I remember my mom making these when I was a kid, and I remember thinking that they were fucking impossible.  But, replace “fucking” with whatever powerful adjective I had at my six year-old disposal, which was probably just “super”.  I didn’t learn the f-bomb until I was maybe nine or ten?  And I learned if from my friend Marika.  HI MARIKA!  She’ll probably never read this.  But her sister does.  HI ANNE!

What was I saying?  Checkerboard cookies.  Turns out they are the best of the Fancy Pants cookies because the dough itself is very difficult to screw up.  Now that I’ve said that about it, it’ll probably fail for everyone.  The checkerboard part is also very easy, but the more obsessive-compulsive you are, the more precise the cookies are.

This is a Maida Heatter recipe and to be totally blunt, if you like chocolate, you have to own a copy of her Book of Great Chocolate Desserts.  There is no better book of bottom-line, time-tested, classic chocolate recipes.  The only downside is that her recipe descriptions are like reading an IKEA instruction manual minus the drawings.  She will tell you precisely how to separate your dough into two equal parts in a way that is so strikingly inefficient that you’ll re-read the recipe three times trying to understand what she’s saying.  But she will tell how you to hold the spatula while you are doing it, goddamn it.

The checkerboarding itself is good for a rainy afternoon – it’s the kind of bored play-dough activity that is made especially pleasing by having hot cookies to eat when you’re done.  But making perfect 6″x6″ squares cut into perfect 1/2-inch strips is somewhat maddening, bored or not.

Luckily we’re just making cookies and not rockets.

If the checkerboard part is entirely a turn-off, it’s also easy to make spirals (roll thin sheets of each flavor, lay one on top of the other and roll into a cylinder and then slice) or artistic strata (alternate layers of color just with your fingers, mash everything into a long rectangle and then slice).  The truly ambitious could make some pretty cute panda cookies.

And the taste?  Comfortably unchallenging.  There’s not so much cocoa in the chocolate part to make them chocolate-bombs, and the white part is lightly scented with almond extract.  You’re not making these cookies because you want to taste something exotic — don’t get me wrong, they taste great.  I love them, in fact.  It’s difficult to keep from eating all of them once you’ve started.  But the real reason you make them is because they make your six year-old brain go TOTALLY BONKERS.  Dudes, it’s invisible tea party time.  Except you’re a grown up now and you can have a real tea party.  Put that in your bottle and suck it, six year-olds!

Maida Heatter’s Checkerboards
i’ve totally rewritten Heatter’s instructions and added more salt, but otherwise the recipe is unchanged from her book.  i highly recommend the extra salt – I think it’s what makes these slightly more interesting than just spritz or shortbread cookies.  which are good cookies!  but these can handle the very slight complexity that extra salt adds.

8 oz. (2 sticks) of unsalted butter, softened
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1/4 tsp. almond extract
1/2 cup sugar
3/4 tsp. kosher salt
2 3/4 cups flour
2 Tbsp. baking cocoa (not Dutch process)

1 egg, beaten and set aside for gluing the cookie together with

• In a bowl, beat the butter until smooth and very soft.  Add the sugar, and beat for a few minutes until the butter and sugar has lightened a little.  Add the vanilla and almond extract and mix just until incorporated.  Add the flour and salt and mix until the dough forms into a smooth, dense, play-dough like mass.  If you are using a hand-beater, this may never happen because of the little beaters.  If it seems like it’s taking forever, dump the dough onto a clean work surface and knead by hand until play-dough like.

• Split the dough into two equal parts (either weigh them or do your very best eyeball guess) and mix the cocoa into one of the parts.

• Form each of the flavored doughs into perfect 6″x6″ squares.  I can walk you through doing this exactly, but basically: use a ruler, push out the dough on plastic wrap and don’t be afraid to use your fingers to push everything into shape.  To form really crisp edges, use the flat of the ruler to push up against the sides.  Take your time, the dough can handle a lot of abuse.  Put the first one on a plate and put it in the fridge while you do the second one.

• While the second square refrigerates, cut the first square into perfect 1/2-inch strips, again using the ruler.  You will have exactly 12 strips.  Do the second square.

• To make the checkerboard, alternate strips to use a total of twelve (making a 3×4 stack).  Make a second stack with the remaining twelve.  Or make a giant cube out of 24 strips for all I care — do whatever you want.  But!  Be sure to glue each stick to its neighbor by brushing a little eggwash on.   Carefully wrap your stacks up in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes before slicing.  The dough stacks can also be frozen in this state so that you can theoretically bust out an awesome tea party on short notice.

• Of course the Mad Hatter version of the above is to not measure anything and make it as screwy as you can.  That works too.

• Slice into 1/2-inch thick slices, which will make exactly 12 cookies.  Or, in my case, you’ll get a mysterious 13th cookie.

• Bake at 350° for 15 – 20 minutes, or until the edges are golden.

Hold your horses about the giveaway, I’ll get to it in a second.  Or just scroll down now, I’m not the boss of you.

Anyway, I used the flawlessly great King Arthur Flour Cinnamon Bread recipe, replacing the cinnamon with instant chai.  Also, during the mixing process I added about a cup of chopped cherries.  Oh, and I replaced 1/2 cup of the white flour with whole wheat.  And I used a pan somewhat larger than what they recommend, hence the lack of the nice big, lofty sandwich loaf shape.

But whatever: it was totally radical.  I ate half of the entire loaf in one day and then was too full to eat dinner, which is as good an endorsement as any. I can only clutch my abdomen in gastronomic woe and wonder what kind of awesome french toast this would have made.

So anyway, you wanna have some of this chai?  The kids at Tipu’s were happy that I liked their product, and unbidden by me sent two 4oz. packs to do with as I pleased.  I debated for a long time about keeping the Slow Brew stuff, but I actually feel too guilty.  I don’t know where this misplaced guilt comes from.  I’d steal candy from a baby, but I wouldn’t keep free chai?  It’s true.

