The calls usually start just before Thanksgiving, “Have you seen them?” “Yes, but I don’t like the dessert.” “Me either, too complicated” “And we don’t want to do all those hors d’oeuvres.” “I know, remember three years ago?” That’s my mother. Every year we choose a Christmas Eve dinner from a magazine. We make all of the recipes for the whole meal, including the wines if we can find them. It’s been Gourmet, Bon App?tit, even Martha Stewart (which we refer to as the year of the flatulent Brussels sprouts). Eventually my brother, Paul, will call. I pick up the phone and hear, “Prime rib - it has to be prime rib.” This has been going on for more than ten years. We almost always end up doing prime rib and not just to keep my younger brother happy.

Cooking a large piece of meat is a scary proposition for many people. It can be expensive. You have invited a crowd over to eat it. You have what seems like a million things to worry about. It really doesn’t have to be very scary, though. Just get yourself a digital meat thermometer. The best basic prime rib recipe we’ve ever used is from Martha Stewart. With these instructions, your roast will be perfectly cooked to medium rare through almost the whole thing. In the end, a roast is a very easy dinner party option. You just chuck it in the oven and don’t think about it until the thermometer calls attention to itself. Don’t forget that it continues to cook after you take it out of the oven.

For almost every year, there is a surprise standout. Last year it was the gorgeous tower of seafood hors d’oeuvre: oysters, shrimp cocktail, crab claws, the works. We slurped and dipped and licked our fingers. I still make the goat cheese tartlets and not just because I had to buy the small muffin tin pans. You can vary the fillings; the crust makes these worth spending the time. Ditto for the earl gray truffles.

I’m not sure if these sophisticated culinary ventures are appreciated by everyone to the same degree. Some of my family members would rather not eat “those strange things.” We always eat too late. My sister dropped out after 2003, when we followed Gourmet magazine’s Christmas dinner menu that included several time consuming hors d’oeuvres and 5 desserts (Ruth Reichl shame on you). Her fears that my mother and I are out of our minds were confirmed that day as she spent 4 hours rolling those truffles on cocoa covered hands. She hasn’t offered her sous chef services since then. But we’ve come to our senses and now we pick a less troublesome menu.

Here’s a report on this year. Bon app?tit was offering all of the requirements and requiring none of the impossible to find ingredients or special equipment purchases. For a simple hors d’oeuvre, they suggested smoked salmon, cr?me fra?che, capers and lemon. The first course was a broccoli soup with mascarpone. I’m changing my broccoli soup recipe to this one because it has so much more broccoli than I’ve ever seen used in this kind of soup, which makes it so thick that you don’t really need to use so much mascarpone; when I make this again, I’ll probably just use a little half and half or cream anyway. My brother, Paul, did the prime rib. It was accompanied by four things. The green beans with caramelized shallots were so so (I have a better, similar method). The gratin of potatoes with cr?me fra?che and heavy cream came out undercooked and far too rich. We skipped the Yorkshire pudding for reasons I’ll not go into, but who needs two starchy side dishes anyway? The revelations this year were the last side, the roasted tomatoes with stilton, and what they call “two-mushroom pan sauce,” which was really a rich, thick gravy that I think I would drink all by itself if you handed it to me in a glass. For the tomatoes, you cut plum tomatoes in half, seed them, marinate them in olive oil and garlic for a short time and roast them at 375 degrees for 65 minutes. As the magazine states, “This simple roasting method brings deep, bright flavor to winter tomatoes.” All of us said, “Can I have some more?” The dessert, a spiced cranberry pear tart, was simple and light and also something I’ll make again. In fact, I think I’d make the whole meal over again without changing much. I’d love to thank Betty Rosbottom, the author and creator of our Christmas meal, “All the Trimmings.”

