Chevre Disaster

This made me think I could make goat cheese:

This made me realize I could not:

 

Let me back up. Just before Christmas, I got a Food52 Shop email hawking

the Belle Chevre goat cheese box. It would be a fun activity for Dixon and I

to do together, I thought. He likes science. Cheese-making is kind of science.

 

So I bought the box and gave it to him for Christmas. Then I ordered the milk from

Atwaters (who couldn't have been nicer) and last Sunday, he and I set about

making some goat cheese.

 

According to the instructions, it's as easy as adding some citric acid to milk,

then heating it up.

 

You're supposed to heat it to 185 (they even give you a thermometer),

stirring continuously, then let it sit for 10 minutes.

 

After that, you pour the liquid into a cheesecloth-lined bowl, where

you let it sit for a bit longer, then you strain out the liquid.

 

Except for me, at that point, it was still all liquid.

 

And it remained that way.

 

Maybe I heated the milk too quickly?

That's the only thing I could've done incorrectly.

 

Oh - and fun family activity? HAHAHAHAHAHA.

 

After about 30 seconds, Dixon's arm hurt from stirring,

so he asked if he could go back downstairs to play video games.

 

Sigh.

 

At least Cooper helped.

 

Helped me make a big bowl of hot, acidic goat's milk, that is.

Jane Jetson's Kitchen

You know what? I'm actually glad I don't live in "the future" as it was seen through the eyes of 1955.

Don't get me wrong: flying cars would be cool. But it seems that everybody in the '50s was so obsessed with time-saving and efficiency that they didn't realize that maybe, we'd actually want to spend time on certain activities. Like cooking.

I've written here before about the evolution of cooking from chore to hobby - which had something to do with time-saving techniques that allowed women to get out of the kitchen at least some of the time. Based on this Popular Science slideshow of "kitchens of the future," the real attitudinal shift - when people started thinking of cooking as fun - didn't happen until well after the mid-20th century.

The kitchen above was designed in the mid-50's and it takes efficiency to a whole new level. The idea was that with the push of just one button, an entire meal - seasoned and all - will be prepared. No need for Wifey to toil away over the stove. Now she's got more time for vacuuming and hospital corners (or martinis).

Do I want it? No. Does it represent a time and a place I'm glad I don't live in? Yes. But am I so, so glad that scanners were invented so that we can preserve it? Absolutely. It's a pretty great reminder that when my grandmother was making dinner, it was a much bigger pain than it is for me today.

Plus, even if the actual technology behind the kitchen misses a few late 20th century trends, I'll tell you what I do like: that mid-century aesthetic. Look at those cabinets and all that stainless steel. Why, it looks like...my kitchen.

Great Grapes Recap: The Photos

Great Grapes was this weekend - the wine tasting event at Oregon Ridge that also featured a bacon-themed blogger cookoff, pitting me against Kathy (aka the Minx) and John (the Baltimore Snacker). It was a hot day - kind of miserably hot - but we were lucky enough to be under a pavilion, which kept us a little cooler.

The cookoff didn't have many rules, but we did have to use bacon in our dish. Oh, and no nudity, which was probably for the best, what with all that bacon grease flying around.

During my planning process, I asked a few people what their favorite bacony foods are. More than one (including one Bill "Big G" Kelly, aka Alicia's dad) mentioned that bacon is best when its simply tucked inside a BLT. That was it - my inspiration.

Because food always tastes better to me when I know it's story (and because I love infographics), I did a little research on the BLT and ended up making a timeline for the judges:

The timeline was paired with a copy of my menu:I'll post the recipes, one by one, during the week. Nothing was hard to make and I ended up really happy with how all of it tasted. The sweet BLT, in particular, was kind of delicious. Plus, after the contest, back at home, I made appetizer-sized, open-faced portions of the sweet and savory BLTs - both a success.

And the vodka...it is good.

Now, on to the real pictures. Here I am, hard at work, pouring bacon grease into my little espresso can: Greg Nivens, the organizer of the Great Grapes events, was the event emcee (along with Dara). To say he's a fan of bacon would be, well, mild. I think it must be where he gets his energy and larger than life personality - he's great. Here, he's explaining to the audience that no one should ever, ever throw away bacon grease. It's just too good.