So, for those of you not familiar with the rules of these lands:

1) You may only comment once.  If you comment more than once I will delete all but one of your comments.  It’s not personal, but more than one comment will throw the odds of the random number generator.  AND THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE TWO.

2) I don’t care what you say – but!  I do want you to state if you have a preference for either of the chai varieties.  If you both have the same preference (or none) then I will randomly choose who gets what.

3) Contest closes at 8pm PST on Monday night – any comments made after 8pm will not qualify.

4) Anyone may enter, dad.

5) Leave a valid email address in the field that asks for an email address, not in the body of the comment.  If you don’t respond to my follow-up email within 48 hours if winning, I’ll give the chai to someone else.

So that’s all she wrote.  Don’t thank me, thank the internet.  And Tipu’s.  But mostly the internet, without whom we would never have met each other, you and I.

***UPDATE FROM VARADA FROM TIPU’S:

Very clever use of the Instant chai in the bread. To your fans who don’t end up winners, anyone who calls can talk me into sending a little sample of the Instant Black Chai as long as they hold out. We’re making more – as fast as we can! So anyone who wants to try it before they buy it, call me at 888-506-CHAI. LOVE your blog! You SO get our chai!!!

Man, these guys are on the Google alert ball.  Call Varada and get a free sample either way.  And just to be clear: I’m not associated with Tipu’s in any way; my first taste of their chai is from a package I purchased, and I’m getting nothing from them for my adoration.  I just genuinely love their product, and they seem like enthusiastic, friendly people.

*****CONTEST IS CLOSED!*****

Stand by for winners!

I have a strange relationship with salsa.  First of all, it’s rough on the ol’ Crohn’s.  All those vegetable skins, I guess.  Secondly, jarred and “fresh” salsa from the store all contain sodium benzoate, which I can taste because I have some kind of pointless supertasting skill just for sodium benzoate.  If god has a purpose for each of us, then mine is to detect the presence of preserving salts, I guess.  The last thing is that salsa is always so much better in a restaurant than when made at home.  This¹ always intrigues me.

But!  Mike the Viking used to use his powers of pillaging for delivering Mexican food from a restaurant in Olympia that had the best salsa ever, in spite of or perhaps because of the rest of the food sucking balls.  And he told me: they roast it.  Their secret was an even ratio of red bell peppers to tomatoes, and the peppers all get roasted until black and toasty.  The part I can’t bring myself to comply with is that they used canned tomatoes, which is insane, but also makes sense considering that tomatoes don’t really exist in the Pacific Northwest.

My recipe still isn’t exactly right – I think I tend to under-roast the peppers out of fear of over-roasting them, and I suspect the real secret may be in using canned tomatoes (baby jesus forgive me), but it’s getting much closer.  Also: the liquid fill line in your food processor is there for a reason.

Restaurant Salsa, Almost Perfect

3 medium sized tomatoes (or plain canned tomatoes if you’re feeling nutty)
2 red bell peppers
1 hot pepper of choice – I use something super mild like a poblano, pasilla or Anaheim
1 whole yellow onion
3 cloves garlic
1 – 2 tsp. salt
1 Tbsp. sugar
juice from 1/2 a lime
large bunch of cilantro, stems and all

• Line a cookie sheet with foil and broil the shit outta those vegetables, everything but the cilantro.  Because my broiler has hotstpots, I have to monitor the sheet and pull out items as they start to blacken and rearrange the rest to keep them browning.  So much depends on your own broiler, the distance from the broiler, the size of the vegetables, yadda yadda, that I can’t give you any kind of guidelines on how long this will take.  You’ll have to just hover around the kitchen, use your nose to smell for when they start to blacken, and stop them before they actually char.

• Oh!  And don’t peel them!  Leave the char on!  I fought this several times, insisting that they did not in fact leave all that burned skin on, and Mike insisted I was a fool.  He was not wrong.

• Take note that both the onion and the tomato have a higher water content, and may not readily brown – this is okay, we’re just trying to un-raw them.  When all the peppers are done browning, remove the tomatoes and onions and garlic as well, no matter what they look like.

• Throw everything into the food processor all together and pulse quickly until it is the texture you want.  Also consider putting about half aside when it’s chopped rather large and then processing the rest until practially smooth , mixing the two parts together when you’re done – this will make a nice thick salsa, but with some large texture still in it.

• If you dawdle taking photos, the whole thing will puke liquid all over.  Just so you know.

¹ Want to know why mashed potatoes from restaurants always taste so good?  Butter.  And cream.  And salt.  In levels that you would never knowingly put in your body.  EVIL CACKLE!

Of course it’s more complicated than that.  I have some serious opinions about quiche that go a little something like this: IT IS NOT AN OMELET IN A PIE SHELL.  I hate firm, eggy quiche, it makes me gag and yes I am being a drama queen.  Quiche should be a savory custard pie.  Not frittata.

Mike the Viking has been bothering me for years about showing him how to make the quiche, but I wouldn’t because when he can make it himself, he doesn’t need to keep me around any more.  I finally gave up and showed him, so I guess I should pack a satchel and steal away in the dead of night.  Wait, that’s ninjas.

For science, we used a Trader Joe’s frozen pie crust and guess what?  It was pretty okay!  I don’t think it’s an all-time replacement for homemade, but since this was an experiment in Mike’s autonomy, I wanted to see if he could just pick up a frozen crust for when he wants to woo my replacement with his quiche-making skills.  The problem was that the crust is too small, the morons.  It’ll fit maybe one of those little disposable aluminum pie tins, but not my standard glass Pyrex pan, hence the manual pushing around of the dough to get it to fit.

There is 100% no reason to use fresh spinach, because you’d just have to cook it down anyway.  I’d never eat frozen spinach in anything else (well, I would in spinach dip), but it needs to be squeezed dry before you can use it.  This is messy and leaves your sink looking like someone murdered the lawn in it.

This happened again.  I read somewhere that dogs need consistency in the home, so, you know.