Hors d’oeuvre is one of those funny words that give French a bad reputation. It’s hard to spell. If you are one of those people who can spell it, you might find it hard to pronounce - that’s one of the problems with French, right? If you look the words up separately in the dictionary, you would come up with “out of work.” That’s what you get if you try one of the online translation programs, like this one. (Try it, really.) In actual usage, this expression means outside of the main work, it’s something that is not considered part of the meal. In proper French, the word is hors d’oeuvre in both the singular and the plural, because oeuvre is the meal, and you’re probably only going to have one of those. In English, we generally do add an ’s’ if we are talking about more than one of them and pronounce it ‘or-derve’ in the singular and ‘or-derves’ in the plural.

Hors d’oeuvres can cause some people to get a little loopy. There’s a person who wrote a short story called “A floating platter of hors d’oeuvres” in dialogue form. Reminds me of the president’s party at the university where I work. The American Association of Artificial Intelligence sponsors a contest for making robots and one year the challenge was to make a robot that could serve hors d’oeuvres. (I hope this gets into production soon. I want one.) There are also the people who make hors d’oeuvres in funny shapes. I’ve seen fruit or vegetables shaped into bouquets, but it doesn’t get any better than the guy who made some little canap?s and a deep fried version of pikachu, the pok?mon character. Have a look at cheese pikachu and fried potato pikachu. I think that people have fun with hors d’oeuvres precisely because they aren’t the main attraction; they don’t have to be taken seriously.

Generally, I serve a bit of something on toast rounds or crackers, some nuts, olives or sausage or maybe some crudit?s as an opening to a meal. No need to get complicated. During this time of year, however, I usually want to put out something a little more fancy, like smoked salmon on blinis or some little quiches. Here are two recipes for hors d’oeuvres that go with the season, that aren’t too expensive and aren’t too filling. They work well together and have nice bright colors.

Red and green crudit?s with ancho?ade

Crudit?s

• 1 bunch broccoli florets, cut into bite sized pieces
• 1 bunch asparagus, ends trimmed
• 2 small zucchini
• 1 small fennel
• 1 seedless cucumber
• 1 red pepper
• 1 pint cherry tomatoes
• 1 small package radishes
• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

Dip

• 1 can anchovies, drained
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced
• 2 T red wine vinegar
• 2 T parsley, chopped
• 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1 t dijon mustard
• 1 bunch broccoli florets, cut into bite sized pieces

Blanch broccoli florets and asparagus in a steamer. Cut cucumber, zucchini and pepper. Arrange on a platter and decorate with cherry tomatoes and radishes. To make dip: combine ingredients in the bowl of a food processor and process until smooth.

Salmon cakes with chipotle lime sour cream and cilantro.

Salmon cakes

• 1 large or 2 small cans salmon
• 1/2 cup bread crumbs
• 1/4 cup light mayonnaise
• 1/4 cup chopped white onion
• 1 egg
• Salt
• Pepper
• 1 T butter
• 1 T vegetable oil

Mix first 7 ingredients (salmon through pepper) together in a mixing bowl. Form into bite sized patties or cubes, as I’ve done, and place on a plate. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for approximately one hour. Heat butter and olive oil in a large nonstick or cast iron skillet over medium heat. Fry the salmon patties and drain on paper towels before adding topping and decoration.

Topping

• 1/2 cup light sour cream
• 1/4 cup light mayonnaise
• 2 T lime juice
• 1 chopped chipotle in adobo along with some sauce (reserve the rest of the can of chipotles for another use, I use one chili in some mayonnaise on leftover chicken or pork sandwiches)

Mix ingredients together. This can be done ahead of time, but keep the topping cold in the refrigerator until just before serving. These taste best when the salmon cakes are warm and the topping is cold.

Place one cilantro leaf on top of each patty for decoration. To serve, line a platter with shredded lettuce and wedges of lime and place salmon patties on top of lettuce. Serve while still warm.

Our friends Hamilton and Ana called last week to invite us to a holiday party. Hamilton is a historian who works on Modern Spain. Ana is from Spain and is a pilot. You really can’t get any more modern and Spanish than that. So, when they called, they said they were having a tapas luck party. Kind of like a pot luck party, but they want people to bring tapas. I think this is a very good idea, especially since many of our friends are really good cooks and I know that they will make things that I will want to eat.

