Anger Burger

Can we briefly discuss the “express” or “15 item limit” lanes at the grocery store?

But first: I used to love the self-checkout lanes.  It was so nice to be able to bag my own groceries and not talk to anyone.  Misanthrope’s dream.   But then I switched to reusable grocery bags¹ and discovered that no self-checkout machines are capable of dealing with your own bag.  The machine preforms seppuku when you set your bag on the shelf, unable to comprehend a world where a 2-ounce discrepancy exists.  Briefly at Ralphs there was an option to check “I’m using my own bags” and that option was deleted when people realized you could add a tiny stolen item to the bag at that point and the machine would ignore it.  After weeks of having to flag down the employees each time to get a machine override I gave up.

There’s a humanist belief that within us each is the capacity to respect one another, and when we all understand this our world will drastically alter.  Violence will stop.  Hunger will stop.  Great minds will work toward ending disease and poverty instead of making themselves richer.

This will never happen, and anyone that has stood in an express lane at the grocery store knows this.

Every single time I ago there are two distinct people:

THE CHEATER
The cheater is almost always an affluent person in a kind of faux-rush, an absent-minded twat with their car keys in their hand as though a scenario where their car will need to be started without warning is imminent.  They are guaranteed to have about 20 items in their basket.   They will, when the checker asks “Did you find everything ok?” answer sincerely that they did not.  Anecdotal case-in-point: the girl who whined “I looked everywhere for Tapatío hot sauce and I couldn’t find it,” after which the checker sends a bag-boy off to the hot sauce isle to find the giant display of Tapatío.  Meanwhile 400 people in the check-out line grow old and die.

THE INDIGNANT LOSER
If your blood pressure isn’t raised by the Cheater, then the Indignant Loser will surely do it for you with their passive-aggressive sighing and attempts to assault with mere eye contact.  Occasionally they will talk to you in an effort to gain solidarity, “Can you believe this?” (”Yes.”) and even more awkwardly might scold the checker, “This lane is 15 items or less, right?  Why are you allowing her to be in this line?”

I fall into an amorphous third category wherein I start out as being an Indignant Loser and then once I see other Indignant Losers I lose all my steam and fall into an atheistic funk involving fantasies of secret compounds and gun hoarding.  And in the event that neither of those are in front of me in line, it’s almost certainly some batshit crazy loon buying a single packet of soy cheese slices while paying with a sack of pennies.

I hesitate to offer a solution since I know it won’t be entertained, but here it is: have a lane called a “Luxury Lane,” and that alone will draw off all the people who also rent “Luxury Apartments” that are really just low-quality ant farms with faux-granite countertops and stainless steel fridges.  So, the Cheaters, basically.  This will leave the other lane, which will be renamed the “Budget Lane” to people with only a few items but who actually have their cash out and ready to pay.   You’ll also have to install a simple coin-counting mechanism into the register for the batshit sack-o-pennies, but that’s pretty easy.

Ugh.  Now I have heartburn.

¹The RuMe bags are by far my favorite – they have long handles, long enough to actually hoist over your shoulder even when the bags are full, and they have squared corners and bottoms.  When I first went shopping for reusable bags year before last I was surprised to discover they all had seams on the bottom, which makes the packing of groceries stupidly harder.  It’s seriously like these people have never packed a bag of groceries before in their lives, which now that I think about it they probably haven’t.  The RuMe bags also fold up and seal with velcro, which no one else was doing.  Everyone else either folded up into large, sloppy pockets or had little separate, loose covers, like, I wonder how long it would take to lose them.  Ten minutes?  Five?  AND RuMe makes an extra-large “macro” size so that you can have bags for those awkward toilet paper superpack buying rampages at Target.

So there I am, digging through my recipe archives¹, looking for something to do with the rest of my quart of buttermilk when I remember that Smitten Kitchen did a buttermilk cake a while back and off my fingers flew.

Unsurprisingly, the cake is amazing.  It’s perfect.  And as it took 30 minutes to assemble and 30 minutes to bake, an hour after starting I was rewarded with a lovely, fragrant cake that I had little intention of sharing with anyone.

