Toasted, seed-covered bagel, two cups of coffee, two persimmons
Regular pastrami sandwich on white bread from Togo’s, with pastrami and lettuce only, and a mini can of Coke
Persimmon
Beef chow fun and fried rice at Yamo, a bit of Diet Coke
Fun size Butterfinger
Water crackers with homemade bitter lemon marmalade
Bacon

• The nocino that I made last July is … well, it’s interesting. It’s bitter, sweet, and indefinably herbal all at once, and it’s a dark, dark, impenetrable brown that absorbs almost all the light around it. Photons, enter not these depths! Basically, it looks like the herbal medicine that Grandma gave me when I was little, although it tastes much better. I would like to make a couple more batches next year when walnuts turn green again and see how they turn out.
• I have some left over white wine from a picnic at the beach, and so I looked up methods of turning it into white wine vinegar. Basically, there are three options:
  1. Leave an open container of wine in a warm place for a couple weeks to a couple months, until the mother forms.
  2. Use a mother–a starter culture–to guarantee that the bacteria that form in your wine are the right kind of bacteria for wine vinegar (acetobacter), and not other, unfriendly beasties. Mothers can be purchased online or at a wine- and beer- making supply shop.
  3. Use unpasteurized cider vinegar instead of a mother.

  I’m going with option #1, because I don’t feel like buying a mother or unpasteurized cider vinegar. The point of this exercise is to use up a leftover product and turn it into something usable instead of throwing it away, and by proxy, wasting money, after all. Additionally, I’m impatient and want to start right now, instead of waiting until I can get mother or unpasteurized cider vinegar. I wonder if it’ll turn out okay; if the wrong sort of bacteria will colonize it; and if dumping in a couple spoonfuls of white wine vinegar would help the process or harm it. Since the white wine vinegar that I currently have is pasteurized (I think), I don’t think it would add any helpful bacteria to the wine. I guess I’ll find out in a couple of weeks (or months)!

• Homemade vanilla extract: 12 vanilla beans. 1L vodka. 2 months. Voila! Vanilla extract! At $2.50/bean and $7.65/1L vodka, making it is much cheaper than buying vanilla extract. I now have slightly less than a liter of vanilla extract, and I’m wondering how long it’ll last. In the past, I have finished more conventionally sized bottles of vanilla extract, and that took a long time and multiple baking frenzies, so it’s quite possible that this bottle will last me for a couple decades.

Dough = Number of servings x (1 cup of flour + 1 egg)
Filling = Featured ingredient + soft cheese + hard, pungent cheese

It’s impromptu cooking, all done to taste and with guesstimates of how much dough we’ll need for the amount of filling we have. Thus far, we’ve made mushroom and quark ravioli, with rosemary browned butter, and arugula, panir, and fiore sardo ravioli, with browned butter. Last week, the +1 picked up mushrooms and fennel, and so I’m thinking mushroom ravioli (shiitakes, leaving the cheeses up to the recommendation of the lovely folks at Cowgirl) with raw fennel shaved over it. The fennel is light and crunchy and tastes of licorice, and given the textural contrast between it and soft, sauteed mushrooms, I’m not keen on putting it into the stuffing. I like ravioli to be soft and sumptuous, without hard little chunks hidden in the middle, ready to surprise you at any moment with a CRUNCH CRUNCH. Eurgh. Not to mention that cooked fennel is rarely cooked all the way through, with the result that it’s partly soft and partly crunchy, neither fish nor fowl. When it is cooked all the way through, it loses the sharp and fresh aspect of its flavor. Neither situation is desirable, so we’re sticking to the shaved fennel. The question is, what to do for a sauce?

In the past, I’ve done stuffed pastas with browned butter or cream sauces (e.g. TFL’s sweet potato agnolotti with sage cream sauce), but I’d like to do something other than browning butter in a pan and pouring it over the ravioli this time. It has to be something that will match the mushroom and the fennel without overwhelming them; if it were winter, some combination of oranges and fennel would be great. Would lemon juice work? I used to toss it into things all the time, until I figured out that that was the cause of the funky taste that I didn’t like (in risotto, in sauteed greens, in stir-fried haricots verts, etc.). Oops. I like lemon juice in a lot of things, but not in hot, savory preparations, it seems.