Here, the judges - Bernadette Woods and Jessica Kartalija from WJZ (who were both cuter than cute in real life) and Hugh Sisson from Clipper City Brewery and Heavy Seas Beer - deliberate over the dishes:We were rated on taste/flavor (50%), presentation (25%) and creativity (25%). I'm sure that it was a difficult decision, too, because everything I tasted was excellent.

And...the dishes. Kathy (with help from her husband/sous chef Neal) made a BLT banh mi:

Her sandwich was gorgeous - really bright and fresh-looking - and had nicely balanced spice.

John made an Ethiopian dish - bacon and pancetta wot - which had fantastic flavor (great heat) and was totally new to me. He drove all the way to Silver Spring to make sure he had the best bread for the dish - that's commitment: He's already posted the recipe on his blog.

And then there was my plate:

Yes, there is a lot going on. As I said, though, I was really happy with the flavors, which is what's most important, as far as I'm concerned.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of the Bloody Mary's...they looked like Bloody Mary's. But the smoky bacon flavor of the vodka really does come through.

So, in the end...I WON! It was a pretty exciting moment for me, especially since I really had no expectations going into the event. I just wanted to have fun.

Also, I owe a big thanks to my sister, Erin, and her friends LP and Kathleen, who helped me lug the entire contents of my kitchen up to the pavilion and back, and who took a million pictures (including these) because I couldn't. I wouldn't have won without them. I wouldn't have finished without them. Hell, I probably wouldn't have been able to start without them. Also thank you to Cooper for tasting everything (and getting to the event in time to help pack the car back up) and Alicia for doing last minute tasting and advising.

So that was Great Grapes. After the cookoff, Cooper and Erin/LP/Kathleen and I did a little wine tasting and a lot of wilting in the heat, then we headed back to Towson to catch the tail end of the USA-England game, which the county broadcast outside in a courtyard:

It was a fun event, but, again, so hot. After the game, I wasn't sorry to retreat to my air conditioned kitchen, where we ate bacony leftovers and pizza, and passed some time the way we usually do, staring at baby Maggie:

By 9 p.m., we were all settling in for the night and starting off for bed. It was a long, exhausting, hot day, but so much fun from start to finish. Kathy and John were great competitors and I had a blast!

Cooking Lessons

Last weekend, I (finally) had my first cooking lesson with my friend Jen - though it was sort of off the cuff. A couple of months ago, Jen asked me to help her learn how to cook. She's been working full-time with a long commute for years, but this week she is finally going part-time...so she'll have more time to cook. Right now, she has a couple of trusty staples she can make well, but she's looking for more.

I decided to start at the beginning with her, and I'm putting together a little guide to help her figure out what she needs in her pantry, what she should look for when she's shopping (what to buy at different stores, the best brands, etc.) and tips to help her figure out what to have for dinner on any given night. Plus recipes, of course.

In my experience, the worst thing about not knowing how to cook is not being able to figure out what to have for dinner every night. I used to dread that decision making process. Once I learned how to think about ingredients and flavors and cooking methods, though, I began to enjoy deciding what to make for dinner. All it took was a little experience. I'm hoping to give Jen shortcuts to get past the struggle.

When she asked me to work with her on her cooking, Jen specifically asked me to teach her how to make my enchiladas. She looooves Mexican food and they'd be a good fit into her repertoire, anyway. Plus, they're, um, not complicated. I don't make my own sauces or anything - all I do is poach some chicken, shred it then saute it with scallions (or red onions) and chopped chiles and El Paso taco seasoning. I fill tortillas with the chicken mixture and shredded "Mexican" cheese, top it all with Ortega enchilada sauce and more cheese, and stick it in the oven. Seriously, so much of the shopping is taken care of in the "international foods" aisle of Giant...it's kind of an embarrassing recipe.

