Kristin Janz

It’s been over a month since I last posted. Shame on me! However, having not yet discovered the magic formula where I avoid distractions all day and get as much writing done as I think I should, I figured I would at least use the time spent sitting at my computer for actual fiction writing, rather than blogging about fiction writing (or about all the cooking I’m doing instead of fiction writing).

I would be remiss in my wifely duties, though, if I failed to mention that my husband Donald’s short story “Her Majesty’s Guardian” is now out in Daily Science Fiction, an excellent online magazine.  If you’re already a subscriber, you would have received this in your email inbox a week ago, but now it’s live on the website for everyone to enjoy.  It’s a great story, and very short, so I hope you’ll all have a chance to read it.

Here’s a picture of Donald for you to enjoy, from our Italian honeymoon back in May.  This was taken in an ancient tavern in Ostia Antica, the old port of Rome at the mouth of the Tiber River.

Donald posing as an ancient Roman bartender

Speaking of ancient Rome, Donald and I are thrilled to be “embark[ing] on a culinary exploration of ancient Pompeii” tonight, with help from the Museum of Science.  Donald is excited that all the courses include some sort of meat.  I’m hoping that the wine pairings won’t be served traditional style (i.e., diluted 3:1 with water).

On Wednesday, I made cheese for the first time, and documented the process with my trusty digital camera.

I used the paneer recipe on page 297 of Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant. You need 2 quarts of milk, 3-4 tablespoons strained lemon juice, a large pot, a large spoon to stir the milk with as it heats, cheesecloth, a colander, and something to weight the cheese with as you press it.

First, you put the milk in a pot and heat it to a vigorous boil over high heat. Make sure to use a pretty big pot. I used a 6 quart stockpot. The milk foams a lot as it starts to boil, and if you aren’t careful, it will foam over the edge and you’ll have an awful mess to clean up. (This did not happen to me, but it did foam quite a lot, even in a 6 quart pot. I was glad I didn’t try to use a smaller pot.) Stir the milk often as it heats, so the bottom and sides don’t burn.

Once the milk has boiled, turn off the heat and stir in the lemon juice. I used just a smidge under 3 tablespoons, because that’s what I got out of 1 lemon, after straining the squeezed juice through a tea strainer. The recipe said you might have to use an extra tablespoon, but I didn’t. It also said you might have to heat the mixture on low heat for half a minute or so to get it to curdle, but mine curdled almost immediately, once I’d mixed in the juice. What you’re looking for is that the solid part of the milk (the curds) will separate out from the liquid (the whey), first in little tiny globules, then in larger chunks. (Who can avoid thinking of Miss Muffett at a time like this?)

After adding the lemon juice. Appetizing, huh?

Then you pour it into a colander lined with cheesecloth. I wasn’t sure how much cheesecloth to use. The recipe said several layers. I took 3 long strips of cheesecloth that I unfolded from the piece of cardboard in the middle of the package. I used about 1 1/2 packages.

I worried that I might have used too much cheesecloth. I'm still not sure.

After most of the liquid has drained away, lift up the cheesecloth around the curds and pick up the whole thing like a bag. With your hands, keeping the curds inside the little cheesecloth bag, squeeze out as much liquid as you can. This is where I wondered if I had used too much cheesecloth. I felt that if I had used a little less, maybe only 2 strips instead of 3, I would have been able to squeeze out more water. I thought the texture of the finished cheese was maybe a little soft. On the other hand, I’m not sure the 2 strips would have enfolded all the cheese curd properly, and some of it might have gooped out around the edges. I guess if I try this again, I might try 2 strips, and see what happens.

Here’s what it looks like after you’ve squeezed the water out. According to the Moosewood recipe I was using, this stage is called chenna, and is a soft cheese that is often used in Indian sweets.

After squeezing out as much liquid as possible

Next, keeping the cloth wrapped around the cheese, squish and/or pat it into a sort of flat block. The recipe said 5″ x 5″ or 4″ x 6″. Mine was more like 5″ x 6″, but close enough.

