June 28

Friday!  Yessssssss.

It’s just after noon, and I’m sitting in Essex, my “office” by day, with an imposing to-do list. But before I put on my blinders and get down to it, I wanted to stop by and share a few things that I enjoyed this week. It’s going to be hot (84 degrees! Sunny! HOTTTTT!) in Seattle this weekend, and weekends aren’t really our weekends, living as we do in Restaurant Land, but I have plans nonetheless to get new tires and a rack for my bike, so I can start riding to the office next week. (My last real bike ride was at 19 weeks pregnant and a very bad idea.) In any case, I hope you’ve got a great weekend ahead.

I’ve mentioned Kate Christensen’s writing before, but in case you’re not yet reading her work, please allow me to direct you to this post, which feels so... so... right. I can’t wait for her new book.

A short and funny but useful flower tutorial on the World’s End Farm blog.  I will never be known for flower arranging - ha ha ha please - but I would kill to see things, just for a second, the way Sarah does.

This post of Ganda’s took my breath away.

I want to drink this immediately.

This photo of Katie’s pointed my way to this spectacular-looking cake, and now that strawberry season has arrived in the Pacific Northwest, it’s finally time to try it.

An important piece about women, ambition, and power.  I think it’ll be on my mind for a while.

And last but not least, we’re teaming up with Book Larder to host a dinner in celebration of the new cookbook from the geniuses behind Franny’s!  July 29!  Tickets are available now!  I can’t wait.

Cheers.

Told you so

Every so often, I encounter a recipe that makes me want to forgo the usual niceties of a post - the introduction, the story, the conclusion, the delicate foreplay - because that would only slow you down, when what you should really do is grab your shoes and make a list and run to the grocery store and throw some money at the cashier and run back home and make this immediately and I mean it, go, right now, DO IT.

One such recipe is Conchiglie with Yogurt, Peas, and Chile, from the stunning book Jerusalem, by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi. Even June is all over it.

The only problem is that I made it for a late dinner a few nights ago, when the sun was already well into setting - which is really and truly very late, here in my northern city - and it was too dark to take a picture. Today I tried to take a picture of the photograph in the cookbook, but that didn’t pan out either.

(Yeah, yeah, my child owns a pair of elastic-waist jeggings.  In my defense, they were hand-me-downs.)

In any case, you can picture it yourself. First, you zizz some Greek yogurt, olive oil, peas, and garlic in a food processor until the mixture is an even shade of pale green. Then you heat a pot of water and boil some pasta in it, and while that’s going, you warm some pine nuts and chile flakes in a skillet filmed with olive oil until the nuts are golden and the oil is red, and you also heat some more peas in a little bowl of water scooped from the pasta pot.  When the pasta is ready, you drain it and fold it together with the yogurt sauce, the now-warm peas, some torn basil leaves, and some crumbled feta.  The hot pasta heats and loosens the sauce, and the overall effect is creamy but not heavy in the least, bright where you hit a basil leaf or a pea, salty where you hit a lump of feta. You scoop it into a bowl, spoon over some pine nuts and the chile oil, which brings that kind of low, creeping heat that makes your lips tingle, and as I scraped my bowl and went back to the kitchen for seconds, I decided it was the best thing I’ve made in a long, long time. (The best savory thing, I should clarify. Nothing compares to cake. Who do you think I am?)

Yesterday afternoon, June and I went to our friend Lecia’s house for a visit and an early dinner, and while we were sitting around on the floor, talking and catching up and watching June torment the family cats, Lecia mentioned that, the previous night, she’d made what she thought might be the best pasta she’d ever had.

“It has yogurt, and peas. I think you’d like it,” she said. “Have you heard of the book Jerusalem?” (!!!)

I told you so.


Pasta with Yogurt, Peas, and Chile
Adapted slightly from Jerusalem, by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi

The original version of this recipe calls for conchiglie, or shell-shaped pasta, but you could use any small pasta shape you like: orecchiette, penne, farfalle, and so on.

