Anger Burger

This is probably the best birthday cake I’ve ever made, even if I did run out of frosting before I could pipe a decent border around the bottom:

I was a little stressed about the butt-smears around the board, but I got over it.  I also wanted to cover the sides (not the top) with silver sprinkles, but the whole cake was so fucking heavy that we couldn’t even tilt it 5 degrees to the side without danger of catastrophic structural failure.  So I just threw some sprinkles on the top and called it a day.  Grandpa certainly doesn’t give a shit, why should I?

Anyway, my mom and I have dutifully chugged through a lot of yellow cake recipes in an effort to find something as junky and delightful as boxed cake mix.  Long story short: I found my holy grail, and it’s Shirley Corriher’s “Magnificent Moist Golden Cake”.  I hijacked the recipe from Cookie Madness based on the photograph alone.  It looked so unnaturally shaggy and fluffy, and then the recipe itself is so weird (trust me — just read it) that I was entranced.  And it was perfect.  Aside from one small thing: it makes very little actual cake.  Cookie Madness split the batter between two round pans, but you can see from her photo what a short cake it makes.  My cake above is two whole recipes mixed separately and baked separately in two 9×13 cake pans.  It was a little bit of a pain in the ass, but the batter is easy enough to put together and the end result was awesome.

For the record, Joy the Baker’s “Best Chocolate Buttercream” is actually the best (though I leave out the plain milk to keep the texture more spreadable).  For reals.  Don’t skip the Ovaltine (you can’t identify the malt flavor) and follow her instructions.  It’s not the ingredients that makes the buttercream, it’s the motion of the ocean, if you know what I mean and I think that you do.

AND!  I’m going to shut up about this cake soon, but if you have any edible writing to do,  the Wilton Fondant Icing Writer is totally worth the $3 it’ll cost you.   So, so much better than mixing together a tiny quantity of icing and making a little parchment writing tip.  I will truly never endure that garbage again.  It dries hard and comes in bright colors.

I’ll tell you more about this banana pudding later:

The recipe makes something like 7 quarts and we were certain we’d end up throwing away at least half of it.  So of course it was totally obliterated before I even got a serving of it.  True story.  I was told it was delicious, but I have no goddamn firsthand knowledge of this.

My sister’s brilliantly doofy salami/cheese/olive horns.  This salami was really too big, but you use what you’ve got.  You roll the salami, stick one end in an olive and use a piping bag or a snipped ziplock to full the horn with cream cheese or Alouette or Boursin  if you’re rich.

I didn’t catch who made this or how they made it, but it was rad.  It was fresh corn (I could tell because a lot of the kernels were still stuck together) and beans in a mild sauce, but for some reason it was magic.  Maybe it was the pumpkin tureen.

This landscape.  You’re familiar with it, I hope?  I mean, whatever your family’s version is, but basically a vast accumulation of unidentifiable salads and dips.  And a random jar of pickles thrown in, because when has that ever gone badly?

Here my cousin’s daughter demonstrates how to smell a spoon to try and suss out what the hell you’re putting on your plate.   She hasn’t yet learned to just put in on the plate and eat it.

It warms my heart to know that other people have cake disasters, too.  Of course it still tasted good.

No one can accuse us of being a multicultural family, that’s for sure.

This is Dolores, she’s the one that arranged this.  I barely had a chance to talk to her because I was busy eating.  But I think she knows that’s how I express my love.

I’ve got some old things lined up for you since I’m on the road.  First of all, I made this, and I don’t have a recipe for you:

It was one of those fugue state dinners where you start cooking, having only an oblique concept of what you’re making, and then suddenly you’ve made the best fried rice you or anyone in your family has ever had, and a side of baby bok choy and pea shoots so perfectly cooked that you eat the entire pile that you’d just declared was “way too much”.  (Not the above pile. The above was just my first serving.)

Later, my mom ate around the dried fish in her deluxe Japanese peanut snack mix, a sight that cracked me up.  It was like low tide fishpocalypse.

Mike made himself dinner!  I came to investigate when I heard it get quiet in the kitchen:

Well, okay.  Quesadilla with a side of cheese and salami.  Why not?

Yesterday I was at the grocery store looking at cantaloupes (88¢ each!) when I heard through a very thick accent:

lady: “You’re throweeng avay money!”

me: “I’m sorry?”

lady (conspiratorially): “I bought two of sose yesterday and I throw them avay!  Can’t eat sem they are so bad.”

me: “Oh, thank you for telling me.”

lady: “Throweeng avay money!”

me: “Yes, I am taking your advice.  I won’t get one.”

lady: “You’d think sese people vould know how to grow a cantaloupe!”

me: “Um…”

So there you have it.  I’m not 100% sure who “these people” are but I have a good guess.  And then I debated for a long time on buying one anyway, just to karmically negate what she’d said.  But I couldn’t do it.  Her weird cantaloupe curse spooked me.  I bought mangoes instead.

