups to measure out other stuff, like rice or cereal. Every single morning I wake up with the intention of going on a diet, and I’m absolutely militant about measuring out a cup of cereal and a 1/2 cup of milk. The rest of the day, I may not measure a thing, but in the morning, you can bet your bathroom scale that I will be measuring my cereal and my milk.

So inevitably when it comes time to bake – my measuring cups are all over the place – in the cereal bin, unwashed in the sink, hiding under a pile of dishes in the dish rack, or cozily tucked inside my sack of Basmati.

I’ve decided, therefore, that the Fancy Pants Measuring Cups will have their own privileged corner in my cupboard from which they shall be dethroned for the sole purpose of baking.

And in case you were wondering about the fate of the Incomplete Family and the El Cheapo Set, they’ve been relegated to the menial and thankless task of measuring stuff so I don’t eat too much.

I can assure you that these will most likely not be the last set of measuring cups I purchase. This set is good for baking accuracy, short of measuring your ingredients on a scale. But there’s a whole world of cute, artisinal measuring utensils that I haven’t even gotten into yet. So it’s safe to say this will not be my last obsessive story about measuring cups. In fact this is only…..a measure of more to come.

I Heart Baking

A post I saw over at ruhlman.com got me thinking about how I’ve arrived at the doorstep of the culinary world in search of something that goes much deeper than merely creating great-tasting food. Baking as a craft is no doubt fascinating with endless opportunities for perfecting, growing and learning. And while the craft itself does draw my interest, it also offers a respite that connects to something deeper within.

Since graduating college, I’ve tried off and on to be a “writer”. I use that term loosely to basically mean “I have no idea what the hell I’m doing but I think I should be doing something intellectual“. As I struggled valiantly to grapple with the “tools” of a writer’s trade – namely thoughts and words – I felt a deep sense of disconnect within me that I could not place. All I knew is that it just didn’t feel good.

When I got especially frustrated, I’d go into the kitchen and make something – anything – from scratch. Underbaked scones, flat as a pancake cookies, ridiculous recipe concoctions that no one would dare eat but me. I derived a great sense of pride from these total disasters that I never felt with writing, not even when I got my first published byline. But the thing was – even with all these recipe FAILS, I felt more smug and satisfied and stimulated to try again, try better – from the work I did in the kitchen, than anything I ever accomplished at my computer.

What was so ultra-satisfying in the kitchen, even when the results were far from perfect, that I could not feel even when I’d managed to string together the perfect combination of words for the first sentence of the first paragraph of the first chapter of the first book that would never see the inside of a publisher’s office?

Well, that’s just it. It’s hard to describe. Is it something to do with actual physical, tangible components that I gather by hand, then mix by hand? Or the child-like excitement I feel every single time I bake when I anticipate the results of my masterwork while it benignly does its thing in the oven? Was it the physical act of working with all my senses? The feel of butter and flour on my fingers? The immediate soul-satisfying scent of vanilla? The seductive gloss of melted chocolate? Was it the fact that for the moment, I didn’t have to think so hard, I could let my mind rest and let a deeper, more natural part of me take over? A part of me that simply knew what to do – and there was no anxiety in the doing of it.

I think it’s all of those things. I’m sure there are writers – real writers – whose creative juices flow naturally as they play around with thoughts and words. For me, I realized, I had to get out of my head and into my body. I’ll take the long hours standing on my feet, peeling apples for hours on end over staring at the blank page of a Word document any day. The peeling I find hypnotic, meditative, productive. The blinking cursor – is just a bloody curse.

Amy's Bread & Levain Bakery

It’s a gorgeous day in New York – an improvement from the cold, gray weather we’ve been suffering through even though rumor has it that it’s almost going to be summer time soon. As I heard one guy say on the street today, “Well, we’ve moved up into the 60′s, so at least we’re on our way up.” Sigh, where are you summer?

Anyway, it was still sunny and cool, more like early spring, but I decided to take advantage of the sunshine and set out to visit two bakeries that I’ve heard and read about ad nauseum but had yet to visit. I don’t know if it’s just me, but for the most part, I read about a place and have such high expectations that by the time I get there and sample the goods, I’m inevitably disappointed.

Well, not this time. I went to two tried and true New York bakery establishments and they both deserve every bit of the fanfare following they get.

First up was Amy’s Bread. I went there expressly to try the Lime Cornmeal cookie, which is a little weird, I know, since they are a bread place after all. But I had heard so much about this Lime Cornmeal cookie over on my baker-role-model Joanne Chang’s blog that I was literally dreaming about it and decided it had to be the first thing I tried there.

It was great. It had a great corn flavor which made me think that using good quality cornmeal probably makes all the difference. It’s like eating a lime-corn version of a classic NY Black & White cookie. Big and soft.

Over the weekend, inspired by my anticipated consumption of this cookie, I made an experimental version of corn muffins. I based it off the Magnolia Bakery cookbook recipe, and added lime zest and and a little cayenne to the batter. Why cayenne, you ask? Because I have an addiction to heat. It’s….problematic.

Need more evidence of my addiction? I decided to make a lime glaze for my corn muffins and added finely chopped Thai Bird Chilis to the glaze. Umm, yeah a little wacky. I don’t know what it is, I apparently can’t keep from adding hot stuff to my food, even when it’s supposed to be sweet. Anyway, the sweet-spicy combo is classic for Thai cuisine, and Bangkok’s where I grew up, so it must be in my blood. It didn’t taste half bad, actually. The glaze had a little bit of a bitter aftertaste, I’m not sure if it was ‘coz the confectioner’s sugar I used was sub-par (ugh, I bought store brand, lesson learned), or if the combo of the lime with the chili gave it a little bit of a bitter edge.

My muffins were a moderate success, but the Lime Cornmeal cookie from Amy’s was pretty dang awesome.

Next up was Levain Bakery, home of the “best chocolate chip cookie in Manhattan”. And yes, it was good. Really awesomely, cosmically good. My only complaint, as so many others have already attested to, is that it doesn’t seem to qualify as a “cookie” per se, because it’s so big, it looks more like a scone.

Then again, at the end of the day, if it tastes good, who the hell cares whether it falls in the category of cookie or scone, no? Let’s just call it a Fat Cookie and get on with the more important task of eating the thing. I got the classic Chocolate Chip Walnut – and they do not gip you on them walnuts – so nutty, chocolatey, doughy (in the best way possible) and yummy. Ultra-satisfying.

I walked the 40 blocks back to Port Authority but after all that yummy goodness,  I’m not sure it made much of a dent in the calorie tally.

How To Get Stuff Out Of A Pan

Seriously.

Annoying.

Why is this always the hardest part?

Epiphany # 1: It ain’t over till it’s out of the pan.

Hence  – (hence?)

1. When in doubt, use parchment.

2. Cool thoroughly. Like, beyond thoroughly.

3. Cursing at brownies, cooking spray, muffin pans or author of recipe while digging madly with a spatula generally does not help the situation.

4. Ugly, broken, smashed up brownies still taste just as good as good-lookin’ ones.