Who's Your Daddy?

Yesterday on the light rail, Enzo asked Teresa, “Is that my daddy?” pointing to a big black guy across the aisle. (Enzo’s anonymous sperm donor-dad is Chinese, and I am white.)

The guy gave Teresa a look like, who me?

Teresa said, “No, that’s not your daddy.”

“Who is my daddy?”

“Let’s ask mama Kate when she gets home.”

When I got home we conferred. I said we could tell him his daddy is a really nice man that we don’t happen to know personally but someday when Enzo’s grown up, he will know him. (Enzo’s donor is “identity-release” meaning that when Enzo turns eighteen, he can find who he his and get in touch with him.) Teresa said that’s way too complicated. Let’s just tell him some people have two mommies and some people have a daddy and a mommy and some people have two daddies. Thank god we live in a place where that is actually true. Besides, Enzo’s sperm donor isn’t really his daddy. Enzo doesn’t have a daddy. There are going to be times when he is incredibly sad about that. Guilt, guilt.

See, that’s what I like about food. It’s simple—I mean morally simple. You get hungry, you figure out what to do about it. Here’s an egg. Here’s piece of bread. Scrambled eggs with toast are good. Or you could add milk to the egg and make French toast. Or you could boil the egg and make an egg salad sandwich. And what about English muffins? It’s all wonderfully practical and (unlike child rearing) you’re unlikely to do anyone lasting harm.

But then there’s that awful book—you know the one I mean, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, about how every time you buy a porkchop at Safeway, you’re feeding an agricultural industrial complex based on corn that makes half the world die of terminal fat while the rest die of starvation. Oh, and the whole thing takes so much fossil fuel that you might as well just kill yourself right now. And I’m thinking, “But it’s only a porkchop.”

In a fit of rebellion against that book--which I haven’t even read, but it’s gotten so much media attention that I feel as if I have—I went out and bought a Twinkie. He heard the author, Michael Pollan, on the radio saying mean things about Twinkies. He called them An Edible Food-Like Substance. I hadn’t had a Twinkie in about thirty years, but I remembered them as perfect. So I bought a Twinkie, and it was awful. Twinkies are one of those childhood memories that should be left undisturbed.

So I made a plan to bake the perfect Twinkie. It’s a sponge cake, right? It says so right on the package. An extra sweet, extra salty, extra junky sponge cake. I found something in The Cake Bible that looked perfect, and here it is:

Bert Green’s Special Sponge Cake, from The Cake Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum

Orange Juice 2 tablespoons

Grated lemon zest 2 teaspoons

Vanilla ½ teaspoon

Superfine sugar 1 cup + 7 tablespoons

Sifted cake flour 1 cup

Eggs 5

Egg whites 3

Cream of tartar 1 teaspoon

[The directions for this are not obvious to me, and I doubt they are too others, so I’ll put them in too, though it’s a lot of typing.]

• Preheat oven to 350. Get out one ungreased 10-inch two-piece tub pan, and preheat it for at least 5 minutes.
• In a small bowl combine the orange juice, lemon zest and vanilla.
• Remove 2 tablespoons of the sugar and reserve to sprinkle on to raw batter.
• Remove 3 more tablespoons of the sugar and whisk together with the flour.
• Rinse a large mixing bowl with hot water and wrap the sides with a hot towel. (If using a hand mixer, place the bowl in a sink partially filled with hot water.)
• Beat the yolks, gradually adding the remaining 1 cup sugar, on high speed for 5 minutes or until the mixture is very thick and ribbons when dropped from the beater. Lower the speed and gradually add the orange juice mixture. Increase the speed and beat for 30 seconds. Sift the flour mixture over the yolk mixture without mixing in and set aside.

• Beat the whites until foamy, add the cream of tartar, and continue to beat until soft peaks form when the beater is raised. Gradually beat in the 2 tablespoons of reserved sugar, beating until very stiff peaks form when the beater is raised slowly. Ad 1/3 of the whites to the yolk mixture and with a large skimmer or rubber spatula fold until incorporated. Gently fold in the remaining whites in 2 batches.