The downside is that the recipe re-fired an old irritation I have for the whole “milk + lemon juice = buttermilk” wives tale.  And it pains me to see Smitten Kitchen trooping along with it — it causes such a hitch in my giddyup to see my beloved bacteria-laden buttermilk impostered so poorly with acidified milk.  You see, milk and lemon juice together does not make buttermilk.  It makes, as mentioned one sentence ago, acidified milk, which is not really the same at all.

A fair comparison is to say that thickening milk with gelatin is the same as making yogurt.  Sure, it looks similar, and all it’s missing is that critical fermentation process.  Additionally, some of the more authentic buttermilks (like Knudsen) add small flecks of butterfat to the milk to boost flavor, making it a lot more like the actual stuff you would theoretically get from the making of butter (hence the name – buttermilk is actually the residue from making butter) (or rather:  used to be, it isn’t any more).  You might even be able to find honest-to-goodness real buttermilk if you have a local dairy representin’ at your farmer’s market.

This isn’t to say that milk and lemon juice together don’t make an interesting product — they do — it’s just that I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t just use buttermilk instead.  An even better substitute would be mixing equal parts plain full-fat yogurt to whole milk, but again, what is this, the Cold War?  Is there a ration on buttermilk?  The stuff keeps forever in the fridge, why not just buy a pint?

Still, that’s life, I guess.  Some people care about human rights.  I care about buttermilk.

(Seriously, this recipe is great.  Go get it.)

¹A pile of print-outs and unlabeled lists of ingredients.

Man, I have hashed this over in my head so many times I feel like I’m breaking up with the damn cup.  How do I say this?  Am I making a mistake?  Am I actually an asshole like everyone keeps telling me I am?  Can I even find a better cup?

First, the beginning: on various blogs around the web I’d read about the Keep Cup, an Australian company with a plastic – yes, plastic – travel cup.  No gimmicks, other than a claim at environmentalism (which in turn is just: use our cup instead of disposable ones).  But it hooked me:

1. It comes in an 8oz size
2. It does not have a handle
3. It has a sippy cup lid that appears to actually work.

I hate travel mugs, and having been a barista for nearly a decade, I’ve handled pretty much all of them.  I can taste metal.  The drink holes are messy.  They don’t break apart in enough pieces to thoroughly clean.  They’re all too big.  You get the idea.  And here was the Keep Cup, which, despite sounding like a retrograde feminine product, was sitting there quietly defying every single hate-point I have for travel mugs.

The only problem is that they aren’t sold in the US.

I think to myself, big deal, I’ll order one.  I send and receive international packages semi-regularly, and mail from New Zealand takes about five days.  I gulped and re-thought the whole thing when I saw that shipping was going to be the same price as the cup itself (about $10), but I forged ahead.

Now we are to the part where I am not sure what to say.  You see, nothing wrong happened, exactly, but I just… I guess I got rubbed the wrong way by the company.  I’m not sure how else to explain it.  First, an email went totally unanswered.  I tried again a week later and got a rather flustered email back about how busy the company was.  Then, three weeks later when the cup had still not arrived, I sent another email and was told they’d do tracking on it for me and get back ASAP.  Which I guess stands for something else in Australia, because no one got back to me.  A month after my order, the package arrived and looked like it’d been carried on a raft at sea after a long donkey ride through the desert.

Which, okay, whatever.  Shipping is a game of dice, especially international shipping.  And the cup arrived, and all is well, so what do I have to complain about?  Nothing, really, except for that feeling where you have to work really hard to give someone else your money, which is a feeling I dislike greatly.

I had planned to take photos of the cup and out about, a kind of documentaire vérité of the cup doin’ its business, but the truth is that I’ve forgotten to take a photo of it in use for two months now, and the cup and I are still a little frosty toward each other.  It works fine.  It’s great, in fact.  To someone who doesn’t value physical lightness the cup might seem cheap, but this is a positive for me.  It’s plastic.  For once, something isn’t overbuilt into absurdity (see also: toothbrushes).  The whole lid pops apart for cleaning.  The silicone band is grippy and insulates fingers from heat.  On the same subject, the plastic doesn’t insulate nearly as well as one of those steel monstrosity travel mugs you can give a concussion with, but again, for me it works.  The simple summary is: if other mugs are Hummers, the Keep Cup is a Prius¹.

I sincerely recommend this cup to you, provided you’re anything like me.  I guess my reservation is: be prepared for a difficult birth, but the baby will be great.  And let’s hope Keep Cup can find an American distributor.