Over the weekend, I felt like making enchiladas, so it seemed like a good idea to invite Jen over to help (and to eat). While this was a spur-of-the-moment lesson and it wasn't nearly as hands-on as future lessons will be (plus, my little cookbook/guide isn't finished yet), I hope Jen got something out of the whole experience. Something besides dinner. She did ask a lot of questions, so that's good!

Our plan is to have two more hands-on lessons, then I'll be releasing Jen into the wilds of the kitchen and grocery store on her own.

Somehow I'm pretty sure she'll make it.

Trendy Monday: Still a Culture of Lifestyle

Last night, I finally finished The United States of Arugula. What a really, really good book. I am wildly jealous of the talent and store of knowledge posessed by its author, David Kamp.

As I mentioned last week, Kamp addresses the rise of the concept of "lifestyle" in the mid-seventies. Towards the end of the book, he brings the subject up again, noting a resurgence in "lifestyle" as an important entity (of course I can't find the exact quote this morning). It was interesting to me to read about a "resurgence" - since I didn't realize that "lifestyle" ever left, at least as a marketing tool.

But then I thought about it a bit. Over the weekend, my parents and Tom and Cail and Erin came up to celebrate my dad's birthday. My dad didn't want to actually sit down to eat, so he suggested we have a bunch of appetizers instead. My mom brought some pate she got from a new shop in Severna Park, and I made scallops wrapped in bacon, mussels in a red sauce (that I'll write about later - I'll be reviewing the book they were in), my go-to potato chips with chevre, red pepper jelly and bacon, and the usual cheese and crackers.

At one point, the conversation turned to the difference between how I cook and how my mom cooks. Cail is also into food, and she has her own, third way of cooking, but it's probably more like mine than my mom', and I think that's a generational thing.

My mom learned to cook not from her mom (who is really good at making reservations) but, like many women her age, from Julia. Her copies of the Mastering the Art of French Cooking books are worn down, dog-eared and faded. She didn't spend her early years slaving over aspics and terrines, but there's something about the way she cooks and what she cooks that owes and obvious debt to Child. It's difficult to describe, but I think there's an emphasis on process and product that she may not have had if she'd learned to cook today.

Not that I reject process or end product, but I think that I could be described as more of a lifestyle cook than my mother (even though I use a lot of her recipes). Certainly today there's more of an emphasis on the original ingredient, and the way you shop has everything to do with lifestyle.

But beyond that, I think there's a different emphasis on how the food comes to the table. I'm having a hard time articulating this, but with lifestyle cooking, the way things look matter, as does they way they're eaten. Making dinner starts at the store and it ends with cute placemats from Crate & Barrel that match the teakettle that matches the art on the walls. And this, on a random Tuesday.

I think, maybe, the cooking process used to be more compartmentalized and today, it has more flow. Not surprisingly, really, when you consider the way the compartments have broken down across our lives. I work from home, stealing a couple of minutes here and there to edit copy or do some research analysis, all while Dixon's playing or napping (and, of course, while I blog).

We live fluidly, so why shouldn't we cook the same way?

I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with this, except to say that I've been thinking about it. I'll end, though, on a more practical note. I've got a couple of big posts coming up - some book reviews and an essay I've been working on for a bit. Unfortunately, sometime during the night on Saturday, my laptop decided it had had enough of this world. Right now I'm writing on Cooper's computer, while Best Buy transfers my old hard drive to the new computer I bought yesterday. So I don't think I'll be doing a whole lot of posting until I get the new computer back - I just don't work well on a non-laptop.

Not fluid enough, I guess. Too compartmentalized.

Valentine's Dinner Recap

So...meh.

Dinner was OK. Salads were, of course, fine. Nothing surprising. Bread was good. The bittersweet chocolate tasting for dessert was totally good, if the presentation left a little to be desired (Cooper was all: "That's it? Candy bars?").

But the truffles, you ask. How were the truffles?

The truffles themselves were entirely unremarkable. They had very little flavor and, call me a philistine, but they were a little gritty for me. They weren't fresh, but they were packed in a very small glass jar with a vacuum-sealed lid and the seller had great feedback on Amazon (not that I think it was the seller's fault).

