Priscilla

These recent asparagus menus are the kind of thing upon one could solely subsist, subsist solely, seems to me. 90-degree Sunday of working around the homestead. A restorative coupla icy Salty Dogs, as chicken halves which had been salted and peppered and left to sit around in the fridge for two days after the Zuni Cafe method finished slowly cooking over hardwood charcoal in the old Weber. Room temp chicken, big crunchy icy iceberg salad with creamy ranch-type dressing and copious cracked pepper. LBB sourdough bread, saltylicious Tillamook butter. Korbel brut rose, icy.

Joey Madison or WoodleyGrrl, or others, do you have any specifics on pay and benefit disparity between W-M and Target, other than the anecdotal? Are Target employees unionized? (Edited to ask about unionization.)

Somehow Target and Costco have been given a pass on such scrutiny. And yet, the aforementioned dread Horizon milk is found at Costco, a company whose buyers are certainly ruthless on their price point and supply demands. I would imagine Target's are no different. Are Target's employees paid more than Wal-Mart's? And do they all, even part-timers, have company-paid health insurance? A lot of the anti-Wal-Mart agitation is classism. I fail to see how shopping at Target or Costco is more pure or noble than shopping at Wal-Mart.

I bought this book when it came out because there was such a good section on Laduree, including (serendipitously) their recipe for financiers, plus beautiful evocatively you-are-there photographs of the tea salon itself. And the pain de mie recipe in the book, from Max Poilane, was for years my go-to pain de mie. Has a lot to offer, this book does -- I am glad to have it brought back to the fore.

What a run of wonderful dinners. Highly inspirational. (Helena we had moules recently too, marineres, with a hit of reduced cream.) Last evening, boneless-skinlesses which had been marinating a day or so in our fave Middle Eastern spice packet mix, with the addition of olive oil, grilled over hardwood charcoal. Nice small zucchini sliced and grilled, dressed with olive oil and vinegar. Served with loads of FoodMan's taratoor sauce (so good -- finally the right one!) and rice with vermicelli. Again, finally the just the right version of this staple dish. (These links are to Recipe Gullet, but I think both dishes appeared in FoodMan's eGCI course on Lebanese cuisine.) And a flatbread I'd made the other day -- with which the taratoor was also stupendous.

Got a flat of strawberries, which will be prepped and left overnight for preserve-making tomorrow.

Sounds just about right, Basilgirl. Rigatoni with Ragu Bolognese (from Marcella's recipe as per usual), splash of cream. Big old Romaine salad dressed with olive oil and red wine vinegar. Foccacia baked with crunchy salt on top. Cheap not-bad red wine.

At St. Vincent de Paul the other day with but a mere moment's perusal I added to the Modern Library shelf a beeyootiful dust-jacketed Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. This is relevant because as a result of having given the books a glance at all I also quickly amassed four cookbooks, including the robust La Cuisine by Raymond Oliver, which I have been curious about for years, and here it was for 99 cents. Yesterday, blowing through the Friends of the Library room, the nice volunteer on duty turned out to be a neighbor who recognized me as belonging to my child, and I recognized her as the owner of a very refined Palomino horse and a very handsome Anatolian dog and a very cute tortoiseshell cat. Also I scored a very groovy Peter Max vegetarian cookbook, which I hastened to pay 50 cents for because I love Peter Max. So that's five accidentally, and then there's one on purpose, Chuck Williams's Celebrating the Pleasures of Cooking, which is strangely not releated to the Cuisinart mag with the quite similar name MtheC wrote about in TDG, but is a chronicle of his life's interest in food and cookery, since even before he founded Williams-Sonoma. So that makes six.

Last evening an excellent pizza topped with ingredients which the day had been made into Caprese salad. The basil was made into pesto, however, for the pizza; tomatoes sliced thinly, fresh mozz sliced thickly. Exceptionally nice salad mix salad. Just the thing.

I didn't use pecans, in deference to my 13-year-old chocolate cake consumer, who prefers no nuts interrupting his enjoyment of baked goods. (Not against nuts categorically.)

OK, I have made the cake twice. It's it, the one, all right. Excellent! Half batches each time, baked in a pan that is about 11" x 7". Used Dutch-process cocoa. Frosting cocoa, butter, milk brought to a boil, powdered sugar stirred in, poured on cake. Completed inside half an hour. People I served it to over the weekend loved loved loved it, but were of two minds as to its appeal: Some of 'em said oh it's so rich, like a brownie, others said oh it's so light! I'm more in the it's-so-light camp, the even sponginess being an identifying charactertistic of this cake, for me. What a good cake! Best frosting ever, too.

RebeccaT, could you post your recipe for the pourable frosting?