Everything gets layered in.  I kept pointing out to him that the true craftsmanship of the quiche came from making sure the fillings went all the way out to the edges, but I’m not sure how much of that part he absorbed.

Oh for christ’s sake.

Well, he’s got one fan anyway.

The other issue the Viking is undoubtedly going to screw up when he’s alone is the patience aspect.  You can’t just dump the cream and eggs in, you have to coax it in.  Like with a lady.

Lumps get gently patted down.  Also like with a lady.

I live in terror of him using the oven when I’m gone.  I mean, “on” he gets.  “Off” is the sticky wicket.

When it’s done it turns golden and puffs up, but when you let it sit for 10 minutes it deflates to normal size and firms up a little more.  The interior is soft like pudding and might fight you just a little getting it out of the pan, but I don’t imagine I have to convince you this is a bad thing.  It’s a whipping cream and cheese pie.

Anger Burger Family Quiche
the primary piece of advice I have for quiche is to use either heavy cream or half-and-half (adding one extra egg to the latter).  don’t use whole milk.  do not.  the second piece of advice is to – with the exception of spinach, which should be from frozen – cook any filling before assembly.  say for example we make the other household favorite, the “breakfast quiche”: this consists of two or three small red potatoes, half an onion, half each of a red and green bell pepper (all diced small) and a quarter pound of breakfast sausage (or Gimme Lean), and everything gets fried up in a saute pan until brown and delicious as though you were going to eat it just like that.  THEN it gets put into a quiche with cheddar cheese.  or another example: broccoli and ricotta.  the broccoli is either steamed or sauteed until almost tender, allowed to cool just enough to squeeze some water out of it with your hands, and then added to a quiche with big globs of fresh ricotta and some part-skim mozzarella.  see a pattern here?  nothing goes in raw.  if you put in anything raw, it’ll weep water during cooking and make your quiche runny.  fair warning.

1 bottom pie crust, uncooked
2 eggs
1 pint whipping cream (heavy or regular, both are fine)
12 oz. of gruyere and/or standard swiss cheese, even the cheap stuff works great, grated
1 bag or two small boxes of frozen, chopped spinach, thawed and squozed
1/2 tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. garlic powder
fresh pepper to taste

• Prepare the crust first by forming it into the pan and putting the whole thing in the fridge to stand by.  Set oven to 350°.

• Drain thawed chopped spinach by taking handfuls of it over the sink and squeezing it mostly dry.  Don’t get obsessive about it, just drain it the best you can.  There’s a lot of waste doing this, lots of small pieces will escape each time, but them’s the breaks.

• In a measuring cup that holds 2 cups or more, beat the two eggs, then mix in the pint of whipping cream.  Mix thoroughly.

• In the pie shell (uncooked still) layer as follows: half the cheese, then the spinach (crumbled up nicely to discourage big solid wads), salt, garlic powder, then the other half of the cheese.  SLOWLY pour the cream and eggs over the top, allowing it time to trickle down into the cheese and stuff.  If you pour too fast it’ll just flow right over the top and off the sides of the quiche.  Using a fork, lightly pat down the cheese and everything, taking care to remove pieces of cheese from the crust edge.  Top with lots of fresh pepper.

• Bake for 45 minutes, or until puffed and golden and the quiche seems pretty solid if you give it a little shimmy.

• Allow to sit 10 – 15 minutes before attempting to cut.  Or it’ll be a little runny, that’s all, if that doesn’t bother you than dive in.

• Quiche leftovers are better than fresh.  Reheat slices in the oven at 300° for 20 minutes, uncovered.

A recipe I’d been avoiding was Ina Garten’s Scalloped Tomatoes.  First of all, it’s not what I’d call “scalloped.”  I think because scalloped potatoes are just a gratin, which in turn is just a casserole with a topping of either bread or cheese, but… this is a stupid discussion.  I just flat don’t think that a pile of tomatoes and bread is “scalloped.”  Fight me on it if you want, but you’ll be the boringest troll ever.

ANYWAY.  The other thing that nagged at me was the simplicity of the recipe.  Ina tends to do this to me: something very basic that she gushes over and I think, why is she acting like that is so special? It’s total Huck Finn business, no question.  I have no doubt Ina could get me to paint her fence.

Oh, and then there’s the fact I can’t eat tomatoes.

Technically, I can eat them just fine.  But something with my Crohn’s disease detects the tomato coming in for a landing and basically blows up the entire airport if you know what I mean.  Sort of unrelated, I’ve been nursing the suspicion that the reason I can’t eat tomatoes is because of the skin.  I know.  After nearly two decades of this disease, you’d think I’d have Nancy Drewed this out by now, but I’ve had more important things to worry about such as how do I not think about donuts? and is that a spider?

It was a major leap, then, to realize that I could kill two birds with one stone: try to eat a lot of tomatoes but with no skins, and make the damn Scalloped Tomatoes already.  It helped that Smitten Kitchen made  it and wouldn’t shut up¹ about how great it was, too.

You should know that I’ve actually soaked this glass pan in acid to remove the brown stains, and they won’t budge.

Still unable to come to terms with the “scalloped” nature of this dish, I renamed it “tomato stuffing”.  My mom and I made a round of the stuffing last week and were, shock, immediately crushed out on it.  Most alarming was the fact that my stepdad, an avowed and card-carrying member of the Meat & Potatoes Society, not only ate a serving, but went back for seconds.  I reported him to the Meat & Potatoes Society and we haven’t seen him since.

For the record, I don’t like the texture that a lot of fresh Parmesan makes when baked on something.  I wish I’d stirred more into the stuffing.

Except!  We couldn’t let it be.  The final texture, he did gently amend, was a little too mushy for him, and really for us as well.  We liked it fine, but agreed that a more accessible version could be made by increasing the bread quantity and leaving the crusts on.  I take this a step further by adding that the advised 5 minutes of pan-frying the bread cubes is a prime example of too-little-too-late.  I recommend either having very stale bread cubes or even oven-toasting them in order to make a more stuffing-like texture.

