Almond-Cornmeal Cake, or, Sundays with Cybele

Summer is an ideal time for improvisation– especially for those of us living in San Francisco. If the sun is shining for more than 30 minutes at a time, we get a bit giddy and wonder if we should just leave our sweaters at home and head for the nearest park or beach to get a much-needed dose of vitamin K. Long term planning is often shed as quickly as our layers of clothing.

Dinners are no exception. Last Sunday, I was invited down to Hillsborough for an al fresco meal in an impossibly rose-scented garden. The event had been in the planning for several weeks, owing to the varied schedules of the guests and host. All that was required of me was to show up– with dessert. When the idea for the dinner was germinating, I had proudly announced that I would make cannoli because of some unaccountable need to flex the confectionery muscle of my father’s people. Besides, I knew my friend Cybele, in whom Sicilian DNA also makes its home, would be there. I think I wanted to impress her.

For those of you with little or no experience with cannoli, it is about the least spur-of-the moment dessert one can make. The dough is made, it rests for a couple of hours. It is rolled and stretched and rested again. And rolled again. It is cut and fried, cooled and filled.

The day prior, I had the dough ready for preparation. The day of the dinner, I got as far as mixing the filling when, suddenly, it just felt all wrong. It was a warm day. Cannoli are for holidays. They are not for garden parties. The dough is still sitting on a shelf in my refrigerator, getting to know its neighbors, the cornichons and mustard.

When I arrived at Cybele’s house, I showed her the cake I’d made, and the figs and cream with which I’d planned to serve it. I had planned on simply slice the figs, toss them with a little sugar, and be done with them.

“Figs?” she asked, “What about putting a little pomegranate molasses in them?” She took me into the kitchen, and poured two slow-moving drops of the stuff onto the end of a fork and put it in my mouth. It was a flavor new to me– sweet, sour, full of depth. It was exactly what the figs needed to make them interesting without taking over the dessert. I learned something new.

One of the many things I love about this woman, apart from her warmth, humor, intelligence, and just-plain-great-to-look-at-ness, is her uncanny cooking-sense. She goes by instinct. She just gets food. It is something that cannot be taught. Not completely.

The dinner was a complete success. Boccalone salumi and Beecher’s “Just Jack” cheese (in honor of our host) washed down with a couple bottles of cool Pinot d’Alsace, which fit in nicely with my current obsession with World War I military planning errors. Rib eye prepared by my friend Lyle (who often refers to himself as the luckiest man alive, owing to his partnering with Cybele), roasted, garlicky potatoes and mushrooms to smother- but-not-choke the steaks, accompanied by good, elegant bottles of Rioja. And a perfect salad of Asian pear, lettuces, and summer tomatoes ended the meal. Digestion-aiding conversation followed.

We were ready for dessert by sunset. Given the gargantuan nature of the meal consumed– especially the 22-ounce steaks, I was grateful I followed my now-engorged gut and decided to leave to cannoli for another day. As I served out dessert, I asked for a bit of feedback, as is my habit with anything I make for the first time. I had mentioned substituting much of the cornmeal with corn flour. Jack rightly commented that “any more cornmeal would have made this a dessert for hamsters.” I was rather inclined to agree. Everyone was in full agreement about the addition of the pomegranate molasses– it was just the right touch.

This post is just my little way of thanking Cybele for simply being around. She is, in her own way, the pomegranate molasses in everyone’s life- sweet, with just the right amount of acid wit. A blend of the exotic and oddly familiar, she adds a touch of subtlety and depth to everything she does. And, as if by instinct, it is always the right touch.

So, thanks, Cybele. You have a habit of making good things better.

Almond-Cornmeal Cake

The idea of this cake came from a recipe by Lorenza di Medici, who knows a thing or two about al fresco dining. And Italian food. As I made the dough, I realized it was going to be too dry for my purposes. I wanted something moist– a word I detest but, at the same time, a quality I treasure in baked goods. Too late in the day for going back to the market for fresh supplies, I decided to wing it and make some major adjustments, in keeping with my own rigidly, self-imposed idea that improvisation was the theme of the day. Fortunately, it worked, and worked very well.