Next, you put it back in the colander and put a heavy weight on top to press it into paneer cheese. I had a bit of trouble with this step, because the colander I was using was too narrow to fit in any weight that would cover the whole surface of my cheese. You want the whole cheese to be covered, or the edges won’t get pressed (they’ll probably be a bit crumbly no matter what you do). I ended up switching out the original colander for the drainer part of my salad spinner. I wasn’t quite as happy about this, because I’m not sure the drain holes are really elevated far enough off the surface below to allow the liquid being squeezed out to escape properly. But it was the best I could do. I filled a 4 quart pot with water and put that on top as the weight.

You can see the overhang of the roof outside reflected in the water

The recipe says to press it for 30-60 minutes, and that the longer you press it, the firmer it will be. I let it go about 70 minutes. Here’s what it looked like, after being unwrapped.

Here's how much you get

I rinsed out the cheesecloths under running water and hung them out to dry, planning to wash them properly this weekend when I do laundry. I didn’t want to throw them out, because I bought one of the packs at the grocery store and it was kind of expensive (at least for such a small amount of cloth).

I hope everything I use these for doesn't taste like spoiled milk

That’s it! I wanted to cook something with the paneer, so I cut it up into small cubes.

It’s kind of amazing to think that this is all the cheese you get from 2 quarts of milk, isn’t it? With harder cheeses like cheddar and Parmesan, where you do a more effective job of squishing out the whey, the yield is even lower.

Two cups of cheese cubes from two quarts of milk

I used the paneer to make the Spiced Paneer on page 351 of Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special. Cubes of paneer sauteed in oil with cumin, cayenne, cardamom, turmeric, salt, and a bit of yogurt to help the spices stick to the cheese. It was very tasty! The paneer went into a salad for dinner that night (Spinach with Cilantro-Cashew Dressing, page 289 of the aforementioned book). I used the famous baby spinach that I had worried might have been squished under my corn, and a tomato from the 4 1/2 pound box of CSA tomatoes I received this week.

The final product

The paneer did crumble apart a bit as I cooked it, especially the edge pieces, and the texture was kind of soft, but it firmed up nicely in the fridge.

I did taste the paneer before cooking it with spices, and it was very mild, but definitely tasted like cheese. I’m wondering if this might be a good substitute for the sort of cheese curds they use in Canada (and which are impossible to find here) to make poutine. Next time I have leftover gravy, I’ll have to find out!

I was surprised by how easy it was to make the paneer. The whole process (not including the hour of pressing) took less than 45 minutes, including clean-up. And that’s 45 minutes in real time, not Rachael Ray time!

Um.  Can you guys try not to put the corn on the cob on top of the baby spinach next time?  I swear, Wilson Farm has the worst grocery baggers on the planet (I’ve lost track of how many peaches, plums and nectarines they’ve ruined), and apparently the same people are putting the CSA shares into the baskets.

We finally got a decent amount of tomatoes.  For a few weeks, we’d been getting 2 a week.  This week we got 16.  Donald is a little disappointed that we still got the same massive amount of zucchini and summer squash, though.  And lettuce is back, after a lovely 2-week lettuce hiatus.  I’m sort of disappointed that heirloom tomatoes are in full swing, and we only got the most basic, boring tomatoes they grow at Wilson Farm.  But I can sort of understand.  The heirloom ones tend to be more susceptible to splitting and cracking, especially around the stem, and once that happens they go bad pretty quickly.  If we got 16 large heirloom tomatoes, we’d have to eat nothing but for a couple of days so that they didn’t rot before we got to them.  And then we’d have no tomatoes left for the rest of the week.  Also, even basic, boring tomatoes are pretty tasty in August, when they’re locally grown (not the tasteless ones that they pick green in California and blow ethylene gas over to sort of ripen them before they put them out on the shelf in your Massachusetts grocery store).

For dinner tonight, I made Mediterranean couscous salad (with tomatoes and zucchini, as well as other vegetables), tomato and mozzarella salad with basil, and boiled corn on the cob (with lime-cilantro butter).  Fresh local raspberries from our CSA share for dessert (even though Donald was eyeing the new cherries I’d bought; I told him we had to eat the raspberries first, though, because they’re more perishable).  Everything was yummy, though Donald opted out of the couscous salad because of the measly 1 cup of diced zucchini I’d added, and had leftover pork tenderloin with figs from last night instead.