And the final verdict?  Totally fucking delicious, and so far my intestines are keeping their opinion to themselves.  Do I dare say I can eat tomatoes?  I’m not sure.  It often occurs to me that the lamest part of having Crohn’s disease is the unpredictability — just because I’ve twice survived eating a heap of tomatoes without skins doesn’t mean the third time won’t lay me out.  Only time and my belligerent refusal to abandon tomatoes will tell.

Anger Burger Tomato Stuffing
greatly influenced by Ina Garten and Smitten Kitchen
there’s a lot of room for personalization in this, as you might imagine.  more vegetables, like gently fried leeks, would only improve things.  additional fresh herbs, like oregano and thyme, would take it further into Italian realms, though I can’t say I’d prefer that.  be advised that despite containing a boggling quantity of tomatoes – two and a half pounds! – the recipe still only makes a 9×9 inch casserole dish.  this would make a welcome variation at Thanksgiving, but I’d advise doubling the quantity.  lastly, it dirties a lot of pots and pans, but in the easiest possible way; everything but the final big pot (and casserole dish) just rinses clean with water.

1/4 cup olive oil
4 – 5 cups 1/2-inch cubes of bread, something sturdy and flavorful, with crusts left on.
2 – 2 1/2 lbs. good tomatoes, not too ripe but nice and fragrant
1 – 5 cloves of garlic, to taste (use at least one, but many more if you like garlic)
3 Tbsp. sugar
2 tsp. kosher salt
fresh pepper to taste
1/2 cup finely chopped fresh basil
1 cup freshly grated parmesan

• Peel your tomatoes.  This can be achieved by Googling “how to peel tomatoes.”   Dice the tomatoes to 1/2-inch or smaller pieces and set aside in a small bowl, juice and seed and slime and all.  To the bowl of tomatoes, add: the garlic, diced fine or grated or crushed or otherwise terrorized, and the sugar, salt and pepper.  Don’t stir, just let it sit there.

• If you want your stuffing with slightly dryer consistency, I recommend oven-baking the bread, tossed with the 1/4 of olive oil, at 350° for about 15-20 minutes.   Spread the cubes out on a cookie sheet and move them about during cooking about halfway through to ensure even browning.   Leave the heat on, but remove the bread and set aside.

• Heat a large flat-bottomed skilled over medium heat.  Add the browned bread pieces, then add the tomatoes and stuff.  A few extra glugs of olive oil wouldn’t hurt either.  Heat together until just sizzling and incorporated, maybe five minutes, and then turn off the heat.

• To the pot, add the basil and 3/4 cup of the Parmesan, stirring quickly just to barely combine.  Turn out into a casserole dish and top with 1/4 cup of the Parmesan.  Bake for about 40 minutes, or until the surface and edges are nicely browned and the edges are bubbling like looneytunes.

• Let sit for 10 – 15 minutes before serving.

Some suggested additions:

• Before adding the bread and tomatoes, saute the white part of one cleaned, chopped leek in 2 Tbsp. of butter over medium heat until soft.  Then add bread and tomatoes.  Or the same thing with two sliced shallots.  Or both.

• Before baking, top the stuffing with 1/2 cup of shredded, dry (part-skim) mozzarella OR

• About 5 or 10 minutes before the stuffing is done baking, top with slices/globs of the softest, sexiest fresh cow or buffalo mozzarella or burrata that you can find.

• I hate getting on this wagon, but: bacon.

• Top with fried or poached eggs as a main course.

¹She actually would shut up about it and only wrote maybe a paragraph about how great it was, but in my mind it was a neverending loop that followed me from waking to sleep like a particularly slow zombie.

I read stuff, so I’ve been aware of the Magnolia Bakery for a while.  If you’re not, quickly: they’re in New York and they are widely credited with kicking off the American trend of cupcakeries in the last 5 or 10 years or whatever.  Carrie Bradshaw eats one in an early television episode of Sex and the City, if that gives you any idea of how this all came to pass.  But I’m not here to talk about Ms. Bradshaw and her independence-representing cupcake¹.  I’m here to talk about banana pudding.

So, I kept hearing “Skip the cupcake and get the banana pudding.”  But I’d also heard they gave out samples, so when I got there I asked for one.  And was told “It would be a while,” the reason for which I’m still not clear.  They did, however, have pints available for purchase in the cold case.  Since I was walking home and had errands to do, I skipped it altogether.

Later, online,  I noticed another angry comment (I can’t find the actual one, but here’s a pretty solid paraphrase):

“I liked the banana pudding until I found out it was made from INSTANT PUDDING!!!1!  This makes me so angry!  I can just make it at home!”

To which Mike had the best retort of all: “You can also make cupcakes at home, moron.”  Curious of this instant pudding business, I Googled the recipe and lo!  They are right.  It is a lightly complicated preparation of instant pudding.  And the wrath this fact incurs is both startling and delightful.  So many angry ladies!

But really, the reason you don’t make it at home is the same reason you’d buy a single cupcake from Magnolia: this recipe makes 7 quarts.  Even with my one advised correction, this makes far too much banana pudding for a home cook to consume.  This is party food.

The correction I advise is to reduce the heavy cream from 3 liquid cups to 2.  So basically, reduce the whipped cream volume by one third.  While the appeal of this pudding is that it is more of a “banana cream” than a “banana pudding,” I still felt like the whole thing was a tad bit too whippy.

Everything gets layered, though it didn’t really occur to me until later that the layering is entirely unnecessary.  You can’t see the layers from the exterior of the bowl,  and all you’re trying to do is ensure that every piece of banana and every vanilla wafer is covered.

But layering has a methodical quality that I like anyway.

It’s such an old-fashioned recipe that it begs for an old-fashioned presentation.  I highly recommend the dreaded maraschino cherry.  I mean, it’s a giant keg of whipped cream and Nilla Wafers.  You can’t pretend to have scruples now.