This cake plays well with late-summer fruits. I chose figs, but berries would do well, too. Or just a big dollop of sweetened cream and a good, cool glass of Tokaj.

Ingredients:

1 cup almonds, blanched and without skin

1/3 cup yellow cornmeal

2/3 cup corn flour

1/4 cup unbleached all purpose flour

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

4 ounces unsalted butter

3 egg yolks

A pinch of salt

Powdered sugar for decoration

For Figs:

Ingredients:

1 pint of fresh Mission figs

2-3 tablespoons of sugar, depending upon the ripeness of the figs

1 teaspoon pomegranate molasses

Procedure:

1. Grease with butter a 9-inch cake pan with removable bottom, lining the pan with similarly-greased parchment paper.

2. In a Cuisinart, or whatever you wish to call yours, combine almonds, cornmeal, corn flour, all purpose flour, and salt. Pulse until the almonds are crushed sufficiently to make a fine meal.

3. Cream butter and sugar until, well, creamy. Add yolks one at a time. The color should be roughly equivalent to that of a blinding afternoon sun.

4. Combine the butter mixture with the flour group until well incorporated. Spread into cake pan and bake on the middle rack of a pre-heated 400° oven for about 30 minutes, or until done.

5. Wash figs, slice into quarter segments. Toss them in sugar and molasses, but gently. Let sit for about an hour.

6. Remove from oven. Remember to turn off your oven. Place the now-baked cake on a rack to cool. Remove from pan. Please remove the parchment paper. Dust with powdered sugar when plated.

7. Slice cake and serve with prepared figs and sweetened cream.

Serves 6 to 8, depending.

Hungry Girl: How to Cook with Non-Dairy Creamer

Several weeks ago, Amy Sherman gave me a cookbook entitled Hungry Girl: Recipes and Survival Strategies for Guilt-Free Eating in the Real World, because she knew it would drive me crazy.

How well she knows me.

I browsed through the pink-tinged pages looking at the recipes, fighting my way through the over-enthusiastic use of exclamation marks and cute-and-confusing titles like “pizzalicious chop chop” (page 44) and “amazing ate-layer dip” (page 158). Intending to be “sassy” and “fun”, the writing comes across as though it were the product of a calorie-obsessed teen-aged girl rather than an adult woman.

The author, Lisa Lillien, is “a self-appointed ‘foodoligist’ (sic)” and founder of the website HungryGirl.com– a popular website with more than 100,000 500,000 subscribers. According to her website, she rightly states that she is neither a dietitian nor a food professional, but “an average female, struggling with the same food issues most females struggle with every day.” Losing and gaining the same 10-15 pounds several times over, and trying “every diet under the sun,” she has a self-admitted food obsession– counting calories and finding low-fat, low-carbohydrate substitutes for a wide variety of foods.

The book, which is a natural extension of her popular website, is sadly rife with rather unnatural foods. For example, her “2-good twice-baked potato” (page 124, from”Manly Meals” Chapter 6) calls for fat-free American cheese and fat-free liquid non-dairy creamer. Is substituting the fats found in natural dairy products with things like corn syrup solids and Polysorbate 60 (both found in non-dairy creamer) such an excellent idea, however many calories might be saved? Polysorbate 60, as I have learned from a rather amusing article posted at Wired magazine, is:

…made by polymerizing ethylene oxide (a precursor to antifreeze) with a sugar alcohol derivative. The result can be a detergent, an emulsifier, or, in the case of polysorbate 60, a major ingredient in some sexual lubricants.

Perhaps the dish should be re-christened “2-good twice-lubed potato.” (And hint to the recipe testers– you might want to sprinkle the potato with paprika and parsley after removing it from the oven.)

In Chapter 12, or, “Happy Hour”, Lillien states up front that it’s no secret that alcohol has “lots of calories”, and guides her readers towards lower-calorie choices if one must drink, but her drink recipes fumble. The “kickin’ cranberry cosmo” (page 249), for example:

Ingredients:

5 ounces Diet Ocean Spray Cranberry Spray Juice drink

1 ½ ounces of vodka

1 teaspoon lime juice

5 to 8 ice cubes

Optional: splash of diet lemon-lime soda, lime wedge (for garnish)

By omitting the Cointreau or triple sec for the sake of approximately 20 calories, Lillien has turned the Cosmopolitan into a Cape Cod. I should think any author as attached to the color pink as Miss Lillien is would know the difference.