I’m one of those people who studied Spanish in college (for three years!) but never spent enough time in a Spanish-speaking country to get really good at it. Before my husband the Spanish professor and I got together, I’d had only one opportunity to practice the language out of the classroom; it was during a trip to Mexico for New Year’s one year. I ate and drank and danced quite a bit, but had almost no opportunities to speak Spanish. That experience was enough to make me realize I understand the language pretty well, but I hadn’t ever learned how to ask where the bathroom was. For a trip to Mexico, this is an important question. Since I’ve been married, I’ve had several trips to Spain and a little more practice with the language. I did learn how to ask where the bathroom is, but I don’t always understand the answer.

I’ve also learned that Spain is one of my favorite places in the world for food. I’m not talking about the El Bull? revolution. Just give me the olives, the cheese, the ham and the chorizo, thank you very much. The everyday stuff. The first time I went to Spain with Erik, we had an unexpected vacation. We were supposed to be going to the Biblioteca Nacional, the national library in Madrid, but it was closed for renovations much longer than they had announced. What do you do for three weeks in Spain when you have no money? You walk to Santiago de Compostela. This is the place where Saint James’ bones were supposedly buried. It has been a site of pilgrimage for more than a thousand years. Known in Spain as el camino, the road to Santiago was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1993 and is something many people do these days more as a form of tourism than as religious ritual.

What I liked best about walking road to Saint James was the rhythm of the day. Wake up early, eat a sweet pastry and drink some coffee. Walk until eleven and stop for a little sandwich and something to drink. Walk again until two in the afternoon. Find a refugio, one of the hostels that dot the route, check in and drop off your pack. Have lunch. Eat anything and everything that you want. Have a nap. At about seven, go out to explore the town and have some tapas and beers. Sleep. We did this for three whole weeks. It was the best vacation I’ve ever had.

You know how everything tastes amazing when you’re really hungry? That must be why I’m still dreaming about some of the tapas I ate during that trip. I wish I could say that I never ate tapas I didn’t like. One day on the camino, we stopped for elevensies in a bar in a small village. It was the kind of place where old men play checkers and little kids run around. It was clean and cool and hadn’t been redecorated since the seventies. The waiter had a big mustache. We each ordered a ca?a, a small glass of beer. When the drinks arrived, the waiter put them on the table along with some toothpicks, some of those funny paper napkins they have only in Spain that are a lot more papery than napkin-y and a little stainless steel dish of something covered in red sauce. It was a hot day, we had been walking, we were thirsty and hungry. I sipped my beer. It was cold and light. I took a toothpick and stabbed at one of the pieces of whatever was in the red sauce. So did Erik. We put the bites into our mouths and started to eat. It was softish at first. Crunch. What was that? We both looked at each other as we chewed. Erik had a funny look on his face. “I know what this is,” I offered. “I don’t want to know,” he stated. It was pig ear. Fried and smothered in a spicy red sauce. I didn’t spit it out. Neither did he. I’m more careful now, though, when I stab at the tapas covered in red sauce.

I’ve decided to make some empanaditas to take to the party. These are the bite sized version of empanada, literally “breaded” in Spanish. They are very simple and quite versatile. I’m using a modified version of my pie crust recipe that I’ll roll out and cut into rounds. For the filling, I’m going to caramelize onions and shitake mushrooms with just enough butter to give it wonderful flavor, but not so much that it will ooze down someone’s wrist when they bite into it. The filling isn’t very Spanish, but I’m sure nobody will mind. You can fill them with other things like cheese, roasted red peppers or a spicy ground lamb mixture come to my mind.

Empanaditas

The crust

• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 t salt
• 12 T butter, chilled, cut into 1/2 inch pieces
• 10 T lard, chilled, cut into 1/2 inch pieces
• 1/4 cup ice water (or more if needed)

Place flour and salt in a food processor and pulse briefly. Add butter and lard and pulse again until mixture forms pea-size bits. Add water a little at a time and pulse until the whole thing comes together in a mass. Wrap dough with plastic and refrigerate for at least one hour and up to 3 days before rolling out.