If you have some exotic type of dried chile, like Urfa chile, Aleppo chile, or Kirmizi biber, you lucky lucky dog, this is a great place to use it. If not, you can use regular red pepper flakes. I happened to have some Aleppo chile, and though it was ground, not in flakes, and probably a few years old, it worked beautifully. Oh, and if you’re worried about the amount of heat, consider starting with a little less of the chile than what is called for - or just don’t put much chile oil on your pasta.

2 ½ cups (500 g) whole-milk Greek yogurt
2/3 cup (150 ml) olive oil
2 medium cloves garlic, crushed or pressed
1 pound (500 g) fresh or thawed frozen peas
Kosher salt
1 pound (500 g) pasta shapes of your liking
Scant ½ cup (60 g) pine nuts
2 teaspoons Turkish or Syrian chile flakes, or red pepper flakes
1 2/3 cups (40 g) basil leaves, coarsely torn
8 ounces (240 g) feta cheese, coarsely crumbled

In the bowl of a food processor, combine the yogurt, 6 tablespoons (90 ml) of the olive oil, the garlic, and 2/3 cup (100 g) of the peas. Process to a uniform pale green sauce, and transfer to a large mixing bowl.

Bring a large pot of water to a boil, and salt it until tastes like pleasantly salty seawater. Add the pasta, and cook until it is al dente. While the pasta cooks, warm the remaining olive oil in a small frying pan over medium heat. Add the pine nuts and chile flakes, and cook for 4 minutes, or until the pine nuts are golden and the oil is deep red. Also, warm the remaining peas in some boiling water (you could scoop out a bit of the pasta water for this); then drain.

Drain the cooked pasta into a colander, and shake it well to get rid of excess water that may have settled into the pasta’s crevices. Add the pasta gradually to the yogurt sauce; adding it all at once may cause the yogurt to separate. Add the warm peas, the basil, feta, and 1 teaspoon kosher salt. Toss gently. Serve immediately, with pine nuts and chile oil spooned over each serving.

Yield: about 6 servings

June 4

Last night, it occurred to me that I had inadvertently neglected to write down something important: that June’s head smells like strawberry jam. I’ve thought about it for a long time, trying to make sure that was it, and now I’m certain: not strawberries, but strawberry jam.  She smells like something I would like to eat on buttered toast.  Now there’s a menu idea for Delancey.

Brandon bought himself a record player as an early Father’s Day present, and he’s been buying old records left and right. The other day he came home with Cat Stevens’s Tea for the Tillerman. The next morning, before he woke up, June and I were hanging out, like we do every morning, and I turned on the record player. June sat on my lap and played with the zipper on my sweatshirt while I drank my coffee, and we listened to Cat Stevens. And as my friend Andrea so eloquently put it, I had this feeling that these mornings of ours, and these days, they’re the good old days. I was telling my friend Ben about it later that evening, when he asked how my day had been, and he said that it sounded “death defyingly sweet.” I couldn’t have said it better.

A few of you have asked what June is eating these days, and the answer is: mostly breast milk. She will be nine months old on Sunday, old enough to be eating solids, but she’s only vaguely interested. I’m kind of glad, actually. I’m happy to take it slow. We’ve been giving her tastes of whatever we’re eating, so long as it seems manageable for her tiny mouth, and letting her take the lead. (In these photos, she was playing with a hunk of Matt Dillon’s wonderful sourdough bread.) I’ve read many different takes on the subject of feeding young children, and so far, what seems to work best for our family is to not worry too much about it. I hope we can sustain that feeling. We’ll try to make food that is reasonably good for us, and to create moments to sit down and eat that food as a family, and I trust that June’s body will know what it needs and when it needs it.  Maybe I’m naive.  I mean, of course I’m naive.  But mostly, I hope that June will grow up thinking of food as something fun, and not as a battleground.  Because as everyone knows, in any battle, the loser’s head gets eaten on buttered toast.  (Maybe I’ve been watching too much Game of Thrones?)