Magnolia Bakery’s Banana Pudding
the original recipe also says to serve between 4 and 8 hours after assembly, to which I offer some more specific notes: after 4 hours, the wafers will still be lightly crunchy in the middles.  if this is what you want, then great.  around 6 hours is where I think it is optimal, but even more than 8 hours resulted in distinct, non-soggy cookie bits.  I have no idea what it does after that, because there wasn’t any left.  lastly, there’s all this emphasis on brand names — Jell-O pudding and Nabisco Nilla Wafers — which you can probably totally disregard.  like, maybe you can tell the difference between Nabisco vanilla wafers and generic ones when they’re plain, but after they’re in a big tub of whipped cream?  i doubt it.

pudding base:
1 (14oz) can sweetened condensed milk
1 1/2 cups cold water (I reduced this to 1 cup for stronger pudding flavor)
1 small (3.4oz) packet instant vanilla pudding

next day:
3 cups heavy cream (I’d use just 2 next time — that’s one pint)
1 (12oz) box vanilla wafers
4 – 6 large ripe bananas

• The night before serving, in a smallish bowl (that can hold 3 cups) mix together the pudding base by adding the instant pudding first to the sweetened condensed milk, and then whisking the water slowly into the resulting sludge.  Cover and refrigerate until the next day.

• Ideally 6 hours before serving, whip the cream into stiff peaks (this is aided greatly by having a very cold bowl and very cold beaters, if you can).  Set aside.

• In a third bowl, dump the pudding mix out and give it plenty of good stirs to get it all loosened up.  Add one large spatula-full of whipped cream to the pudding mix and fold it in until mostly but not entirely incorporated.  Then add about 1/3 of the remaining whipped cream, again folding in until mostly but not entirely incorporated.  Repeat with remaining 2/3 until you have a giant bowl of pudding-tinted whipped cream.

• Cut the bananas into slices and reserve about a cup of Nilla Wafers to crush and use as a topping.

• In yet another bowl, this one capable of holding about 7 quarts or so, begin layering the pudding cream with bananas and Nilla wafers.  Top with crushed wafers, cover, and refridgerate undisturbed for about 6 hours.

• Just before serving, decorate with something kitschy like sliced maraschino cherries or canned mandarin orange slices.  Set out to serve with a giant spoon and stand back so you don’t get splattered when your family rushes up and disembowels the pudding.

¹Okay, maybe I am a little.  As with any disproportionately popular food item, Magnolia’s cupcake buzz seems to consist of 50% die-hard fans and 50% haters.  Or maybe 49% haters with the remaining 1% being people like me who think their product is fine and everything, just too overpriced for everyday cupcaking.  I expected a block-long line at Magnolia two weeks ago when I visited, but I just walked right in, ordered a vanilla cupcake, paid for it and left in under 5 minutes.  I ate it while walking home.  It was what I would solidly classify as a “good, homemade cupcake.”  As in, they are small — the size of standard cupcake liners — and they taste like butter.  There are lots of complaints online about dryness, which I have to bitchily correct: the cake is finely textured and very delicate, which an inexperienced cake eater might mistake as dryness.  The frosting was too sweet for me (and in fact tasted so strongly of powdered sugar I was sort of startled off it for a moment), and the final bill of $2.75 would make me grumble even at a bake sale.  However!  If you want a single cupcake?  They’re great.  They’re fine.  Maybe my low expectations saved them on this one.

First hurdle: I just came from Southern California where there are buckets of free cucumbers just sitting along the sides of the roads¹.  In Washington state the canning cukes still aren’t ripe, which means the farmer’s markets won’t carry any because god forbid a cucumber come west of the mountains and have the carbon footprint of Fiji Water or whatever.

The second hurdle was my old friend Fiddle-Dee: I started tweaking SK’s recipe before I was even halfway through it.  Hers calls for a pound of cucumbers, which, after putting into a sack, seemed like hardly any at all, certainly not enough for my mother, myself and the jar I’d planned on giving to my friends Sean and Junko in thanks for their never-ending hospitality.    So I doubled it.

This recipe isn’t true canning, by the way, so don’t worry about what is MY SECRET SHAME: I’ve never canned anything.  It seems like a tremendous hurdle to me.  For a long time I was afraid of it (botulism!) and then more recently it just seems unnecessary (uh, I have no pantry), and then most recently of all, I realized that it is possible to just can one or two jars of something at a time.  Anyway, blahdeeblah, this is not that time: quick pickles merely require the cooking of a marinating syrup and some time and maybe a nice jar but even that isn’t important.  The pickles wilt down and “pickle” in a horrifying shitstorm of salt for two hours on the counter and if you’re a fool then you’ll taste one and have your head turn inside out.  Trust me.  I’m lucky my mother was a nurse.

Oh yeah, and the other hurdle was that I went to the crazy spice lady in Olympia and asked her for a few spoonfuls of mustard seed and she asked, “What color?”  So I asked, “Which is good for pickles?”  To which she answered “All of them.  Brown is the cheapest.”  So I said, “Brown it is then.”  And then I got home and my mom said, “You were supposed to get yellow.”

Take of that information what you will.

Then they go live in the fridge for at least 24 hours before eating.  And again — you may try tasting them after just a minute or a few minutes or an hour later, and each time you will be freshly heartbroken at how they don’t taste right.  Eventually you will come to know two things: the salt takes about 24 hours to leech back out of the pickles, so quit it with the early tasting (and when SK says they “begin tasting pickled in just a couple of hours,” the emphasis here is on the word begin) and that sugar levels are a very subjective thing.  SK advised cutting the sugar down even more than what she did, so I followed her advice and both my mom and I found the pickles to be not sweet enough.  Wah-waaah.  I think they’re okay but borderline, my mom definitely wanted more sugar.  Then again, she’s on chemo and sometimes thinks the air tastes funny, so maybe we shouldn’t listen to her.

