Rye Crumble Bars with Jam

I am supposed to be writing a manuscript, not baking rye crumble bars. No more rye crumble bars no more rye crumble bars no more rye crumble bars no more rye crumble bars no more rye crumble bars.




When I found out that I was pregnant, I asked my publisher to extend my deadline, which was supposed to be March 1. I wasn’t sure how ill I would feel, but I’d heard plenty of pregnant lady horror stories, and I thought it was best to plan for the worst. Happily, I wasn’t very ill, but I was very unproductive. I was very, very tired. One morning, when the alarm was going off and I showed no signs of movement, Brandon checked to make sure I was still breathing.

I am pleased to report that I am no longer that tired. I am less pleased to report that I will be living at my desk for several weeks to come. But I’m also sort of excited about it. After a year of feeling like I was mostly writing around the story, alternating between panic and elation and panic and elation and desperately needing a beer, I feel like I’m finally inside of it. I can see the story differently in here, and I’m finding a lot that I didn’t know about: details, ideas, explanations, a number of stupid jokes (which will hopefully improve before publication). This, to me, is the best part of the job: the way that the act of writing often shows me, for the first time, what was there all along. I could say a lot more about that, but all I really should say is THANK YOU, UNIVERSE, FOR SAVING ME, and then get back to work.




You, however, can bake some rye crumble bars. The recipe for these comes from Kim Boyce’s terrific Good to the Grain, and I stumbled upon it last week, at the end of a good day, while looking for a way to use up some rye flour I had bought. I’d bought the flour for a different recipe, a recipe that I wound up not liking, and I don’t know how things go in your house, but in mine, rye flour will not disappear of its own accord. So I got out Kim Boyce’s book, because it’s yet to fail me, and boom, the streak continues.

This recipe might look a little daunting, time-wise, because it consists of three parts: the shortbread crust, the crumble topping, and, in between, the jam. I didn’t have a lot of time to spend in the kitchen, so I took Boyce’s advice and made mine over the course of a couple of days, as the moments presented themselves, and stashed the components in the fridge until I was ready to assemble the whole thing. Basically, you make a quick shortbread dough from a mixture of rye flour and all-purpose, and then you press that evenly into a pan. (I did a notably crappy job of this, because I was rushing to make a phone date with my mother, and my pressed-out dough wound up looking less like a pastry crust and more like a gently rolling sand dune. But it came out fine.) You bake the crust until it’s firm, and then you spread jam - you slather jam, actually; you’re using quite a lot - over the crust. Then you top the jam with a crumble made from oats, both flours, two types of sugar, and melted butter, and you slide the pan back into the oven.

Judging by the ingredients, I knew that the bars would be tasty, but the result was even better than I could have expected. I tend to think of rye in the context of rye bread with caraway seeds, which have a strong, sour flavor; I forget how subtle and sweet the flour itself is. It’s nutty, almost malty. I like rye bread, but rye crumble bars have nothing to do with it. Anything with a shortbread base and a crumble topping is bound to taste good, unless you fill the space in between with wood putty, but it’s the sweet, toasty rye flour that makes this recipe, and the way the sweet, toasty rye flour tastes with butter. I filled my crumble bars with a homemade mirabelle plum jam that a friend sent us last spring, and while I doubt it gets any better than that, I’m also eager to try a batch with apricot jam, or maybe strawberry. But there’s work to do first.


Rye Crumble Bars with Jam
Adapted slightly from Good to the Grain, by Kim Boyce

For this recipe, I used Bob’s Red Mill dark rye flour. You can also buy light rye flour, in which some parts of the grain have been removed before milling, but Boyce suggests the dark type, which has a deeper, nuttier flavor, and I second her recommendation.

As for jam, choose any one you like, but make sure that it has a good level of brightness and acidity. That’ll help it hold up to the richness of the buttery crust. Also, if you come up a little short, don’t worry. I only had 1 ¼ cups, not 1 ½ cups, and it was no problem.

Shortbread crust:
65 grams (½ cup) dark rye flour
120 grams (1 cup) all-purpose flour
50 grams (1/3 cup) dark brown sugar
½ tsp. kosher salt
113 grams (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly
1 tsp. vanilla extract

Crumble:
100 grams (1 cup) rolled oats
32 grams (3 Tbsp.) dark brown sugar
52 grams (¼ cup plus 2 Tbsp.) dark rye flour
30 grams (¼ cup) all-purpose flour
38 grams (3 Tbsp.) sugar
1 tsp. kosher salt
85 grams (6 Tbsp.) unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly

To assemble:
350 ml (1 ½ cups) jam, preserves, or fruit butter

Set a rack in the middle of the oven, and preheat to 275°F. Rub a 9-inch springform pan with butter, or grease with cooking spray.

To make the shortbread crust, combine the flours, sugar, and salt in a large bowl, and whisk to mix well. Add the melted butter and vanilla extract, and stir until thoroughly combined. (I found the mixture a little dry at first, so I put my hand in and squeezed and massaged a bit to bring the dough together.) Using your hands, press the dough evenly into the bottom of the prepared pan. Put the pan in the freezer for 30 minutes, while you make the crumble. [Or, if you’re doing this step ahead of time, wrap the pan in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge or freezer. If it’s in the fridge, just remember to transfer it to the freezer for 30 minutes before baking.]

To make the crumble, put all of the crumble ingredients except the melted butter into the bowl of a food processor, and pulse until the oats are partially ground, about 5 or 10 seconds. Pour the mixture into a bowl. Add the melted butter and stir with your hands, squeezing the mixture as you stir to create small crumbly bits. Set aside. [Or, if you’re doing this step ahead of time, wrap the bowl in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge. Take it out about 30 minutes before using, and if needed, use a fork to break up any giant clumps that have hardened.]

Bake the frozen shortbread until pale brown and firm when touched, about 50 to 55 minutes. Remove from the oven, and raise the oven temperature to 350°F.

To assemble the bars, spread the jam over the shortbread crust, and then top with the crumble, evenly sprinkling it over the surface and squeezing bits of it together to create irregular nubs. Bake for 50 to 55 minutes, or until golden brown on top, rotating the pan halfway through for even baking.

When the pan is cool enough to handle but still warm, run a sharp knife around the edge of the pan to loosen any jam that may have stuck. Remove the ring. Completely (or mostly, anyway) cool the bars on the pan base before cutting into wedges.

Note: These bars are best when eaten in fairly short order. After three days or so, the flavors taste less clear.

Yield: Boyce says 10 wedges, but these bars are rich, so I’d say more than that. Maybe 12 to 16 wedges, depending on the size you choose.