¹Which is also to say: in a streetfight I’d much rather be the person with the insulated, 20-ounce. stainless steel travel mug, but I’ve come to accept I am not a predator in my species.

***I tried to work some comment about iPads and Keep Cups into this post, but I’m just failing today.  Maybe you guys can help me out.

I hope.

Please, please ignore the grout.  I’ve bleached it so much I burned my nose.

Like a lot of cooks, my mom and I have holy grails.  We occasionally reach them, and this is why we keep cooking rather than break down into lurid CMYK Hamburger Helper purgatory.  One of my mom’s big ones was one-at-a-time pancakes and I remember the day she called me, voice raised in gloating victory.  I’VE DONE IT.  I’VE FINALLY DONE IT.

I wooed a boy with the promise of banana pancakes.  True!

Store-bought pancake mix, for being so simple, is alarmingly disappointing.  And really, pancake mix is basically just flour and leavening agents — your inability to do this yourself marks you as a noob more than your Mario Batali cookware¹ does.  Sorry, betty.  Get used to it.

Chocolate-bar  pancake for me.  It was that kind of day.

Originally the pancakes were for camping, when the ability to mix just two individual pancakes for her and her husband was the difference between making them and skipping them in favor of something less wasteful.  After the great formulation she realized she could be making herself a single pancake for breakfast at home as well.  But that is neither here nor there.  The point is this: with the dry parts mixed and stored away and a jar of the wet mix kept in the fridge, a single pancake is only a small bowl, a spoon and a hot skillet away.

Again with the grout.

So what’s with the forgiveness part?  Well.  Let me tell you.  I didn’t exactly ask my mom if I could share her master pancake recipe with you guys, but I’m sure she’d say yes.  I mean, it’s you guys.  We love you guys.

Starr’s Pancakes
a single pancake is simply 1/4 C. of dry mix with as much wet mix as needed to make it thick but still barely pourable, about three spoonfuls or something, it depends on your buttermilk.  and the buttermilk is crucial, in my opinion, don’t substitute it with plain milk or something else.  vegans have their own blogs, go find them.

dry mix
2 1/2 cups flour
2 1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. salt

wet mix
1 egg
1 cup buttermilk
2 Tbsp. melted butter.

• There’s really not a lot I can teach you if you don’t know how to make pancakes.

• Also, the wet stuff keeps for a little over a week in my observation, depending on how sterile your container is.

• I also replace the butter with flax oil and add maybe 1/4 cup of ground flax seeds to the dry mix, but that’s only for people who are obsessed with their brains being lubed with enough Omega-3 fatty acids.

• You might also notice there is no sugar in the mix.  This is intentional, and a reminder to soak the cooked pancake with so much maple syrup that it drips all over your shirt.

• I almost forgot! Don’t mix the wet and dry together until just before cooking — the baking soda reacts with the acid in the buttermilk and poofs it up really quickly, which is in large part what makes fluffy, lovely pancakes.

¹I actually own a Mario Batali spatula that I hate and should just give to a bum and get  over it.  Whenever it gets warm, it curls.  True story!

The verdict: pretty damn cool, though Zazzle’s color saturation is a little wack.  To be fair, it might be my .png file.  I must consult my graphic advisers.  Still!  A woman at Staples and a man at the grocery store complimented me on my shirt, and this being the first day I’ve worn it!  Success.

It happens more regularly as I age, but still with a disconcerting rarity: I invent something for dinner and it works.

I mean, you know how it goes.  Or maybe you don’t: you throw some shit together, maybe you’ve got some ingredients that are borderline botulism-breeders, but either way you just start cooking and sometimes it’s okay, but much of the time you end up with some kind of prison-movie prop food.

This time I had some potatoes, just bought some spinach, and had half a tub of plain yogurt that was taking on an interesting new hue.  Sounds like the dinner bell!

As soon as I realized what I had, I half-remembered-half-fantasized an old recipe for some kind of Indian yogurt-rice, a tangy, light dish with lots of chopped cilantro.  I also had some cilantro!  Things are coming together now, eh, Milhouse?

But that’s where everything stops being Indian.  My favorite curry power, the Japanese S&B Oriental Curry Powder (found in most grocery stores), has a decidedly non-Indian flavor to it, but is the exact curry flavor you want for something like curried deviled eggs or curry ketchup.

