carrying on

if you're stressed, it's fine dining we suggest!

As with most writing these days I started this newsletter like a houseafire and then lose steam and then some worser-than-before news happens and I can’t look away. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water . . . the Oval Office shouting match happens and you are sucked back in to the vortex of despair. I feel powerless, that’s what they want you to feel, well ok but what do I DO about it, you carry on, what does that even mean that is not a satisfactory response.

Carrying on.

I used to sing when I cooked, all the time. Mostly show tunes¹, from an ancient collection that still lives in my Apple Music account. While I purchased some of the albums from Apple, others somehow continue to exist in files that I uploaded from CDs way back in the mists of time when there were such things as drives into which you put discs and your computer whirred around reading and copying them. I actually have a lot of other music in this Apple account - it is also the home of my dare I say legendary Holiday collection - but these days the musicals are the main thing I listen to there. The collection skews classic - Annie to The Wiz, “A Couple of Swells” (Judy Garland and Fred Astaire in Easter Parade) to “Zip” (Elaine Stritch, both in the original Pal Joey and her masterwork from her solo show Elaine Stritch at Liberty).

Of course Hamilton is in there, I’m not a complete caveman.

Anyway, the point is, I love this stuff. I have loved it for as long as I can remember. I even have actual record albums that my PARENTS bought from Boston try-outs of shows like Camelot. And I really like nothing better than an afternoon in the kitchen belting one tune after another while cooking up something delicious, with a dog or two hanging around.

(Now of course I have the final piece of that puzzle 😍.²)

I haven’t sung while cooking for a very long time, though. I don’t know why, I guess I got hung up on myself or something. When I’m in the kitchen, I tune in to the news, watch the sports, listen to the Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me and OF COURSE to Indoor Recess!³ No real singing though. But last week, feeling like maybe I could channel my inner Arthur Christmas and calm Newt by singing to him, I pulled up the ol’ Apple Music and there were all my old friends and it was kind of glorious.

They accompanied:

Short ribs - look at those gorgeous babies I mean the meat not the dog but he’s cute too - from Highland Butcher that were cooked with a shocking amount of fennel seed and oregano and garlic and other flavors and were jesus god so freaking good. The vast quantity of flavor agents is the clue that this is actually a Chris Schlesinger recipe called Orange-Braised Short Ribs with Fennel and Oregano and as usual it delivers.

It is apparently fennel seed week at 112 Avon Hill Street because it is also in this - roast chicken with caramelized cabbage which sounds so quotidian but as with so many routine things is supremely comforting.

I don’t follow the marry-me recipes but I did make marry-me salmon and the technique for cooking the salmon here is quite nice - sear the skin side to crispy then take it out, make the sauce (hello 1980s your sun-dried tomatoes are calling!) and basically poach the flesh side in it.

MARMALADE! So much knife-work which is so painful if you have carpometacarpal joint arthritis but is so very very good when all is said and done that you would do it again in a heartbeat.

In a bold move, Ruhlman’s Meat Pies includes non-meat pies like this five-onion tart which Peter had to explain to everyone was like tres-leches, five different kinds of onions not five onions.

Luisa Weiss’s apple-marzipan cake was not quite the slam-dunk it has been in the past? It was positively dry around the outside and nobody loves a dry cake. But this shouldn’t stop you from trying it because baked correctly it is incredibly delicious. And it looks awesome, doesn’t it?

Oh hey *social interaction alert* we had an actual dinner party! More like a supper party but real-life friends came over and we had lovely get-together entirely from the pages of Amy Thielen’s Company. This also required my getting over myself⁴ and cooking from this book that I was excited to get because I love her New Midwestern Table but am also completely intimidated by because she is so cool. I mean, she was a high-flying chef in NYC before returning home to Minnesota where she lives in this rustic-cool cabin in the country with her bearded Minnesota-dude husband and quirkily-engaging looking kid and probably a dog or two and basically throws all these incredibly cool parties where people come over and do outdoorsy things while she cooks something fabulous over a homemade outdoor fire pit and serves cocktails in jars and there are probably ferments and local butcher interpretations of amazing cured meats and it looks not so much effortless as like effort-fully super fun if you had all those friends and family and the awesome setup in gorgeous northern Minnesota. And then she writes a whole cookbook about it! ugh I hate accomplished people.

Anyhoo the recipes in Company are fun and interesting and just complicated enough to be satisfying, if occasionally for like 10 or 25 people. I made the “Nordic backcountry ski supper” menu for six despite being neither Nordic nor in the backcountry nor skiing but you know, it still really hit the ol’ spot-terooni. Here’s what we had:

- not-Amy’s-but-guessing-she’d-approve Gold Rush cocktails to start: bourbon, lemon, and honey syrup;

- sardine, parmesan, and guanciale-because-no-lardo-to-be-found on sourdough for snacks;

- yellow split pea soup with spareribs - this was WAY better than it sounds. All sorts of veg, and the pork adds a bit of backbone;

- wilted spinach with shiitakes and celery root and bacon;

- Patty swooped in with an assist on the dessert which was a shockingly good coffee with chocolate syrup, whipped cream, praline, and cognac instead of chartreuse because chartreuse is like seventy thousand dollars a bottle right now. Bill would have liked a cookie or somesuch with it as he does not consider fancy coffee a dessert but the rest of us snorfed that down.

Random other non-photographed cooks in recent days have included these kind of odd-sounding but very very good oatmeal chocolate chip cookies with ras el-hanout, a Zuni Café bucatini with broccoli and cauliflower and all the flavor bombs⁵, and a spectacularly satisfying soup of smothered cabbage and rice from who else Marcella. And I don’t know why but I made this amazingly fragrant semolina cake soaked in rosewater and orange blossom syrup called namoura. That’s not true, I do know why because the Times made it sound so very good and they were not wrong.

Everything I cook seems to turn out round except for loaf-tin breads of course. Feeling RAWTHER chuffed about this week’s white trad pan loaf and sourdough production. But now we are losing Peter⁶, which means I am losing a major bread-eater in the house, so what is a baker who is bent on improving her skill and has a bubbly starter to do?

🚨GIVEAWAY ALERT!🚨 If you want a random half-loaf of whatever is baking and we can arrange hand-off, let me know. I could put together a text group and just let folks know when there are extras available? This is the sourdough, the white trad pan loaf, and a rye-caraway experiment. There is also a yeasted brown bread upon occasion and there can be soda breads.

You will help me by letting me continue to hone my craft, and also by providing feedback. (also this will be an interesting indicator of whether anyone actually reads to the end . . . )

1. I should probably just say soundtracks because there is a healthy dose of movie musicals in there as well. Or maybe American Songbook since there are also a bunch of collections of just Gershwin or Porter and the like.

2

3. That’s Izzy’s radio show, Sundays at 4 pm on WMHB Water-viiiiilllle. You should tune in, she’s brilliant.

4. I get in my own way a lot. So dumb.

5. Garlic, crushed red pepper, fennel seeds, olives, anchovy (left out in deference to vegetarian guest). “Every flavor should be clamoring for dominance.” I love cookbook writing like htis.

6. To a job, which is a good thing.