...something that rhymes with bappynewyeardearfriends.
I wish I had something more fun, profound, witty or just plain neat to help carry us into 2005, but other than plans to donate to the relief fund for the survivors of last week's tsunami, my New Year's resolutions pretty much look like last year's, with special attention paid to #6. Happy 2005, sweet ones.
It's not a new observation, it's one I've heard and read for years, but there is something uniquely pleasurable about hearing and reading it again in the hands of a capable and passionate writer. I've mentioned here before how wonderful I found Gina Mallet's observations about milk and eggs, but she has plenty to say about the storied pasts and dim futures of fish, meat, cheese and produce as well. Throughout these essays, she periodically returns to a curious observation about American consumers (and yes, I know this isn't exclusive to Americans, but we seem to practice this more fervently, and in greater numbers, than people of other nationalities): As a people, we imbue our food with the power of life and death. Our food is rarely just food: either it will kill us or save our lives. Either it will make us fat (obesity! obesity-related health problems! death, death, deaaaaaath!) or it will unclog our arteries, clean our blood, sex us up with vitamins and keep us from dying, ever. Even those of us who work with food, who take pleasure in it and, to put it bluntly, eat a lot of it, even we are not immune to this. I can't enumerate how many times I have joked about shaving years off my life thanks to the mashed potatoes or the bagna cauda or the pig's trotter or the cherry pie I've just eaten. I have eaten broccoli, soba noodles, oatmeal and grilled fish, and while I genuinely like all of these foods, I will admit to a frisson of relief as I ate them, convinced that what I was eating would give me back all those years lost to organ meats and creme anglaise.
It has taken me a long time, a lot of weight gain and a lot of weight loss, to remind me that food is indeed just food, at least for me, because I'm lucky enough to not have any fatal food allergies, and thus it is that I know that if I'm very good about eating my tasty oatmeal and yummy salads and interesting chicken preparations, then I can have the occasional cupcake without feeling as if I'm on a patch of loose topsoil over hell, my foot sliding in due time as Jonathan Edwards warned in "Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God." I don't look at food as an either/or prospect nearly as much as I used to. Why, then, have I not been similarly enlightened where exercise is concerned? For as long as I can remember, at all levels of fitness, at all weights and measures, I have been of the mind that when it comes to exercise, it's not the journey, it's the destination. That's a shame. I have always envied people who had that kind of relationship with movement, whether they were tiny, long-muscled runners or those enormous Bulgarian men who could lift 1,000 pounds, roaring all the way. I have never had that kind of body confidence, not even when I could run long distances, not even when I was taking dance classes four times a week. Occasionally I would feel it while weightlifting, but more often than not, I would feel like there was a wide chasm between what I was telling my arms and legs to do and what they were actually doing. I think of myself as a 12-year-old, studying ballet, lumbering and graceless, and I have to look away from the image, the way I do at scary movies.
This is all a longwinded preamble to announce that after a month of office-based hilarity, I have Just Said No to working through lunch, and I have rescued my inner gym rat. The good news is that after a month of Christmas eating, my clothes still fit. The bad news is that they're not supposed to fit; they're supposed to be too big, dammit! They're supposed to swim around my midsection and fall to my hipbones, not fit loosely and comfortably around my tummy! So back I go, running like a hamster on Jolt on the elliptical machines (because lately the treadmill has been making my knees hurt, and besides, if I'm going to run, I want something to look at. Don't ask me why the treadmill feels like running in place, but the elliptical doesn't. It just doesn't, capisce?) and doing oddball Pilates-style crunches and lifting what turned out to be a shocking amount of weight on the leg curl machines. We love having a low center of gravity, yes, we do. I do all this stuff and try to remember that it's not about prettying up, or being virtuous, or never dying: it's about knowing that I can move around, and sweat, and breathe; I can, I can, and I do.