I still get surprised when an entire 9oz. bag of spinach cooks down into little more than the density of three eggs, but it does, so don’t stop adding it to your pan, even when it seems like enough.  It won’t be.

I really must get a white plate so my food stops looking like it’s visiting from the 70’s.

Sunday’s Curried Potatoes and Spinach
i know it looks like a typo, me calling for low-fat yogurt, but in this instance the tanginess of the yogurt is more important than the creaminess. i know; what is the world coming to?  end times.

2 Tbsp. olive oil
3 petite waxy potatoes, diced small
1/4 white onion, diced small
3 cloves garlic, diced
1/2 C. water
1 Tbsp. mild curry powder (S&B is best)
1/2 inch worth of grated fresh garlic GINGER
9oz. bag of washed baby spinach leaves
3 heaping spoonfuls of low-fat plain yogurt
1/2 C. chopped fresh cilantro
2 tsp. sugar
1 tsp. kosher salt
1/2 tsp. fresh ground black pepper

• In a saute pan over medium heat, warm the olive oil and add the potatoes, onions and garlic.  Saute for a few minutes, being careful to keep them from sticking to the pan.  Add the salt, pepper and curry powder, and continue to saute another 5-7 minutes, or until the potatoes take on a little bit of color.

• Add the water and lower the heat a little, stirring occasionally until the water is gone and the potatoes are nearly done, another 10 minutes at the very most.  If you need to add more water to keep the potatoes from sticking, do so.  Don’t go crazy, though.

• Start adding the spinach.  I chop my spinach by carefully placing big handfuls on the cutting board and coarsely and barbarically chopping at it until it’s broken down a little, but you don’t have to.  Add the spinach in handfuls, stirring after each time, until the entire bag is wilted into the potatoes.  This will take about 5 minutes.

• By this time the potatoes should be cooked through and the spinach should be just wilted.  Turn off the heat, add the yogurt and the cilantro.   Test for salt.  It might need more, the spinach tends to counteract it.

A note about cooking salmon: salmon really benefits from a quick salt rub.  About 1/2 hour before cooking time, heavily salt the salmon, wrap it in a paper towel or piece of plastic and allow to sit in fridge for 20 – 30 minutes.

When it is time to cook, rinse the salmon thoroughly under cold water and pat dry with more paper towel.  The salt adds just enough seasoning to the salmon that it often doesn’t need anything else, and tenderizes it a little too.  But be warned: more than 1/2 an hour and you’ll start curing the salmon and will then have a rubbery texture when you cook it.

I know what you’re getting for your birthday!¹  I’m pretty certain I have all the kinks worked out, and I’ll be adding more items as the whim strikes me, but there you go.  At the top of this page now, below the logo, is a new link called “shop!“  That way you don’t have to find this post every time you want to find the Anger Burger link at Zazzle.

Enjoy!  And for Christ’s sake, drip some ketchup on the front.  It’ll be like 3D!

¹I mean, from someone else.  I’m not getting you anything.  Sorry.

***UPDATE  1.27.10 ***
My shirt arrived in the mail today and the quality is pretty much what I expected: pretty good quality with a few slight flaws that only I would notice (the color is a little over-saturated, for example, but I imagine it is better than under-saturated).

As an aside, I ordered a LARGE in the women’s dark shirt and it is borderline too small.  It’s fine, but it’s a hair tighter than I would normally purchase for myself.  I’m 5′6″ and 135 pounds, so this is a pretty silly “large”.  To be fair, Zazzle warns to buy one to two sizes larger in this particular shirt brand, and I agree with an emphasis on “two”.

Anyway, all this is to say: I love it!  And I think you’ll love it too.  Photos coming soon.

Quickly, and just to get it out of my system: last year my dad bought me a Dell Studio 14z laptop, a laptop marketed as a “student” model due to budget and lack of an optical drive¹.  Part of the deal with the laptop was that they’d throw in an upgrade to Windows 7 for free when it came out. Let me rephrase that, because that makes it sound too generous on their part.  What is actually the case is that the purchase for the laptop included the Windows 7 OS, but since it was not released yet, existed as a voucher.  Very important difference considering that I was waiting to get a new laptop in an effort to avoid using Vista.