No, this post isn’t about haggis.  Before going to see Cowboys and Aliens the other night at the Somerville Theater, Donald and I went out for dinner at Highland Kitchen.  I’d never eaten there before, but it seemed to get good reviews, particularly for its cocktail menu.

It’s a little out of the way, about a half hour walk from either Porter or Davis, but the 88 bus goes right by the restaurant. Here’s a picture of the apple tree in someone’s front yard along the way, that I resisted the temptation to poach from.

Mmm, apples!

I really liked the restaurant, and can confirm that they serve “real cocktails”. I had the “Rarely Eagle”, with bourbon, St. Germain, lemon juice and orange blossom water, and it was very tasty and not too sweet. For an appetizer, Donald and I shared a serving of grilled artichokes with some dipping sauce. I wasn’t too impressed by these, but I think roasting in a hot oven with olive oil or deep-frying is probably a better preparation for baby artichokes. The grilled ones we had didn’t really have much grilled flavor, and no crispy caramelized bits (which I think you need a good amount of oil for, with artichokes, if you don’t want to just burn them). It was like eating vegetables or something!

I thought my entree–sea bass with roasted potatoes, summer succotash and pinot noir butter–made up for it, though. The fish was perfectly cooked, and the summer succotash (summer squash, lima beans and corn) was a nice complement to the fish. I do think they could have improved the potatoes with a bit more oil and a hotter oven, but then, I’m not really a big proponent of low-fat cooking, and I understand how some people might prefer them just the way they were. And anyway, it’s hard to go wrong with potatoes (unless you mash them–yuck!). Donald had the blackened catfish po’boy sandwich, which came with a huge pile of delicious hand-cut fries, and he said his was good, too (I can attest to the goodness of the fries!).

We were too full for dessert (or popcorn at the movie, for that matter), and there wasn’t anything on the dessert menu that either of us found terribly compelling (though had I been less full, I might have tried the plum shortcake).

Another nice thing, although we didn’t take advantage of it, is that if you want a non-alcoholic cold beverage besides water, you’re not limited to the usual Coke/Sprite/ginger-ale spectrum; they also have a couple of IBC sodas, ginger beer, sparkling limeade, and fresh lemonade.

There’s not a ton of vegetarian options, but they have a vegetarian soup of the day, and one each of the sandwiches and entrees on the regular menu are vegetarian (and, of course, all the desserts). So if your vegetarian friend isn’t too picky (or just wants to eat dessert!), you could probably bring them here.

I heartily recommend this place, and would certainly go back!

Just for a change from boiled corn on the cob, I decided to use this week’s corn from my CSA share to make creamed corn for lunch.

A bowl of creamed corn, with fresh corn off the cob and heavy cream. And butter. Because heavy cream just doesn't have enough fat.

It was yummy, though I’m feeling maybe I ought to have a double portion of salad tonight, with no dressing, to make up for it. (In case you’re wondering, I didn’t only eat corn and heavy cream for lunch; I also had leftover Greek vegetable stew and salad (with dressing). And a peach.)

Maybe next time I’ll try the variation with blue cheese and bacon.

On the writing front, not such a good day. I was working on the novel, and only got about 1800 words written. Considering that Donald can write 800 words just in the evening after coming home from a long day at his regular job … well, not so good! This is why I need to be a stay-at-home writer in order to accomplish anything, because I’m so slow. Though today was especially bad. I just wasn’t into it, and in the morning I kept dozing off at my desk. And I didn’t have any caffeine in the house. I took a 20-minute nap, which was probably a better idea anyway, and actually helped a lot. (My theory is that using caffeine to stay awake is like curing a hangover with the hair of the dog; it only prolongs the inevitable.) I did force myself to sit at my desk for 6 hours staring at the file of my novel, though. So discipline was okay, just not inspiration.