A few nights ago, June went down at seven, like she usually does. I poured myself a glass of wine and started going through some boxes of hand-me-downs that we’d picked up from friends that afternoon. A little before eight, she woke up crying. I let her go for a bit, hoping she’d settle back to sleep, but when she didn’t, I went into her room. I reached down in the dark and picked her up, and she burrowed her face into my shoulder and rubbed her eyes and grunted. I sat down in the rocker and held her while she continued to do her best impression of a mole in sunlight, and after a few minutes, I set her back down in the crib. She rolled onto her side and popped her thumb into her mouth, and I leaned over the railing and gave her a “back tickle,” the way my mother and my aunt Tina and my grandmother used to do for me, and as I looked at her in the faint light that trickled in under the blinds, I felt almost unbearably glad, like I might split right open.

Of course, there are less glad moments, like that sunny afternoon when I was feeling all lovey and we were about to take a walk, and I popped open the stroller and then turned to get June out of the car, only to find that, when June and I turned back to face said stroller, it was gone, having rolled down the driveway, careened around the corner, and overturned into the drainage ditch alongside the road. PARENT OF THE DECADE! You can rest assured that I will never, ever, ever again forget to set the brake on a stroller - or a car, or a toy car, or anything that moves.  Also, feeling lovey is dangerous.

June Pettit: Living Dangerously since September of 2012!

I’m trying to get back into the swing of cooking more than just eggs and roasted vegetables and banana bread, and hopefully I’ll soon have something to report about that.  But in the meantime, I’ll be Austin this weekend, speaking on a panel about storytelling at the BlogHer Food Conference.  I can’t wait! See you out there.

Eureka

You women who manage to keep up smart, articulate blogs while raising young children? You women who manage to keep up smart, articulate blogs while working and raising young children and doing all that household stuff that most of us wind up doing? I throw myself at your feet.  I don’t have anything remotely original or insightful to say on the subject; I just think you’re remarkable. I have childcare twelve hours a week, jobs with flexible hours, a supportive spouse, and a kid who (usually) sleeps well (please don’t let this jinx me, please don’t let this jinx me), and yet I fight to get to this space. Of course, part of the problem could be that, each night, when I sit down in front of the computer, I wind up lip-syncing to Fleetwood Mac on YouTube, inspecting my reflection in the window and wondering what kind of atrocities I would have to inflict upon my hair in order to pull off a convincing Stevie Nicks next Halloween.  (I WILL, OH, I WILL.)

The other night, after June was asleep and before I turned on Fleetwood Mac, I went down to the dungeon, also known as the garage, and dug up three boxes of old Polaroids. I was looking for two shots that I needed to scan and send to my editor for my next book, but instead I found approximately four thousand others that I had forgotten I ever took. I never found the two images that I actually needed - no doubt tucked away for “safekeeping,” never to be seen again - but I did find this:

Eureka! A broccoli pizza atop a shop vac!  And a crimini pizza and Brandon’s favorite very very sharp knife, on a cutting board, balanced haphazardly on a rung of an extremely dusty ladder!

These shots are from early 2009, the winter when we were building Delancey and testing recipes, shortly after Brandon finished building and curing the wood-burning oven but before the restaurant had anything resembling a kitchen.

I was slicing mushrooms that night on a folding card table, wearing the same gray hooded sweatshirt that I’m wearing at my desk this morning, only today it’s not crusted in drywall.  That night feels sort of romantic to me now, now that I know how it all turned out, but at the time, I was freezing, and it was dark in there and everything was covered in debris, and we were tired, always tired.

Yesterday June and I ate dinner at Delancey with a friend from our childbirth class and her nine-month-old daughter. I sat in one of the chairs that were stacked precariously in this photo, and June tasted (by which I mean sucked awkwardly on, and then wore) her father’s pizza for the very first time.  June, the child I had no idea I even wanted to have, back when I took this photo!

I am easily awed this morning.  This might be my espresso talking.

And Katie was our server. Sweet Katie! Still there, after three and a half years!  A billion years in Restaurant Time.