Anger Burger’s Smitten Kitchen’s The Dispatch Kitchen’s Bread and Butter Pickles
i tried to describe bread and butter pickles to Junko (who rightfully was all, uh, WTF is a ‘bread and butter’ pickle?) and all I can say is: they’re a little sweet and a little salty and do not have sweet spices like clove or cinnamon, and instead are savory, oniony and frankly sort of Japanese.  my mom was also sad that we didn’t think to put pimentos or red bell peppers in them, which add another flavor dimension, so my recipe adaptation reflects that.

2 lbs. pickling cucumbers (often called Kirbys)
2 large yellow onions, sliced thin
1/2 cup Diamond Kosher salt specifically (LISTEN TO SMITTEN KITCHEN ABOUT WHY)
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups distilled white vinegar
1/2 tsp. ground turmeric
1 Tbsp. plus 1 tsp. yellow mustard seeds
2 Tbsps. whole coriander seeds
1/2 tsp. celery seed
1 large jar diced pimentos, drained, or 1 fresh red bell pepper peeled and diced small

• In a big bowl, layer the cucumbers, onions and salt.  Toss together with your hands to combine.  Reflect on how rad it is that you have a hangnail that now has salt crammed under it. Cover the surface of the veggies with ice cubes and set aside the whole bowl on a counter for two hours.

• In a big pot, bring the vinegar, sugar and spices to a simmer.  While it is getting there, drain the cukes well but do not rinse clean.  Dump into vinegar pot along with the pimentos or peppers and at high heat bring everything back up to steaming hot.  The vinegar will barely get to a boil after about 5 or 7 minutes, but at soon as everything seems real hot, remove from heat.

• While still warm, decant into jars or other glass container, evenly distributing the vegetables and covering with the pickling juice.  Allow to cool at a little at room temperature (until just warm to the touch) and then refrigerate.

• You can sneak tastes, but don’t judge until at least 24 hours and ideally 48.  Will last a few weeks in the fridge, but don’t experiment; just eat them.

¹ This is not true.

1) MORE THAN ONE SPECIES OF MEAT
I’ve made a mix I refer to as “Beast of the Field”:

3lb. high quality grass-fed ground beef
1lb. ground, unseasoned pork
1lb. ground lamb

The proportions are so large because America has a retarded habit of only selling ground meets in set amounts, so that beef is usually 1.5 pounds a pack, but pork and lamb are both always exactly 1lb.  Because I want about more beef than other meat in the mix, this is what I get.  Everything gets loosely mixed together in a large bowl, half is wrapped in plastic and foil and frozen, and the other half makes two loaves.  From there, one loaf is eaten in a few days and the other prepared, cooked loaf is frozen and then later thawed for sandwiches.

But this is all somewhat beside the point. The mix exists because beef tends to be bland and lean and rather than go through the pain of grinding better cuts myself, I’ve found that subbing in the different flavors and textures of other meats makes for a flavorful, interesting and well-textured final product.

2)  SEASON IT TO WITHIN AN INCH OF ITS LIFE
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve taken a bite of meatloaf and thought, yeah, that’s a wad of meat.  Don’t get me wrong — if you’ve made a loaf of freshly ground Kobe beef, I don’t want anything but a pinch of salt on that mother.  But this is meatloaf.  It’s working class food.  It’s meant to be eaten with mashed potatoes and peas on the side and a frosty glass of Coca-Cola to wash it down with, which means you had better put enough salt, onion powder (more on that later) and Worcestershire sauce in it to make itself known.

3) USE PLENTY OF FILLER
I’m sure it seems counter-intuitive since fillers are always bad, but in the case of meatloaf, it’s a large part of what keeps it from being a mere lump of meat.  Bread filler makes for a softer loaf in addition to:

4) MIX GENTLY
The more you rough the meat up, the more you encourage the protein bonds to stick back together, which you don’t really want.  For a light, soft meatloaf, quickly mix by hand with claw-scrunching motions until just barely incorporated.  Same goes for forming the loaves: quick shaping, don’t fuss over it.  Get it straight in the oven.

Make the loaf flatter than you want the cooked one to be — see below to see how much they change shape

5) MAKE A SMALLER LOAF
I do feel like this should be obvious. I see too many recipes that call for baking an entire 2 lb. wad of beef in a hot oven for an hour, a method that guarantees a dry, crusty slice of meat, particularly since most meatloaves are made with beef far too lean to be baking until fully cooked through.  While my mix is probably fatty enough to endure this, we find that forming two smaller loaves makes for more of the coveted end pieces (MINE!) and a faster cooking time.  It also allows more of the fat to cook off, getting the meat to almost braise itself.  It really is a minor miracle.

And arguably of more importance: meatloaf sandwiches.  Mike has made it clear that this is truly why he wants me to make the loaf, and I don’t mind that at all.  On a slice of bread with a little bit of mayonnaise and a smear of HP Sauce, boy-o what a treat.

And that’s it!  Metaloaf.  <–THAT’S A HELL OF A TYPO!  Holy shit!

Basic Beast of the Fields Loaf, aka Metaloaf
as I mentioned, it seems to be easier to make double the batch of raw meat, freeze half, then continue on with the recipe.

1 1/2 lbs. grain-fed ground beef
1/2 lb. unseasoned ground pork
1/2 lb. ground lamb
1 egg
1/2 cup milk
1 cup fine, unseasoned breadcrumbs
1 1/2 tsp. dried onion granules (or: 1/2 fresh onion, grated fine)
3 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
1 1/2 tsp. salt
pepper to taste

• Heat the oven to 350°.  Have at hand a 9×13 casserole dish or foil-covered baking sheet with a rim.  The foil just makes clean-up easier.

• In a bowl, mix everything together at once, quickly and with your hands.  Don’t overwork it.

• Split the mix in half and form from each a small loaf shape.

• Bake for about 40 minutes, or until the exterior is browned and sizzling and the interior is cooked all the way through.  Serve immediately.

I’ll tell you about those peas later.