And dessert? How about the “ginormous creamy frozen caramel crunchcake” (page 227)? Cover the top half of one caramel-flavored rice cake with Cool Whip Free. Gently place another rice cake on top, making a sandwich. Freeze for at least 1 hour, then enjoy. There’s that Polysorbate 60 again. And high-fructose corn syrup? Yup. A diet high in fructose makes lab rats fatter than those placed on other diets. Read that Wired article again– it’s all about Cool Whip. Oh, it’s also been pointed out that the Sorbitan Monostearate, which is also found in this fat-free topping is sometimes used as hemorrhoid cream.

Super fab!

This book isn’t all bad. In fact, it contains some excellent, sensible advice for those of us out there battling with our own weight issues. For example, Lillien suggests ways of staying active at work, how to avoid mindless snacking, and is vigilant about listing the per-serving calories, fat, sodium, fiber, carbs, sugars, and proteins in all of her recipes.

And not all of the recipes are creepy, just most of the names. For example, the “v10 soup” is completely devoid of atomic-age substitutes and comes with a warning that it is “jam-packed with an INSANE amount of veggies!!!”

Perhaps I’ve got it all wrong. Maybe living as I do in the heart of the Bay Area has spoiled me to the point of not recognizing what the “real world” might be, in terms of day-to-day eating. I’m not an on-the-go girl trying to fit into cute, size 2 pants. Nope, I’m a nearly-40 year-old man. But, as a gay man, the tyranny of body consciousness and fitness is not unknown to me.

In a country which is growing fatter by the year, it’s a shame that the author, who has such a large following, should choose to lead her readers down the path of empty calories and diet tricks. In an effort to help people avoid the “real world” dangers of fast food and junk food, Miss Lillien merely offers pale substitutes of the originals. In obsessing over calorie and fat content, she offers little in the way of whole foods–relying heavily upon heavily processed, store-bought items instead– many of which are thought to contribute to weight-gain in the first place, like high-fructose corn syrup.

Is Hungry Girl’s cookbook “guilt-free” as advertised? Hardly. This book, however well-intentioned, offers little in the way of substance. If anything, it’s guilty of promoting the same unhealthy food obsessions that drove Miss Lillien to create her popular website in the first place.

Now, if you will please excuse me, I’ve got a big bowl of Fiber One® drowning in some delicious non-dairy creamer to consume.

The Frownie

At dinner the other evening, a friend of mine was recounting his recent trip to Pittsburgh for a wedding. Having attended a small college near the city, he became rather nostalgic talking about his late nights chugging coffee and cramming for finals at the local Kings Family Restaurant. Never having been to neither Northwestern Pennsylvania, nor Ohio, I had never heard of such a place and said as much. He then proceeded to mention that Kings Family Restaurants were the home of the “Frownie”.

“The what?” I asked, though the name seemed to illustrate itself with near-perfect precision.

“A Frownie is a brownie, but with a frownie face piped onto it. If you purchase a whole pack, it’s called a Pity Party.”

I stopped hearing anything more about the wedding. I only wanted to know about Frownies, so I went home to do a little research.

That’s one mean dessert.

Kings Restaurants’ latest dessert offering, which they are calling The Angry Mob, includes twelve frownies, accompanied by hot fudge, whipped cream, twelve scoops of vanilla ice cream, and a poster. I suppose that, if one can manage to ingest such vast quantities of fat and sugar, one might as well eat the poster, too.

The Frownie, as much as I have been able to learn, was dreamed up about three years ago to drum up business at the 40 year-old restaurant chain, which had been flagging in recent times. Thanks to Smith Brothers Advertising, who make the likes of other Pittsburgh-area brands like Heinz Tomato Ketchup sexy, the Frownie has caught on.

It’s not surprising that the Frownie originated near Pittsburgh, home of Carnegie Mellon University. Carnegie Mellon, if you didn’t know, is the birthplace of the emoticon, thanks to Scott Fahlman, who started the whole sideways smiling business more than 25 years ago on the University’s Computer Science community b(ulliten)-board. He invented the frowning emoticon, too. In the same message, no less.