Pistachio-Citrus Pound Cake

Earlier this week, I think it was, one of you kindly wrote to me, asking if I might do a post about what I’ve been eating for lunch lately. The reader who wrote to me is pregnant, and there are a number of foods that us pregnant ladies are told to avoid, making quick, easy lunches hard to come by: no deli meats, no (uncooked) cured meats, no high-mercury fish (tuna, for example), no cheeses of certain types, and so on. I am going to spare you, however, a post on what I’ve been eating at my desk lately, because my lunches are about as riveting as C-SPAN. The post would go something like this: nut butter sandwich, carrots, tangerine, nut butter sandwich, carrots, tangerine, nut butter sandwich, carrots, tangerine, hard-boiled egg, bowl of soup, nut butter sandwich, carrots, tangerine, and if you are still awake at this point, you win a pound cake.

A pistachio pound cake. With citrus.

I haven’t found myself with much time for cooking lately, or not outside of recipe testing for my manuscript, but this cake caught my eye as I was thumbing through the latest issue of Bon Appétit. The merest mention of the word “pistachio” can turn my head, and not surprisingly, this cake shot to the top of my to-do list, above more sensible tasks like making spinach-cilantro soup or poaching chicken for salad. This, for the record, is how a 33-year-old woman winds up lunching on nut butter sandwiches and carrot sticks, the official midday meal of American first graders. I blame the editor at Bon Appétit who, as the headnote explained, ate this pound cake at a restaurant in Houston and declared it her “dream dessert.” You can’t use words like that and expect people to go on living their lives as though nothing had happened, as though there were not a pistachio pound cake recipe to be tried.

So one night last weekend, I baked a pistachio pound cake. It should be called a pistachio-citrus pound cake, really, because it contains juice and zest from three different citrus fruits. The basic batter is classic pound cake - plenty of butter, sugar, eggs, and flour - but into that go fresh lemon juice, fresh orange juice (or juice from a Pixie tangerine, if you happen to have some on hand; I highly recommend it), some zest from that same orange (or Pixie tangerine), and some zest from a lime. Then you fold in a generous dose of coarsely chopped pistachios, scoop the batter into its loaf pan, and put another generous dose of pistachios on top. Actually, I should warn you: it may seem as though you have too much chopped pistachio to cram onto the top of the cake, but you must persevere. There’s no such thing as too much pistachio.

Like other pound cakes I’ve made, this one bakes for a while (about 90 minutes) in a low-to-moderate oven, which is convenient, because it gives you time to redeem yourself by cooking something nutritious - or, if you prefer, to rest your feet and nurture your two-decades-long fascination with Sexy Frankenstein, also known as Jonny Greenwood, by reading that Radiohead story in the current Rolling Stone. Meanwhile, the house will fill with the scent of toasted pistachio and orange, heady and almost exotic. When you open the oven door to check on your cake, you’ll be rewarded with the sight of a tall, pistachio-crusted, perfectly browned loaf. I’ve done a lot of baking, and I can’t remember another time when I felt so giddy or so proud as I pulled a cake out of the oven. It’s a handsome thing.

We ate the cake plain, in sturdy slices, for breakfast or after lunch, and while it was very good right away, it gets even better, more delicate, once the flavors settle for a day. Like a proper pound cake, it’s firm and buttery, but it gets a gentle lift from the citrus, both in flavor and in fragrance, and then, behind it, there comes the deep, toasty, rumbling flavor of the pistachios. It’s an ideal afternoon cake. If I were going to dress it up for company, I might cut up some strawberries, soften them in a little sugar, and heap them on top of a slice, maybe with some lightly whipped cream - or, wait, even better, just spoon on some strawberry conserve. Or I might do nothing at all.


Pistachio-Citrus Pound Cake
Adapted slightly from Bon Appétit (April 2012) and Raymond Vandergaag of The Tasting Room at CityCentre

2 cups (260 grams) all-purpose flour
1 ½ tsp. kosher salt
1 tsp. baking powder
2 sticks (226 grams) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2 cups (400 grams) sugar
5 large eggs
2 Tbsp. fresh lemon juice
2 Tbsp. fresh orange juice
2 tsp. finely grated orange zest
1 tsp. finely grated lime zest
1 cup (125 grams) shelled, unsalted pistachios, coarsely chopped

Position a rack in the middle of the oven, and preheat the oven to 325°F. Lightly butter a 9”x5” loaf pan, or grease it with cooking spray. Cut a rectangle of parchment paper to line the bottom and the two long sides of the pan, leaving a little overhang. Press the parchment paper into the dish, and grease it lightly, too.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, salt, and baking powder. Using an electric mixer, beat the butter on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Add the sugar, and beat until well incorporated, 1 to 2 minutes more. Add the eggs one at a time, beating to blend between additions. Add the juices and the zests, and beat until well combined. (Don’t worry if the batter looks curdled.) Add the flour mixture, reduce the speed to low, and beat until just incorporated. Add ¾ cup of the pistachios, and fold in gently. Pour the batter into the prepared pan, smoothing the top. Sprinkle the remaining ¼ cup pistachios over the top.

Bake the cake, rotating it halfway through, until a tester inserted into the center comes out clean, about 1 ½ hours. Transfer it to a wire rack, and let it cool completely in the pan. Run a sharp knife along the short ends of the pan to loosen the cake; then pull up on the parchment paper to lift the cake out of the pan.

Note: The flavor of this cake is best on the day after it’s made.

Yield: 8 to 12 servings, depending on how thickly you slice it.

P.S. True story, and yes: a bar (probably) in July + a baby (probably) in September = we are nuts. But happy.

P.P.S. It’s a girl(!).

Stir-fried Minced Beef with Chiles and Basil

Before I say anything else, I want to thank you for your kindness about my aunt.  I was very nervous when I put up that post, but I felt much better for having written it, and I hoped that meant something.  Thank you for reading, and for saying what you did, and mostly, for understanding.

There is no smooth transition to be made from talking about death to discussing Thai food.  Let’s wing it.

I don’t know why that fried egg looks like it has no yolk. It definitely had one, because before I took this picture, I punctured it with that spoon. I think this is my punishment for not taking a proper photograph: my iPhone ate the yolk. Anyway, please imagine that it’s there. And while you’re at it, imagine that I’m totally, totally, 100% prepared to have a baby. Go on.

I found out a few weeks ago that I’m anemic, which at least partly explained why I had nearly dozed off at a stoplight a couple of times and once cried when I couldn’t get a kitchen drawer to open.  My doctor prescribed iron supplements and plenty of beef.  The good, grass-fed kind, he said. It’s a very nice thing to be ordered by one’s physician to eat more meat, and I was excited about it - except that, because I was busy dozing off at stoplights, I couldn’t think of what to eat.  A person can only go so far with hamburgers and steak.  That was when I called up Matthew, and he told me to make a Thai dish: stir-fried ground beef with chiles and basil, served on a bed of rice, with a fried egg.

I’ve made it four times since, and one of those times was in Oklahoma, for my mother and cousins, so they can vouch for it.  In fact, maybe this will tell you something.  It’s thunderstorm season in Oklahoma, an annual event that I spent my entire childhood dreading, and a giant hailstorm hit that night, as we were finishing our meal.  The windows along the back of the house began to shatter, and as we ran to the closets for cover, you could hear the wind screaming through the rooms. But the Thai beef was tasty enough that, after we had come out of hiding, my cousin Jason hovered over the wok, tempted to dip in for seconds, even though the leftovers shimmered with tiny shards of glass.  It’s a very good recipe.