• Pour the batter into the hot pan. (It will be a little more than ½ full.) Sprinkle the top evenly with the remaining 2 tablespoons sugar. Bake 35-40 minutes or until golden brown and a cake tester comes out clean when inserted in the center. Invert the pan, placing the tube opening over the neck of a soda or wine bottle to suspend it well about the counter, and cool the case completely in the pan (this takes about 1 hour).

• Loosen the sides with a long meal spatula and remove the center core of the pan from the sides. (To keep the sides attractive, press the spatula against the sides of the pan and avoid any up–and-down motion.) Dislodge the bottom and center core with a spatula or thin, sharp knife. (A wire cake tester works well around the core.) Invert onto a greased wire rack and re-invert onto a serving plate. Wrap airtight.

• Understanding: One of the secrets of this cake’s exceptional moistness and tenderness is using 1/3 cup less flour than classic sponge cask and a very high proportion of sugar (almost ½ cup more). For additional volume, Bert applies heat while beating the yolks and uses 3, sometimes ever 4, extra egg whites to compensate for structure usually provided by a higher quantity of flour. To ensure that the cake will not collapse during baking, he preheats the empty pan so that the batter starts to expand and set immediately.

Rose says that the cake is sweet enough that you don’t really need anything extra, but no creamy filling would totally defeat the purpose, so I thought quite a bit about whether to use stabilized whipped cream or vanilla butter cream. And I decided the creamy filling really needed to be inside, not on top, to recreate the Twinkie experience, so I decided to use the same batter to make cupcakes and then fill them with a pastry bag, so that the cream filling would be inside but also peep out of the top.

And then I realized I’d have to buy a pastry bag and superfine sugar and cake flour and all new clothes. And the conversion to cupcake form might not be foolproof—how to invert them? And the hopelessness of trying to recreate childhood memories dawned on me again. It might be wonderful, but it still wouldn’t be the Twinkie I remember. So I never made my homemade protest Twinkies, and it’s very sad. I have to be content with writing about thinking about it--a completely unsatisfying substitute.

*

I just had an overwrought fantasy about Enzo’s donor reading this entry and somehow figuring out that he’s our guy. Then he made the Twinkie cupcakes, following the recipe above. Or better yet he owns The Cake Bible--that’s the kind of guy he is--so he bakes it right out of the book. And then he leaves a comment on my blog with his name and phone number.

If that actually happened, I’d be completely freaked out, but in the fantasy it was perfect. We got together. He was adorable. We ate cake. Enzo loved it.

P.S. If you’re out there, I think the stabilized whipped cream would be better than the buttercream. But either one would be fine. Also don’t forget to put a little extra salt in the cake. Twinkies are pretty salty.

My Inheritance

When I was in high school I had a boyfriend whose mom hated to cook, and she did it every night, and it tasted like oppression. My boyfriend turned out to be dangerously mentally ill. I think it was the food.

I like cooking (which really means I like eating) but I can’t imagine how anyone can cook every single night. I think about food all the time, but most nights I can’t think of a thing to fix for dinner. Last night Teresa had nothing, I had a bowl of tomato slices with olive oil, salt and mozzarella cheese, Enzo had Stouffer’s Swedish meatballs and frozen red/yellow/and green bell peppers straight from the bag, crunch, crunch. You can’t fault it for nutrition (or at least it could be a lot worse), but thinking about eating as nutrition is like thinking about reading as education or sex as procreation—a grim doctrine if there ever was one.

My mom always liked cooking (which really means she liked eating). Me too. I remember her showing me how to cut cold shortening into flour for piecrust, how to beat egg whites so they’re fluffy but not dry and how to fold them gently into the pancake batter. I helped her make enchiladas, taking my place in the assembly line, stuffing the tortillas with cheese and the onion-cumin-olive mixture. She taught me how to make pesto and bread and hummus and how to roast and peel eggplant for baba ganoush. She showed me about how much salt to put in the pasta water. She let me make awful and complicated salad dressings in the blender.