Oddly, the slices in my photo look somewhat dry, but I assure you they weren’t.  They were soft and flavorful and moist enough to pick up small pieces by merely pressing the fork against them.  Mike went back for “Just another little slice” and ended up clutching his swollen belly and looking sort of smugly uncomfortable for an hour after dinner.  Success.

Right, okonomiyaki.  There are split factions over whether or not nagaimo or mountain yam is a critical ingredient, pitting blogger against blogger.  Everyone agrees that mountain yam on its own is pretty fucking gross¹ — it’s a crunchy, starchy root toober (<–brain fart error and I’m keeping it) sort of like a jicama, except that lots of people are allergic to touching it raw and when you grate it it turns into semen.  True!

See?  Actually I grated it a little too large here so it didn’t quite get that translucent snottiness, but you can see where it might head that direction.  And stirring a big bowl of it is pretty gag-inducing.  It sort of reforms itself into a big glob that you can’t really stir through, almost like a raw egg white.

The thing is, when it cooks as a part of a savory pancake batter, it becomes fluffy and light.  Most of the okonomiyaki recipes I found online did not include grated mountain yam, and I consider this to be a real travesty.  Some even recommended against it!  This is bullshit.  They’re just saying that because they can’t find any.  There’s no question in my mind that the mountain yam produces a final texture that absolutely cannot be emulated with any other product.

Wait, maybe I should explain what okonomiyaki is?  Well, it’s a giant savory griddle-fried fritter with lots of vegetables and maybe a little meat or seafood in it, and then slathered with delicious toppings.  Some people call it “Japanese pizza” disregarding that Japanese people eat regular pizza; other people call it “Japanese pancake” also disregarding that Japanese people eat regular pancakes, too.   Ultimately, there’s no American analog for the okonomiyaki.

So aside from the mountain yam debate, there are as many different recipes for okonomiyaki as there are for potato salad.  You have to just know what sort of end product you want, but in a way, this is very freeing.  Don’t like green onions?  Don’t put them in.  Like corn?  For god’s sake, dump some corn in.  Like little shrimpies?

Have some little shrimpies. I guess these are called “sakura ebi”?  Which translates to “cherry blossom shrimp”?  All I know is: pretty.  Also: tasty.

So here’s my okonomiyaki, pretty traditional with little shrimpies, some beni shoga (that’s pickled ginger similar to the kind you get with sushi, but not exactly the same) and chopped green onion.  And corn!  There’s corn in there, but you can’t see it.  Mmm, invisible corn.

When you get this snotty, stringy glop all stirred up, and right when you’re stating to doubt yourself, that’s when you layer on the Berkshire pork belly slices.  Both sides of the “pancake” get fried for quite some time, taking care to actually cook it all the way through.  If you do the pork belly, the pork belly side gets all crispy and delicious after you flip it over.  You know what else would be rad?  Spam.

When you’re done, it gets topped with okonomi sauce — a sweet brown sauce that tastes a little like worcestershire; Kewpie mayonnaise; little powdered potent flakes of seaweed called aonori; and last but not least: dry fish flakes called katsuobushi (which dogs and cats also lose their minds over).  It seems like a random assemblage of weirdness — and it is — but no more weird than a Chicago-style hotdog.  And in my humble and learned opinion: way better tasting.  THAT’S RIGHT CHICAGO, I SAID IT.

Okonomiyaki
i learned everything I know about okonomiyaki from two people: Junko Yamamoto and Makiko Itoh of Just Hungry. (Who I guess had an unnamed emergency surgery two days ago but will be okay?  Let’s hope so!  Get well, Maki!)  Junko showed me the physicality of it, and stressed multiple times that she never used a recipe and that as long as the texture of the batter was right, your final product would be delicious.  Makiko’s recipe at her blog is the one I worked from to assure myself I was doing it right, and it’s as spot on as you can get (and she has helpful photos).  as Makiko notes, you can readily buy both powdered mountain yam and powdered okonomiyaki mix, but there’s really no reason to when any decent market with Japanese produce will always have mountain yam.  of course you could theoretically make it without the yam altogether, but did you even read the first half of this post?  one more thing!  it seems like a lot of strange ingredients, but they are all very common Japanese foods and will almost certainly be at your nearest Asian market that carries at least some Japanese goods.  also, everything is cheap and keeps for a long time, so they’re safe food investments.

for the ‘pancake’
4 oz grated mountain yam (nagaimo), which will probably be about 4 inches of tuber
4 to 5 tablespoons of dashi stock, or water with a pinch of dashi powder
1/2 cup all purpose flour, sifted
3 eggs
1/2 small green cabbage, chopped like for coleslaw
3 tablespoons of beni shoga (or sushi ginger, in a pinch)
2 chopped green onions
1 tablespoon of sakura ebi (if you can find them, if you can’t it will be okay)

suggested additions:
thinly sliced pork (belly is best, bacon is too flavorous)
squid
shrimp
Spam
your favorite vegetable — shredded carrot?  sliced mushrooms?  corn!
a fried egg for the top
cooked ramen noodles — true!
masago, aka flying fish roe (the little red eggs sometimes on California rolls)

toppings:
okonomi sauce
Kewpie mayonnaise
aonori seaweed
katsuobushi (fish flakes)

• In a large bowl, peel the brown skin from and grate the mountain yam very finely.  It is easy to grate and will turn instantly into white slime.  This is good.  However!  The bare vegetable has a agitating quality to many folks’ skin, so either use clean kitchen gloves or carefully hold the yam by a piece of plastic and avoid touching the snot.

• Add the water and/or dashi and stir to combine.  Add the sifted flour and stir thoroughly.  It will be quite thick and coagulate into a disgusting blob.  Add TWO of the eggs and again stir to combine.  It will become an even more disgusting blob.

• Add the cabbage and stir to coat.  It will be somewhat difficult because the snotball will be fighting you a little, but you can’t hurt it so just keep stirring.  Add the third egg and stir some more.