For the third time in this space, I find myself citing Regina Schrambling at gastropoda, but for the first time, I find myself thanking her for keeping me honest. Not long ago I linked to a now-archived New York Times article about the closing of Jon Vie Bakery on Sixth Avenue and 12th Street. I promised that I would rant about this later, but I should have explained why I was ranting. I hate to see a bakery close, any bakery, anywhere, but I confess that my anger about the closing of Jon Vie was the kind of anger I feel anytime a long-time neighborhood business closes. I certainly wasn't mourning Jon Vie for the loss of its quality baked goods, because the few things I've bought from them, while they weren't awful, they certainly weren't terrific, either. Nevertheless, the story as told by the Times broke my heart: Jon Vie's rent went up to over $10,000/month; the owner was bound by a lease that forbid him to sell any other prepared foods but pastry and cookies; he couldn't make that kind of money unless he branched into hot foods; R.I.P. Jon Vie, the bakery where Marisa Tomei buys her rugelach.
It is a heartbreaker of a story, sure, but Regina wasn't buying. She had had terrible pastry and worse service at Jon Vie, and she pointed out that even while the owner was saying "I can't make that money on cakes alone," Magnolia Bakery was thriving and Amy's Bread (which, incidentally, was the bakery where I became a bakerina) was on the verge of opening a new store on Bleecker Street. Now, maybe Magnolia and Amy's have different lease situations, but Regina's point still stands: the Times went for the easy, tearjerking version of the story, and didn't do a lot of legwork. So I will say that while on principle, I'm still sorry to see Jon Vie go, I'm not about to leap up on the soapbox, the way I did at the closing of Bonte Patisserie on the Upper East Side. (For those of you who haven't heard me rant about Bonte, I'll be glad to do so, but not now. It's getting dense enough in here as it is. 
Okay, I'll rant a little, but not about bakeries. In general, when people rant about frivolous lawsuits, I tend to keep mum. It's not that I like frivolous lawsuits; it's just that like beauty, frivolity is in the eye of the beholder, and while I know that there are some plaintiffs looking for the big money jackpot, there are also some plaintiffs who find themselves in a problematic situation through no fault of their own, and who may be powerless to change it any other way.
Now that my bleeding-heart credentials are firmly in place, I will say that our continued attempts to insure ourselves from liability and the aforementioned frivolous lawsuits are verging on the berserk. Among the various wonders in my Christmas haul is a copy of Fried Chicken: An American Story by John T. Edge. (John T. Edge, if you are not familiar with him, is the author of some truly astonishing pieces of food writing; in my own foodwriting pantheon, he sits just below Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson and Laurie Colwin, and just to the side of Calvin Trillin and Clementine Paddleford. When I read his writing, time melts.) This is the first book in a series about iconic American foods; he has another book about apple pie, and is writing others on French fries, doughnuts and hamburgers. Fried Chicken contains palate-smacking recipes, warm and tender stories about the cooks who make these beauties; scrupulous and unflinching historical context...and the following disclaimer on the Library of Congress CIP Data page:
The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The Publisher is not responsible for specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The Publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.
"I'm waiting for this to say 'This book may contain peanuts,'" said a colleague of mine. I couldn't answer him because I was too busy mashing my forehead into my keyboard and whimpering.
Having just rabbited on and on about exercise, it may sound counterproductive and silly to extol the virtues of a spaghetti sauce made with 1/4 pound of butter, but really, considering that this sauce will sauce three or four pounds of pasta, at least half a dozen pizzas and, in a pinch, can be converted into tomato soup with a little water or stock, we're not talking about a gut-busting sauce. I've been making it ever since the weather turned cold and the apartment needed a little extra heat. In general, our landlord is as close to perfect as a landlord can get, but he still seems to suffer a bit of a disconnect -- although maybe it's the boiler suffering the disconnect, not him -- when the weather dips below 20 degrees. Say you wake up, it's 10 degrees outside, the wind is whipping around. On days like this, the radiators are invariably tepid. Not cold, no, but not hot, either. We walk around in sweaters, we double up on socks because the floor is freezing, we move the space heater from the bedroom to the living room and back to the bedroom. The next day, the radiators start to hiss, and they gradually gather steam (har, har) until two days later, when the radiators are on full bore, and as the outside temperature nears 55 degrees. We shake our heads and wait for the whole thing to start all over again, which it will, because the instant the heat is turned down, the temperature plummets.