My mom taught me—or I absorbed—that pretty much everything starts with sautéd onions. They’re the demi-plie, the simple fist step from which you can go anywhere. She never told me this, certainly not in those words. But you absorb patterns and do what works. So it’s a sad commentary that at this moment I have no onions in the house. Of course I also have no clean underwear.

It’s a piece of luck that my mom and I both liked to eat. And when you’re a kid you just absorb things. You don’t even know you’re learning to cook or learning each other. I picked up not just how to cook particular dishes (that you can get from a book) but how to think about food, how things go together, how things don’t have to be perfect to be good. And how to use a recipe in a strictly advisory capacity.

I don’t know if Enzo and I will have anything like that. He likes trucks, and I just don’t. He likes hacking at things in the kitchen, but I think he’s just humoring me. We both like books, but his taste is terrible.

He likes eating, though. That we have in common.

My Birthday Cakes

It all started because I went to a bakery in Pasadena and ate a salted chocolate French macaroon that was so good that I almost started crying. And I’ve been obsessed with salt and chocolate ever since.

What a good time for my birthday to come around.

Ideas. Well, the main idea is to bake something wonderful in itself and then, when it’s almost finished baking, sprinkle it with that absurdly expensive coarse French mineral sea salt. I have never owned this salt. But now I’m going to get some for my birthday.

The great charm of the macaroon was the way the salt was partly dissolved into it, making a sort of sweet-salty crunchy crust. I think to do this you can’t salt it before baking because the salt would dissolve completely, but you can’t wait until it’s completely baked because the salt would just roll off. So you pick your moment and sprinkle and hope.

So, some ideas…

• Salted truffle brownies.
• Margarita Tart. (Salted lemon bars cooked in a tart pan. Substitute Grand Marnier for some of the lemon juice.)
• Salted truffle brownies, cooked as cupcakes, with a sea salt caramel I the middle.

I went to Taylor’s Market, where you can get things like organic veal shanks and chocolate/rose gelato and jewel-like produce. It’s within walking distance, but I never go because of the prices. Of course they had the French sea salt, but it was fourteen dollars for a small jar. I couldn’t do it, not even for my birthday. And I remembered seeing some pretty nifty salt an Ono’s, the Japanese market, which is where I dragged Enzo last Saturday.

Ono’s is modern and swank and expensive. Everything is small and exquisitely packaged, and all the product information is in Japanese characters, beautifully abstract to the unreading eye. We found thirteen kinds of salt including The Salt, Practical Edition in a small hexagonal box tied with a red ribbon and stating in English “Three years stored solar salt of tidal flat.” That cost six dollars, and we bought it. There was also an impractical edition, which cost more than the French salt at Taylor’s, simply called The Salt.

(A few days later)

Forget the salt. I’ve decided on carrot almond cake and chocolate amaretto cake, both from Marcella's Italian Kitchen. Since I’m about to be in my forties, instead of just forty, I think I’m mature enough to handle two cakes. Besides, I’ve wanted to try both cakes for years, and the years are passing. And as a midlife crisis type gesture, two cakes seems pretty tame. It’s better than two girlfriends.

Tomorrow is my birthday, and my first present is that Enzo and Teresa are doing to clear out of the house this afternoon, so that I can come home early and bake and listen to music and maybe have a glass of wine. Hurrah!

(next day)

I forgot what it was like to cook ALONE, alone, beautifully alone, licking both beaters all by myself, thank you, and without Enzo running to get his snow plow truck to drive through the flour. I went over the recipe a few times, made a few changes: more chocolate, more salt. (The recipe had no salt, obviously a clerical error, and yes I used my three years stored solar salt of tidal flat.) I considered adding baking powder, because I’ve never made a cake leavened only by egg whites, but I decided to trust Marcella on that one.

Anyway, here’s the recipe. My variations are in parenthesis.