Perhaps simmering the ravioli in chicken stock for a kind of soup would work, but then ought it to be a big bowl of soup with ravioli floating around in it, or ought the ravioli sit in a small puddle just deep enough to moisten them, with lazy circles of olive oil floating on top? What would happen with the fennel? Would it work as a garnish, crunchy to start with, then gradually imparting its flavor to the soup? Or should it be banished from the ravioli altogether and turned into a salad? Maybe in the winter, we’ll do a meat and mushroom ravioli in broth, garnished with shaved fennel and orange zest. Savory and sweet; hearty and light; deep, rich mouthfeel and freshness.

Suggestions are welcome; I’ll let you know what we end up doing.

• Another batch of gnocchi, which only took 2 hours, with one hour of roasting the potatoes and one hour of actual work, and went much more smoothly and cleanly than the first time I made them.

• Another batch of sausages, this time with pork fatback. I don’t have a meat grinder, so I minced the fatback by hand:
  

  Half a pound of pork fatback.

  Let me tell you now, no matter how much you like knife work–and I like it quite a lot-mincing half a pound of fatback is not fun. Freezing it helped, but it was still slippery and time-consuming. On the other hand, this batch of sausages is much juicier than the last batch, in which I omitted fatback.

• Caramelized white chocolate
  

  Caramelized white chocolate looks a lot like creamy peanut butter thinned out: light brown and slightly liquid.

  for caramelized white chocolate ice cream, which could use a bit more milk or cream for a smoother texture but would probably go quite well with the nocino I made in July.

• Chocolate-coated gummy bears:
  

  Stirring gummy bears into melted chocolate.

  I don’t particularly like gummy bears, but the +1 loves them, especially when they’re covered with chocolate. I like the opportunity to work with chocolate and I like making him happy, so there you go. I used a candy thermometer, which you can see at the top of the photo, and this was the first time I successfully tempered chocolate! (on purpose. I did it on accident once, before I knew that chocolate had to be tempered.) This Cooking for Engineers page was quite helpful.

• Chicken stock

• Vanilla ice cream

• 김치 만두 (kimchi mandu)

• Chocolate Almond [& hazelnut] buttercrunch toffee
  

  Water, butter, salt, white sugar, and brown sugar heating to 300*.

  The toffee turned out fine, but it was full of air bubbles and had a very crumbly texture. It sort of falls apart in your mouth the way maple sugar candy does. I want to make something like Alfieri Farm’s brittle, which is hard, snaps satisfyingly, and lingers in your mouth like hard candy.

• Whole wheat challah, made over two days with a biga and soaker, and a simpler one day challah with honey. The +1 made the whole wheat and I made the honey challah, and we were incredibly excited. Real baking! Bread baking! Successful bread baking! The last time I tried to make bread was in 2006, when I made the no-knead bread at my parents’ house. Unfortunately, their house was too cold for the bread to rise, and so the final product was a pale, dense, unappetizing lump (although it did have a crumb, which was encouraging). The challah turned out much better, with long fibers, the soft and chewy texture of the rolls my mom used to buy for snacks, and a shiny brown crust. We shaped the challah into crowns and three-stranded braids.

• Nocciola: the taste of summer in Rome. Hazelnut gelato.

• Ravioli stuffed with fiore sardo, a firm sheep’s milk cheese from Sardinia(?), panir, and arugula. This was mostly the +1′s work, as he loves making fresh pasta and does it beautifully. Mine always sticks to the counter, but when he makes it, the ravioli come out neat and easy to cook. These were delicious with browned butter and black pepper, although the spiciness of the arugula dominated the cheeses. If I were to try it again, I’d blanch the greens before adding them to the cheese mix.

Part of life in the Mission is pitchers of beer and tamales from the Tamale Lady at Zeitgeist. Indeed, the first time I ever had a tamale, I was tossing back a pint at Zeitgeist, when a lady appeared in the back yard, dragging a cooler with her, and suddenly half the people present made a beeline for her. Said I to a friend, “Who is that, and why is everyone running at her?”

“That’s the Tamale Lady,” said he, digging out his wallet and preparing to join the mob.

“What’s a tamale?” I asked.

“What! Do you mean to tell me that you’ve never had a tamale? You’ve lived in California how long, again?” he expostulated.

Reader, it is true: despite being born and raised in California, I had never tasted a tamale. My friend remedied that, however, and soon I was pulling apart the corn husk and digging into my very first tamale. A cloud of savory steam, hot sauce dripping down my fingers, chunks of pork in a polenta-like dough. This, I thought, was deliciousness, making a mental note to look up a tamale recipe.