Well, this has been a godsend! Thirty years ago or so, my Mother used to make this cake for group purposes, Girl Scouts and so forth, but her recipe has long since been lost. (Reading of the provenance I'm wondering if she got it originally from one of my Dad's OK panhandle relatives.) When I saw the topic title I hastened to look for the unusual aspects of the recipe that I remembered as touchstones -- heating ingredients, touch of cinnamon, use of a half-sheet pan, frosting while hot, quickness of preparation Dana mentioned ... check, check, check, check, check! Very exciting to have it back! I'll make it for my Mom and the assembled for Mother's Day, along with her favorite, strawberry shortcake.

Oh my goodness, incredible food, FM! Those trotters might be what get me to finally shell out for the Bouchon book -- they look delicious. (Edit: Not to slight the rest by any means!) Last evening, chicken tikka, except from the old Weber, lacking a tandoor as we are. But v. good nevertheless. Used whole legs for the beloved express lunch #1 effect. Tari Aloo, Potatoes in Fragrant Gravy from Julie Sahni's Classic Indian Cooking. Raita with yogurt, cucumber, tomato, mint, cilantro, a breath of garlic. Basmati. Chapatis brushed with ghee.

So, four recent acquisitions. Purchased on purpose, (and long overdue it was, too), Paula Wolfert's Mediterranean Cooking. Scored serendipitously, Julie Sahni's Classic Indian Cooking, Frank X. Tolbert's A Bowl of Red, and also James McNair's Pizza, McNair's single-subjects something with which I have no experience, but people I like and respect find 'em useful. Saw no reason not to invest the 50 cents.

Happened onto some extra beeyootiful really fat asparagus (for 99 cents/lb. to boot). Peeled, blanched, etc. Treated to Marcella Hazan's alla Parmigiano -- laid out ends overlapping in a baking dish, stalks sprinkled with Parmesan and dotted with butter, (tips left nude, as per Marcella's admonition), salt & pepper, baked in the uppermost of a hot oven until some crustiness formed. Several stalks per person topped with a perfect poached egg, courtesy of my husband, the egg poacher of the family. (Years ago he set out to learn to poach eggs because they are about my very favorite food, and I continue to exploit his skill whenever possible.) Well. What a fantastic dish. One of the classic flavor profiles. Could give roasted a run for its money. Will be back multiple times in the next run of dinners, I predict. I am thankful for the extended asparagus harvest of recent years -- we're now buying CA, but the earliest on the market was from Mexico. The several extra weeks give a person a chance to satisfy whatever asparagus-preparation jag she may have got onto, and still have time for variety.

Dunno from Chino Hills, exactly, but there must be a farmer's market, or several, nearby some days of the week. I like Henry's, fresh and cheap as Jschyun says, but then I don't care to see a lot of exotica in regular supermarkets, I think it dilutes the quality of everything else when the produce manager is charged with having to fill the radicchio de Treviso slot rather than having as a priority making sure the salad lettuces, for instance, are extra nice. Henry's does a very good job on this account, plus, as a veg-oriented cook who has relied on farmer's markets since the 1980s as much as possible, I find the stuff at Henry's to be fresh and seasonal, two things important to me. Astoundingly so, compared to supermarkets in general. That said, I got the most beeyootiful -- nearly picture perfect, really -- organic frisee at Whole Foods in Tustin the other week. Whole Foods does a good job with exotica, and everyday quality too. Bristol Farms comes in handy, because you know if they have it, it's not going to be tired or bruised. (They often have fish I like, too.) You will however pay through the nose, and, in my opinion, the flavor is sometimes not there, more a function of picture-perfection not guaranteeing good flavor than Bristol's fault. Ethnic markets associated with cooking cultures that use a lot of fruit and veg are of course a good place to look. 99 Ranch, a pan-Asian supermarket chain, is all over, (and sometimes the produce prices are eye-poppingly low), but a lot of the time the quality is not so good, even though the range is wide. There is also too much stuff prewrapped in plastic and on foam trays, I think. Japanese markets often have well-chosen veg of good quality, Ebisu in Fountain Valley is a personal fave. I know others like Marukai (Andiesenji mentioned the Gardena branch; there's one in Costa Mesa, among other places), and Mitsuwa Marketplace, although I find the latter to be afflicted by the prewrapped-in-plastic thing. When I lived near Santa Ana and its large Hispanic population, even the regular old Alpha Beta down the street had truly wonderful fruit and veg, which was adamantly NOT true of other Alpha Betas at the time -- when cilantro wasn't yet found in every supermarket produce department, for example, the Santa Ana Alpha Beta always had mountains of superfresh bunches for cheap. More recently a great Mexican cook introduced me to the El Toro Market in Santa Ana, where one takes one's life in one's hands just pulling into the small parking lot but inside is rewarded with fresh-masa tortillas (a stone rarity, even among fresh tortillas) and very good produce. My present Santa Ana Alpha Beta is a Stater Brothers whose produce department is very good -- again, not true of every Stater Brothers, in my limited experience. It has patronage from a wide variety of ethnic groups, and is oriented toward cooking, lots of raw ingredients, rather than a preponderance of prepared takeaway as in most regular supermarkets. Trader Joe's picks up dairy slack, but their produce is strictly emergency rations, for my purposes. (Plastic-wrapped and tired, together again.) None of these come near replacing the one-top stopping ease of Northern California ... I don't think there's another place on Earth where it's as simple to come by good ingredients.