Very long story short: I have been trying for two straight months to get that upgrade, and Dell just won’t send it.  It’s apparently a thing (I refuse to wade through message boards, but my dad did, bless him) where you log in, register your computer and then it’ll never let you back online to order your upgrade.  And you can’t re-register because, well, someone² has already registered that laptop.  I’ve exchanged probably a dozen emails now with Dell trying to get it sorted out, and each of them (even living people!) have answered: just log on to your account… At which point I start screaming I CANNOT LOG INTO THE FUCKING ACCOUNT, THAT IS THE ENTIRE POINT.

Then, this last Monday, I received a phone call at 8am from an unknown number, so I ignored it.  I get a lot of mistake calls, I think because I have a Los Angeles phone number.  15 seconds later the phone rang again, same number, and I briefly thought: perhaps I should answer it.  And then I remembered, no, if someone wants to talk to me they can leave a message like a regular human being.  Also, I was in the middle of dropping my in-laws off at the airport.  I get home and find an email telling me that Dell has made the outrageous effort of trying to call me, but since I didn’t answer our issue is now over.

Oh, fuck it.

All of this is now exacerbated this morning by an additional email warning me that I have until January 31st to get my Windows 7 upgrade and then the free offer will expire.

So, this boring lame post is all me just venting:

Dell, I like this laptop a lot.  It was a good purchase, for the price.  But this thing where you have to complete a mystical quest in order to get a piece of software that was promised?  Insulting.  And I am reporting you to the Attorney General for fraud.

Love,
Sunday

¹ This is supposed to be marketed as portability (which is true, it’s pretty light) but in reality just keeps the costs down.  Which is fine by me.
² You.

***UPDATE  1.27.10***
Well!  I don’t know if it is coincidence (probably), the Attorney General (probably not) or this blog (definitely not), but I received another phone call from Dell at a more reasonable hour, and had a long talk with a gentleman who deleted my previous registration account and sat with me through another registration.  It was successful, and the account shows the software is set to ship on February 10th.  The phone call itself was a positive experience with only a little of that call-center crap (you know: hard to hear, obviously scripted lines).  It doesn’t make up for the stupid experience up until then (anyone with a regular 9-5 job would have never been able to write the emails and make the phone calls I did), but I should technically amend this entire post to say: my problem been, I believe, resolved.  Sort of.  20% resolved.  The other 80% is waiting for the software to actually arrive.

Instead of a big lead-in, I’ll get to the point: make this recipe.

I lied.  There’s a lead-in.  You see, I’ve mentioned this before, but I have this habit of finding recipes online and belligerently believing that there is something wrong with it, even though it is alluring to me.  Perhaps because it is alluring to me.   To put a finer point on it, I tend to believe recipes are too good to be true.  It’s a strange quality of my kitchen hobbyism, and one I’ll just lump under the amorphous description of Anger Burger, like some complex Zeitgeistian German description-word.

Emma Christensen over at The Kitchn shows up with this “Lemon-Scented Pull-Apart Coffeecake” which immediately sends me into rage mode (wtf with that name, yo?), in no small part because her photos of it look fucking delicious.  Immediately afterward the in-laws came for a spell and the recipe went to the not-literal backburner.

And then, today.  Which shall forever hence be known as THE DAY THE LEMON BREAD ARRIVED.

I am reluctant to say anything that might dissuade you from making this bread — after all, I got it right in one try, and that’s saying a lot — but in all fairness, it’s a hair finicky.  Sort of.  I think if anything, it takes a little faith courage.  For example, the dough itself is a little on the sticky side, and as much as I hate recipes that say “you might need a tablespoon of flour to help keep the dough from sticking” (usually this means “YOU’LL NEED SIX TABLESPOONS AT LEAST”), I fought the urge to load it down with more flour to better knead the dough with.  In this instance, wetness is your friend.  Wetness means a nice texture.

The description for how to form the bread is confusing at best, and an incomprehensible logic puzzle at worst.  As Emma Christensen says, the best way is to just visualize what you’re going for (a loaf of individually shaped slices) and go with a gut feeling.  Also, seeing photos of the final product helps a lot.  In a nutshell, you’re rolling the bastard out and layering.