I sliced them and tossed them with pasta with an outrageously simple but rich Rocchetto sauce (which was pretty good), then drizzled a tiny bit of black truffle oil over the top of each of our plates. As bland as the actual truffles were, the oil was equally pungent and intense. Talk about heady.

The end result was a dish of nicely cooked tagliatelle tossed with a sauce that was so overwhelmingly rich that I couldn't even finish it. The combination of the cheese and truffle oil was over the top - just too much.

So...now I've tried it. Also, now I know exactly how strong my truffle oil is. (Cooper gave me tiny bottles of white and black truffle oil for my birthday. I think they each may last for years.)

Plus, Valentine's Day is really about the company, not the food. Right? Right?

Dictionary Friday: Emulsion

Like last week, from The Food Snob's Dictionary:

Emulsion
Tricky to execute mixture of two unblendable liquids that must be achieved by slowly adding droplets of one liquid into another while vigorously stirring or whisking. Though emulsions have been commonplace in cooking (in such forms as mayonnaise and hollandaise sauce), the word itself started appearing on menus only as of teh 1980s, when show-offy chefs with fusion pretensions became fond of recklessly combining unorthodox ingredients. Tuna tartare with daikon "chips" and yuzu-grapeseed oil emulsion, $26.95.

Chosen only because I am feeling tired and uninspired...and because I really do make a nice hollandaise, if I do say so myself. I use our blender - an Oster that used to belong to either my parents or Cooper's - it's got to be close to 30 years old. It's awesome. And I shock myself with my patience when I add the butter to the egg mixture. I produce something with a really great texture and I am remarkably consistent.

It's like my best show-offy go-to. And it's a good thing I have it, too, because I also have a lot of disasters in the kitchen.

Speaking of, more on last night's dinner later. It wasn't a disaster, but it certainly wasn't a masterpiece, either. Good thing we both went into it thinking "experiment"...

"Cooking for Fun"

In this week's New York Times Magazine, Freakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner take on an interesting subject: why has today's middle and upper class adopted as hobbies activities that our great- or great-great-grandparents did their best to phase out. The three big ones: gardening, knitting and, of course, "cooking for fun".

The authors, of course, provide their uber-smart economists take on the subject - they decide that it comes down to personal choice. I like to cook because I can choose not to cook if I don't want to, and Cooper and Dixon and I wouldn't starve.

What the authors don't touch on, though, and maybe it's a little "soft" for them, is that one thing that knitting, cooking and gardening all have in common is an emotional benefit. I would argue (without having any research at all to back it up) that emotional benefits are more closely tied to societal perceptions than other types of benefits might be (such as economic or physical benefits). Because our emotions are influenced and created by a zillion unseen societal and personal forces, emotional benefits are likely to shift over time.

And that's almost definitely the case with cooking. The sense of satisfaction in creativity that I get when I cook is directly related to the value that society places on gourmetish cooking. Right now, society happens to consider cooking cool and trendy and creative and worthwhile (as evidenced by the development of a whole bunch of cooking-related reality shows. Just kidding. Sort of.)

Anyway, it's a worthwhile article, and a short one. I love those Freakonomics guys.

Why

Erin, from A Dress A Day, writes a beautiful post today. She describes in obviously loving detail exactly why she sews:

My answer to "why", I realized, is not JUST because I'm a raging control freak who needs to be personally responsible for everything I put on my body, either in termsof creation or collation, but also because I love the way it feels to sew.
That's right. Sewing feels good. It feels good in the same sensual, atavistic way that holding a just-bathed baby feels good, and it feels good in the same disembodied, intellectual way that writing a computer program feels good.

Replace "sewing" with "cooking" and I could've written those sentences (especially the part about being a raging control freak). This, of course, is further evidence backing my belief that there's very little difference between most connoisseurs - even casual enthusiasts - with interests in sensory hobbies. Food, art, fashion, music. It's all the same in the end: sensual, intellectual, and good-feeling.

The Selfish Cook

I believe I’ve mentioned here before that, through past research and more recent observations, I’ve realized that people who love to cook fall into two utterly distinct categories. For the first, the people who love cooking because they love providing for and taking care of others, an audience is an absolutely necessary ingredient for gratification. You just can’t take care of someone who’s not there.