One day almost four years ago, in early June of 2009, the chef of the restaurant across the street, which was then A Caprice Kitchen but is now The Fat Hen, knocked on the door of Delancey. We were inside, doing some construction task or other, and she handed us a package wrapped in white paper.  It was a gift from the elderly lady who lived in the apartment behind her restaurant, she said, and the lady had asked her to deliver it to us.  I peeled off the tape and folded back the paper, and inside, there was a homemade cake, a dome of vanilla cake with vanilla frosting, sculpted into soft, feathery peaks.

The older lady never came to Delancey, and I never met her - though Brandon did once, and he reports that she was very shy.  She moved away at some point to a retirement home. There’s now a young couple in the apartment that was hers, and from what I can tell when I park my car on the street outside, it sounds like one of them plays the drums. But the residual warmth of her gesture struck me the other night in the garage, and I can still feel it.

I'm feeling daring

I have finally learned how to use the espresso machine that Brandon chased down on eBay and gave me for Christmas in 2011!  The best part of this development, however, is not the double espresso that I can now enjoy each morning while sitting on the living room floor with June, reading Madeline or singing along (poorly, loudly) to our favorite song, “On the Road Again.” No, no, the best part is that while I make said double espresso, I get to recite aloud for June and Alice, in my best/worst Italian accent, the molto gag-worthy slogan written in loopy script on the side of the machine:

For Music ~ Puccini

For Art ~ Bernini 

For Espresso ~ Pasquini

In other news, do you know what goes nicely with espresso? Cream cheese pound cake. CREAM CHEESE POUND CAKE! (Holy holy holy, finally. Delancey and Essex have been needy lately, heedlessly gobbling up my time. Stupid restaurants. My sincerest apologies.)

Listen: I’m not normally pound cake person.  Not a real pound cake person. I may have gotten riled up about a pistachio pound cake last year, and there was that sweet potato pound cake a few years ago, and I may have put a berry pound cake recipe in my first book, and I may have even found my way around a few Sara Lee frozen pound cakes as a teenager - remember the crust on top? The way it was soft and spongy and eerily uniform in its brownness? I loved that part - but those were all special cases. I don’t get wildly excited about pound cake as a general concept.  I can get behind a nice, plain cake, maybe a busy-day cake, but pound cakes are often too plain, too heavy, too doorstoppy.  Pound cake, in the classic sense, strikes me mostly as a vehicle for transporting strawberries (or other fruits) and whipped cream from a plate into my mouth. I know that, in the eyes of many, there’s all kinds of sacrilege in this paragraph, but I’m feeling daring.

All that said, this pound cake is exceptional. It caught me off guard. I was looking for a way to use up some cream cheese that I had lying around, and I came upon the recipe in the excellent book Southern Cakes, by Nancie McDermott. That’s the same book that gave us the sweet potato pound cake, so it’s not surprising that this cream cheese version is spot-on. But really, it’s a keeper. Lovely is the right word for it. There’s nothing revolutionary about the ingredients - just your basic pound cake building blocks, plus a pack of cream cheese - but it’s unusually moist and even-crumbed, with a top crust that crackles like a wafer. And as you begin to chew, here comes the cream cheese, a gentle tang kicking through the sweetness. I love the way McDermott describes it: she says that the cream cheese makes a “quiet little sensation.” Am I alone in being unable to use the word sensation without thinking of INXS, and then having to listen to this song a few times, feeling mopey about Michael Hutchence’s untimely death 16 years ago? Probably?

Anyway, I baked two loaves and froze one of them, and both Brandon and I noticed that the frozen cake, once thawed, was even better than the fresh one had been. This discovery makes me want to bake a half-dozen of these cakes and stash them away for future occasions that demand sweets on short notice. Like tomorrow’s breakfast.


Cream Cheese Pound Cake
Adapted from Southern Cakes, by Nancie McDermott

This recipe was shared with McDermott by one Suzanne O’Hara of Burlington, North Carolina, and it comes together with remarkable speed and ease. I think I’ll be making it often.

