What makes the Engine of Creation Run? Not Physics but Ecstatics Makes the Engine Run:

Let Deep Roots Grow:
If you do not MINGLE you will Cease to Progress:
Seek Not to Fathom the World and its Delicate Particle Logic:
You cannot Understand, You can only Destroy,
You do not Advance, You only Trample.
Poor blind children, abandoned on the earth,
Groping terrified, misguided over
Fields of Slaughter, over bodies of the Slain:
HOBBLE YOURSELVES!
There is No Zion Save Where You Are!

--Angel, Angels in America: Perestroika, Tony Kushner

It was so beautiful to spend the weekend of the Rapture writing a lecture about Angels in America. That whole scene about how God left after the 1909 earthquake: it's just perfect. The Great Work Begins, my dears. It's such a treat to read aloud to yourself on a Saturday afternoon, to have a play fold you under its wing like that.

It's funny because in posting about the simple things that really do it for me-- literature, butter-- I forget that sometimes I do cook things with steps and that this is a cooking blog and maybe I should give you all some recipes to try. Do you want to make some pretty good cookies? These are nice cookies: what they lack in my ecstacy over sunflower seed butter or olive oil (hot&heavy baking loves), they have in old fashioned chewy goodness. There is nothing particularly sexy or interesting about these cookies, but I will say that sometimes old school kind-of-boring buttery cookies are just a very good idea. John Barricelli-- Martha's right hand man and Norwalk local (holla!)-- notes that these cookies are a good addition to a lunchbox, which I think sums up their friendly-but-not-wholesome-but-not-decadent-either appeal.

"Nice" cookies
from the Sono Bakery Cookbook

+2 cups flour
+1 t baking soda
+2 sticks butter at room temp
+1 1/2 cups sugar (1 cup granulated and 1/2 cup brown, although I ran out of brown sugar so whatever)
+1 t salt (or a little more. Mine weren't salty enough. Did I forget the salt? I might have forgotten the salt)
+2 eggs at room temp
+1 1/2 T vanilla
+12 oz chocolate chips, I chopped a bar into small chunks (er, Sonia chopped a bar into small chunks, thanks) and I liked the mixture of big & little pieces of chocolate. Maybe do that.
+1 cup shredded coconut
+1 cup rolled oats

--Preheat the oven to 350.
--Beat the butter and sugar and salt for a few minutes and "make sure it tastes ok"-- ahhh this is my favorite part of making cookies for real. Also the oats in this dough are awesome for making sure you don't just sit and eat the whole thing of dough, do uncooked oats give other people a stomach ache? Is that a thing?
--Beat in the eggs and vanilla. Now the dry ingredients, make sure the flour is kind of fake-sifty and the baking soda doesn't hide in gnarly clumps. Now fold in the chocolate and coconut and oats all gentlelike.
--Make these cookies big-- like a full quarter cup each. Bake 15-18 minutes, they will still be soft in the center and that's a good thing. As Martha would say. Or the guy that developed her recipes would say. Or I would say as I bring not one but five of these cookies in my lunchbox.......based on a true story.

books about feelings and shaksuka pizza

"The other women discovered not only that she was from Barnard... summa cum laude, parbleu!... but that she had the most adorable little cracked voice, like a boy's. It was perfect with her hair, so short and boyish too, and by the end of the second week three of the teachers were writing passionate notes to her."
-MFK Fisher

Ah, is there anything like picking up a book that you had previously discarded as inert and finding, well, yourself? I am loving The Measure of Her Powers. All of the stories are about somebody paying too much attention to their senses, which is how I feel basically all the time, so it's both a intimate window into someone's beautiful life and a private validation of feeling and noticing (too) many things.

Reminds me of a production of In the Next Room that has been haunting me since I saw it a few weeks ago-- something about two-thirds-finished women and a race of poets. A therapist once told me that I have "a certain capacity for emotionally intense states" and I think that's right. I think Sarah Ruhl's characters do too-- not in a stylized manic pixie dreamgirl kind of way but the kind of way that feels genuinely radical. Which is all to say that I was rereading some old entries and I am a little sick of my refrain that I am some kind of failure at adulthood. Unfinished paintings, Ruhl's painter says, are truer to life and nearer to God.

