Oxtail stew!
It is really kind of appalling how often this happens and also how often I don’t even really notice.
I am obviously at some far-off point in my life going to be the worst Mom ever. “In a minute, honey, Mommy just has to obsessively monitor her blog traffic! There’s some formula in the cupboard, maybe learn to fix it yourself?”
He ate my heart
I am just going to title things after Lady Gaga song lyrics all week, heh. Ok but so I wrote about cooking … on my blog? I know this is getting a bit ridiculous but for some reason this post seemed more like the jurisdiction of my blog.
“Like you’re angry at it!” (I took this literally and my first punch hit the bottom of the bowl)
Today my grandfather spent the afternoon teaching me how to bake his signature bread, which he bakes weekly. I think I’ll stop there because that sentence alone makes me feel sort of like how I felt when, while riding my bike down Myrtle Avenue with four pounds of swiss chard dangling from each of my bike’s handlebars, I caught myself absently humming “The State I Am In.” Anyway, I am bringing a loaf home tomorrow so please get in touch if you would like to help me eat it before it goes stale, it really is the best bread in the world.
Three apple pies (two cardamom, one streusel crust), one pumpkin pie, one Kahlua-chocolate pecan pie, one normal pecan pie, one carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, pumpkin and chocolate-mint-chip cookies, boston creme pie, fruit tart, chocolate cake. If I’m forgetting anything it’s probably because megadoses of sugar kill brain cells.
The noodle and the damage done
We are still feeling the last aftershocks of the Cooking the Books episode. Last night I used the excuse of not wasting the few long-lived sage leaves left in the package to cook some premade gnocchi with the same browned butter and sage sauce that went on the malfatti. I also made a shrimp and broccoli stir-fry with some geriatric broccoli from the last CSA delivery of the summer share. Either one of these dishes would have been an acceptable dinner if I was just cooking for myself but having an audience makes me feel pressure to have a “main dish” and a “side dish.” Sometimes I think that instead of photos of a pizza slice wrapped around a bacon cheesburger stuffed with the creme from five oreos, the This Is Why You’re Fat tumblr should replace all its content with just the words “Because You Are In A Relationship.”
Also Amy blogged about being on the show at HER BLOG, which exists. It is hilarious. It’s true that I did make her take off her shoes, and also that I did tell her what my advance was. (She was like “I heard you got a million dollars for your book” and I was like “Uh hello look at this apartment, where I live, do you think that could possibly be true? That was just a rumor that the Internet started so that they could later debunk it like ‘actually she got [way, way less than a million dollars], what a failure,’” and Amy was like “Oh that makes sense.” Clever!)
The next episode of CtB will feature Anna Jane Grossman. Anna Jane is the author of OBSOLETE, which is a funny book with lots of useful information about typewriters, landlines, and other things our children will never believe existed, when we describe these things to them. Then as evidence we’ll hold up this book, OBSOLETE, and they’ll be like “What’s that?” and we’ll be like “It’s called a book” and they’ll be like “Weird.”
SPOILER ALERT: We are going to cook something obsolete, obviously.
Yakisoba, a Japanese “fast food” dish of fried noodles, pork, cabbage, onions, carrots and green peppers topped with scallions and pink pickled ginger, is one of my favorite things to eat — it’s my go-to restaurant meal when I’m alone and I want to treat myself well, but don’t want to spend a million dollars. Last night I tried to recreate it with mixed results. Basically it was a fail in terms of yakisoba versimilitude but a success in terms of tasting good. I had already done a specific shopping excursion to get the pork (to THE MEAT HOOK aka meat paradise. They gave me a free sausage. It was so good. They have a TUMBLR for god’s sake!), so I lacked the energy to trek to an Asian market to buy yakisoba sauce. Instead, I scoured the internet and concluded that some combination of soy, mirin, and oyster sauce would have to stand in.
The ad hoc sauce worked okay, but lacked the specific super-salty almost-dashi-ish richness of real yakisoba juice. Owning a jar of pickled ginger is a thrill, though. I am excited to put it on lots of random things.
Anyway I am going to revisit yakisoba obsessively until I nail it, and then I will post the internet’s only definitive English-language yakisoba recipe, so STAY TUNED. Also please email me if you are Japanese/have suggestions.
Cooking the Books with Amy Sohn, produced by the genius Val Temple. Oh my god, we had a good time making this. Hot dish: we learned that Amy is writing an as-yet-untitled sequel to Prospect Park West (I like “Union Street”), that kids at Amy’s toddler daughter’s school are not allowed to bring peanut butter and jelly in their lunches (peanut allergies), that postnatal yoga class can be somewhat “bullshit,” and that if a man doesn’t buy you a bag of frozen peas after you walk into a glass door, he is not worth marrying. Amazing. Authors who wish to appear on future episodes should email emilymagazine AT gmail.