But for the second, those selfish cooks who do it for the love of the process and for the food itself, someone to cook for is merely icing on the proverbial cake. Again, as I have mentioned before, I am one of these cooks. The selfish sort.

Sure, it’s always wonderful to hear about what a good cook I am, or how beautifully my table’s been set, but really, the rush I get from cooking peaks before any guest has a chance to comment on my creation. Just before, in fact. At the final moment I am in the kitchen, after I’ve plated the food, arranging it in artful, yet uncontrived, and always aesthetically pleasing jumbles on my pristine white plates. That last second I’m alone, before the meal shifts from personal to social. That is when the endorphins are highest. As much as I love sitting around a dinner table, drinking wine, talking and eating, it’s the moments just before, effort expended, next minutes filled with potential, that make entertaining worth it.

The Transcendental Qualities of Cooking

Yesterday morning, I read this post by Richard Lawrence Cohen. It's very moving, an honest essay about the nature of his family, and his resulting feelings about success and failure in work (among other things). It's the kind of post some readers will immediately identify with, having blinding insights about their own families.

I am not one of those readers. My family is not anything like RLC's - thank God. But I had a blinding flash nonetheless.

RLC introduces a concept he gleaned from a book of folklore, that of instrumental life vs. transcendent life. The author of the book states that most people (RLC's family being the exception) live most of their lives instrumentally - doing what they do to live - but reserve a part of their lives for transcendent activity. This could be anything that makes your life a little bit better - anything inherently aspirational. For some, it's reading and bettering their minds. For some, it's perfecting their bodies. For some, it's decorating their homes.

For me, it's cooking.

The other day, I wrote about the role cooking plays in my life, and in the lives of other people who love to cook. It's an interesting topic to think about, and one that I happen to know firsthand many companies research extensively. There's tension around cooking, in part because it's something that everybody does, but not everybody does it the same way.

For many people, cooking is a chore - a burden. For some, it's a labor of love. And for some, it's much more personal, almost selfish. I am in the last group. Cooking is inherently a part of the instrumental life - it is literally something humans must do to survive. But for me, it's so, so much more than that. It's aspirational, even when I'm screwing it up. As I put together a beautiful, hopefully delicious meal, I subconsciously (or maybe consciously, since I'm writing about it) raise expectations for myself, and for those I'm cooking for. I strive to become worthy of the meal I create.

People like me are in the minority - we're a smallish segment of the entire population (this I know based on my aforementioned firsthand experience with the research.) Often, I think, we're misunderstood. People who don't feel this way about cooking just can't imagine why we'd rather cook all the food for a party of 100, when we could just have it catered.

But I also think that our kind might be growing. The culture of celebrity chef these days suggests that there's at least a sizable group of people who'd like to be foodies, even if they're not quite there yet. I know I'm not the only one out there who hopes to morph into Barefoot.

Mmmm...a little philosophy does help post-Thanksgiving turkey-and-oyster withdrawal, huh?

And I Thought I Slaved over the Stove

I found a lot interesting about this Ad Age Online article (I wrote about some marketing-related thoughts here). But one point stood out above all the others: apparently in the 1920s and 30s, women spent an average of 30 to 42 hours a week preparing food for their families.

Now, I cook a lot. A lot more than most people (especially most people my age). I'm home during the day. I have the luxury of time. But 30 to 42 hours a week? Does that include selecting and butchering livestock or something?

I'm probably just not grateful enough for all of the luxuries the modern kitchen has to offer, like microwaves and KitchenAid mixers. But I don't even use tons of pre-prepared foods, or fancy tools (much of my prep and cooking is done with one big knife and a saute pan.) Yet even if I cooked a pretty involved meal every night, and cooked breakfast, and made a real lunch, the longest I can imagine spending in the kitchen is about 4 hours a day (and that's a stretch). And if I cooked that much, Cooper and I would both be the size of a house.

Whew. 30 to 42 hours. I can't imagine I'd like cooking nearly as much if it was that much of a job.