3 cups (420 g) all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon fine salt
2 sticks (226 g) unsalted butter, at room temperature
One 8-ounce (226 g) package cream cheese, at room temperature
3 cups (600 g) sugar
6 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 325°F. Grease and flour a 10-inch tube pan or two 9-by-5-inch loaf pans. (I also lined my pans with parchment, because it makes the cakes so easy to remove.)

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt.

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the butter and cream cheese, and beat on medium speed until soft and fluffy. Add the sugar, and continue to beat for about 2 minutes more, stopping once to scrape down the sides. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in the vanilla. Reduce the mixer speed to low, and add the flour mixture in three doses, beating only until the flour is absorbed and scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan or pans.

Bake for about 1 hour and 15 minutes (for a tube pan) or 55 to 60 minutes (for loaf pans), or until the cake is golden brown, pulling away from the sides of the pan, and a cake tester inserted into the center comes out clean. Transfer the cake to a wire rack, and cool completely before loosening the sides with a thin knife and removing the cake from the pan.

April 7

I’ve been feeling a little under the weather for the past few days, but I wanted to pop in. I promise not to breathe on you.

June is going to be seven months old on April 9, this Tuesday, which would have been my dad’s 84th birthday. Brandon says that she has my eyes, and if it’s true, then she has my dad’s eyes, because that’s where I got mine.

She and I are flying to Oklahoma City on Wednesday, to visit my mother. June’s first trip to my hometown, to the house where I grew up! It feels like a big deal. But if you’re on our plane, I would like to apologize in advance: June is chatty, and by chatty, I actually mean screechy, shrieky, chirpy, gargly, and generally deafening. It’s totally adorable, and then you lose your hearing.

In any case, we were roughhousing in the living room this afternoon, before Brandon went to work, and I took these pictures. I don’t know how to explain it, but June is developing a real sense of humor. She’s a very funny person. Or maybe I’m just amused because I am her mother. Probably. I’m going soft.

I have a cream cheese pound cake recipe to share with you shortly, as soon as I can type it up - before I leave, I hope! - but in the meantime, some nice things for your Monday:

I always appreciate what Sarah has to say.

Mr. Rogers + a rad breakdancing kid = yesssssss (via Youngna).

I would like to someday cook like Margot Henderson, and I’d like to live in her house, while I’m at it. 

Sarah Farr of Harbor Herbalist blends excellent teas, and her monthly tea subscription is brilliant.

Back soon.

We have a rhythm

June is six months old. She has two teeth, monstrous thighs, and is my favorite person in the world. Totally predictable, I know, but I really never thought I would say that about someone who spends most of the day drooling and pulling my hair.  Sometimes she looks at me tenderly, places a dimpled hand on either side of my face, and then lunges forward, giggling, and savagely bites my nose.  She suits me so well.  Really, she’s perfect for me.  We have a rhythm.

I sent my revised manuscript to my editor in the final days of February. A few days later, we lost our manager at Delancey and Essex. Though losing a staff member always makes me and Brandon feel mopey for a while, the timing was eerily right.  I hadn’t been involved in the day-to-day operation of the restaurants since last summer, shortly before June was born, but suddenly, with the book out the door, I had some time on my hands. And anyway, I’m not very good at not having a project. So I’m back to managing Delancey and Essex. My job isn’t the kind of thing that most people fantasize about when they think about opening a restaurant; it doesn’t involve a chef’s coat, gleaming copper pots, copious booze, or anything that could remotely be described as badass.  I do payroll, front-of-house scheduling, organizing, filing, e-mail tending, and polite whip-cracking.  I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I like it. I like the quiet aspect of it, the behind-the-scenes-ness of it, the tangibility of it, the fact that I get to make things work better.  It brings a kind of satisfaction that’s very different from writing.

So the days are full. I’m at the restaurant during the daytime hours on Wednesdays and Fridays, and June and I also stop in most evenings, before she goes to bed. June drools on everyone within a ten-foot radius and, when she’s feeling sporting, lets me dance her along the bar like a marionette.  I know she will see in us the many stresses and frustrations that come with owning a small business, but when I think about her growing up there, in that community, with so many people who care about her and have known her since she was born, I feel glad in a way that I don’t have words for.