The original version of it comes from David Thompson’s excellent book Thai Street Food, and as Thai street foods go, he says, it’s fairly new - maybe only fifty years old.  He recommends using as many chiles as you can handle, because the dish is meant to be spicy. As he explains, the "supple richness" of the fried egg is meant to offset the heat.  What I like about it, other than the fact that it’s fragrant and bright and hot, is that it’s nearly instant.  You can make it in less than ten minutes, with ingredients that you might well have lying around.  The original recipe calls for holy basil, but I used regular basil.  I used beef, but Matthew likes pork.  And if you can’t find Thai chiles, you could easily substitute serranos.  The important part is hard to mess up, and that’s chewy, saucy union of rice, egg yolk, and beef.



Stir-fried Minced Beef with Chiles and Basil
Adapted from Matthew-Amster Burton and Thai Street Food, by David Thompson

In Thailand, the eggs would be fried in the wok, either before or after cooking the rest of the dish. But Matthew claims that he always breaks the yolk when he does it that way, and he’s ten times better at stir-frying than I am, so I cook the eggs separately, in a skillet.

As for the chiles, the number that you use is up to you. I used five chiles the first time I made this, and it was pleasantly fiery. The second time I made it, I was eating solo and decided to go a little milder, so I used only three chiles. (You can always remove some of the seeds, too.)  Oh, and if you have an exhaust fan over your stove, turn it on. I always forget until the chiles hit the hot wok and I have a coughing fit.

Also note: this dish comes together very, very quickly, so be sure that you’ve measured out and prepped your ingredients and have them close at hand.

3 to 4 large garlic cloves, chopped
4 to 10 Thai (also called bird’s eye) chiles, sliced
A pinch of salt
2 Tbsp. peanut oil, divided
6 oz. (170 grams) ground beef
1 Tbsp. fish sauce, or more to taste
A pinch of sugar
1/4 cup (60 ml) chicken stock or water
2 large handfuls of basil leaves
Hot cooked jasmine rice
2 large eggs
2 lime wedges

Stir together the garlic, chiles, and salt. Heat a wok or large skillet over high heat, add 1 tablespoon oil, and add the garlic, chiles, and salt. Stir-fry for a few seconds until fragrant, then add the beef. Continue to cook, stirring, until the beef is cooked through and just starting to brown. Add 1 tablespoon fish sauce and the sugar. Add the basil and stock or water, and stir just until the basil is wilted. Remove from the heat. 

Meanwhile, warm the remaining 1 tablespoon oil in a separate skillet, and fry the eggs. The proper fried egg for this dish, Matthew says, has a runny yolk but a browned and crispy underside.

Scoop the rice into bowls, and then divide the beef and its juices over the top. Crown with the fried eggs. Serve immediately, with a good squeeze of lime.

Yield: 2 servings

Chewy Granola Bars with Pecans, Chocolate, and Cherries

My manuscript is due on June 1.  Hello from the Cave - or, as I first typed, "Hell from the Cave," which has a nice slasher-movie ring to it.  Hi.

For those keeping track, no, you are not crazy: the book was supposed to be due in March.  I had to ask for an extension, unfortunately, because of the small human under my shirt who makes me very tired, and because there’s been a difficult health situation in my family.  2012 came in roaring, and though I wish it would settle down and start acting its age, I doubt it’s going to.  I am, however, going to FINISH THIS BOOK.  If I can stay awake long enough.

Each night, when I get into bed, I’ve been reading a few pages of Nina Planck.  Her books were recommended to me by a couple of you, and clearly, you know me well.  For obvious reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I eat and why, and Planck’s defense of traditional whole foods like butter, eggs, and meat feels intuitive to me.  It’s been a nice, sensible way to close out my long days. (And so, I should note, has Friday Night Lights, which I just finished.  I miss Tim Riggins already.  I’m not proud to have fallen for the brooding-hunk routine, but I’m willing to own it.  I would also be willing, for the record, to watch an entire hour of close-ups of Taylor Kitsch’s lips, if the producers of the show ever decide to make a Best of Tim Riggins’s Makeout Scenes DVD.)

In any case, I was doing some research the other day, looking up granola bar recipes for a forthcoming Spilled Milk episode.  When I came across one on Smitten Kitchen, it leapt out at me - not only because it made a chewy granola bar, which I like, and because it came from Deb, who knows her way around a kitchen, but mostly because I loved the no-nonsense ingredients: oats, nuts, nut butter, dried fruits, butter, honey, and very little else.  The list of ingredients resonated with much of what I’ve been reading in Planck’s book, and that sealed the deal.  I decided to try it.  Of course, I did add chocolate.  Let’s be clear about that.

I love these granola bars.  They straddle the line between nutritious afternoon pick-me-up, which I’ve been needing lately, and dessert, which I never really need but want anyway.  For the most part, I followed Deb’s recipe - which she, in turn, adapted from King Arthur Flour - but I tailored the flavorings to suit my tastes.  For a nut, I used pecans, because I like them in granola.  I also threw in some big flakes of coconut.  And some dried cherries, though only a few.  (I don’t like a lot of fruit in my granola.)  And the chocolate.  I grew up on packaged granola bars with chocolate chips, and you know how I’ve come to feel about granola with chocolate, so it felt natural to throw in some chocolate chips that had been kicking around in the cupboard.  I didn’t bother to chop anything, not even the pecan halves, and I was glad for it later.  I liked all the lumps and bumps.  The whole process took less than an hour, most of which was oven time, and 72 hours later, only a couple of bars are left.  Brandon has been eating them for breakfast, and I took two to Matthew, and you can figure out the rest.  I’m already planning another batch.

Chewy Granola Bars with Pecans, Chocolate, and Cherries
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen

For my first go at this recipe, I used ½ cup (100 grams) sugar.  That amount yielded a balanced, mildly sweet bar, but whenever I got a bite with cherries or chocolate, I wished that the base mixture were even a little less sweet.  Next time, I’ll try cutting the sugar back to 1/3 cup (67 grams).  Oh, and I should tell you that I used unrefined cane sugar.  Like this.  It’s what we use at Delancey, and over the past year, I’ve been using it more and more at home.  I find it to be 100% interchangeable with regular white sugar.

Also, I might leave out the cinnamon next time.  Maybe.  It’s nice, but there’s already a lot of good stuff going on in here.

For chocolate, I used Ghirardelli 60% chocolate chips, but you could chop up and use any chocolate you like, preferably bittersweet.  And if you’re confused by the thought of coconut chips, as I’ve been in the past, they’re the big, flat flakes. (Here’s a photograph.)  Last, you don’t have to use the pecan-coconut-chocolate-cherry flavor combination that I chose, of course.  You’re welcome to use a mixture of any fruits and/or nuts you want, ideally 2 to 3 cups in all.