I’m sure it’s a coincidence, but last week I complained about all the vegetables we were getting each week in our CSA share, and this week we didn’t get as many.  Here’s what we got this week:

1 head red leaf lettuce
2 cucumbers
1 bunch salad onions (3)
1 bunch scallions
1 bunch beets with greens attached
baby beet greens
green beans
6 ears corn
2 yellow summer squash
2 zucchini

Last week we got an extra lettuce (romaine), and more summer squash, and both Romano beans and wax beans instead of regular green beans. We didn’t get beet greens or beets, but we got an eggplant, and some basil.

I suppose this week’s take is a more reasonable amount of food, but now that I’ve been trained to expect ridiculously massive quantities of produce every week, it doesn’t feel like a good deal if we’re getting less.

I’m also a little annoyed that the “full share” people are always getting the special vegetables when the “half share” people like us aren’t. Maybe this is to be expected, but we’ve only gotten kale and Swiss chard once, and the full share people are getting one or the other (or both!) every week. And this week the full share people got tomatoes. Tomatoes! Possibly the most desirable vegetable, and we didn’t get any. Hopefully it’s just that the tomatoes are only starting to come in, and they didn’t have enough for everyone. But I’m certainly not joining this CSA again if I don’t get some tomatoes at some point.

Although the title might suggest the opposite, I love the CSA I’m in.  CSA stands for community-supported agriculture; you pay the farm a set amount before the start of the harvest season, and each week you get vegetables.  You don’t get to pick which vegetables you receive.  I like all vegetables, so this is not a problem for me.  (My husband Donald, however, has been introduced to all sorts of new vegetables he hadn’t even known he disliked.)  And the vegetables are very good.  I won’t even buy fresh green beans except at Russo’s and occasionally Whole Foods, and even there I have to pick through the bin bean by bean to find ones that haven’t started to rot.  The green beans from my CSA share, on the other hand, are the freshest beans I’ve seen anywhere since my childhood, when we used to grow them ourselves.  Same for the beets, and Swiss chard, and zucchini, and lettuce, and corn, and pretty much everything else.  I like to support local businesses when I can (read:  when it’s not too inconvenient for me), and I don’t like how centralized all our agricultural production is becoming (it makes sense for some crops, like grain, and less for perishable vegetables), and I especially don’t like the crappy quality of the vegetables that I see at most supermarkets.  I feel that the value of what I’ve gotten each week is competitive with supermarket prices, and as an added bonus, the farm whose CSA I joined (Wilson Farm) has a store and they offer a 10% discount to CSA members on their pick-up day, on anything else in the store.

So what’s the problem?

Mainly, that Donald and I are having a hard time eating so many vegetables.  Here’s what I received last week.  This is a “half-share”, the smallest size offered, suggested as an appropriate amount for 2-3 people.

1 head red leaf lettuce
1 head romaine lettuce
2 large cucumbers
1 large bunch of scallions
1 bunch of salad onions (3 onions)
2 zucchini
3 yellow summer squash
1 enormous bunch of basil
6 ears of corn
1 pound wax beans
1 pound Romano beans
1 eggplant

Is that it? I think that’s it. Is it just me, or is this a lot for 2 non-vegetarian adults who don’t eat every meal at home to get through in a single week? Some weeks we get 3 heads of lettuce. We’re eating salad at every meal except breakfast (in addition to another vegetable side dish and sometimes a vegetable main dish), and we still end up with lettuce left over when it’s time for the next CSA pick-up.

I think part of the problem is me (I do almost all of the cooking in our household, because I like cooking and Donald doesn’t). I like to cook from cookbooks. I like to find an interesting recipe, then go out and buy the ingredients, and cook it. I’m not a spontaneous cook. I can’t say, well, I have beans and eggplant and zucchini, I’ll make a vegetable stew with them. Well, I guess I can say that. But I’d rather find a recipe for a bean/eggplant/zucchini stew, because experience has taught me that a reliable recipe is probably better than whatever I’m going to make up off the top of my head (I’m a pretty boring recipe-inventor, and also always add too much oil if I don’t have a recipe to keep me in check). Wilson Farm has recipe print-outs that you can pick up, and they included a free cookbook with the first CSA share pick-up, but a lot of the recipes they make available call for extra ingredients (including additional vegetables!) that weren’t actually in my share and that I probably don’t have at home, so they’re not that useful (at least not to me).