If this happens on a weekend, it is less of a problem, because I can make a nice stew or braise, one that requires at least three hours of either stovetop or oven cooking. My general wintertime standbys are coq au vin, oxtail stew or a particularly nice (and surprisingly low-fat) recipe from Nigella Lawson that consists of cubed lean stewing steak, dredged in flour seasoned with salt, pepper and Colman's mustard, cooked with onions, carrots, prunes and stout for hours in a covered Dutch oven. These are all wonderful, but unless you start them the night before for dinner the next day, you can't produce them after work, unless you don't mind eating dinner at 10 p.m. I have managed to skirt this problem by making spaghetti sauce. There are some sauces that benefit from all-day cooking, but for the most part you can have something really marvelous, something that tastes like all-day cooking, in under an hour.
There is almost no tomato sauce that I don't like. I like your basic ragus and bolognese, full of meat. I like plain tomato sauce with meatballs dropped into it. I like a nice vegetably mix of onions, celery and carrots, chopped fine in the Cuisinart and softened in a bath of hot olive oil. I am a mad fool for puttanesca sauce, a rich tomato sauce enhanced with olives, capers and anchovies, on which I went on a bit of a bender after reading The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket, the first book in A Series of Unfortunate Events, in which the luckless Baudelaires make pasta puttanesca for the evil Count Olaf and his troupe, only to have the Count smack the bowls out of their hands and demand pot roast instead. I could eat pasta puttanesca on a daily basis, but it's a bit acidic for Lloyd, so I tend to serve it sparingly.
I used to assume that there was no place for butter in a tomato sauce until I read Nora Ephron's recipe for Sauce Segretto in New York Cookbook by Molly O'Neill. Ms. Ephron's recipe calls for two sticks of butter; again, we're talking about a sauce that is meant to feed a lot of people, but even I blanched at the thought of putting half a pound of butter in a sauce, much as I would at the thought of an entire cup of olive oil. My own version of the segretto is inspired by Ms. Ephron's, but is pretty much the result of my noodling with proportions until I found something I like. You can add garlic, if you like, or oregano, but I find they work better with the hardier, oil-based sauces. This sauce is of a completely different idiom, but it's still good. Kids seem to love it, too, especially the ones who are a hard sell for puttanesca.
Bright Orange Spaghetti Sauce for a Cold Grey Night
1 stick unsalted butter, cut in half
3 medium-sized yellow onions, cut into medium dice
2 28-oz cans plum tomatoes in sauce (I think that it's worth it to look for San Marzano tomatoes -- San Marzano is a specific tomato varietal, sold under different brands. But if you can't find San Marzano tomatoes, any plum tomato will work here)
salt and pepper to taste
Melt half the butter in a heavy-bottomed Dutch oven until it is foaming but not brown. Add the onions and cook until translucent. Season with salt and pepper. Add the tomatoes, breaking them up with a spoon; bring to a boil, then turn down and let simmer. Be careful, as the sauce will splutter and it's easy to burn yourself on this. Let it simmer for about 1/2 hour; you don't need to babysit it, but it's a good idea to pass by now and again and give the whole thing a stir, so that the tomatoes and onions don't burn on the bottom, and you discover this at the end of the 1/2 hour, and you have to pour the sauce into another pan to finish cooking, and thankfully you saved your lovely sauce because you didn't panic and stir the burned bits in with the rest of the sauce, but now you have to soak your Dutch oven for a week. Not that I'm speaking from experience.
At the end of the 1/2 hour, cut up the rest of the butter into tablespoon-sized chunks and stir in until it is melted. Taste the sauce and add more salt and pepper if it needs it. Then either take a hand-held blender and run it through the sauce until it is perfectly smooth (wear good potholders for this job!) or pour it in batches into a blender and blend until it is perfectly smooth. Either way, the sauce will go from your garden-variety tomato red to a bright, carrotty orange color. Feel free to oo and ah over how pretty it is.
You can add cheese to this sauce when you put it on your spaghetti, either Parmesan or pecorino cheese. Or you can leave it be. Incidentally, this sauce is embarrassingly delicious cold. If you are the type who likes to nosh on leftovers by the light of an open refrigerator door, don't say I didn't warn you.
(Any former, current or future miserable teenagers out there, feel free to roll your eyes at the cheesy invocation of Ian in the title.)