In any case, it’s true what they say: there’s never a dull moment.  On Thursday, I got a splinter in my tongue while using chopsticks to eat bibimbap. On Friday, I dreamt that my mother confessed that she doesn’t like my bangs, something I have long suspected. A few nights before that, I read a New Yorker article about Ruth Bader Ginsburg while taking a hot bath. I don’t like to make a big deal of it, but yes, the rumors you’ve heard are real: my lifestyle was the inspiration behind Katy Perry’s hit song "Last Friday Night." Tonight I might throw caution to the wind and mix up the dry ingredients for tomorrow morning’s baked oatmeal.

If you’ve been in a bookstore or on the Internet anytime in the past couple of years, you’ve no doubt heard of Heidi Swanson’s wonderful Super Natural Every Day, and you’ve probably also heard of her wonderful baked oatmeal.  I first tasted it shortly after Heidi’s book came out, when Jess came to visit and made a batch, and then Lecia brought some over one morning when we met for a walk, and now, for the past few months, I’ve been making it nearly every other week.  Maybe you’ve been making it, too, but I wanted to mention it, in case you haven’t.  Because you should.

There’s a tiny chance that some of my love for this oatmeal has to do with the fact that I can assemble most of it the night before.  (I am not so great at making a hot breakfast with Tiny Nose-Biter around, or not unless it’s mostly done when I climb out of bed.)  There’s also a tiny chance that I love this recipe because I will eat anything that involves oats.  (The only way I would probably not eat oats is if I found them in my coat pocket, tangled in lint.  Probably.)  But mostly, I love this oatmeal because it pushes all the buttons that I like breakfast to push: it’s sweet but not too sweet and filling but not too filling, and it makes you feel totally virtuous about eating maple syrup and butter.  Plus: the leftovers might be my favorite snack, whether hot, room temperature, or cold.

Happy week! Go forth.


Baked Oatmeal
Adapted from Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Every Day

I’ve made this oatmeal a few times with walnuts, as described below, but I also like to make it with almonds or pecans, either whole or coarsely chopped. It’s nice to toast the nuts beforehand – and it’s easy: just a few minutes on a sheet pan in a 350°F oven, until they smell fragrant – but I often skip it. No harm done.

I’m a big believer in whole milk, and I think this recipe needs its fat and richness. (I’ve had it with 1% and was disappointed in the result.) Actually, the next time I make this oatmeal, I might try replacing a cup of the milk with coconut milk.  That could be exciting.  I might also throw in a half-cup of unsweetened shredded coconut.  I’ve added coconut before - about a quarter-cup, or 25 grams - and though I can’t say that I was aware of its presence, Brandon and I both agreed that the baked oatmeal was especially good that morning.

As for the fruit, you could use any berry, including frozen ones. I don’t even worry about thawing them first.  I suggest a range of amounts for the berries below, one that’s very berry-y and one that’s less so.

2 cups (200 grams) rolled oats
½ cup (60 g) walnut halves, toasted and chopped
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 ½ teaspoons ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon fine sea salt
¾ to 1 ½ cups (90 to 185 g) blueberries
2 cups (475 ml) whole milk
1/3 cup (80 ml) maple syrup
1 large egg
3 tablespoons (45 grams) unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 375°F with a rack in the top third of the oven.

In an 8-inch square baking dish, mix together the oats, the nuts, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt. (This part can be done the night before, if you like, to make things easier in the morning.) Scatter the berries evenly over the oat mixture.

In another bowl, whisk together the milk, maple syrup, egg, about half of the butter, and vanilla. Slowly drizzle the milk mixture over the oats. Gently give the baking dish a couple of thwacks on the countertop to make sure the liquid moves down through the oats.

Bake for 35 to 45 minutes, or until the top is golden and the oat mixture has set. Remove from the oven, and allow to cool for a few minutes. If the remaining butter has solidified, rewarm it slightly; then drizzle it over the top of the oatmeal. Serve.

Yield: about 6 servings