2 cups (190 grams) quick-cooking oats, divided
1/3 cup (67 grams) to ½ cup (100 grams) sugar (see above)
1 cup (110 grams) raw pecan halves
½ cup (25 grams) unsweetened coconut chips
½ cup (85 grams) chocolate chips or chopped chocolate of similar size
¼ cup (40 grams) dried cherries
½ tsp. fine salt
¼ tsp. ground cinnamon (optional)
1/3 cup (85 grams) peanut butter
1 tsp. vanilla extract
6 Tbsp. (85 grams) unsalted butter, melted
6 Tbsp. (120 grams) honey
1 Tbsp. water

Preheat the oven to 350°F.  Lightly butter an 8-inch square baking pan, or grease it with cooking spray. Cut a rectangle of parchment paper to line the bottom and two sides of the dish, leaving a little overhang.  Press the parchment paper into the dish.  Lightly grease the parchment paper.

Put 1/3 cup (30 to 35 grams) of the quick-cooking oats in the bowl of a food processor.  Process until finely ground.

In a large bowl, stir together the remaining 1 2/3 cup oats, ground oats, sugar, pecans, coconut chips, chocolate chips, dried cherries, salt, and, if using, cinnamon.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the peanut butter, vanilla extract, melted butter, honey, and water. Pour the wet ingredients over the dry ingredients, and stir well, until the mixture is evenly moistened. Transfer to the prepared pan, pressing the mixture firmly to ensure that it molds to the shape of the pan. (A piece of plastic wrap helps: just lay it over the pan before you begin pressing.  Much less stickiness.)

Bake the bars for about 30 minutes, or until they’re brown around the edges and just beginning to color on top, too.  (I set a timer for 25 minutes and began checking on them at that point, and I was surprised to find that they were already browning at the edges.  I left them in, however, for another 5 minutes or so, until the tops had a hint of color.)  The mixture will still seem soft and almost underbaked if you press on it, but it’ll set as it cools.

Transfer the pan to a rack, and allow the bars to cool completely in the pan.  When cool, run a sharp knife along the edges of the pan; then pull up on the parchment paper to lift the sheet of bars out of the pan.  Cut the bars into squares.  Or, heck, rectangles.  Whatever you want.

Note:  I let my bars cool for a number of hours, and they cut very neatly, but I noticed that some commenters on Deb’s post mentioned issues with crumbling.  Here’s what she suggested:  If your bars seem crumbly, refrigerate them in the pan for 30 minutes to further set them, and then try cutting them while cold.

Another note: I stored my bars on a cutting board wrapped in plastic wrap, but if you’d like to put them in an airtight container, consider layering them between sheets of wax paper, so they don’t stick to one another.  In hot weather, you might need to refrigerate them.

Yield: 16 squares

Oatcakes

You good, good people. Before I say another word, I want to thank you for your many comments, your e-mails, and the incredibly kind card - a real, three-dimensional paper card - that one of you sent to me at Delancey. Your kindness blew me away. I thought for a long time before deciding to write that last post, and I want to thank you for making me feel not only safe in deciding to do it, but very, very glad. I remember my doctor saying to me, one day in mid-December, that I would not only recover, but that someday soon, I might even have a hard time remembering exactly what postpartum depression felt like. Though he’s been my doctor for years, and though he knows us very well - he’s Brandon’s doctor, too, and June’s doctor, and he delivered June - in the privacy of my mind, I thought, Riiiiiiiiiiiight. Suuuuuuuure. Well! Turns out, being wrong is my new favorite thing.

In other news, June is a champion. She’s my new favorite person. She sleeps with her arms straight up by her ears, like she’s cheering very, very quietly about something, or like a gymnast who’s just stuck her landing. She thrashes around like a rodeo bronc when in the nude, and if you sing "Katy Too," by Johnny Cash, with the words "Baby June" subbed in for "Katy too," she will grin and stick her tongue out. This is because she has just discovered that she has a tongue. Every day is a small revolution.

I’ve been cooking more regularly, which is a great development, except that I haven’t been cooking particularly well. I have long had a special talent for making bland soups, and I guess it should be some kind of consolation that, with so much change in my life in the past year, this, at least, has remained consistent? On the upside, I’ve been roasting a lot of rutabagas, and I highly recommend that. And the other day, I made braised endive with prosciutto for the millionth time, and for the millionth time, it was excellent. And last night, after dinner, I fell down a rabbit hole of Bon Jovi videos, which has nothing to do with food but was also excellent. When I was eight years old, I had a Bop magazine poster of Jon Bon Jovi, shirtless and wearing a fringed scarf, on my bedroom wall. I think that explains everything.

I have a recipe for you today. Not the best photographs, but a recipe.

For years now, I’ve followed the site 3191 Miles Apart and the work of its co-creators Maria and Stephanie. Two years ago, they began publishing a quarterly, which is filled with photographs, recipes, projects, travel guides, and anything else they feel excited about, and it’s always beautiful and beautifully produced, printed on matte paper that feels nice in your hand. One night last weekend, while June was sleeping and Brandon was working, I climbed into bed with 3191 Quarterly No. 9 and promptly fell onto Stephanie’s recipe for oatcakes.

I should say that oatcakes are not actually cakes.  As Stephanie explains, they’re sort of a cross between a cookie, a cracker, and maybe a biscuit - a small, crunchy, nubbly thing that you could eat at pretty much any time of day.  The concept is Scottish, although I’m going to be totally blasphemous and uncouth and American and admit that I like Stephanie’s version better than the oatcakes I tried in Edinburgh. In my defense, my friends who live in Scotland - and one of them is Scottish by birth - didn’t love the oatcakes we ate that day either. No idea what the brand was, although I can tell you that we bought them at Mellis. Anyway.

I like to eat oatcakes with sharp cheddar, though you could also treat them more like a cookie and dunk them in a cup of tea.  This week I’ve been eating them with peanut butter and slices of apple, as a second breakfast. (I eat my first breakfast around 6:30 am, while sitting next to June on a blanket on the kitchen floor, singing "Baby June / Katy Too," and it’s gone long before lunchtime comes around.) They’re a little sweet and a little salty, and they somehow manage to come across as both wholesome and tempting.  Do any of you remember Carr’s Wheatolos?  Oatcakes don’t really taste like Wheatolos - maybe a cousin of the Wheatolo - but for me, they push the same buttons. God, I miss Wheatolos.

Oatcakes

Adapted slightly from Stephanie Congdon Barnes and 3191 Quarterly No. 9

1 ½ cups (150 grams) rolled oats
1 cup (140 grams) all-purpose flour
1/3 cup (60 grams) packed brown sugar
½ tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. fine salt
1 stick (113 grams) cold unsalted butter, diced
¼ cup (60 ml) full-fat plain yogurt
Whole milk, if needed

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment.