(Fortunately, Wilson Farm posts the week’s share contents on their website the day before you pick it up. It’s subject to change at the last minute, but it’s usually roughly accurate, and immensely helpful in menu planning, so that I don’t have to pick up my share on Tuesday and then go to another grocery store on Wednesday once I’ve seen what I’m getting, found some recipes, and figured out which additional ingredients I need.)

I have been making pesto with the massive amounts of basil we’re getting, and putting it in the freezer. But a CSA share isn’t really great for “putting up” food. For one thing, there’s all that lettuce. For another, although you get too much food each week, you don’t actually get enough for it to be practical to freeze, can or pickle it. I’m just not going to freeze two pounds of beans, or pickle 3 beets.

Oddly, if we were getting fewer vegetables for the price we paid, I wouldn’t feel like we were getting a very good deal. I wonder if it would make sense for farms to start offering quarter-shares. The most common complaint I hear from friends in CSAs is that they can’t manage to eat so many vegetables, so I think there would be a demand for it (assuming it was half the price of a half-share, and it wasn’t all lettuce). Or, if Donald and I could find another couple to split our weekly take with, or maybe even 1 other person … we are actually getting through everything in our share each week, except for the lettuce, but just barely.

So, I might just not be the best person for a vegetable CSA (the meat CSA is easier, because everything is frozen when you pick it up, and then you have plenty of time to figure out over the next several days what you’re going to do with it all). It’s been a really good experience, and has encouraged (nay, forced!) me to cook more seasonally. I still look to cookbooks for inspiration, but at least now I’m saying, “Okay, I need a recipe with beets or zucchini; butternut squash soup can wait until fall.” I’m sure I can continue to do this sort of thing even if I don’t also have beans, eggplant, cucumbers and basil to deal with.

A friend of mine said that she had tried a CSA in the past, but been similarly defeated. She started thinking how great it would be if she could just go each week and buy only the amount of vegetables that she actually needed … and then realized that she had just invented the grocery store.

But what am I saying: “It’s been a really good experience”? Ha! It’s Week 8 of 20. We’re not even halfway there.

It’s been almost a month since Donald and I got back from our honeymoon, and I’m just getting around to blogging about it now. Donald has already written about it here and here.

In case you haven’t read Donald’s posts, I should start off by saying that we took an overnight flight to Rome from Boston on Tuesday (May 10th), and arrived in Rome early Wednesday morning. I think Donald may have gotten a bit of sleep on the flight over, but I didn’t.

We spent 7 nights in Rome, staying at the Hotel San Pietrino in the Prati neighborhood of Rome, north of the Vatican. I liked the location, as it was far enough away from the Vatican that it wasn’t crowded and touristy. There was a great coffee shop across the street where I could have my morning espresso or cappucino and a pastry, and a gelato shop a few doors down. I found the hotel in the Lonely Planet guidebook, and I agree with the authors that it was “a fabulous choice”, but have to disagree most strenuously about the “comfortable beds”. I don’t think I’ve slept in a harder bed since my trip to Japan, where I mostly slept on not-very-thick futons on the floor. Donald liked that the hotel had wi-fi.

We ate lunch at a place called Hostaria dei Bastioni, just outside the Vatican walls. In fact, you can see the walls in this picture, behind Donald.

You can see the walls on the right-hand side of the picture, across the street from the restaurant

The restaurant was okay, but nothing special. Despite what Donald implies in his post, I don’t insist on eating only at restaurants I found in a guidebook. I do think it’s good to have a destination in mind when you’re going out to eat in a strange place; then, if you find something that looks better along the way, you can go there instead. Also, if you’re in a very touristy area where most of the restaurants have big menus out front in 4 different languages, it can be good to know where else to go instead. Restaurants in Rome can also be kind of expensive, so the guidebook was helpful in identifying places that were more moderately priced, since I kind of wanted to have a reasonably decent sit-down meal at least once a day, rather than just grabbing pizza or a sandwich whenever we got hungry, and Donald kind of wanted to not spend over a hundred dollars on each of these meals.