I think in the age we live in, raw emotional intimacy is far more radical than physical intimacy or selling sex, which we see on every block. We see radical emotional intimacy far less frequently.
-- Sarah Ruhl

Anyway, I have no good segue, except that I invented a really good pizza. It's based on the Israeli egg dish shakshuka, which are eggs poached in spicy tomato sauce. Ideally, of course, you make your own tomato sauce. I've even said on here that there's no reason not too. But listen, even a jarred-tomato-sauce hater like me sometimes has some in the house and wants to make a pizza and doesn't know what to put on it. Eggs. The answer is eggs.

SHAKSHUKA PIZZA

--Pizza dough
--Tomato sauce (homemade or otherwise)
--Garlic, one or two cloves minced
--Red pepper flakes or chopped hot peppers. You could also use jalepeno or anaheim chiles (I used about 2 T worth of dried Japan peppers, chopped)
--Olive oil

+ Preheat the oven as hot as it will go.
+ Heat a little bit of oil with the garlic and pepper. If you do this in a cast iron skillet you can use that as your pizza stone: bingo. You don't need too much oil, just enough to give the spicy stuff a medium. You could probably skip this step and just use some hot sauce for some legit semihomade style Sandra Lee action. But it is really fast to make your own "hot sauce" so. yeah.
+ Then stretch you dough, spread LIBERALLY with tomato sauce and the spicy garlic oil. The eggs will get less rubbery if they are nestled in the tomato sauce, so use way more than you would for a normal cheese pizza. Bake for 4 or 5 minutes.
+ Then crack 2 eggs on top. Bake for another 8 minutes or so, until the whites are set.

Sein & Zeit

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

-Charles Baudelaire

wendell berry

It's weird to write about food for school-- which is to say, I hope, for a living. I don't have any particular qualifications except brio, so writing a bibliography last week was certainly humbling. I did, though, stumble upon this essay by Wendell Berry, which is like a better, shorter, less condescending version of the Omnivore's Dilemma. If you are into that kind of thing-- or especially if you aren't-- check it out.

P.S. If you care, I have been eating this couscous and this sorbet and they are both amazingly delicious.

So while I finish up writing, enjoy:

Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.

also, this is divine

Summer Song
William Carlos Williams

Wanderer moon
smiling a
faintly ironical smile
at this
brilliant, dew-moistened
summer morning,—
a detached
sleepily indifferent
smile, a
wanderer's smile,—
if I should
buy a shirt
your color and
put on a necktie
sky-blue
where would they carry me?

As usual, William Carlos Williams can say how I feel better than I can. Thanks, Elise! Any day that I get a poem in my inbox is a very good day indeed.

beer bread

I was going to make Irish Soda Bread to be all theme-party-like for you guys, but I used all my eggs making a savory bread pudding. That I have been eating for three straight days-- do you think bread pudding has protein? Just watched Jamie Oliver's TED talk speech and have so many emotions about nutrition and obesity and America.

Anyway this bread is amazing. I was always curious about non-sweet quick breads and this one is amazing. The texture isn't too biscuity at all, which was my number one fear. It's just delicious and it slices fairly well, too, for fake PBJs or even real sandwiches. AH!

Add beer bread to the long list of things to be thankful for this week. Including sunshine, E Street Cafe in Encinitas, cutoffs, new cheap headphones with way better sound than any other headphones I have ever owned (?), Peets' Assam tea, getting the last charger at said Peets, editors putting queer erotica in a very serious-looking queer theory reader. I got about halfway through before I realized the author wasn't going to start theorizing.



BEER BREAD (variations at A Year in Bread blog sound good, too)

3 cups flour
1 T baking powder
1 T sugar
1 t salt
a 12 oz beer (I used Simpler Times and it tasted banana-y! In a good way)

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Put all the ingredients in a bowl, mix the beer in slowly until you have a thick dough. Plop it in a loaf pan and bake it in the oven for 45 minutes.

book review: garlic and sapphires

Stayed up all night reading Garlic and Sapphires. The writing style is not as... tender as Tender at the Bone, but it's a fun yarn and a fast read despite the arrogant celebrity quotient this time around. If you can stand to watch Top Chef (and/or love to revel in the celebrity chef culture-- who doesn't?) then this is a great way to kick off your summer reading and peek into the kitchens of New York's finest. Got any other food-related books I have to read? A recipe I should try? Let me know.

no but for real

sorry about that lack of posting... new job + boston makes jack a dull boy.

so yeah-- true life: i've been living on deli sandwiches. but happy thanksgiving, everybody!

today was big news in the dessert world:

salted caramel sauce
a cheesecake
and pumpkin souffles.

more on savories tomorrow.

even though there are no pictures, the salted caramel sauce is totally kickass and delicious... like bougie style in hot chocolate, over cheesecake, ice cream. oh salt, let me count the ways. ps read this book; it's awesome.