Oh, give me a MI-DEL graham cracker and I’ll be a happy lady.   They’re brutal!  Even calling them “honey” grahams is misleading – they’re barely sweet and excellent with savory toppings; a bit of triple-cream brie and a piece of salmon?  Ugh, stop.  But I’d never try to pass off a s’more made with a MI-DEL graham.  It’d be worse than going to that birthday party where someone sweetened the cake with beet juice, you know, it’s fine while you’re there but when you get home you have to make a sandwich out of brown sugar Pop Tarts, Betty Crocker cream cheese frosting and thinly sliced gummy bears.  You know, to get your blood sugar back up to a workable level.

Anyway, I love the MI-DEL a lot, but they’re a little pricey (I’ve never found them for less than $4 and often as much as $6 a box) and wouldn’t turn down the idea of a cheap alternative.  I don’t know why I do this.  Both Mike and my mom have the same response, which is to roll their eyes at me.  Is it worth saving $2 to bust your nuts finding a MI-DEL analog?  No?  Then stop it and shell out the money.  Still, when I saw a box of grahams at Trader Joe’s I bought it without really thinking about it.  It wasn’t until I got home that I became uncomfortably aware that the label design was a little too Laurel Burch¹.  OMINOUS MUSIC.

I knew from the moment I picked one up that I was going to be angry.  And sad.  And then angry again.   Never in my life have I seen such an airy, smooth, crispy graham cracker.  This is the bottom, sure, but it was wrong.  I could tell.  One bite confirmed: this is a cookie. A super-sweet, mostly characterless and brittle cookie.  No.  Stop.

Also!  A Trader Joe’s follow-up to this fairly popular rant of mine regarding the solicitors outside: I wrote a somewhat less pissy and more straightforward version that was actually sent to TJ’s proper, and received word back from them.   Here’s part of it:

“At this location the solicitors are on public property.  At this time there are no laws or avenues for us to work with the local government to eliminate these folks.  We are simply unable to make any changes.  We diligently work to keep them off our property and this is a daily battle.   At this location we have security guards present in the lot to help with this matter. Please accept our apology.  We too wish they would not be there and are thankful that you continue to shop with us.  If ever an opportunity arises for us to change the circumstances we will surely jump on it.”

I like the phrase “eliminate these folks”.  Friendly, but terrifying.  I call beef on their claim of “security guards”, though — there are men dressed curiously like forest rangers who walk around the entrance, but I’ve never even heard them speak let alone confront the solicitors.  Anyway, this is 100% true: two days later as I walked into TJ’s the sidewalk is now painted in bright red-and-white: “DO NOT BLOCK THIS AREA”.  The entire sidewalk!  It’s hilarious.  Even more hilarious was the pissy Doctors Without Borders solicitor standing directly on it who snarled at me “Do you ever wonder what it would be like to not be able to see a doctor, not even for a broken arm?”

The following conversation is truly as close to the original as I can recall:

me: “Fuck you.”

And, scene.  This is why I’m not allowed out of the house.

¹ You should know that two of my favorite pairs of earrings are early Laurel Burch pieces, before the 80′s when she realized that making rainbow psychedelic cat jewelry for elementary school teachers and pediatric nurses would make her a rich woman.

In the ongoing discovery of things I do poorly, we can now solidly list “speaking.”  Luckily Brian Salvatore at the Enthusiasts’ Radio Hour and his bechamel voice make things a bit more auditorially palatable.   I suspect we were a bitch to edit.  Also: Dell laptops?  Not the best microphones in the world.  Take note.

To wit: myself and contributor Aaron Leva were interviewed for Mr. Salvatore’s charming and well-produced podcast in an episode called P B and O, named after yours truly (you’ll have to hear why).  It’s a long podcast — almost an hour and a half long and we make up only a portion of the whole show– but you won’t regret listening to the whole thing.  It’s all about food enthusiasm!  You remember enthusiasm, don’t you?  I barely do, but the podcast helped me recall bits and pieces.  Also I name-drop Apelad.

If you don’t want to download the show from the link above than you can listen to it online at Mevio.  Well!  How exciting.  And further thanks to Brian for overflowing with compliments and having that masterful “podcast voice” that makes you feel like you’re on This American Life.