In any case, I did find this lunch restaurant in the Frommer’s guidebook, which tends to have better restaurant recommendations than Lonely Planet, though they’re still kind of hit or miss, especially in the “inexpensive” category.

Speaking of guidebooks, this was my first international vacation since getting a Kindle, so instead of lugging around big paper guidebooks (or photocopying selected pages), I bought both the Frommer’s and Lonely Planet guides for the Kindle. The Kindle editions are definitely better than trying to carry around a thick guidebook when you’re already trying to find room in your purse for a bottle of water, a camera, a wallet, a wrap for the evening in case it gets cold, and maybe an umbrella, and your husband doesn’t want to carry any more of your stuff in his backpack. However, the maps in the Lonely Planet guidebook are completely useless in the e-book edition, whereas they’re somewhat useful in the paper books (you still need to buy a more detailed map of whatever city you’re in, especially if it’s a city like Rome with confusing streets). Of course, the Frommer’s maps are useless even in the paper edition, so no change there. The Lonely Planet e-book is better organized overall (the Frommer’s doesn’t even have a Table of Contents! For shame!). But I found myself using the Frommer’s more, not just for restaurants, but also for more useful and detailed information about various attractions. (Lonely Planet is better for hotels though, if you like to stay at cheaper places like we do.)

After lunch we went to the Pantheon.

You can't see the dome part too well from here

The streets around here are very narrow and confusing, and very crowded, as this is the historic city center, full of tourist attractions. On my last trip to Rome, I spent quite a bit of time wandering around in this area, getting lost, seeing whatever I happened to come across. But Donald’s not quite as much of a fan of wandering aimlessly through strange cities, so we didn’t do that as often on this trip.

We had walked to the Pantheon from our hotel, but on the way back we decided to take the metro. I dragged Donald past the Trevi Fountain on our way to the metro. It was sort of on the way. And it’s famous.

The famous Trevi Fountain

For dinner, we went to another restaurant I found in the Frommer’s guidebook, this one a Sicilian place called Sicilia in Bocca (which I think means something like “Sicily in the mouth”). I had a fava bean and greens soup, which I liked, and something else I can’t remember. Donald had a seafood salad, and then beef rolls (thin slices of beef that were breaded, fried, and rolled around a filling). I liked the food here a lot better than at the place next to the Vatican. It was also more expensive, even though it was listed in the “Inexpensive” section of the Frommer’s guidebook.

On our walk back to the hotel, I noticed a nearby pizzeria that looked good, and made a note of it for future evenings, even though it wasn’t in the guidebook.

This may have been an ambitious schedule for our first day in Rome, with almost no sleep the night before. But the next day would be even more tiring.

(to be continued)

I recently bought this cookbook. It’s a gorgeous hardcover with a colorful cover, and many beautiful pictures of delicious-looking food inside. It was an impulse purchase. I’d been shopping for a dress for my wedding (yes, yes, the store at which I purchased the cookbook also sold dresses!), and the book was just so lovely, and the recipes sounded so good (at least to read about) that I just couldn’t resist.

The gimmick for this one is that it’s divided into 4 chapters, one for each season, and the recipes in each chapter feature foods that are at their peak in that season (at least, in the northeastern US; the author is based in New York City). Within each chapter, there’s a 2-page spread highlighting what’s best this time of year, then a section for seasonal cocktails, one for appetizers, one for main courses, one for desserts, and one for breakfast foods (also a couple of sample menus at the end of each chapter).