Dear friends, until I can get home and properly address Vital Issues of the Day(tm), I will commit two grievous faux pas: I will leave a placeholder post and I will shamelessly blow my own horn. After weeks of your nominations, kind words and mash notes, PTMYB has been named a finalist in the Best of Blog Awards, Cooking and Recipes division. Once again, I am tickled pink, especially when I see the other finalists who were nominated. I encourage all y'all to go to the BoB page and check the links of the other finalists. There is a wealth of good writing, good eating and good writing about eating to be found on their pages.
Do not, however, go to the BoB page to vote for me, or any of the other finalists, at least not yet. Voting doesn't start until January 1, 2005. If you vote before then, all you will do is eat up bandwidth and make the good folks at blogmechanics smite their foreheads in frustration. Do you really want to be responsible for all that smiting?
Aw, heck, I'll just link them here. The other finalists are 101 Cookbooks, Amuse Bouche, A Spoonful of Sugar, Cooking for Engineers, edible tulip, My Life With Garlic, This Mama Cooks!, tinyfork and Pastry Life. These are great sites. Read them. Know them. Cook from them. If you'd like, you can even vote for them (but don't tell me...)
Regular transmissions will resume as soon as I can haul my sorry, er, self, out of a desk chair and into a cozy subway car home.
It could have been worse, it really could. Lloyd and I could have been one of the thousands hapless enough to fly U.S. Airways and to change planes at Philadelphia International Airport. Maybe it was just weather trouble, maybe it was a wildcat sickout, maybe it was none of the above, but either way it resulted in a pileup of luggage that made the cover of both the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times, and made me dizzy with relief that our bags were not among them.
Nevertheless, while it never approached that level of awfulness, our trip did not begin auspiciously. The plan was for me to leave the office at 1, head to Penn Station, pick up our tickets from the Amtrak ticket machine (no long scary lines!) and meet Lloyd in front of the Krispy Kreme. I ended up leaving the office closer to noon so that I could pick up some lunch and some extra cash from the ATM. It was the smartest thing I did all weekend, leaving early. Apparently somebody at the Amtrak Philadelphia ticket office punched a wrong button and ended up issuing our tickets to someone else, and thus when I went to print out the tickets at the Quik-Trak machine, surprise! No tickets for you! I had visions of spending all weekend trying to get out of New York, looking forlornly at the spiced beef that had to be roasted that day if we were to eat it on Christmas Eve, eventually seeing myself on file footage shot by the local news affiliates: "Hey! Look at all these stranded travelers! Let's show you that exhausted furious chubby woman with the bag full of beef again!" Fortunately, an extra ticket window opened up, a window expressly for Metroliner passengers and/or people who had bought their tickets online and were having trouble picking them up, and the nice folks at Amtrak issued us a set of dupe tickets, and thus was the worst of our travel trouble over. (The drive from 30th Street Station to my parents' house in the pounding, driving rain, that was my mom's trouble to deal with. Thank you, Mom.)
I'm afraid, dear friends, that anything that follows from this point is pretty much anticlimactic. A happy family that plays together nicely is a grand thing, but it doesn't exactly make for scintillating reading. The only real moment of drama in the weekend came when a friendly young woman knocked on my parents' door and asked us if we knew that, according to Biblical prophecy, there is a direct link between the birth of Jesus and peace on earth. Unfortunately for her, Lloyd answered the door. (Relax, folks. Lloyd did not abuse the nice young missionary woman, but he did make perfectly clear, in a friendly but firm way, that further good news would not be welcome.) There was also some ancillary drama on Christmas Day when we went to visit my grandmother, who has mid-stage Alzheimer's and a tendency to get very nasty to my mom, but other than that, it was a weekend full of meandering happily throughout various kitchens; finally roasting the beef after a two-week spice cure and smelling that inimitable fragrance all over the house; putting together a Christmas Eve dinner at my parents' house that consisted of that magnificent beef, scalloped potatoes, tossed salad, celery remoulade, and gingerbread; going to my mom's best friend's house in Kintnersville (a beautiful part of Pennsylvania for those of you not familiar with it) and watching her put together the best standing rib roast and Yorkshire pudding I've ever eaten for our Christmas dinner; and even more happy meandering through the kitchen.
