Priscilla

And, the Consort brought me another new one: coconut filling enrobed in the most beautiful pearlescent pink fondant ... the delicacy of which is quite nearly ineffable. Non-chocolate See's, what a concept.

What a fantastic report. Reminds me in a big way it's been WAY too long since I've been over the border.

I had a nice larb made with chicken in a little Thai place the other day ... Friday, perhaps. It was good, a little weak on the sweet leg of the salty-sour-spicy-you heard four-part harmony, but not bad. Good amount of ground toasted rice, which is something sometimes stinted. However too there were long floppy uncut cilantro springs, OK for garni but oughta have been more cut to look right, and taste right, in the salad. But, good overall.

OK, the otherworldly marshmallow-caramel treat in the homely waxed-paper wrap is called a Scotch Kiss. Wowee what a flavor blast.

Oh THAT RLB! I associate her firstly with The Cake Bible, I oughta update my mental reference. Consider it updated!

Last evening, last minutey, lateness threatening, Toad-in-the-Hole. I like all the Yorkshire-pudding relatives. Used Jane Grigson's idea of a thin layer of batter baked on its own briefly first, THEN the sausages arranged, then the rest of the batter and back in the oven. Seemed right to employ the oval gratin dish with TRADITIONAL ENGLISH BAKER printed right there inside under the glaze. Used Nigel Slater's recipe for Marsala-enriched onion gravy, what a find THAT is, joins the A-list immediately. For the Toad-in-the-Hole occasions, anyways -- Mr. Slater uses it on other things as well. Teensy peas & carrots from France in a glass jar, you know the type, slowly super-heat-infused with butter, lots of s & p. Just right. Rose of Rioja, also just right.

I know I'm going to look stone IGnorant, but I've been going RLB RLB RLB and nothing's coming. As for the pork, crispified in a nonstick pan and used as for carnitas ... but you're thinking that way already. In a Cubana-type sandwich? Smashed onto baguette, with crunchy salt, like rillettes? Maybe a cornichon.

Oh Maggie I must I must it would be only right wouldn't it. My local FotL room IS some sort of Portal to Infinity ... a year ago or so I found Jeremiah Tower's New American Classics there. Without exaggeration a life-changing 50 cents. Cheap date? Or the polar opposite? One time I was in there and an earnest young man was telling the Volunteer on Duty that he needed a copy of Hamlet, perhaps MacBeth, now I think of it, and she was saying to him, oh well Classics are here, see if it's there, and I had to say, excuse me, but there are usually three or four or 12 Hamlets (a/o MacBeths) over on the Plays shelf, over there ... and didn't he find one straightaway. And just this last visit, the one with the David Rosengarten book, the Crown Prince found the January 2000 Nat'l Geographic he'd been seeking, the one with the crucial Part 3 of the three-part series on Ancient Greece, for the regular 10-cent NG tariff.

(If I will not face ostracization for putting this in here when I haven't even posted my inventory): Yesterday at the Friends of the Library room I found a first edition of David Rosengarten's Red Wine with Fish, a book I've idly pursued, as opposed to singlemindedly hunted down, for years, but found it to be 1. way too expensive for a book merely idly pursued, and, 2. hard to find, anyways. Well yesterday there it was, in crispy never-read condition, for the usual 50 cents. With a tearsheet inserted from the Wine Spectator. I love to see what previous owners have tucked into used books. Whole stories can be spun from such. God Bless FotL. Last week or the week before I scored Paula Wolfert's Cooking of South-West France.

Coco's dressing, I suppose it would be considered a ranch-type dressing, on account of the buttermilk, although (at least in my experience) it majorly predated the ranch dressing trip. About equal parts mayonnaise and buttermilk, peeled smashed garlic clove, hit of cider vinegar (maybe 2 t. or a T), s and especially p, grated Parmigiano, although I usually use some Pecorino Romano as well, and then several T. of sour cream whisked in UNcompletely. Needs to sit in the fridge several hours before use. Not for delicate, soft greens! We have regular old vinaigrette-dressed salads far more often, but sometimes nothing else but Coco's Dressing will do.

Oh my goodness too many to list ... children's books certainly, especially (for me) the Betsy-Tacy books, and Mr. Ray making onion sandwiches on Sunday nights and Anna the cook's beginning to teach Betsy (later, after Betsy and Joe were married) how to cook, and on and on. Betsy, Tacy, and Tib Go Over the Big Hill, and find -- Middle Eastern food in MN. And on and on. And a third, or fourth or fifth, for the Little House books ... Farmer Boy, Alamanzo's family story, inserted a dish, Apples & Onions, into my repetoire that remains to this day. I can remember eating baked potatoes with only salt, as the Ingalls did during The Long Winter. And in the same book Pa sussing out that there was wheat (seed wheat) behind a false wall in the Wilder's store, and later Ma grinding it in the coffee grinder to make coarse bread. And the Anne of Green Gables series, lots of evocative food moments. Much later, excellent foodage in The Buddha of Surburbia, by Hanif Kureishi, and tea too, a bonus.