½ pound butter softened to room temperature, plus 1 tablespoon for smearing the baking pan
1 cup granulated sugar
A bowl for beating egg whites—preferably, but not indispensably, a copper bowl washed with vinegar and salt, rinsed thoroughly, and dried. (Yeah right.)
5 eggs (also at room temperature)
½ cup flour
4 ounces amaretti ground to a powder in the flood processor
2 (3 or even more) ounces semisweet baking chocolate, grated fine
(¾ teaspoon salt—less if using salted butter.)
(1 tablespoon Amaretto liqueur plus a little overflow)

I don’t have to put in all the directions, do I? You know how to make a butter cake, which is all this is: cream the butter and sugar, separate the eggs and add the egg yolks one at a time, beating each one in; combine all the dry stuff and add it to the butter-egg yolk mixture a little at a time, beat the egg whites, fold them in. Bake.

The cake was a little burned, so I trimmed off the edges, and if the test of a great cake is that even the burned edges are delicious, then this is a great cake. I frosted it with whipped chocolate ganache from The Cake Bible, which is pretty much bittersweet chocolate whipped cream.

It’s a dense, low-lying cake, and covered with messy light brown whipped cream, it looked like a cow paddy, according to Teresa. But it did not taste like a cow paddy. Almondy and chocolatey and buttery and not too sweet and just salty enough, and the frosting was chocolate on legs.

I didn’t have time to make the carrot cake. Next year. Or maybe next week.

Happy birthday to me.

Popsicles: It's What's For Dinner

My butt is getting bigger and bigger, and pretty soon it is going to explode.
Boom!
There, that’s over with. Now what’s for dinner?

*

Yesterday Teresa made quesadillas, and I cut up red bell pepper and pitted some fabulous cherries. When we sat down to eat Enzo took one look at all this and pointed to the freezer, crying out, “Vegetables! Vegetables!” So I got him what he likes, frozen mixed vegetables. Not heated up, not even thawed. They’re like little crunchy vegetable popsicles. He likes the mushrooms and corn the best. Afterward he had an actual popsicle. And then he had another.

*

Our garden. It exists. That’s something.

Enzo loves arugula. He knows how to say it, and he knows the difference between arugula and baby romaine and oak leaf. I will make him gay yet, by god. Pass the goat cheese!

The tomatoes are coming on strong now, and at first it was like hunting Easter eggs to find a red one among all the green. Now there are so many red ones that the thrill isn’t there anymore. But they’re still good to eat. Enzo insists on setting the bowl of tomatoes on the back of his flatbed truck. “I farmer,” he says and then makes revving noises.

We also have basil and mint and parsley and baby leaks (sort of like chives). We are mocked by our cucumbers which are plentiful and terrible. They’re bitter though and through.

I made a gaspacho-like thing with store bought cucumbers, yellow peppers, sweet onion (soaked in salt water and then rinsed), olive oil, lime juice, salt, mint and Thai basil. I think there was Greek yogurt in there too. If there wasn’t there should have been. I made croutons and put them on top along with halved cherry tomatoes.

Enzo ran the food processor with great natural authority and helped me toss things down the feed tube. It ended up a puree, which wasn’t my plan, but it was good that way.

Enzo didn’t like it. Maybe I should try freezing it into popsicles next time.

This Little Piggy Went to Market

I’ve always liked markets. When I was a baby, the only way I wouldn’t be cranky after my nap was if my mom popped me and my sister into the stroller while I was still almost asleep and took us to the market. This was Beirut, 1969. We would get a drink called Bone Juice and buy food.

I don’t remember any of this. It’s family legend. And I’ve always pictured Bone Juice as a brightly colored sugary drink in a little bone-shaped carton or plastic bottle. Why not? Enzo’s gummy vitamins are shaped like bones.

But as I was writing this in my head a few nights ago, it occurred to me that it probably wasn’t Bone Juice but Bon Jus, as in Good Juice, as in French. Somehow Bone Juice had lodged in some pocket of my mind and lasted forty years. We must all have these childhood scraps and misapprehensions, tucked away, untouched by time.