In a large bowl, combine the oats, flour, brown sugar, baking soda, and salt, whisking to blend. Add the butter, and use your fingers, pressing and squeezing, to work it into the oat mixture until it resembles a coarse meal. Stir in the yogurt until a soft dough forms. (If your yogurt is on the thick side, you may need to add a tablespoon or so of milk, just enough to bring the dough together.) The dough should be a little crumbly. Lightly flour a work surface, and turn the dough out onto it, rolling or patting it to a ¼-inch thickness. (I found that the dough was a little too sticky to roll cleanly, but it worked out alright.) Using a 2-inch round cookie cutter, stamp out oatcakes, and transfer them to the prepared sheet pans. (A bench scraper comes in handy for transferring the oatcakes to the sheet pans and cleaning the counter afterward. I found that I could comfortably fit about 15 oatcakes on one pan and the remainder on the second.) (I am really into parentheses today.) It’s okay to gather and re-roll any scraps of dough.

Bake the oatcakes for about 15 minutes, or until they are golden brown around the edges. Transfer to a wire rack to cool completely, and then store in an airtight container at room temperature.

Yield: about 25 oatcakes

P.S. Thank you, Stephanie, for allowing me to reprint your recipe. It’s a keeper.
P.P.S. This essay by Zadie Smith is wonderful (via Brian Ferry).

She felt like cheering

I have three half-siblings.  I know I’ve told you that before, probably lots of times. My half-siblings are a decent bit older than me, so growing up, they often seemed more like uncles and an aunt.  I was an only child, mostly.  But my mother came from a big family, and she had an identical twin sister named Tina. Though Tina lived in California and we lived in Oklahoma, she and my mother did their best to make sure that their children, my cousins Sarah and Katie and I, would feel close as we grew up.  I fell in love with the West Coast  - and, I’m sure, wound up living here - because of trips we took to visit Tina and her family when I was a kid.

In the mornings, when it’s still cool outside, Tina’s neighborhood smells like eucalyptus.  In the afternoons, Katie and I would walk through the backyard to old convenience store across the street, where we would buy beef jerky from a plastic tub.  There’s now a fancy grocery store where the convenience store used to be, but a little further down the street is a mall that still looks pretty much the same, a outdoor mall, something we didn’t have in Oklahoma.  It was at that mall that Sarah and I, then pre-teens, went on my first and only shoplifting spree.  We got a paper shopping bag at a department store, put my denim jacket in it, and then proceeded to hit a few other stores, hiding our loot under the jacket.  Our primary target was a Hallmark shop, where I scored a few calligraphy pens and a tiny carpenter’s bubble level on a keychain, the kind with yellow liquid in a clear tube.  I had no idea what a level was, but it looked awesome, and I was too scared of being caught to spend a lot of time puzzling over it before I shoved it into the bag.  Our mothers didn’t catch us, but back at Tina’s house, with our booty stashed safely in the closet, I was still terrified.  I was not cut out for a life in crime.  I don’t know if Tina ever found out about what we did, but I remember that closet so clearly.  I remember her house so clearly, the way it smells, the way it slopes slightly toward the street, so that every door needs a doorstop. When I’m falling asleep, I sometimes picture myself there.

That’s my mother on the left in both of the pictures, and Tina on the right.  They didn’t always dress alike, but they weren’t opposed to it.  Actually, the older they got, the more often they did.  They even wore their hair the same way: a couple of inches below the shoulder, usually pulled back into a ponytail. There’s a set of elderly twins who are famous around San Francisco, Marian and Vivian Brown, and we ran into them once in Union Square, both impeccably dressed.  My twins are not the type to pencil in their eyebrows or go for animal-skin cowboy hats, but I always pictured them getting old together the way the Brown twins have, making a scene, making trouble.

In early February, Tina was diagnosed suddenly with pancreatic cancer. She went to my mother’s house in Oklahoma to stay for a while and receive treatment.  My cousins and I took turns flying in to help, and we tried our best not to spend too much time Googling pancreatic cancer, because that kind of thing will scare the crap out of you. But it was hard to ignore the fact that, as all the literature says, the illness moves quickly.  Tina passed away at home, my mother’s home, on May 29, with five of us around her.

The Internet is an awkward place to write about death.  It doesn’t have the right weight.  I don’t like it. But I’ve been trying to figure out what to write here instead, and nothing else came.  Over the past few months, whenever I’ve told someone about Tina, it’s been hard to explain why it should feel so difficult to lose an aunt, as opposed to, say, a parent.  For me, Tina was somewhere between the two. In high school biology, when I learned about genes and DNA, I remember being thrilled by the thought that my mother and Tina had identical DNA, and that, maybe, on some level that an actual scientist would probably scoff at, it meant that Katie and Sarah were my half-sisters.  I loved that idea. Maybe, on that same questionable level, it meant that Tina was more than my aunt.

She was the only person in the world who called me Margaret, my legal name.  She sort of sang it, actually, Maaaaar-GRIT, her voice rising as she went.  When I was in college, I lived with her during the summers.  She introduced me to Dungeness crab and to the giant chocolate-covered coconut macaroons at Max’s.  She was the first person I knew who really loved the place where she lived.  It doesn’t sound like much to say, but it had never occurred to me that a person could fall in love with a city and actually get to live there, not just visit.  I didn’t dislike Oklahoma City, but I didn’t love it, and my parents didn’t, either.  I didn’t know what it might be like to feel another way.  But Tina and I were once driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, and I remember her saying that she never got tired of it, of that drive, even after forty years in the Bay Area, and that she each time she crossed the bridge, she felt like cheering, I LIVE HERE!  I didn’t know then that Seattle would make me feel that way, that it would be my place. But now, whenever I catch myself silently cheering, I think of her.

I also think of Tina when I cook in my cast-iron skillets, because the summer that I was twenty and living at her house, I once used a cast-iron skillet and then left it overnight, rinsed but still dirty, in her white kitchen sink.  The next morning, when she found it there, she also found beneath it a dark, angry ring of rust that hung on for months.  I am now a champ at the prompt cleaning and drying of cast-iron skillets.

I don’t know who took this picture, but I found it on Tina’s desk last weekend.  It must have been taken in the 80s, because this was her hairstyle then.  I love the lens flare, how relaxed she looks, how pretty she was.  She looked very different when I last saw her, but she was still beautiful.

About a month ago, when the author Maurice Sendak died, NPR re-released a number of interviews that he did over the years with Terry Gross of Fresh Air.  I listened to all of them, and I listened twice to the last one. (It starts about 27 minutes in.)  I hope I can someday feel the way he did about aging and dying. I’ve known so many people who, like Tina, didn’t really get a chance to get old. There was something he said that I keep thinking about: "I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I still fully expect to see my brother again." Most days, I don’t believe in an afterlife, either, but I hope for my mother, and for all of us, that Mr. Sendak was right.