Steak frites last evening. NY strips cooked indoors this time in the beeyootiful 12-inch Griswold, outtake fans on Warp 6. Grilling's OK, but surface area meeting superhot cast iron ain't nothing to sneeze at, neither. Frites, oil blanched the day before, second frying just before service, I think the refrigeration really benefited the texture, especially contributing to exterior dryness and crisposity. Lovely Romaine salad with buttermilk-Parmesan cheese dressing, what we call Coco's Dressing, after the house dressing after a long-since-gone-commissary chain restaurant. Imagine, there was a time when some chain restaurants cooked from scratch back there in those hidden kitchen recesses. Parducci 1997 Zinfandel, suprisingly good.

Or we could declare butternut to be an Enemy of the State, and try for re-education and perhaps someday even rehabilitation. With a great deal of looking-through-fingers, butternut could become a Hero of the Squashes. And then somebody could write a florid propangandistic tract about how it was Wolfgang Puck, all along, him and his Socialist Realist puree of butternut squash soup he's been plying all over the place for years which got us into this fix in the FIRST place.

Course what I MEANT was encouragment, encouragement to strive to resist the butternut that at every turn the Universe is insisting upon one. Butternut inflates expectation only to inevitably dash it on the rocks. In this way it resembles Disney product.

For this sort of filled pasta I use kabocha squash, a beautiful smallish mottled-green-skinned Japanese pumpkin with dense deep orange non-fibrous flavorful flesh. Roasted, put though the fine screen of the old Mouli, although one could certainly carry on with a tamis if one likes that sort of thing. I mean, I sometimes make mayonnaise with a wooden spoon, don't I? Butternut squash, in my experience, is among the wateriest and most fibrous of the hard squashes. It is however very easy to find, not as difficult as others to peel (again, if you like that sort of thing), and has a relatively small seed cavity. So if it's watery, ubiquitous, pale-flavored squash one is after by all means go for butternut. Adam's dark-fleshed sweet potato also was commended by Marcella Hazan in one of her first two books from the 1970s I don't remember which one but she found it an acceptable U.S. substitute for the dense pumpkins she knew in Italy. Making pasta just this past Saturday afternoon, the Consort and the 12-year-old, who were sort of getting a lesson in this task, were amazed by the historic bits of Pasta Past that shook out of the old Atlas. I do something like Stevea said, put through a small piece of dough repeatedly, which does a good job of collecting any Unmentionables. I do brush out as much as possible with each use, of course, but there's a lot a lot a lot of hidden Italian crevices in there, and all has been well, lo, these many years I've been using my Atlas.

Last evening, Japanese-style marinated fried chicken, fileted thighs cut into strips. And, using available veg: Cucumber salad with rice vinegar, soy sauce, and toasted sesame seeds, sake-simmer julienned carrot, spinach seasoned with Torakris's sesame sauce, asparagus with red miso dressing, and Japanese pickled cabbage made by me. Nice rice from the cooker. Sake and mineral water.

Priscilla, it's so moving you remember this. In fact, this is how i cooked Dal Roccolto arborio (my favorite rice brand) just yesterday. A dish in itself, nothing more than a good EVOO (or slightly salted italian butter) needed... Helena, it is good to see you're still using this preparation, too! (I wondered whether or not as I stirred mine in the water.) I buy Trader Joe's Arborio, ain't bad, good in fact, and the price is certainly right, although I don't any longer use it for risotto, because well because Carnaroli is so delicious for risotto. I will keep your brand of Arborio in mind if TJ stops carrying theirs -- they like so well to discontinue items that are popular with me. Unbelievable extreme nuttiness, from just rice, in just boiling water. OK a little sea salt in there, but still. If I can get it sorted I'll link to the earlier eGullet discussion.

Mulching everywhere heavily with fallen sycamore leaves. Harvesting excellent Satsuma mandarins. Roses will be ruthlessly pruned right quick here, also the apple tree only not so ruthlessly. Daffodils up an inch or so! Putatively pink varieties, in fact it was the appearance at long last OF pink daffodils that allowed them into my garden at all. I like daffodils and they are the flower of my birth month, March, too. I don't hold out much hope for the pink coloration, however -- last year, their first in the ground, they bloomed all right, profusely, even, but in an array of yellowish tones only a couple of which were maybe verging on corally. Can't have that. If I wanted YELLOW flowers in my garden I'd PLANT 'em, wouldn't I. However, is there the teensiest chance that after their interim year of acclimation to my garden microclimate they might bloom pink, as pink as the new dawn, pink like the big white cat next door's ear linings, pink just like in the catalogue photos? If they do not I am afraid they will have to find a new home.