I had promised cinnamon rolls for our Christmas breakfast, the dough to be mixed after Christmas Eve dinner, left overnight in the fridge to ferment, taken out to be filled, shaped, proofed, baked and iced early Christmas morning. Christmas Eve found me happy but exhausted amidst wrapping paper detritus and my spanking-new Christmas presents. My mom told me not to worry about cinnamon rolls, that I had more than earned my stripes with dinner, but I felt guilty about reneging nonetheless. Christmas morning found me poking through my mom's Hoosier cabinet, where she keeps all of her baking supplies, and mixing some spur-of-the-moment scones. I've made a fair amount of scones in my day, but even I was surprised by how well these turned out, and by how well I could schwag a recipe based on the ingredients at hand.
"Oh, no," my mom said when she came into the kitchen on Christmas morning and found me elbow-deep in dough. "You don't have to do this. You shouldn't have to spend your whole Christmas working." Before I could demur and insist that it was no trouble at all, and fun to boot, Lloyd beat me to the punch. "Believe me," he said, "she considers this entertainment." Well, sure.
Jen's Spur-of-the-Moment Christmas Scones
makes 9 huge scones or 12 nice moderate scones that won't make your friends in foreign countries shake their heads and ask "why must you Americans eat such big foods?"
3 cups (12 3/4 oz.) all-purpose flour, measured by spooning the flour into the cup and leveling it off with a knife
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
scant 1/4 cup (1 3/4 oz.) granulated sugar
5 oz. (1 stick + 2 tbsp) unsalted butter, chilled (I used Plugra, which worked very nicely, but a standard American butter like Land O'Lakes or Breakstone will work, too)
8 fluid oz. (1 cup) buttermilk, plus a little extra if the dough runs dry
1 egg
about 1/2 cup dried cherries (tart or sweet will both work)
about 1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1 egg yolk beaten with a little cream or milk (for egg wash)
coarse sugar (optional)
Preheat oven to 450F degrees (Gas Mark 7 for our friends in the UK). Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and sugar in a large mixing bowl. Cut in the butter using a pastry blender, two knives or your fingers, until the dough is the consistency of coarse cornmeal. Add the egg to the buttermilk and beat to combine, then add to the dry ingredients and mix. Take care not to overmix, and feel free to add a little more buttermilk if the whole mix feels a bit dry. Add the cherries and chocolate and mix to combine.
Flour a work surface, turn the dough out, knead about five times to be sure everything is well-incorporated, and roll or pat out into a roughly 1-inch thick circle. Using a bench scraper or sharp knife, cut the dough into 9 or 12 equal pieces (you can also use a biscuit cutter). Place the cut scones on the baking sheet, brush with the egg wash and sprinkle with the coarse sugar, if using.
Bake the scones for 8 minutes (if you're making the regular size) or 10 minutes (if you're making the large). Turn off the oven and let the scones bake for an additional 5-7 minutes for the regular, or 8 minutes for the large. The scones should be golden brown and well-risen. Take them out and let them cool, but only a little. 
Dear friends, I screwed up. It was not my intention to post a big fat muckity muck on how New Yorkers Are People, Too, whackadoo, whackadoo, whackadoo (Sorry. Every once in a while, I prove my mother right when she says that I watched too damn much tv as a kid), only to disappear for three days. I've had so many nifties I've wanted to share with you, including musings on the cold -- basically it's been very cold here, but not as cold as its been for some of you -- the cardamom snaps recipe, for which 'mouse has been asking so sweetly; a damn fine recipe for spaghetti sauce; and a smaller, more contained rant about the impending death of yet another New York City bakery.
I still have plans for all of this, but my plans have run smack dab into my other plans, also known as The Trip Down to Philadelphia to Spend Christmas With the 'Rents.
Lloyd and I have 2 p.m. Metroliner tickets, so there is a chance I may be able to post tomorrow before leaving. In the event that I do not, though, please have a wonderful Christmas weekend, dear friends. Eat well, drink better, be safe, and please, please come back to visit on Sunday, when Lloyd and I get home and I'll be itching to tell a good story or six.