Ah ha

My father wasn’t a writer, or not in the vocational sense, but he liked to play with words, and I grew up thinking of him as someone who wrote. He never made a big deal of it; writing was just something he did sometimes, a few quick lines on one of the index cards that he always kept in his shirt pocket. I haven’t seen a lot of his work - only a goofy poem he once jotted for me on a notepad from a medical conference he went to, and some haikus that we found in his bathroom drawer after he died. Many years ago, in a context that I now don’t remember, my mother told me that Burg tended to write most when he was feeling down, and not so much when he was happy. I don’t know if he would explain it that way, and I can’t ask him, but it resonated with me at the time. Probably because I was a teenager then, and I was doing my own share of mopey writing - mostly about the tall, long-haired kid who was a senior in my high school when I was a freshman, who played in a moody band with a clever name and reportedly smoked a truly staggering amount of weed but, I was certain, could be reformed into a fine, upstanding boyfriend if only, if only, IF ONLY I could manage to open my mouth and try speaking to him. There was a lot of woe going on, a lot of longing. I had a lot of feelings. In any case, I remember that conversation with my mother, and I remember thinking, Ah ha! That’s it! I too write the most, and the best, when I’m unhappy. That’s the trick...

Of course, that was sort of an unhelpful realization, and after some years passed and I stopped being a teenager (FINALLY), I began to see that it was not only unhelpful, but also untrue.  I discovered other ways to approach writing and other things to write about. I think we can all be grateful for that. Though I do wonder what happened to the tall, long-haired kid.  He’s totally unGoogleable, and you know I’ve tried. He’s also now almost forty.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say, and I swear that I really am going somewhere here, is: I don’t like being unhappy, and I don’t like writing about being unhappy. It’s boring, and it makes me tired. But about three weeks ago, I was diagnosed with postpartum depression, and I don’t see a way to not write about it. It began in the form of insomnia, and it took me a while to recognize it, because it was more complicated than I thought depression would be: I wasn’t sad so much as I was overwhelmed. Statistically, something like one in ten mothers get postpartum depression, but few seem to talk about it - or at least, few that I’ve found. When I was diagnosed, and when I was first trying to make sense of it, what I wanted most was to talk with another woman who had been through it and come out the other side, someone who could reassure me with full confidence that it wouldn’t be a permanent condition. I knew that logically, intellectually, but THE HORMONES, they pull the wool over your eyes, and the wool, whoa, it is heavy. You spend nine months growing a real live human baby in your abdomen, and then you push that baby out, and then you feed that baby milk that your body somehow makes, and though we mammals have been doing it for as long as we mammals have existed, it is big, weird, screwy stuff. It makes you have more feelings than you did when you were fifteen, and they feel very real. And in my case, the case of postpartum depression, they don’t go away when they should, and instead, they build.

I am grateful to have been able to ask for help, and I’m relieved that the help is actually helping. I am grateful for Brandon, and I am grateful for June. And though I would certainly rather just la la la pretend that it never happened, I want to write this down, on the off chance that you or someone you know needs to hear it. I am grateful that I can now reassure myself that this isn’t a permanent condition, that I now believe it.

Whew.

Banana Cereal Muffins

I know. The universe does not need another recipe for a banana baked something. And yet.

It’s a rainy Friday afternoon, and I have a couple of hours(!) home alone(!) to do whatever(!) I want(!), which is mostly to eat Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream and stare at the wall. Brandon and June are out on the town, having a lunch date at a friend’s new restaurant. I hope June is polite and doesn’t spit up at the table or get totally milk-drunk and harass the server - or that, if she does, she at least tips well. Baby jokes! It’s come to this! God, I am so, so sorry.

I’ve been wanting to tell you about this recipe for several weeks now. I first made it on September 7, a Friday.  I remember the date because I was in very early labor that day, though I wasn’t entirely sure of it yet. My mother was in town, and we were trying to keep ourselves occupied. There were three overripe bananas on the countertop, and I felt like baking. But I had already made two banana breads and stashed them the freezer, so for the first time in recorded history, banana bread seemed like a bad idea. Instead, I got out Kim Boyce’s excellent book and thumbed through it until I came to a recipe for Banana Cereal Muffins.

I don’t have a picture of said muffins for you. But I’ll go ahead and let you in on a secret: they’re not especially beautiful. They look like muffins, muffins that might even be good for you. They’re brown and lumpy on top. But they are very, very delicious: tender and with a hearty crumb, faintly buttery, intensely perfumed with banana. They were the first thing I ate after June was born, and though I’m sure the astonishment of that moment has biased my opinion somewhat, I stand by my assessment of the muffin. I can’t remember why, but Brandon had to feed it to me - maybe I was holding the baby? - and rather than putting the whole thing up to my face, he broke off bites and put them in my mouth. It was a very sweet gesture, except that the bites he gave me were tiny, as though he were feeding an injured bird, and he kept getting distracted by something - it must have been the baby, who, yes, I must have been holding - and soon I was barking, "MORE MUFFIN. THE MUFFIN. GIVE ME THE MUFFIN." Which, of course, is nothing new.


Banana Cereal Muffins
Adapted from Good to the Grain, by Kim Boyce

I think of this as a garbage disposal-style recipe, and I hope you won’t take that the wrong way. What I mean is, you can throw your nearly dead bananas at it, and your leftover hot cereal from this morning, and that bag of dark rye flour you’ve had lying around in the refrigerator since last March. Or, if you’re short a banana but happen to have some applesauce, put a little of that in instead. I might even try using leftover oatmeal next time, instead of the cracked grain cereal.

Another note: Boyce calls for creaming butter when it’s cold, rather than room temperature. I can’t say for sure, but I think she does it as a convenience: that way, you don’t have to plan ahead. I was nervous, but when beaten on high speed, it really does cream just fine.

½ cup cracked-multigrain hot cereal, such as Bob’s Red Mill or Bluebird Grain Farms Old World Cereal Blend
Pinch of salt
1 cup (140 grams) dark rye flour
1 cup (140 grams) all-purpose flour
1 ½ tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. kosher salt
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
6 Tbsp. (85 grams) cold unsalted butter
¼ cup (50 grams) dark brown sugar
3 very ripe bananas, about 1 ¼ pounds or 565 grams
2 Tbsp. unsulphured (not blackstrap) molasses
1 large egg

Bring 1 ½ cups water to a boil. Add the cereal and salt, and whisk to prevent clumping. Reduce the heat to low and cook, uncovered, stirring occasionally, until the cereal is tender, 15 to 20 minutes. Cool; then set aside ½ cup of the cooked cereal, saving the rest for another use. (You can freeze it in ½-cup portions to use for more muffins later, if you want.)

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease 8 cups of a standard-size muffin tins.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the dark rye flour, all-purpose flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon.

In the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the butter and the brown sugar. Beat on high speed until the mixture is light and creamy, about 2 minutes. Using a spatula, scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl. Add the bananas, molasses, egg, and the ½ cup cooled cereal, and beat on medium speed until thoroughly combined, a minute or so. It may look curdled. Don’t worry about that. Add the dry ingredients, and mix on low speed to just combine. Using the spatula, mix a bit more to ensure that the flour is entirely absorbed.