Go!  Listen!

It is possible that the reason you are sad about cooking is because your cooking implements suck.

Like most everyone, I started out with some hand-me-down pans. Also like most everyone, those already-old pots and pans suffered through many years of rough cooking, being dropped, inappropriate scrubbing and general tragedy.  But as I approach my 14th year of living on my own, I find myself trying not to take my slowly accumulated and now-functional kitchen items for granted.  Take this All Clad griddle pan – brilliant!  I mean, totally indispensable.  Grilled cheese, crepes, fried eggs, not to mention that its my only non-stick coated pan, so anything I want to fry without oil (see above “grilled” onions for enchiladas) gets me reaching straight for the griddle pan — and more importantly, realizing what total shit I was trying to cook on before.  At $50 it’s not exactly cheap, but I use it several times a week and it is not a duplication of anything else I own.

I was thinking about this today because of a long and agonizing decision to buy what I consider to be an overly expensive and redundant cooking item: a tabletop griddle.

Those little peppers are non-spicy Japanese shishito peppers, which are TASTY just with salt.

First, a backstory that I’m certain Mike will want me to share: I have a moratorium on kitchen appliances.  This isn’t so much a consumerism issue as much as a chronic and lifelong apartment-renter issue: my kitchen doesn’t have any additional storage.  I have no counter space.  We already have an additional purchased kitchen “island” table pushed up against a wall for a work station.  Our current apartment has no closets.  We don’t own a microwave.  And yet, I find myself thinking about much we love a simple meat and veg grill, where I end up eating mostly onions and Mike ends up eating mostly meat.  So we took the plunge and bought it.

I rationalized it like so: we love the food (either “teppanyaki” or “yakiniku” depending on who is talking and whether or not they think that “grilling” is only done over coals) and we love the ease of it.  I can prepare the vegetables and meat in under 10 minutes, and even though it’s hot out, with the windows open and the fan on, I didn’t feel like I’d cooked over the stove all evening.  In the winter, I’m sure we’ll appreciate the warmth.  There’s just one problem: where the fuck will I store this behemoth? And the answer is, I have no idea.  Right now the vote is: wrapped in a garbage bag and stored sideways next to the stove.  I’m sure that will look fancy.  I guess we’re just going to have to move.

But!  I don’t care, because: okonomiyaki.  More tomorrow!

When I was a kid my mom would always say “Hate is a strong word…” when we declared we hated something.  As though she could catch us on a technicality.  Like, I might strongly dislike bedtime, but that leaves a minuscule quantity of liking it.

So, I hate the 4th of July.  I don’t hate America or anything (I strongly dislike it in it’s current state) (mom) but the 4th of July is the convergence of everything I can’t stand.  Noise.  Heat.  Drunkenness¹.  Noise.  An interruption of commerce.  BBQs.  Noise.

So far today I’ve experienced:

• A trail of blood leading from what looks suspiciously like a pile of human excrement in my apartment building’s walkway.  The blood leads to one of my neighbors’ doors.

• The neighbor we refer to as DJ Awesome² start his weekly party up by egging on his yappy dogs into a frenzy of tiny deafening terror.  This has riled up our other neighbor’s Rottweiler into berserker rage.

• The children who live in the apartment building behind ours decided to scream bloody murder for several minutes, the volume and conviction of which implied disembowelment or worse.  Investigation revealed that the screaming was the result of realizing they were children.

• Firecrackers.  Or possibly gunfire.  Both are loud and should be illegal.

Anyway, since I’m not as much into eating to comfort myself as baking to comfort myself, I decided to make another of Smitten Kitchen’s braided lemon breads.  You guys, this is a really solid recipe.  Today is the fourth time I’ve made it, and each time I think, Jesus, this is a keeper. Curiously, each time I make it my dough turns out much easier to handle than Smitten’s — hers even looks significantly wetter than mine, though I follow the recipe to a T.  But when she says to make it directly onto the surface you’ll be baking it on, I agree with vehemence.

Mine varies on a few other small fronts.  I roll mine out much thinner (and therefore bigger) on a Silpat, but for no other reason than I want a flatter braid and I don’t have any parchment in the house.  You’re not supposed to use knives on Silpats, so it takes me a little longer to carefully-carefully cut the side strips without harming the silicone.

It should come as no surprise that I increase the filling.  I mean, I don’t want a piece of bread with a whisper of stuff inside.  I want a giant danish.  So, I not-quite-but-almost double the cream cheese.  It ends up being a gooey mess, but that’s not a criticism.