Another nostalgia trip, different destination. New Orleanian Italian chicken, I used thighs and the most copious amount of garlic I'd used in a single dish in years ... put us in mind of the formerly ubiquitous disputedly James Beardian Chicken with 40 cloves of garlic everybody used to make all the effing time. Not exactly a bad dish, but New Orleanian Italian chicken is a far far far better one. And, of course spaghetti Bordelaise is requisite. But I had this idea to use boiled Arborio instead, after the manner HelenaS got me onto months/years/whatever ago, and it was good. So, riso Bordelaise. Very nice. Lovely Romaine salad with an austerely just-right white wine vinegar-olive oil dressing. LBB seedy baguette. Bonny Doon 2002 Erbaluce de Caluso, excellent.

Wow your duck four ways was just sumptuous, Jackal, and I will add another belated happy b.d. MM, I think your bbq menu was simply world class. Last evening, nostalgia reigned. Homemade fresh pasta, wide ribbons, not papardelle-wide but wider than most fettucine, with gorgonzola cream sauce very slightly changed over the years from Marcella Hazan's archetype in her first book. Really good -- there is nothing like fresh pasta. Lovely big old chopped salad, a dish which for me has strong associations with the cuisine of 15 years or so ago -- cucumber, tomato, onion gentled in milk, blanched skinny asparagus, the pale hearts of three beautiful heads of Romaine, and mortadella with pistachios instead of the proscuitto or salami one'd see in the aforementioned past. All chopped to size, less than 1/2" but nowhere near 1/4". Nice olive oil/lemon vinaigrette with a touch of mustard. A treat! Maybe I ought get nostalgic more often. Frenchy-french skinny ficelles from the Vietnamese baker, salty Kerrygold butter. Yet more Rosemont Grenache/Shiraz, earning its modest keep.

Last evening, lovely cheese souffle, made with sharp Irish cheddar in a new-to-me Villeroy & Boch souffle dish. (I can't remember the last time I made a souffle in something other than the perfection of my pale-pink glazed Emile Henry souffle dish, but I just acquired this V&B one and thought I'd take it out for a spin.) The V&B performed adequately, but there's just something mysterious and wonderful about that Emile Henry clay. On the side the last of the beet greens braised in cream. Frenchy-french baguette. The dread Korbel Brut rose.

The egg jag continues, no telling when it might end. Jags are like that. Course this is a life-long jag, too, so there's that. ANYway, last evening, lovely waffles from the old heart-shaped waffle iron. If one can endure the piercing Nazgul-like shriek this applicance emits when it reaches temp, one can have decent heart-shaped waffles. A bunch of Boar's Head bacon, which inspired the menu in the first place. Hadn't had BH bacon in years -- Niman Ranch uncured has trumped all comers -- but there is was and for some reason it was purchased. Not bad at all, a little more like ham than bacon, which I guess is a pretty big flaw, if you're trying to be bacon anyways. The aforementioned eggs gently fried in the bacon fat -- excellent, landed equally gently atop the waffle which itself was first drizzled with melted butter. Bacon alongside, getting in on the maple syrup deal. Mimosas of Carta Nevada and fresh-squeezed orange juice for the grownups, straight orange juice for the under-21 set. Reminded us all again how navels, our local wintertime oranges, just don't make as worthy a juice as Valencias, which we have for most of the year. Oh well. Would be considered great juice by any other standard.

Last evening, roasted a chicken with lemons inside and butter and honey outside. Pan juices reduced, served to pour at will, were very good. Also, beet greens first allowed to imbibe (as Elizabeth David said) butter and then, heavy cream. A little onion in there at the outset, too, s & p, nutmeg. Just so good. Beet greens, I always say, are the most spinachy spinach. My favorite green, although I do like 'em all, well prepared, as with anything. LBB seedy baguette, saltylicious Tillamook butter. Again with the cheap & cheerful & delicious Rosemont Grenache/Shiraz.

Just say to yourself, "Skim assiduously," and gloss right over any more detail. Some things in life are Best Just Leave It.

Last evening, a steak frites variant. So-called London Broil, cooked on the old Weber over hardwood charcoal, (32 degrees outside!) sliced, saltylicious Tillamook butter allowed to melt over. Frites run the trad twice through the old deep fryer, nice and brown and crunchy. Excellent Romaine salad with creamy Ranch-Blue Cheese-type dressing, just right. Very good Bonny Doon Cigare Volant.