Where I attended culinary school, plating foods in such a way as to resemble a human face was frowned upon– the thought being that no one wanted to dig into something that resembled one’s self. Clearly, they were mistaken. Then again, they were mistaken about a lot of things. Children are undeniably attracted to the cannibalization of smiley-faced pancakes, so who can say eating a scowling brownie is wrong?

Imagine living through a Northeastern winter. I know if I were to spend months freezing my hind quarters off battling the elements, I might find myself entering a local family restaurant and sitting down to a hearty meal and mugs of hot coffee to warm my hands and insides. If a dessert happened to come to the table with a scowl frosted onto its face, I’d most likely take another swig of coffee, look out the window at my iced-over car, and think, Frownie, I know just how you feel.

Katharine Hepburn’s Frownies

I had been thinking about brownies even before Frownies entered my consciousness, thanks to the September 2008 issue of Saveur Magazine. In their article, they list Katharine Hepburn’s home recipe, which originally accompanied and interview with the actress in the August 1975 issue of The Ladies’ Home Journal. Needing a basic brownie recipe, Hepburn’s seemed worthy, based upon name-recognition alone. It had been suggested to me that I might wish to give these Frownies some Hepburn-like quality. Since I neither know anyone who can lend me an Oscar on short notice, nor do I possess the ability to create slacks for dessert items, and taking a tremored, Parkinson’s-like blurry photo would have been in extremely poor taste, I decided to just let the unhappy things alone.

Ingredients:

8 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus more for greasing

2 ounces unsweetened chocolate

1 cup sugar

2 eggs, beaten

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup roughly chopped walnuts

¼ cup flour

¼ teaspoon fine salt

½ cup powdered sugar

1 tablespoon water

Procedure:

1. Pre-heat oven to 325°. Grease and 8 x 8 inch baking pan with butter. Line the pan with parchment paper; grease the paper. Set pan aside.

2. Melt the butter and chocolate together in a 2-quart saucepan over low heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, since one cannot imagine Miss Hepburn using anything else. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the sugar. And the eggs and vanilla and stir to make a smooth batter. Add the walnuts, flour, and salt; stir until incorporated. Pour batter into the baking pan and spread evenly. Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, 40-45 minutes. Let cool on a rack. Remove from pan and cut into nine squares.

3. Mix the powdered sugar and water in a small bowl, making a smooth, thick icing. Place icing into a piping bag fitted with a fine, plain tip, or place in a zip-lock bag, cutting a very small amount off one of the bottom corners with scissors. Pipe two blank, disappointed-looking eyes and a frown onto each brownie. Serve.

Makes 9 Frownies.

A Real Sunday Dinner

Last week, I was invited to Sunday dinner by my friend Karen at her home in Alameda. Happy to have someone else do the cooking for a change, I happily said yes.

This photo post is just one little way of saying thanks to Karen and her kids for the wonderful hospitality. Oh, and for introducing me to the game Apples to Apples. I demand a rematch…

This is Radar, my new best friend.

Zane glazes his Tuxedo cake as we talk of bacon confectioneries.

Cheese provided by Alex and Amelia…

Pesto palmiers before:

And after:

Much wine wine was drunk…

… which caused me to focus my attention on the surrounding chinoiserie.

We decided to take a break from noshing, digest for a few minutes, and enjoy the sunshine before heading into dinner.

There was no centerpiece to supper– no roast chicken, no beef, no barbecue. Just a festival of side dishes, as Charlotte so well put it.

Edamame salad with shaved Manchego…

Zane-made buscuits. I can’t for the life of me make a decent biscuit…

Spinach salad with figs…

There were several other dishes, like shrimp panzanella (below), but I lost count. I did manage to fill my plate and belly.

Once seated, the mistress of the house held court. We all gave her our full attention when we weren’t busy shoveling food into our mouths.

After dinner, I did my best not to fall into a food coma, but was unsuccessful. I dozed in the living room for a little while as the younger folk broke into the first bottle of Fernet Branca.

When I awoke, the finishing touches were being put upon the desserts:

Tuxedo cake (my very first)…

… and fig tart. Not my first, and certainly not my last.