That makes me wonder what Enzo’s will be. Whenever I help him put on his Thomas the Tank Engine backpack we say together, "Backpack! Shark Attack! Easy-Isy-Over!" What do backpacks have to do with sharks? Nothing! I just made it up. But in his mind the two will be linked forever. (Maybe.) And whenever we fart we say, with great glee, “Gas Tax!” The other day we drove by a gas station, and I told him that that’s where you could actually pay your gas tax. And the hopelessness of ever explaining anything dawned on me for about the hundredth time. And yet kids do learn the world. They’re amazing at it.

But back to markets. I still like them—even boring old Safeway. They’re packed with life and possibility. And in Sacramento you can step into so many other worlds: The Red Sea Market on Florin (five gallon tins of olive oil from the West Bank, crates of dates, halal game hens, Bulgarian feta at incredible prices, Al Jazeera playing on the TV) to the Esperanza Mercado on Franklin (four kinds of bananas, brown sugar in a huge cone-shaped lumps, pig’s feet and cow’s feet and octopus). And then there’s the Asian Farmer’s Market on Sundays, set up in an abandoned gas station, where you can buy live chickens and roosters or fresh soy milk and where oranges and sweet potatoes are about half the price they charge at the regular farmer’s market, a few blocks down and over. And the Asian grocery a few blocks down has these beautiful ancient oak chests behind the counter where they store medicinal herbs. You can get huge pieces of curled cinnamon bark about a foot long. I don’t know what to do with a foot a cinnamon, but just knowing it’s out there makes me feel alive with possibility.

Grocery Goddess

Ideally you’d be at the Farmer’s Market yourself with no plans, no recipes, no lists--ready to be inspired by whatever is fresh and cheap, but who’s got the fucking time? So I give Teresa a grocery list for Safeway full of arcane instructions and contingency plans.

• Apples—Fujis, but only if cheap. And not from Chile

• Lettuce--romaine or oak leaf, whichever is cheap and looks good

• One bunch of celery—not in a bag. Get the kind with just a little plastic around the bottom and lots of leaves on the top.

• One pork shoulder roast--around five pounds, but only if still on sale, should be $1.99 a pound

• Jack or cheddar cheese--only if on sale and NOT pre-grated, unless the pre-grated is super-cheap.

• Green enchilada sauce--but cancel if you don’t get the cheese.

• Corn tortillas--three dozen if you get the cheese and enchilada sauce; one dozen if not.

• Flour tortillas--be careful not to get the supposedly butter-flavored ones, also NOT low-fat.

• Coriander—not from spice section, get from Mexican section in little envelope. Also, whole seeds, not ground.

• Cumin--same as above

• Olive oil--cancel if going to Trader Joe’s anytime soon, because it’s cheaper there.

• Red wine (Shiraz, second to cheapest bottle you can find.)

• All the usual: eggs, milk, frozen things you need

I know that shopping with Enzo is pretty much like having an unexploded bomb in the cart. An unexploded bomb that says, "Cookie, cookie, cookie." Translation: tick tick tick. He is only going to stay there so long, and it’s almost impossible to comparison shop or change plans or even follow complex instructions. You’ve got to move.

So I get out of court and check my messages:

Hello, this is your family. What’s cheap for lettuce? And how am I supposed to know if it looks good? Call us!

Hello, this is your family again. [Enzo in background, “cookie! banana!”] How can you tell if the apples come from Chile—do they have a sticker or something? Why don’t you answer your stupid phone? And what’s the matter with Chile anyway?

Hello, this is the last time I’m calling you. The pork roast says it’s still on sale, but it’s not $1.99 a pound, it’s $2.50. Do you still want it? Never mind! We’re getting it.

Okay, this is last time. They don’t have whole cumin in the Mexican section. Do you want me to get whole cumin from the regular spice section or ground cumin from the Mexican section? Never mind, you don’t get cumin. Deal with it. Or answer your phone.