A year later, I had my second tamale, also from the Tamale Lady, also accompanied by a pitcher at Zeitgeist. A few months after that, I had my third and fourth tamales at Platano (incidentally, the best pupusas I’ve had aside from the pupusa stand at the Alemany farmers’ market), and eventually, I got around to looking up a recipe. Tamales are delicious, and almost as importantly, they can be made in large batches, frozen, and reheated in a microwave for lunch. The question of what to make for lunch is one that I’ve been struggling with for as long as I’ve been cooking. So, this weekend, I tried to make tamales. Tried to.

I went with the tamale recipe in The Joy of Cooking, with a couple alterations. The Joy recipe calls for coating 12 oz. of chicken breasts in cumin, chile pepper, and salt and then sauteeing and shredding them; browning onions in butter; mixing 2c of chicken stock with 1.5 lb of masa harina, and then assembling the tamales in corn husks and steaming them for 1-1.5 hours.

What I did:

• Roasted 3 tomatoes that had been malingering in the fridge at 450* until they were charred and leaking juices.
• Deboned 2 chicken legs, cut the meat into bite-size chunks, and tossed the bones and scraps into the bag of chicken bits in the freezer (for stock).
• Melted 2TB of butter in a big pan, thinly sliced a small onion, and sauteed the onion with cumin, ancho chili powder, and salt.
• Minced jalapenos and garlic cloves and pulverized them in a food processor with the tomatoes and onions, then transferred them to a sauce pot with a bit of chicken stock and reduced it to a thick goop.
• Sauteed the chicken in the onion pan.
• Substituted 1.5lb finely ground corn meal, which I had on hand, for masa harina, which I did not, and whisked in baking powder.
• Heated 2.5c chicken stock in a sauce pot and added it to the corn meal, stirring until it reached the consistency of wet sand. The recipe said it should be the consistency of mashed potatoes, but that would have required quite a bit more liquid.
• The fresh corn husks that I’d soaked in a mixing bowl for an hour kept ripping, so I used aluminum foil to wrap the tamales instead. Joy suggested using parchment paper, but I’d used up the last of that the day before, and I distantly recalled some blog somewhere saying that aluminum foil would work, too.
• I got rid of my bamboo steamer when I moved, as I’d used it maybe once or twice since purchasing it. So in lieu of a steamer, I put water in a large pot, wedged a larger metal colander into said pot, put the tamales into colander, and covered it all with an even larger pot lid. The recipe said to steam for 1-1.5 hours, or until the husk easily peeled away from the masa dough, but I had to catch a train and was not using corn husks, so I steamed it all for 50 min, then stuck two of the tamales into a tupperware for today’s lunch and put the rest of them into the fridge.

So, how did they turn out? Well, the chicken was fine and the tomato sauce was great. Roasting and pureeing tomatoes with jalapenos, garlic, onions, and spices turns out to be a great way to use up the tomatoes that I bought right before going away for three days, and had to chuck into the refrigerator upon my return. The corn meal filling, however, was mostly uncooked and awful. I hadn’t realized that corn meal and masa harina would differ in how much liquid they required, and so I’d kept the same amount of chicken stock despite substituting one form of corn for the other. What I should have done was continue to add liquid to the corn meal until it reached the consistency of mashed potatoes, rather than sticking to the recipe in one aspect when I’d made a substitution for another aspect. In other words, trust your instincts in the kitchen, because raw cornmeal is unpalatable.

There are two plates full of tamales in the fridge, so I think I’ll disassemble them, dump all the cornmeal into a pot, and cook it like polenta, adding chicken stock as necessary, until the consistency is about right for tamales, then reassemble the tamales and steam them into submission. Making more of the roasted tomato-onion sauce wouldn’t go amiss, either.

Gave notice at Le Shack, otherwise known as my current residence, yesterday, and I’m now officially on the prowl for a new abode. YAY! On the one hand, I’m thrilled, because hello, I won’t be coming home to any of this crap anymore, but on the other hand, I’m not thrilled, because apartment hunting is a pain and rent in this city is expensive.

Pros

My comfort: I can go back to doing all sorts of things in the kitchen. The line up of things to try/kitchen projects includes brioche, Gewurztraminer-poached foie, duck confit (redo), pate-a-choux gnocchi, olive bread, any kind of bread, strawberry and champagne terrine, roulade of duck with corn and morels, suppli, gnocchi (redo), corn agnolotti, a baked peach dessert, Sunshine bitters, absinthe ice cream, and pizza patate. I have so much that I want to make, and cooking is relaxing. It brings me such comfort. I’m looking forward to having a fridge and a kitchen to myself, a space that is wholly mine: my standards of cleanliness, my space to arrange everything, my space to breathe deeply and unwind.