• Add the remaining ingredients such as the green onion, other optional vegetables, dried shrimp, pickled ginger, chopped squid, roughly chopped raw fresh shrimp, cubed Spam, whatever you want.  As long as it cooks reasonably fast and sounds good, throw it in.  If you’re going to do pork belly slices, wait because those will lay directly on the pancake as it cooks.

• In a wide medium-heat non-stick frying pan or better yet, an electric griddle set to about 350°, ladle out about 1/3 of the glop and pat lightly down into a thick but not-too-thick patty.  While it sizzles away, you can add slices of pork or anything else you want to eventually actually fry directly on the surface of the heat when you flip the pancake over.  So, tofu slices, Spam slices, whatever you want.  After about 5 minutes, use a spatula to look at the underside of the pancake.  When it is nice and brown, carefully (even using two spatulas) flip the whole thing over.

• When the top side is now brown, another 5 minutes or so, flip it back over to it’s original side and top with (in this order): okonomi sauce, Kewpie mayonnaise, aonori and katsuobushi.  The fish flakes will dance!  This is why it is fun to make as a group around an electric griddle and a couple of cold beers.

• Immediately remove to a cutting board or plate and chop into about 4 pieces and gobble it up while it’s hot enough to burn the roof of your mouth.  Maybe that’s why it’s called Japanese pizza?

• But while you’re eating, start the next one.

• The recipe serves two very hungry people or four sort of hungry people who are eating additional snacks on the side.  The recipe is easily doubled and really does provide amazing social entertainment, so it’s pretty rad for when you have guests over.

¹ I mean, lots of people love it, but whatever. It’s my blog.

Angel food cake always seems so wasteful.  A whole carton of yolks thrown away!  In the past I’ve concurrently made lemon curd or something to try and use up the yolks, but this last time I just admitted that throwing away $1.89 worth of egg yolks was more economical than buying $5 worth of lemons just to save five yolks.  Also: my grocery store had angel food cakes on sale for $2.50, so I should have just bought one, but what the fuck.  I endeavor to make all things difficult.

What is funny to me is that you can buy Betty Crocker angel food cake mix.   You still have to whip it into meringue, so the entire “cake mix” portion of the show is defeated.  If you don’t want to make angel food cake from scratch, you should just buy one.  They’re generally alright.  In fact, they’re pretty good.  But again: difficult? No.  So, to the mixer we go.

So full!  Every time I make angel food cake I think, this isn’t going to go well.  Fulling a tube pan almost to the top?  Disaster in the chute.  But no.  It doesn’t rise.

Even though my tube pan has the classic little cooling feet (if you ever wondered what those things were for, it’s for cooling sponge cakes; when they are warm they are in danger of crushing under their own weight, so they need to hang upside down for at least an hour) I always invert my cake to a bottle anyway — more air circulation means faster cooling time.  Also, it looks goofy, which I value above most things.

And that’s it.  Easy peasy.  Clean up is easy less horrible because nothing is greasy.  But we still haven’t hit on why I should remember to make angel food cakes in the first place:

Deeeelishus.  Like a marshmallow.  And then I am reminded of what I always forget even when I remember to make angel food cake:  make it in a sheet pan so I have more crust.  Oh well, sometime in 2011 when I get around to it again I’ll maybe possibly remember.

Angel Food Cake
straight outta Joy of Cooking.

sift together and set aside:
1 cup cake flour
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt

in a large bowl beat on low speed for 1 minute:
1 1/2 cups cold egg whites (probably 12 eggs exactly)
1 Tbsp. water
1 Tbsp. fresh lemon juice
1 tsp. cream of tartar
1 tsp. vanilla
1/4 tsp. almond extract

have ready:
an additional 3/4 cup of sugar

• Heat oven to 350°.

• After beating on low speed for a minute, increase the mixer speed to medium and beat until the volume increases about 5 times (and since this is very hard to visualize) or until the egg foam is a soft foam composed of tiny but still visible bubbles.  This takes from 1 1/2 to 3 minutes depending on the age of the eggs.

• Beat in the additional 3/4 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon at a time, over the next 2 to 3 minutes.  When all the sugar has been added the whites will be totally opaque and creamy with no visible bubbles and will hold soft, glossy peaks that bend over at the points when you lift out the beater.  Do not beat until the points are totally upright stiff when you lift out the beater.

• Sift a fine layer of the flour mixture over the whites (about 1/8th of the total) and gently fold in with a rubber spatula until the flour is almost incorporated.  Do not overmix.  Repeat the process with the remaining flour in about 7 more batches, taking care to fully mix in the flour with the last batch.  If you don’t know how to “fold in” flour then you should Google it first.

• Spoon the batter into a removable-bottom tube pan that is UNGREASED in any fashion.  Straight out of the wash (but dry) is perfect.  Carefully smooth the batter as you go to prevent any large bubbles.

• Bake for 35 – 40 minutes, or until golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean.

• Let cool upside down over a bottle for at least an hour, or until totally cool to the touch.

• To unmold, first run a butter knife around the edge of the pan and lift the cake out by the tube portion.  With a long knife or similar implement, run along the bottom of the cake between the cake and the pan.  Leave the knife still under the cake on one side.  Use a spatula or similar item to insert between the cake and pan on the other side.  Having someone help you, lift the two utensils so you are holding the cake with them, and have the other person push on the tube in the middle to drop the pan bottom.  Set the cake onto a plate.

• If you wrap the cake in plastic wrap, it will ruin the toasted marshmallow crust.  I’m just warning you.  You have to eat the cake in the first 24 hours.  That’s my solution, anyway.

¹ No kidding, this is near the top of my goals in life. To always have cake in my purse. When I was about 17 my mom and I met for coffee one afternoon and she said, “Do you want some cake?” and I remember looking at the cafe’s pastry case and thinking, hmmm, maybe, and then turning around in time to see my mom pulling a piece of homemade pound cake out of her purse. And at that moment, all my teenage grief and angst over my relationship with my mom (founded on nothing at all) totally evaporated and was replaced with love and respect. True story!