It’s us again. Do you think we’re mature enough to get Nutter Butters? They’re on sale. Remember The Debauch?

That last message refers to one time when we ate a hole package of Nutter Butters at a sitting, while playing chess. That was pre-Enzo, of course. We still talk about it fondly as The Nutter Butter Debauch.

I think most of our life together is like this—messages in writing and then on answering machines, a few emails, an occasional debauch. It’s like an epistolary novel of domestic life. And the plot goes like this: muddling through somehow–more of the same–Nutter Butters—answer your phone!—Cookie, cookie!–Check Mate.

Recipe Rebellion

Every few months I buy tofu. Meat is expensive. Also sort of disgusting, but only when you think about it, which I don’t. I adore charred flesh far too much to think about it.

Tofu seems like the perfect food—clean and cheap and easy and nutritionally excellent--if only it didn’t taste like pencil erasers. But time passes and I forget how hopeless it is, and I buy tofu again thinking this time I’ll marinate it, rub it with spices, or perhaps massage it and then light it on fire. My latest attempt sprang from the recognition that tofu is pretty much a vegetable, and almost all vegetables are wonderful coarsely chopped, drizzled in olive oil, salt and pepper and roasted in the oven for about an hour. So I did this and ended up with something that had not just the taste but also the texture of pencil erasers—a tough, bouncy resilience.

Why not try a recipe? I obviously have no intuitive tofu-sense. Oh, all right. I’ll get back to you on that in a few months. I have to wait for my tofu hopes to rise again.

Meanwhile, the honeymoon is over with Marcella. The bloom is off the rose, baby. Last week I made cauliflower with raisins and pine nuts and fricasseed chicken with onions and cognac.

The cauliflower. What is the point of first boiling the cauliflower until it’s tender and then breaking it up and sautéing it with the raisins and pine nuts? Do I look like I have time to wash extra pots and pans? Surely you could break up the cauliflower raw, sauté it with the raisins and pine nuts and then put in a splash of orange juice or water or broth, cover it and cook until tender. Basically braise it. And why are there no onions in this recipe? Was this a clerical error?

The chicken. And here’s the problem with recipes. There’s always one expensive ingredient that you don’t have on hand and will never use again. In this case, cognac—two tablespoons of cognac. I put it on the grocery list, and Teresa refused to buy it because they only had big bottles at Safeway. So I ended up walking to the corner store with Enzo to buy the stupid cognac. Enzo had a cold. Earlier that day he had knocked his head hard against my cheekbone, and I had a pretty bad black eye. It was raining. Enzo wore his cute slicker, and I wore my homeless-looking Carhart jacket. We found the smallest flask of cognac and got in line. We bought nothing else. Of course there was a young mom in line in front of us with two small children buying a quart of milk. I clutched my flask and my crusty-nosed child. I felt like saying, “It’s for a recipe. It’s Italian. Northern Italian.”

Another problem with the chicken recipe is you had to cut up a whole chicken. I usually just get thighs for braising type recipes, but the Marcella said cut up a whole chicken and I was by-god following the recipe. I haven’t cut up a chicken in years. I do not own poultry shears. It’s a grisly task. Also, the breasts cook faster than the thighs and legs, so doesn’t it make sense to choose one or the other? I have to admit, both recipes turned out pretty good, and I ate them for lunch all week.

But what to do with a flask of cognac? I called my mom ask about what we always called The Brandy Show. It’s basically pepper steak (but made with hamburgers for kids) and you deglaze the pan with butter, lemon, Worschester sauce and brandy or cognac and set it on fire. I thought Enzo might like that. So I got to the flambé part, and told him mama was going to do a magic show. He looked noncommittal. I turned off the lights and lit a match pausing for a moment to heighten the drama, then touched it to the pan. Blue and yellow flames sprang up, and Enzo ran out of the room. I couldn’t follow him. There was a fire to deal with. But in moments he was back looking extremely serious and carrying a big plastic fire truck. It was pretty fucking adorable.