I think that Emma is onto something with allowing the dough to rest overnight in the fridge.  When the time came for me to roll the dough, it was fussy.  I ended up fearing for the worst the entire time I was making the layers; mashing and pulling and pinching each floppy, warm, recalcitrant layer into place, until I was certain I had molested the dough beyond its ability to work it out in therapy.

I was wrong.  Even with this struggle, the bread was perfect.  The bottom gets that cinnamon-roll bottom thing, the sugary, sticky, candied thing.  The top fins are crunchy.  Each piece is saturated with just enough lemon zest to make you smell lemon on your own breath for the next hour.  Ugh.  I’m so full right now and I’m still salivating thinking about it.

So while its a little more work than making cinnamon rolls from scratch, I think it might just be a superior product.  Each sheet is thin and double-coated in lemon sugar.  The loaf shape encourages picking at, the kind of thing you serve for houseguests as a late breakfast and come off looking like Captain Domesticpants, Ph.D..

Long story short: I think this is my Gladiator sweet bread.  Forged in adversity.  Tested in battle.  Victorious in the belly.

Lemon-Scented Blah Blah-Blah Blah Blah
i highly encourage you to read both Emma Christensen’s recipe comments and the original recipe in addition to reading mine (mine has very few alterations, just to be clear).  all together they provide a slightly easier time of it.

dough
2 3/4 C. all-purpose flour
1/4 C granulated sugar
2 1/4 tsp. (1 envelope) instant yeast
1/2 tsp. salt
1/3 C whole milk
2 oz (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
1/4 C. water
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla
2  eggs, at room temperature

lemon filling
1/2 C. granulated sugar
the grated zest of 3 lemons
the grated zest of 1 orange
2 oz unsalted butter, melted

• Stir together 2 cups of the flour, the sugar, the yeast, and the salt in a bowl; set aside. In a small saucepan, heat the milk and butter over low heat just until the butter is melted. Remove from the heat, add the water, and set aside until warm (120 to 130°F), about 1 minute. Add the vanilla.

• Pour the milk mixture over the flour-yeast mixture and, using a rubber spatula, mix until the dry ingredients are evenly moistened.  Mixing by hand, add the eggs, one at a time, stirring vigorously after each addition just until incorporated. This can be done in a stand mixer, but isn’t necessary.  This is also very fussy and takes some patience.  Add 1/2 cup of the remaining flour, and resume mixing until the dough is smooth, 30 to 45 seconds. Add 2 more tablespoons flour and mix with a little more vigor until the dough is smooth, soft, and slightly sticky, about 45 seconds.

• Sprinkle a work surface with 1 – 2 tablespoons flour and center the dough on the flour. Knead gently until smooth and no longer sticky, about 1 minute, adding an additional 1 to 2 tablespoons flour only if necessary to lessen the stickiness. Place the dough in a large, greased bowl, cover the bowl securely with plastic wrap, and let the dough rise in a warm place (about 70°F) until doubled in size, 45 to 60 minutes. While the dough is rising, make the filling.

• OPTIONAL ALTERNATIVE: After letting the dough rise, stick the whole thing into the fridge and allow to chill over night.  The next day, resume recipe as normal.

• In a small bowl, thoroughly mix together the sugar and the lemon and orange zests.

• Gently deflate the dough. On a lightly floured work surface, roll out the dough into a 20-by-12-inch rectangle. Smaller is better than larger.  Using a pastry brush spread the melted butter generously over the dough. Cut the dough north-south into 5 strips, each about 12 by 4 inches — again, erring smaller is better than larger here since the second rise will fill up the gaps in the pan.  Sprinkle 1/5th of the zest-sugar mixture over one of the buttered rectangles, lightly rubbing and pressing the sugar into the butter. Top with a second rectangle (it’s ok to manipulate it roughly into place, it can take it) and sprinkle it with 1/5th of the zest-sugar mixture. Repeat with the remaining dough rectangles and zest-sugar mixture, ending with all your rectangles now all stacked on top of each other.

• Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 350°F. Lightly grease a 9-by-5-by-3-inch loaf pan. You don’t need to flour or parchment it.