As we found more room for eating, we sat around the dining room once again, but this time to play a hotly-contested round of that damned Apples to Apples game. The ensuing shots of Fernet, softened by ginger ale chasers, were deemed very helpful to all of us.

Karen, Zane, and Charlotte– thanks again for such a great day. I hope there will be more like it.

How to Make Butter

A couple of summers ago, I called to check in on a friend of mine in New Jersey, who was taking a more-or-less enforced summer off of work. He’d spent his time traveling to Greece with his family, organizing his life, playing with his kids, but the novelty of so much free time was wearing thin. His boredom was as clear as he sighed over the phone when I asked him what he’d been up to.

“Oh…nothing. Just making butter today…”

Making butter? I pictured him sitting on an Amish stool churning away in the shade of his porch. And since I’ve always thought of butter-making as the sole province of women, I pictured him in a dairy maid’s bonnet that matched both his eyes and his rugby shirt. I was a bit jealous of both his crushing amount of free time and the fact that he had thought of making butter before I did. I asked him where he picked up the churn.

“I don’t have a churn, Michael. I’m doing it in my Kitchen Aid.”

There went my fantasy. Use of a stand mixer was cheating in my book. Especially on the East Coast, where my urban, California sensibilities allowed me to imagine butter churns by the truckload were to be had yard-saling on any given weekend.

My fantasy deflated, I cast the thought of butter-making out of my head. Until last week, when I picked up my dog-eared copy of Much Depends on Dinner by Margaret Visser. Her chapter “Butter– and Something ‘Just as Good’” made me think entirely too much about the stuff. I wanted to know how to make it on my own, so I did a little research. And I do mean little.

It’s alarmingly easy to do, as you’ll soon see. For an excellent and very informative post on butter and butter-making, visit Cooking for Engineers– a site filled with all the cooking Geekdom to which I aspire.

Butter

Ingredients

2 cups heavy whipping cream (at a temperature between 60 and 68°F)

A pinch of salt (optional)

Finely diced herbs (also optional)

Procedure

1. Place cream in the clean, cool bowl of your stand mixer, assuming you have one. Mix on medium speed.

2. Basically, you begin by making whipped cream. Once the cream has reached stiff-peak stage, slow the mixing down a little. The cream will now start to clump in the bowl.

3. What you have in the bowl will quickly turn from creamy white to, not surprisingly given the subject matter of this post, buttery yellow.

4. After a short while, the buttermilk will begin to separate from the butter solids.

5. Pour off the buttermilk. You may save it as the appropriate beverage for a late night, heart-to-heart conversation about women with your teen-aged son around your antique farm house table, cook with it, or throw it away. The choice is yours.

6. At this point, it’s a good idea to rinse the remaining buttermilk from the solid bits, since the buttermilk will cause your butter to turn rancid much sooner than one would like. Pour cold water over the butter, then squeeze and knead. Repeat until water runs clear.

7. Congratulations, you now have your butter.

8. You may now add a little salt, if that is your preference. Or fold in some fresh herbs. Whatever the hell you want, really– it’s your butter.

Makes approximately one cup of useable butter excellent for lashing on one’s toast or experimenting à la Maria Schneider. Have a jolly time with it.

Brenda Dickson: Welcome to her kitchen.

Oh, Golly. Where to start this morning?

I think I’ll just begin as I do every morning– with fashion, diet, and exercise advice from Brenda Dickson.

There are some people in this world who spend entirely too much time on Youtube. I count myself among them. One of my favorite discoveries has been Miss Dickson. She’s been somewhat of a sensation on the website over the past several months, elevating an otherwise forgettable actress to cult star status.

She’s been parodied dozens of times, but her original, self-produced self-help video “Welcome to My Home” (1987) needs no added commentary to be both horrifying and hilarious– it’s so vain, yet so well intentioned that it’s impossible not to love. It is gorgeous, wonderful Camp. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I shall refer you to the late Susan Sontag– she can explain it all to you.

And then I shall cry.

Here is part two of Miss Dickson’s video. Her diet advice begins at 4:14, but warm up a little with her exercise routine (with her dog, Charles). There is nothing more to be said, there is only to watch.

Enjoy. Just remember: Salt can make your face puffy, and sugar causes wrinkles.