First off, I love that it includes seasonal cocktails, and most of them sound very tasty. Though the only one I’ve made so far, the rhubarb mule (a Moscow mule with the addition of sweetened rhubarb puree), was WAY sweeter than it needed to be. I made it a second time with extra lime juice, and it was still too sweet. There’s a preponderance of vodka cocktails, as well, which suggests that the recipes are tailored to the palates of those who like the idea of fancy drinks, but don’t actually enjoy the taste of alcohol. But I should try more of his recipes before I judge. Also, the author seems to feel the need to give a shout-out to every brand of premium vodka currently on the market. There are three vodka cocktails in the Spring chapter, and each one suggests a different brand of top-shelf vodka. I mean, really? Do you even need top-shelf vodka when you’re drowning out whatever flavor there is with fruit juice and sugar? Maybe I’m just not a vodka connoisseur, but I made the rhubarb mule with Level vodka one time, and Skyy another, and really couldn’t tell the difference.

The only other recipes I’ve tried so far are “Mammy Louisette’s Ginger-Rhubarb Tart” and “Vermont Double Cream Ice Cream” (vanilla ice-cream with extra egg yolks and creme fraiche). The ice-cream is quite delicious. It seems pretty hard, but this is the first time I’ve made ice-cream at the new apartment, so I don’t know whether that’s the recipe or our freezer. I wasn’t quite as happy with the tart, but I think that might have been my fault. It had a puff pastry crust, and the center never baked through, even though the edges would have scorched had I left it in for longer. I think I wasn’t as careful as I should have been, though, scooping the sweetened and flavored rhubarb into the crust, and I added too much liquid. I also think the crust wasn’t cold enough when it went into the oven. That might be partly the fault of the recipe, though. It says to put the puff pastry in the tart pan, then chill for 30 minutes, then add the fruit, fold over the edges, and bake. My timing was a little off, because Donald needed the oven for French fries at the 30 minute mark. However, there’s no way, after 30 minutes in the freezer, that those rock solid pastry edges are going to fold over. Even after putting it in the fridge for a bit, they were still quite hard. I had to bring it out to room temperature for a while to soften them up enough. However, it might have been a good idea to stick it back in the freezer for a few minutes after I’d added the rhubarb and folded the edges over, because that might have kept the juices from soaking through the center of the tart as much.

I do want to make other recipes in this book. However, it does seem to me that most of them are fancy dinner party food, and not really all that useful for helping me figure out what to do with all my CSA vegetables. Many of the recipes would just take far too long (and this is saying a lot, if you know how much time I typically spend cooking already). I mean, I just don’t have time to make “Aromatic Stuffed Suckling Pig” on a Wednesday night after work.

Which brings me to another issue with this book. I’m an adventurous cook and grocery shopper, and I live in a major urban center in the United States. And a good number of these recipes call for ingredients that I don’t know how to get. Fresh porcini mushrooms? I’ve never seen fresh porcini mushrooms at a store in Boston. Ditto veal sweetbreads. Not to mention suckling pig. Maybe I could order suckling pig from a butcher. But, seasonal or no, these are just not common ingredients. Huckleberries? I don’t think I’ve ever seen fresh huckleberries for sale even at Russo’s. I think you have to live in New York City to make a lot of these recipes.

I probably sound pretty negative about this cookbook, but I should also confess that I spend a lot of time reading it, and trying to convince myself that the recipes wouldn’t be that much work to prepare. They just sound that delicious! Maybe for a dinner party sometime….

The best part, though, is Rachael Ray’s blurb on the back cover, which refers to the recipes as “simple preparations and easy ideas.” Which might tell you all you need to know about Rachael Ray’s so-called 30 Minute Meals.

I used to be afraid of eggnog when I was younger. I don’t like either eggs or milk, and as I’m sure you’re all aware, both feature quite prominently. You can get soy eggnog these days, but I doubt that it’s the same thing. And I have weird food issues. Bananas, for instance. My hatred of bananas is, I am certain, more psychological than anything else, and many people (including Donald, who also doesn’t like bananas) have told me that plantains taste nothing like bananas. People who do like bananas say that plantains are gross, and that they taste nothing like bananas. And yet, I can’t bring myself to try one, because they look like bananas.

Eggnog was always the same. I liked chocolate milk, because the chocolate overwhelms the milk flavor. But eggnog? How could it not taste like egg? It says “egg” right in the name!