1 cup sugar
4 oz butter (half a stick)
1/2 cup cream
sea salt to taste (2 pinches)

put the sugar in your sturdiest pot and heat it over medium high heat. don't stir it, just lift the pan and let the sugar sift back and forth. eventually it'll melt and turn nutty brown. that's the good stuff-- caramel/butterscotch never ceases to amaze me.

add the butter (foam!), stir and take the pot off the heat. add a pinch of salt. now pour in the cream and stir well. see if you think it needs more salt-- another pinch makes it really punchy and delicious.

let it cool, pour it over something.

but more importantly... PUMPKIN SOUFFLES.
i was kind of beat-ass tired while making these, but they really are a fluffy and fun alternative to pumpkin pie. gourmet magazine knows what's up.




1/2 cup milk
1 tbsp cornstarch
nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice & cloves (1 tsp total) or just 1 tsp pumpkin pie spice
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup pureed pumpkin (not a whole can, which is kind of a pain in the ass. but you could use the rest for.... anythingomgpumpkinpumpkinpumpkinfallfallfall)
10 egg whites
pinch salt

--heat up the milk, cornstarch and spices until the milk boils and it thickens. like pudding! hoowee.
--remove from heat & add pumpkin & let it hang out another burner.
--oven to 400. butter those ramekins and dust with some sugar. what's that you say? no ramekins? yeah, i don't know.
--beat the egg whites with a little salt in a cleaner than clean bowl until they hold soft peaks. add the sugar (3/4 cups) and beat until the peaks are stiff and glossy (a few more minutes)
--fold (gently!) 1/3 of the whites into the pumpkin mix. then add the rest. "gently but thoroughly"
--fill up your ramekins. i guess you could try it in a bigger dish, but my large-scale souffle attempts have turned out really sheisty.
--bake until the tops are golden, 18-20 minutes.
--gotta catch 'em all! each up before they deflate.

fondue stuffed squash

Well team, it's almost time for that most food-related of holidays. I also fare pretty well on the allergy front: except for some nutty stuffings and the occasional a-hole who brings pecan pie, thanksgiving dinner is pretty lily-proof.

And while I actually pretty much just gorge myself on dad's stuffing and cranberry sauce and squash and call it a night, Thanksgiving has kind of a bad rep of being "food sensitivity" unfriendly.

And so this entry begins the list of delicious nut-free soy-free vegetarian fall-like dishes... add your own ideas or "lily's test kitchen" possibilities in the comments.



This recipe comes with a book review! I just finished Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichl (NYT food editor and editor-in-chief of Gourmet) 's memoir. It's one of those brilliant "not-mentally-taxing-but-not-trashy" books that are kind of hard to find. Because while none of the stories involve her doing anything too noteworthy, her writing is big fun and the stories are all about food. Which makes me happy because everything in my life is kind of about food, too.

After cooking my fondue-stuffed squash featured in this month's Gourmet, I got to the part of the book where she invents the dish in college. Something about the double whammy of reading about the delicious lunch I had just made warmed my heart.

Fondue-stuffed squash

QUICK AND DIRTY (serves one or two. really just one if it's your meal):
a squash (acorn! or your favorite, but round is good)
a crusty roll
fondue in a box



Preheat the oven to 450.
Slice the roll and toast it well.
Cut the squash 3/4 and 1/4, so that it is like a bowl with a small cap on top, scoop out the seeds and create a good sized hollow.
Layer the toast and fondue generously inside the hollowed out squash, put the cap back on, cook for an hour or so until the squash is tender. Now eat it!


FANCY PANTS TABLE PRESENTATIONAL (for a crowd)
a pumpkin
a sliced baguette (probably will be leftovers, just... eat them!)
1 cup cream
1 cup veggie broth
pinch nutmeg
glug white wine
2 1/2 cups each, Gruyere and Emmenthal

You get the drill: 450, toast the bread and prepare the pumpkin.
Mix the nutmeg into the cream.
Layer the toast with the cheese, broth, cream and wine. It will all get copacetic inside the oven, so don't fret too much about mixing.
Cook for about an hour and a half until the pumpkin is soft and your kitchen smells like heaven.