Cleanliness and order: I can keep the new place up to my levels of cleanliness, without feeling that cleaning is a useless, vain exercise, because the new place won’t have roommates that will leave dirt and bad odors and oil in their wake. I can have everything in its place.

Being alone: I like having people over and I like visitors, but I like knowing that I’m at home alone and don’t have to think about anyone else. It’s a mental space thing.

Having people over: I can have people over without wondering (a) if my roommates are going to stagger in half-naked, wrapped in a zebra-print towel; (b) if they’ve left the apartment a mess; (c) if the bathroom sink smells like something died in the drain. I can have people over without worrying that we’re getting in my roommates’ way.

The prospect of having my own place again is exciting. I’m looking forward to moving into a new place and putting my mark on it, arranging it to my liking. Since my last studio, I’ve learned a few things about making a place look like a home (hint: put things on the walls) and figured out more about what drives my sense of aesthetics. Maybe this time, the interior design will look nice. At my last apartment, the kitchen was meticulously arranged and it was obvious that most of my at home time was spent there: pot lids and tools arranged on the walls, meals plans on the fridge, jars and tupperware full of dry goods. Meanwhile, the bedroom looked like I’d moved a ton of books into it, then decided I needed shelves to put them on, then decided I needed a bed to sleep on, with no consideration for aesthetic appeal. In fact, that’s pretty much how it happened. This time around, I would like my apartment to look less ad hoc and more attractive. Every object should be able to justify its presence: it should have its place and it should have a reason for being there, preferably one that makes me happy.

Cons

Rent is expensive.

Searching for an apartment takes time and involves trekking to different parts of the city.

When faced with uncertainty as to where I will be living next month, I typically become grumpy and irritable.

Answers to Cons

Oh, well. I will find ways to deal with the rent. In fact, once I have a home I don’t constantly want to escape from, I might go out less and spend less money.

Oh, well. Finding a new place is worth the time it’ll take.

This time around, my predominant emotion is not fear or anxiety that I won’t find a place. It’s not stress. It’s excitement and happiness.

I am so happy.

Winnemere, Jasper Hill Farms, and Acme’s Upstairs Bread
Roast chicken, polenta, favas (leeks?)
Macerated olallieberries and strawberries with chili-infused pastry cream: sour, sweet, cinnamon, heat, and fat

I’m making the plain, roasted chicken from Bouchon (recipe at Epicurious).

Chicken calls for something starchy to go with it, and I’ve been thinking about polenta ever since reading Bill Buford’s account of learning the secret of polenta in Heat. Then, last week, I had polenta at Delfina and was blown away by how smooth and delicious it was. They make their polenta with water, butter, and salt, no stocks or milk or mascarpone, and it’s utterly smooth, loose, and delicious. Polenta made with milk or cheese feels too cloying to me, and so I’m going to try Buford’s method, which is to simmer the polenta for hours, and see how if it turns out like Delfina’s polenta. Every other time I’ve made it the polenta has been okay but not great.

Some sort of green, to add color and lightness to the meal? I bought leeks for stock and fava beans for eating at the market yesterday; if I have extra leeks, I might roast one. Alternatively, blanching and sauteeing the favas with a bit of chili pepper would be good, if I can find time to do it. Time will be the limiting factor here, because it takes the oven a while to heat up to 450*F and the chicken will need at least an hour to roast, plus resting time.

Dessert – I made an olallieberry tart yesterday and infused the pastry cream with a dried Thai chili. There are lots of olallieberries and Seascape strawberries and half a batch of pastry cream left over. I want to add cinnamon into the mix somehow, so I’m thinking of macerating the berries with a bit of cinnamon, then serving them with the pastry cream. A tart would be nice, but the chicken is going to be occupying the oven at well over 410*F, which is the temperature for baking the tart shell. Question is, how to present the berries? A dollop of pastry cream in the bottom of port glass, topped with berries, would be pretty, but it feels a little too twee and silly for an informal dinner in the “cozy” mess that passes for a kitchen at the apartment. The same presentation in cappuccino cups would be perfect, if I had any. I don’t have enough small bowls or small plates for everywhere, either.

It’s going to be good: the color contrast of the berries and the pastry cream; the sour, sweet, cinnamony, and hot flavors; and the smooth, luxurious mouthfeel of pastry cream that is peculiar to dairy products.