For filling

• 1 large onion
• 3 garlic cloves, minced
• 8 oz. fresh shitake mushrooms
• 3 T butter
• 1/2 t salt, or more to taste
• Freshly ground black pepper

Melt butter in skillet over medium heat. Add onions, salt and pepper and cook until just beginning to brown. Add garlic and mushrooms. Turn heat to low, place lid on skillet and cook, stirring occasionally until mushrooms has given off all their liquid and everything caramelizes.

Assembly and baking

• 2 egg yolks
• 1/8 cup cream

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Generously flour the area where you will be rolling out the dough. Take dough from the refrigerator and place in the middle of your floured work surface. Roll dough out to about 1/8 inch, turning it over from time to time to prevent sticking. Turn dough over one more time and add more flour to the surface and the top of the dough. Cut out rounds of dough using a circular cookie cutter, or a glass, fancy equipment is not necessary here. Remove surrounding dough, roll it up into a tight ball and refrigerate it. Place about a teaspoon of filling in the middle and join the seams of the dough together, pinching with your fingers to seal and place it on a baking sheet. Repeat until you’ve used up all the dough. If you still have filling, you can get the leftover bit from the refrigerator and roll it out and proceed as above. Whisk together egg yolks and cream and brush it generously on all of the empanaditas using a pastry brush. Bake for 35-45 minutes. When they are golden brown, remove them from the oven and place on a baking rack until they are cool.

Makes approximately 36.

Of all the desserts linked to holiday traditions, my favorite to make is the b?che de no?l. In France, the Yule log cake is traditionally served at the end of Christmas Eve dinner. A simple jelly roll, filled, frosted and decorated to look like a log; it references traditions much older than Christmas. Along with ham, holly, mistletoe, pine boughs, candles and the decorated tree, this cake references pre-Christian northern European practices related to the winter solstice. Yule, related to the word for yellow in many Germanic languages, is derived from the old English word ‘geol.,’ and a cognate of the Old Norse, ‘jol,’ a winter festival that in some areas lasted twelve days. This is also where the word jolly comes from. The large bonfires of modern pagan festivities commemorate ancient celebrations of the longest night of the year and the cycle of the sun. Burning a very large log during the 12 days of Christmas was a longstanding French tradition that waned sometime during the nineteenth century. I’ve found references to Napoleon making it illegal in order to preserve people’s health in apartment buildings in Paris and to the fact that the French had by then cut down most of the very big trees from which this type of log could be cut. I’ve also seen lamentations over the fact that once people weren’t so dependant on fire anymore and alternate methods of heating one’s house and cooking one’s food were available, people no longer had the same respect for fire. Whatever the reason, once the actual logs and rituals related to the hearth were no longer widely practiced, a simulacrum in the form of a pastry was invented. With this dessert, the winter solstice is incorporated into the Christmas feast and the log is consumed not by fire, but by one’s party guests.

Bring up the b?che de no?l with a group of French people and a discussion inevitably ensues. If there happens to be a person from Provence in the group, they will explain cacho fio, proven?al for ‘light the fire.’ A real log in a real fireplace is still at the center of Christmas Eve tradition in that area of the country. French people from other areas will have an earnest discussion about what fillings are the best, which pastry shops make the best b?che, and there is inevitably debate about whether or not to use cr?me de marron, chestnut cream, as the filling, and discussion about the new fad for yule log ice cream cakes. All the French people I know agree that the latter is a modern abomination, invented for lazy people who would rather buy something in the freezer section of the grocery store than make special trips to the bakery to first pre-order their cake and then to pick it up on Christmas eve. This part of the discussion can turn into the lamentation over loss of culinary knowledge, the lack of respect for traditions and general grumbling about modern life. Americans gripe about not having enough time. The French whine about not having enough time to cook, eat and drink. The French people I know who live in the U.S. complain that you can’t find these cakes in the pastry shops in the United States. “Why not make one?” I ask. In return, I get bemused smirks or outright open eyed stares. My French friend and colleague, Mercedes, asserts, “French people don’t have to make cakes, that’s what the p?tisserie is for, we could never make things as good as the pastry chefs, they spend their lives learning how to make things like that.” She has a point. And she has a large collection of gu-gus, the plastic people (Santa Claus, gnomes), animals (mostly reindeer) and objects (trees, a saw, a hatchet, etc.) that the b?che is usually decorated with and she is happy to share them with me.