As I’ve gotten more and more into old-school cocktails, though, I have–cautiously, at first–extended my experiments to cocktails including raw egg. Initially I only tried the ones that used egg white but no yolk (such as the pisco sour, or Ramos gin fizz). Gradually, I worked up my courage enough to try the flip and the coffee cocktail, with their generous portions of whole egg. And you know what? You really can’t taste the egg. Honestly. They’re good cocktails. The egg adds richness and body, but it’s not gross and slimy. Or “eggy”. Not at all. And so, only in the past year or so, I’ve been able to ignore that word “egg” in the name of that favorite seasonal libation, and bring myself to drink eggnog.

Everything is better with alcohol, right?

Last night my roommates and I decided to have a pajama party. It’s sort of a running joke with us. One of my roommates was at a party where she overheard some women talking about an imaginary reality TV show they’d like to see, spoofing “Rock of Love”. From what I understand (I’ve never watched it), “Rock of Love” is about these women who go around bar-hopping trying to pick up random guys? Anyway, the joke was that there should be a show called “Cock Block of Love”, about women who are in their pajamas and ready for bed by 10 pm each night, and my roommate, who was eavesdropping, thought to herself, “Hey! That sounds like our apartment!”

Then, one of us found a retro card with the cover of a 1960s pulp fiction novel called “Pajama Party”, showing three women in various states of pajama-cladness, drinking cocktails and the tag line “Five campus cuties on a no-holds-barred spree!” (I guess they couldn’t fit enough skin on the cover if they put all five of the cuties in the picture? I don’t know.) Of course, the three of us tend to spend most of our time at home reading, writing, playing classical music, or studying; but we do sometimes enjoy a round of cocktails together in our pajamas. So we couldn’t resist putting the card up on our fridge. And we started talking about how we should have a real pajama party. Where we would stay up and eat junk food and watch chick flicks and paint our toenails. And drink cocktails, of course. Since it was mid-December by the time we got around to it, we decided that the most appropriate cocktail was eggnog.

I used the eggnog recipe in Dale DeGroff’s excellent book The Essential Cocktail: 3 eggs, 2 cups whole milk, 1 cup heavy cream, 1/2 cup sugar, 2 oz bourbon, 2 oz rum, freshly grated nutmeg. This was actually only half the recipe, which was supposed to serve 6. I suppose the amount I made does serve 3, if everyone wants seconds. And thirds. And maybe fourths. (If you divide the total amount of alcohol by 3, it is actually less alcohol per person than a typical serving size of alcohol; way more calories and cholesterol, though!)

How festive!

The pumpkin pie was made by my roommate Aubrey. We were supposed to eat it (or at least some of it) at the pajama party, but we felt too full after drinking all that eggnog! Ditto on the popcorn we’d been planning to make. So we’ll have to try the pumpkin pie today! Looks good, though, doesn’t it?

Clearly Dale DeGroff has been consulting with Rachael Ray on portion size

This is what was left in the bowl (of the theoretical 3 servings) after ladling out an initial cup for everyone.

It was very tasty, almost like a cold latte, with a liquid layer and a thick foam on top (I beat the egg whites separately and folded them in at the end). You couldn’t taste the eggs or milk at all!

We exchanged gifts, only I, um, hadn’t gotten around to buying any yet. (There’s still time!) Cory got me Ted Haigh’s book Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, which is very awesome. I’d never even heard of many of these cocktails, and some of the ingredients are almost impossible to find, which is my favorite sort of recipe! And Aubrey got me a beautiful mortar and pestle. I don’t know what I’m going to get for them, now–the bar is set pretty high!

As far as our pajama party went, we watched the movie “Love, Actually”, which I’d never seen (though they had). It was good, though Donald and I had just seen the new Harry Potter movie the day before, and they have some of the same actors, which is always weird.

We didn’t have enough energy for any of our other grand ambitions for the pajama party, like home pedicures or crank-calling Donald upstairs. When the movie was over, we concluded that the best part of a pajama party is getting to go straight to bed afterwards without even having to change.