Scoop the batter into the 8 prepared muffin cups. (I use an ice cream scoop to do this, but you could also use a spoon.) Bake for 35 to 40 minutes, rotating the pan midway through, until the bottoms of the muffins are dark golden in color. (Twist one out of the pan to check.) Remove the tins from the oven, transfer the hot muffins to a wire rack, and cool slightly. The muffins are best eaten warm from the oven or later that same day. Or, on later occasions, consider warming them in the oven or toasting them lightly before serving. They also freeze beautifully.

Yield: 8 muffins

As loud as I wanted

Ah. Okay. Where were we?

Everything is happening at lightning speed. I have to get back to writing it down, or I’ll forget.  One morning, you wake up and you’re 33 years old, with two dogs and a spouse and a refrigerator full of esoteric vermouths and amari, and the next morning, you wake up and you’re 34 years old, with two dogs, a spouse, and a 12-week-old child in a bouncy chair on the floor in front of the refrigerator.  The other day at a doctor’s checkup, I actually told the nurse that I was 33, because I forgot that I’d had a birthday. 33, 34, same thing. In any case, I’m still a baby when I get a shot.

We are beginning to find moments of normalcy. On Monday, we put June in the car and drove to Vancouver to see Bruce Springsteen in concert.  He played "Cover Me," and it was sufficiently deafening that I could sing along as loud as I wanted without worrying that anyone would hear. I also ate a hot dog with yellow mustard.  It was outstanding. June stayed back at the hotel with our friends Katie and Kyle and slept through the entire show.  Someday, when she’s moaning about how ancient and uncool and deaf we are, I’ll tell her about the days when we were seeing Springsteen and sacrificing our hearing and she was drooling shamelessly all over a borrowed hotel playpen.

Twice now, Brandon and I have gone on dates. Real dates, without a small person around.  Of course, these dates are on Sundays, at lunchtime, and Brandon goes to work afterward.  The first time, we went out to lunch at The Whale Wins. (The sardine toast with curried tomato mayonnaise and shaved fennel! The whole roasted trout with brown butter and walnut sauce!  The brownie!  Eric Bordelet’s pear cider!) Then we went to see the new James Bond movie, which was exciting, except that we failed to note that the movie would end after the babysitter was expecting us home, and that meant that we were those people, the ones who trip on your purse while climbing over you and tiptoe sheepishly out of the theater with twenty minutes left. The second time, we went out to lunch again, and after having three-quarters of a glass of Champagne, I fell asleep in the car on the way back to our neighborhood. When I woke up, we were parked in the lot outside the grocery store, where we were supposed to be doing our Thanksgiving shopping, and over in the driver’s seat, Brandon was now sleeping.  We are pros at sleeping in parked cars.  Who knew? This past Tuesday, I had a fabulous nap in a parking lot on Granville Island, with cars roaring across the bridge over my head, while Brandon and June explored the market.

June looks exactly like Brandon when she smiles, and the rest of the time, or most of it, she looks like me. Early the other morning, in our hotel room in Vancouver, I heard her start to fuss in her playpen-slash-crib, and when I bent down to pick her up, she let out a tiny gleeful scream and I could see, even in the dark, that she was grinning at me. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over the fact that she exists - except when she’s having a flamboyant meltdown like she did yesterday afternoon while we attempted to take a walk, and then I am pretty sure that I will definitely, without a doubt, never ever get over it.

When we were first thinking about having a baby, I read Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions - there’s an Anne Lamott book for every phase of my life!  Such a consolation! - and a couple of days ago, I decided to reread it.  There’s so much that she gets right. "Before I got pregnant with Sam," she writes on page 60, "I felt there wasn’t anything that could happen that would utterly destroy me. . . .  Now there is something that could happen that I could not survive: I could lose Sam. I look down into his staggeringly lovely little face, and I can hardly breathe sometimes. He is all I have ever wanted, and my heart is so huge with love that I feel like it is about to go off. At the same time, I feel that he has completely ruined my life, because I didn’t used to care all that much."

Sometimes when I’m driving, because I do all of my thinking (and now, sleeping) in the car, I think about Tina and my dad, all the people June will never meet. You’d think I’d be used to it, now that Burg has been gone for ten years next week, but grief always catches me off guard.  I can’t believe that June will never know my dad; that she’ll never get one of his scratchy, bracing, beard-forward kisses; that he will never have the opportunity to forget her birthday, something he was always so good at.  And then I think about the fact that June will never really think of my mother as a twin.  I just can’t believe she’ll never know The Twins.  Brandon tells me almost every day that he sees them in her, and that makes it a little better.

It feels good to come back to this space.  It never fails me.  Thank you, always, always, for reading.

P.S.  This song. (With thanks to my friend Brian for pointing it out.)  Stevie wins again.

It's called the Pantry

Well. World events don’t seem to get any less troubling, so we might as well get back to business. Yes?

Last week, I said that I wanted to tell you about a new project, and I still do. It’s a project that grows out of Delancey, but it’s a whole new thing: a business headed up by two of our friends, Brandi Henderson and Olaiya Land. Brandon is technically the third partner, but this baby really belongs to Brandi and Olaiya. It’s called the Pantry at Delancey, and we’re all very excited about it. Excited. Maybe that word isn’t strong enough. Elated? Too strong? Thrilled? Let’s go with thrilled. We are thrilled.



Maybe you already know Brandi.



She’s the executive pastry chef at Delancey. She’s been with us since December of 2009, when she moved up from San Francisco to take the job. Those of you who have been to the restaurant will recognize Brandi as the woman behind the Meyer lemon budino, the cider-poached apple with ginger streusel, the rhubarb shortcake with mascarpone cream, and the cannoli with blood orange and candied pistachios. I daydream about that cannoli sometimes. She also makes the ricotta that we use at Delancey, writes a blog called I made that!, and in her meager spare time, likes to cure meat. (That’s pancetta up there, in the top picture.) In general, Brandi likes making things, and that’s why we like her. And handily, she’s trained as an architect, which also makes her good at building things. She’s currently the construction foreman for the space that will soon be the Pantry. She’s also in need of a massage.

You know Olaiya, too. I’ve written about her a lot, because she’s taught me so much about cooking.



Brandon met Olaiya in 2006, shortly after he moved to Seattle, when they worked together at Boat Street Cafe and Kitchen. The first time we ate dinner at her place, she made baked eggs with caramelized onions, and as you can see, I still remember it. A month or two later, she braised a pork shoulder in Coca Cola and served it to us with a pile of warm corn tortillas, and even though we were helping her move and had to sit on the floor to eat, I still remember that, too. In the years since, Olaiya has run her own catering company and taught cooking classes at Sur La Table, PCC, and Delancey. I think it’s fair to say that she’s a gifted teacher. She makes it look like an afternoon stroll. I’ve gotten to sit in on her classes a few times, and if you’ve ever taken a cooking class from me and felt that you learned something, it’s not because of anything I did: it’s because Olaiya taught me how to teach.