My own b?che making began when I first started my career as a French professor. I wanted to have a party at the end of the Fall semester to thank my students for all of their hard work, to cook them some food that would be better than what they ate in the cafeteria and to share some of my knowledge about the importance of food in French culture. When I talked about the b?che to my husband, Erik, he handed me his copy of Julia Child’s, The French Chef Cookbook, where I got the decorating ideas and an amazing recipe for chocolate meringue butter cream that can be modified with different flavors and fillings. This frosting is plush and silky and can be made with semi-sweet or bittersweet chocolate, depending on your preference. Cook’s Illustrated published a very good jelly roll cake recipe in January/February 1994 as the base for their Raspberry Charlotte Royale that I have modified somewhat over the last few years. It’s a moist, light sponge cake with very little flour and no butter, the perfect contrast for the richness of the frosting that holds up well when rolled.

The ingredients and procedure in this recipe are fairly simple. There are several components to the cake, though, and the directions for the cake itself, the frosting and the decorating might seem too long and complicated, but don’t let this throw you off. You can make the frosting while the cake is in the oven and do the decorating a couple of hours later when they’ve both had a chance to cool. I’m giving here a fairly plain version and suggestions for alternate flavors and fillings at the end. Once you see the idea behind the decorating, you can imagine all sorts of different fillings and flavorings. One piece of advice, don’t try making this with anything other than a chocolate frosting. I tried a vanilla butter cream one year, because that’s what I like, and I decorated it with a heavy dusting of cocoa powder. The overwhelming consensus was against anything other than chocolate. I find it easier to let chocolate lovers proselytize their chocolate love and make like I have converted to their side. Now when I make this cake, I just fiddle with flavorings that go with chocolate. Besides, it’s easier to believe in the cake as log when the color is such a nice velvety brown.

Jelly roll cake

• 5/8 cup cake flour
• 1/8 cup cornstarch
• 4 large eggs at room temperature, separated
• Pinch of salt
• 10 tablespoons sugar
• 3/4 t vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup powdered sugar
• 1 T all-purpose flour for pan
• Parchment paper
• Cooking spray

Place oven rack at low position and preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray a jelly roll pan with cooking spray, line it with parchment paper, spray again and flour it. Sift flour and cornstarch together into a small bowl. Beat the egg whites in the bowl of a mixer with the whip attachment, or in a bowl using electric beaters, at moderate speed for about 2 minutes until they begin to foam. Gradually add 6 tablespoons of the sugar, beating mixture constantly until it is stiff.

In another bowl, beat yolks with remaining 4 tablespoons sugar until thick and light in color, stopping to scrape down the bowl once or twice. Add vanilla. Beat on medium-high until mixtures forms flat ribbons, about 5 minutes.

Fold 1/3 of egg whites into yolk mixture. Sprinkle about 1/4 cup dry ingredients over batter and fold in gently. Repeat until all of the egg whites and dry ingredients are incorporated to form a light, smooth batter.

Pour batter into prepared pan, smooth batter with a rubber spatula and bake until just golden and edges of cake pull away from pan, 12 to 15 minutes. Do not over bake or cake will dry out and fall apart when you try to roll it.

Meanwhile, sift powdered sugar over a kitchen towel large enough to hold the cake. When you remove the cake from the oven, immediately turn it out onto the towel and peel away the paper. Use a serrated knife to cut away any crisp edges from all four sides of the cake. Fold one end of the towel over a short end of the cake and roll the cake up in the towel. Set the cake rolled up in the towel on a rack to cool.