• Slice the stack  through the 5 layers to create 6 equal sections, each about 4 by 2 inches. Fit these layered strips into the prepared loaf pan, cut edges up and down, like a loaf of sliced bread. Remember that the dough will fill the space up as it rises a second time, so don’t feel like it has to be perfect.  Loosely cover the pan with plastic wrap and let the dough rise in a warm place until puffy and almost doubled in size, 30 to 50 minutes. Press the dough gently with a fingertip. If the indentation remains, the dough is ready for baking.

• Bake the bread until the top is golden brown, 30 to 35 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack and let cool in the pan for 10 to 15 minutes.

• To remove the bread  from the pan, gently run a butter knife between the bread and the pan.  Have a cooking rack ready where you want the bread to go.  Using a clean, doubled kitchen towel in your left hand and a oven mitt on your right (switch that for lefties), pick up the pan with your right hand and lay the towel over the top of the bread, covering it with the towel.  Now, holding your left hand firmly over the towel and bread, gently turn the pan over into your left hand, letting the loaf free.  Quickly then, gently roll the bread back upright onto the cooling rack.  It might come apart.  Such is the way of things.

• If you are so inclined, drizzle the top of the warm bread with cream cheese icing, as follows:

3 oz. cream cheese, room temp
juice of one lemon
1/3 C. powdered sugar, sifted

• The bread is best, by far, when still warm.

I’m ashamed at how little I am exploring Los Angeles.  Part of it is being without a car, yes, but… really that’s no excuse.  Which is how I found myself on a subway full of people wearing no pants, realizing that I am actually less than an hour away from Chinatown by public transportation – which, I might add, is also the same amount of time it would take me to get there were I driving myself.  This is where I demurely slap myself in the forehead.

We wanted to go to Empress Pavilion, a well-known Los Angeles dim sum joint both loved and hated in equal measure.  Online reviews expound of the bitchiness of the cart servers (um, have you ever had dim sum before?) and the quality of the food, while others insist they had the best dim sum of their lives.  It doesn’t matter: I wanted to try it.  And of course they stopped serving just before we would have arrived.

Instead, we walked over to CBS Seafood (there’s also an ABC Seafood and one must assume an NBC Seafood and a FOX Seafood as well), where we got the full on Whitey Treatment.  This is to be expected.  We are whiteys.  But our friend Justin was, how shall we say, very dehydrated?  And was literally begging the waiters for a cup of water.  We had to ask 5 different people and waited 10 minutes before water came (there were only three other tables of customers).  Then we waited another 10 minutes to order three small dim sum plates.  Then we waited another 10 minutes to get it.  And I think the point at which you can’t get food quickly enough to keep from getting hungry between servings, it is time to leave.  I don’t often get whiteyed-out of a joint, but it does happen occasionally.

Luckily, Justin also has an iPhone, which means that we were made abruptly aware of our proximity to Philippe’s, a Los Angeles institution.  Philippe’s is pretty inarguably the inventor of the French dip sandwich, as well as beloved for their housemade superhot mustard.  And none of us had been there.

The rumors of the tremendous lines were well-founded.  The girl in line in front of us informed her friend that it was “usually much worse than this,” which, I don’t know about you, but there’s not a lot of this shit I’ll endure for any ol’ sandwich.

Which, sadly, Philippe’s was.  I must amend that to say: it was a pretty good sandwich.  The above is lamb (we got one with cheese and one without, to split) and while the meat was good and the bread was great, you don’t dip your own sandwich in au jus, it is done for you as you order, meaning that even if you eat right away — which we did — the result is a soggy, slimy bun.  The meat is also not quite warm enough to melt the cheese, something I didn’t anticipate being so disappointed by.  If I had waited five minutes in line I might feel differently, but after 40 minutes and being elbowed by a group of oversized, drunken sportsfans¹, I’ll probably turn it down in the future.

On our walk back to Central Station, I noticed a cart selling churros.  Not just any churros.  The ones they fill with dulce de leche (or custard or strawberry) when you order.

Oh my god, that was good.  That might have been the best three dollars I’ve spent in recent memory.  It seems baffling that I could fit them in after dim sum and a lamb sandwich, but I have a special extra stomach just for deep fried sweets.  I’m a miracle of science.

¹ At one point the guy behind me tapped me hard on the shoulder and said in an unfocused daze “Are you gonna order?” I stared at him and his friends, unsure what the fuck was going on. You see, we weren’t at the front of the line. “I… will?” I said. He seemed satisfied and we waited for 15 more minutes.