Cute kitties. That Hawkeye, he's sure is lucky he landed you, isn't he. OK, sticky buns. Will we see their preparation? Plus everything else!

I'm convinced about Carl Sontheimer! And I found the reference that'd been circling since reading the article, from Craig Claiborne's autobiography A Feast Made for Laughter. Seems Carl who in 1975 put CC onto the restaurant Chez Denis in Paris, which became the site of a controversial stunt, a crazy expensive ($4,000) meal that was the result of Craig's winning bid on a Public Television pledge premium from American Express, dinner anywhere in the world, at any price. The menu included even ortolans, along with the usual Iron Chef suspects, foie gras and caviar and lobster and so forth. CC got a lot of hate mail, and turns out Carl had a hand in making it all happen!

Snowangel, that looks really really really good. I have fried chicken a couple of times as this discussion has carried on -- I'm only human! Things I have added to my method, having read here and tried: Adding a little leavening to the dredging flour. AND, and this was a full-on revelation: Fifi's Aunt Minnie's instruction to start the pieces skin-side-UP! My carefully developed presentation side, always started skin-side-down, suffered during turnage, and from jostling against other pieces, and so forth. Brilliant. Also, Aunt Minnie's clockwise-counterclockwise pan placement and turning instructions. Acquired chicken-frying wisdom, from someone who obviously cooked a lot of chicken, and often enough that she didn't forget such things in between. Fried chicken is better than bacon, I think.

Linens & Things has wineglasses and flutes by the dozen for $9.99, too.

Maggie, this is a great piece. A pleasure to read and reflect upon. Mayonnaise every day, whether we needed it or not. How life should be. I lament my having missed out on this publication! How did this happen? And so it is added to the mental Want List, along with the other items that live there, second only to the greenish china cabinet which has been uppermost for two or three years now. I'll find it, someday, along with a complete Pleasures of Cooking, too. Your description of TPoC reminds me of my desert-island cookery books, Craig Claiborne's Favorites, compendiums of his NYT columns from the late 1970s. Many of the characters you mention appear, in early incarnations, and the breadth of the cooking going on at the time is, well, breathtaking. The most exciting era of American cookery, so far, to me. CC had this to say about the Cuisinart in the March 16, 1975, NYT (the Cusinart required such pithy exposition in the early days -- much as you were instructing your minions at Crate & Barrel, I would imagine): "The Cuisinart Food Processor is purely and simply a multipurpose machine with a sound-free, sturdily constructed motor, housed in a heavy, handsomely designed plastic base. The base is surmounted by a clear plastic cylinder encircling a spindle that can be outfitted with any of four attachments, including the two double-bladed knives (one of stainless steel and the other of plastic) and two stainless-steel discs (one for slicing, one for shredding)." And he goes on, including sharing your observation, "The plastic blade is nonessential...." Since my first one in 1983 I am only on my second Cuisinart, too. Finally killed the first one, which was already 10 years or so old, crushing lobster shells. (I have since switched to Jeremiah Tower's letting the KitchenAid beat the hell out of them, instead.) After it died, I thought for a couple of months maybe I'd do without -- I try to do a lot by hand, anyways, and maybe the immersion blender will suffice, and one less appliance to clean/store etc., and, blahblahblah. It took my backyard basil only showing sings of burgeoning to get me down to the dread Costco for a replacement -- the seeming gallons of pesto I was used to making just wasn't happening otherwise. Can't wait until this 10-year-old+ machine dies so I can move up to the 11 series -- maybe I can help it along with some lobster shells, eh?

Happy Birthday yesterday, Dinner! (As Susan in FL pointed out the other day.) Hey Dana, we grilled flatiron steaks Saturday night -- served on lovely salad mix, topped with a button of maitre d'hotel butter. What a fantastic cut of beef flatiron is. Last night, excellent cheeseburgers cooked by the Old Man, red red red inside, supercharry on the outside, extra extra purple onion slices (on mine; when I handed off my unfinished half to the ever-ravenous 13-year-old he edited the onion a bit) among all the other usual suspects. Cheddar and jalapeno kettle chips, Black Velvets, Stargate SG-1 Season 6 Ep 3, director's commentary.

Kristin, beautiful dinner -- and the aerial cherry blossom pix are a treat. That's some cellphone camera! Do other households cook from-scratch meals frequently, or are you unusual in that respect?

Really beautiful children, Kristin. And a fascinating blog! If you don't mind, a bit more about rice -- the rice you buy in Japan, is it Japanese-grown? Is there a price difference between Japanese and non-Japanese-grown rice of the same variety? When you buy rice in the U.S. to bring back, do you have a favorite brand?