We’ve cooked a lot together, eaten a lot together, and worked a lot together. Actually, I wrote a fair piece of my first book while sitting next to her in a coffee shop near her apartment. And I wrote the bulk of the proposal for my next book the same way. I feel lucky to get to work beside her, both independently and collaboratively. And really, when you get down to it, that’s what the Pantry means to me: making things, and making our way, with our friends.

I guess I should tell you what the Pantry is? Forgot about that.



The Pantry is a community kitchen. It’s a space for hands-on cooking classes, family-style dinners, private events, and locally sourced catering. It’s located directly behind Delancey, on Alonzo Avenue NW, with a garden entrance designed by Fresh Digs. (There’s only mud and fence posts right now, but not for long.) There’ll be a 16-foot farm table, a cooking camp for kids in the summertime, and a small retail area stocked with independent food magazines, Weck canning jars, Delancey cookie dough and pizza dough, all our best stuff. Brandi and Olaiya already have a number of classes in development: a pizza-making class with Brandon, butchering and meat-curing with Russ Flint of Rainshadow Meats, a food writing course with Francis Lam, a City Chickens class with the good people of Stokesberry Farm, classes with Olaiya, classes with Brandi, a class or two with me - more than I can easily list here. And eventually, the Pantry will also make a lot of products for Delancey, products that we currently have to source elsewhere, like fresh mozzarella, pepperoni, bacon, pancetta, and salame. The projected opening date is sometime in late spring. Cross your fingers.



I took these shots a few Saturday mornings ago. They’re outtakes - or, at least, I think they’re going to be outtakes - from the Pantry’s website, which our friend Sam is building. (More pages to come.) We were sitting there that morning, Brandi and Olaiya and Brandon and Sam and I, at the communal table in the dining room at Delancey, with cameras and film and blood orange peels everywhere, and Olaiya said something that I’m going to paraphrase badly, but maybe the spirit will still come through. She said something like, Look at this! Can you believe we get to do this? Each of us doing what we like to do, each of us doing what we do best, all of us working together?

I’m happy for our friends, and happy for that.

Essex

I MADE IT! By which I mean, I managed to not go into labor before, in the middle of, or in the days immediately following the opening of Essex. VICTORY.

I imagine that I will very soon start cursing the fact that I am still pregnant, but for now, I feel like I should be given a medal, or a cocktail. Since neither is a viable option, I made myself a pan of flapjacks and ate a quarter of it in one sitting.

I haven’t written a lot about Essex here, not because it has felt like any less of a big deal than Delancey, but because the first half of this year, which was when the project began to move forward, ate me alive. There were a couple of months when, in my own head, I had to pretend (la la la) that Essex wasn’t actually happening. But last Wednesday, with great help from a lot of people, it happened. Essex is now open! Every Wednesday to Sunday! Starting at 4:30 pm! I’m so proud of it, proud of Brandon for dreaming it up, proud of our staff for working so hard, proud that we actually did it and that I didn’t have the baby while hunched over the computer in the office, formatting the cocktail menu.

In the early days of Delancey, I was too busy making salads and mistakes and popsicles to reach for my camera and take pictures. I have pictures of Delancey under construction, pictures of Delancey just before opening, and pictures from months after opening, but I have almost none of its first weeks. So this weekend, I sneaked into Essex in the few quiet, golden moments between set-up and opening time, and I snapped some.

Essex sits directly next door to Delancey, in the former home of Bella Umbrella. Even before we learned that the umbrella shop was moving out, we had talked about someday opening a bar there. Maybe it could work hand-in-hand with Delancey, we thought, and be a place for people to hang out before or after dinner. As we began to think about what we would want our bar to feel like, and what we would want to drink there, and what we would want to eat there, the idea grew. Since this is our neighborhood, we wanted it to feel like a neighborhood place, but with exceptional cocktails. Even more, we wanted to sort of geek out with it, to make a lot of the cocktail ingredients in-house - and not just bitters, but liqueurs, fernet, vermouths, and sodas. That thinking then quickly extended itself to the food. If we’re going to serve pretzels, let’s say, we should make them ourselves, we decided. And we should serve them with Brandon’s homemade mustard. And while we’re at it, hey, maybe you could eat a whole meal at Essex!  Maybe we could serve open-face toasts with clothbound aged cheddar and house-pickled peppers. And maybe that lacquered and smoked pork shoulder that Brandon has been tinkering with since May. And maybe spot prawns caught nearby, with a pot of chile-spiked mayo. And oh, oh, OH, our own version of a Thin Mint! We could play around, we realized, and really make stuff - stuff that didn’t necessarily fit at Delancey.

We decided to call it Essex because, in Manhattan, Essex and Delancey Streets intersect, and the Essex and Delancey subway stops share a station. Our Essex and our Delancey share a staff, two bathrooms, a kitchen, a hallway, and an overstuffed office that gives me heart palpitations. Like Delancey, Essex was designed by Katie Caradec (my cousin!) and Pantea Tehrani, of tbD.

And to really keep it all in the family, Brandon named our first liqueur, made from three different kinds of citrus and aged for four months in rye barrels, after my dad. It’s called Burg’s Extra-Special Orange. Burg will have been gone for ten years, ten years, this December, but if he were still around, I think he would have claimed this bar stool as his designated seat. Maybe we should have a plaque made for it. Maybe someday.

British Flapjacks
Adapted from my recipe in Bon Appétit, March 2010

Because I really did eat a quarter of the pan in one sitting, and it would be mean not to share some with you.

1 stick (113 grams) unsalted butter, cut into 8 pieces
½ cup (100 grams) packed light brown sugar
¼ cup (60 ml) golden syrup*
2 1/3 cups (210 grams) quick-cooking oats (not instant or old-fashioned)
Pinch of fine salt
Crunchy salt, such as Maldon or fleur de sel, for finishing

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter an 8-inch square metal baking pan. Combine the butter, brown sugar, and golden syrup in a heavy medium saucepan.  Stir regularly over medium-low heat until the butter melts, the sugar dissolves, and the mixture is smooth. Remove from heat. Add the oats and fine salt, and stir to evenly coated. Transfer the mixture to the prepared pan, and press it out in even layer. Bake until the top is golden (the edges will be darker), about 20 to 25 minutes. Transfer the pan to a rack, and allow to cool for 5 minutes.  Then cut into 4 squares, and cut each square into 4 triangles. (The mixture will still be soft and a little crumbly; just do the best you can.) Allow to finish cooling completely in the pan. (The flapjacks will firm up as they cool.) Before serving, top with crunchy salt to taste.

*A type of syrup popular in the UK. Available at some supermarkets, specialty foods stores, and British import shops.  (If you live in Ballard, like me, you can find it at Ballard Market.)

Yield: 16 servings, if you have a lot of restraint.