Any filling works.  You don’t even need the cream cheese.  You could get a can of “almond filling” from the store and make a giant almond croissant braid.  Sprinkle the top with sliced almonds and then powder sugar it when its cooled.  Chocolate would work — chocolate and nuts and dried sour cherries?  Good god.  I did apricot last time (Trader Joe’s reduced sugar apricot preserves are literally just reduced sugar, not artificially sweetened, and work brilliantly for all kinds of baking) and my mother said she would have preferred it without any cream cheese, just the apricot filling.  This last time I couldn’t decide between another lemon braid or tarted-up³ raspberry version.  Which of course came to the end that all gluttonous crossroads do: BOTH.

I’m not even going to put the recipe here, because Smitten Kitchen already did it so well.  It’s a delightful dalliance from being a miserable curmudgeon, 4th of July or not.

¹ In others.
² I’ll leave you to figure out why we named him that, but here’s a hint: I’m being sarcastic.
³ By adding lemon juice, not by putting blue eye shadow on it.

I hope you don’t mind, but I’m just going to load you up with photos today.  Think of it as inspiration for what you can do with a pot of boiling oil other than submerging BP executives in it.

The tofu goes into some miso soup, the eggplant, okra and Okinawan sweet potatoes (beni imo) go straight into the oil, no batter or breading.  That such a thing was even conceivable was news to me.

Kelp and little dried fishes that made for flavorful miso stock.

Eggplants.  Dry them carefully first or they’ll spit!

Okra fried whole!

This was raw daikon radish and carrot finely julienned and then topped with simple sesame dressing.

Incredible: karaage, or Japanese fried chicken.  I’ll write about it later, but here’s basically what I’ll tell you.

And those fried veggies again, though after they’ve been deep fried naked and then left to their own devices in room temperature dashi broth, which made the veggies soft and flavorful, but still fresh and not at all deep-fried tasting.

So there you have it.  The entire above menu was crafted by my friend Junko Yamamoto, who happens to be a renowned artist as well.  Here’s the part of the evening where I was a big ol’ whitey:

me: “What do you call okra in Japanese?”

Junko: “Okura.”

me: “Oh.”

I’m opposed to BBQing in a very distant way, as I’ve mentioned here before — last summer I think.  I find it to be messy and hot and the only time I want my hair to smell like campfire is when I’ve actually been around a campfire.  And yet, each time I am brought over to my friend Sol’s house and plates of beautifully roasted foods appear before me as if by magic I think, You win this time, BBQ.  This time.

Most vegetables can be improved almost immeasurably by a simple coat of good olive oil, salt, and a short time over very high heat.  Mushrooms are no exception, and stay juicy to the point of sloppiness.

Certain Viking affiliates of Anger Burger were quite pleased at the proximity huge steaks of meat.  As Vikings tend to be.

The Pacific Northwest is pretty predictable when it comes to greenery.  If you stand still for longer than a minute it’ll be coming our your ass.  True!  I had a friend who moved to Olympia from Colorado and a few months into his stay he noticed a rash on his chest.  He went to the doctor and she informed him he had a fungus.  Incredulous, he asked, “I’m growing moss?!” and she said, “Well, did you move here from an arid environment?”  In other words: YES.  YOU ARE GROWING MOSS.

What makes steak better?  Butter.  But you already knew that.

Jesus, these onions.  I ate at least an entire onion to myself.  Everyone gobbled down the asparagus, but those onions slow-roasted to soft, almost creamy sweetness were killing me.  I declared: ROASTED ONIONS WITH EVERY MEAL!  I’ve already failed that promise twice today.

The baby refused to eat corn on command.  You know how it is.  Babies.

I forgot to tell you what your sink would look like after making the fake Nutella:

Sorry.  Also, those skins stained my sink and I had to bleach it.  So, have fun!

And then, something amazing happened.  My government-appointed Viking Mike had to go to a dinner meeting at Loteria in Hollywood, and brought me back this:

It’s not on the menu so I’m not certain what they call it, but it’s two layers of a very soft, not-very-sweet cake around a middle layer of FLAN.  I need to make sure you understand this: THE WHOLE MIDDLE THIRD IS A SOLID LAYER OF FLAN.    And!  A bunch of buttery dulce de leche frosting, I think, and I hesitate on that one because while it was definitely caramel flavored, like the rest of the cake it wasn’t terribly sweet.  Which is a fantastic thing — the cake wasn’t cloying or rich, which is hard to believe.  Still, I could only eat about a third before I felt I was pushing it, it was a huge slice.

FLAN IN THE MIDDLE.

This changes things.   This changes everything.