Meringue italienne: sugar-syrup meringue

• 3 egg whites
• Pinch of salt
• 1/4 t cream of tartar
• 1 1/3 cups granulated sugar
• 1/3 cup water

Place sugar and water in a saucepan over high heat, swirl pan gently, do not stir, until sugar has dissolved and liquid is clear. Cover pan and boil rapidly without stirring for a minute or so. The condensing steam will wash down the sides of pan and prevent the formation of crystals. Uncover pan when bubbles begin to thicken and boil until the soft ball stage, about 238 degrees.

Meanwhile, beat the egg whites in the bowl of a mixer with the whip attachment, or in a bowl using electric beaters, at moderate speed for about 2 minutes until they begin to foam. Add salt and cream of tartar and beat on high until egg whites form stiff peaks.

Beat egg whites on low pouring hot sugar syrup in a thin stream. Once all the syrup is added, turn mixer to high and beat until the bowl is almost cool, about 5 minutes. It will be shiny smooth and form stiff peaks. Reserve 1/2 cup meringue for the mushrooms.

Cr?me au beurre ? la meringue: meringue butter cream

• 2 cups (12 oz.) semi-sweet or bittersweet chocolate chips (I use Ghirardelli), melted
• 2 T rum or whisky
• 1 T vanilla extract
• 2 sticks (1 lb.) unsalted butter, softened to room temperature

Beat melted chocolate into meringue mixture. Gradually beat in butter. Add rum or whisky and vanilla. Chill for about 45 minutes until it is spreadable. You can make this a day ahead of time and bring it almost up to room temperature before using.

Meringue mushrooms

Pre-heat oven to 200 degrees and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Place 1/2 cup reserved meringue in a pastry bag fitted with a large tip with a round hole. Pipe out rounds for mushroom caps and longer pointed cones for stems. Bake in 200 degree oven for 50 or 60 minutes until mushrooms are dry but still white. To assemble, use a small paring knife to carve out the bottom of the mushroom caps. Using a toothpick, put a little of the frosting and then insert a mushroom stem into the hole. Decorate around and on the cake. Use a wire mesh sieve to sprinkle a little cocoa on the mushrooms to make them look more real.

To fill, frost and decorate the log

• 1/4 cup confectioner’s sugar
• 1 t cocoa powder

Unroll the cake and spread half of the butter cream over it in a thin layer. Roll up the cake. You can do this step up to one day ahead of time and wrap and chill the cake.

To frost the cake, place it on your serving dish seam side down. I use a cutting board covered in aluminum foil or red or green foil wrapping paper. Cut off one end at a diagonal to make it look like a sawed off log. Stick the cut off piece on top of the cake with frosting to make it look like a sawed off branch. Place strips of parchment paper under all four edges of cake to keep the frosting from getting on the serving dish. Use an icing spatula to cover the cake with frosting. Drag a pastry comb over the entire cake to make the frosting look like bark. Refrigerate at least 2 hours before serving. Decorate cake with meringue mushrooms and use a wire mesh sieve to sprinkle powdered sugar over everything to make it look like snow.

Variations

Apricot: instead of rum or whisky, add 2 T apricot brandy to frosting and spread the cake with 1/4 cup warmed apricot preserves before filling the cake. This is my favorite flavor with chocolate.

Pear: instead of rum or whisky, add 2 T poire William to frosting. Peel two very ripe pears and pur?e them in a food processor until smooth. Cook the pear pur?e with 1 T sugar and the juice of 1/2 lemon until it thickens slightly. Let cool before spreading on cake before filling. This may sound like a strange combination, but it is excellent.

Chestnut: instead of rum or whiskey, add 2 T cognac to frosting. To one cup of frosting, add 1/2 cr?me de marron or chestnut spread and use it to fill the cake. Bonne Maman brand is the best.

Chocolate mousse filling: whip 1/4 cup heavy cream until very stiff and fold it into one cup of frosting to use as the filling.

Chocolate mousse filling: whip 1/4 cup heavy cream until very stiff and fold it into one cup of frosting to use as the filling.

Cake recipe adapted from Cook’s Illustrated January/February, 1994.
Meringue and butter cream adapted from Julia Child, The French Chef Cookbook

I’m always buying bananas at the store because they are such a good deal and so good for you. The plan is to eat one after I go to the gym, but of course, even when I do go to the gym, I forget to eat my banana and then I’m at work and it’s only 11 and I’m famished and I eat my lunch. That would be o.k., but then I’m starving again by 5 and I never want to eat a banana when it’s happy hour. Maybe I should work on a recipe for a banana daquiri and kill two birds with one stone. What usually happens is I buy bananas, don’t eat them until they are over-ripe, then I take pity on their sad brown and yellow skins and bake banana bread. Instead of bananas, let me eat cake.

Bananas are originally from southeast Asia, but they are cultivated in over 130 countries. They are ranked fourth in world-wide crop production, after rice, wheat and corn. While most Americans know only the yellow dessert banana, sweet and eaten raw when ripe, most of the bananas in the world are of the type meant to be cooked and are eaten as a starch much like potatoes. Bananas are first mentioned in buddhist texts from the sixth century B.C. and are also described by Alexander the Great about three hundred years later. The word banana is of African origin and probably came into use in English through Spanish or Portuguese. One explanation of the name is that it comes from the arabic word for finger, ‘banan’. This may or may not be true, as is usually the case with etymology. Another possibly true claim is the idea that the fruit of original sin was not an apple, but a banana. If this idea were to be widely accepted, christianity might have to be re-thought.

Last year, I made banana bread and took it my brother Paul’s house as a gift. We ate it toasted for breakfast, my favorite time for sweets. He was raving about it and complaining about someone else in our family baking terrible banana bread. I won’t name names, but I’ll say that I think this recipe is very, very good and that anyone in my family, and anyone else for that matter, should adopt it. It includes both baking powder and baking soda, the latter offsets the acidity of the buttermilk, which is what makes the bread so moist and flavorful. If you don’t have buttermilk, you can substitute an equal amount of plain yogurt. You can also make this recipe and bake it in six small loaf pans if you want to give it away at holiday time.

Banana Bread

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 Tablespoon baking powder
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup walnuts, chopped (optional)
• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 2 cups sugar
• 4 large eggs
• 2 cups mashed ripe bananas
• 1/2 cup buttermilk
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350?F. Butter and flour 2 9×5x2 1/2-inch metal loaf pans. Whisk first 4 ingredients in medium bowl to blend.

Beat butter in large bowl until fluffy. Gradually add sugar, beating until well blended. Beat in eggs 1 at a time. Beat in mashed bananas, buttermilk and vanilla extract. Beat in flour mixture. Mix in nuts (if using). Pour batter into prepared pans.

Bake bread until tester inserted into center comes out clean, about 1 hour 15 minutes. Turn out onto rack and cool.

Makes two 9-inch loaves.

Mark Bittman’s article on Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread has caused a brouhaha in the blogosphere. Here’s the deal: you combine flour, water, yeast and a little salt in a bowl to make a very wet dough, cover it with plastic wrap and wait a really long time, preferably 18 hours or more. You then form the dough into a boule (a large ball, a traditional shape for French sourdough) and let it rise another two hours. You preheat your oven and a 6- to 8-quart pot and its lid to 450 degrees. You toss the dough into the hot pot, slap on the lid and bake for 30 minutes, remove the lid and bake for another 15-30 minutes. The written recipe differs slightly from what is shown in the video. You’ll need to sign in to the New York Times to view this.

Most bloggers are very proud of their gorgeous photos; this bread is beautiful. Not everyone is equally happy with the results, however. If you’re not an expert baker, you won’t know the simple details, like you really do need to have the dough at around 70 degrees for optimal rising. You also can’t disturb the dough too much while shaping it as that will deflate all of the lovely bubbles. Finally, everyone is saying that one reason you don’t need to knead the dough and also the reason that it makes such a divine crust is that the dough is very wet. Unfortunately, this can also make the crumb inside a bit rubbery or wet.

In my typical over-analyzing, I’d been reading about this bread baking craze and the chemistry of yeast, trying to decide how to modify the recipe, and basically just thinking about it. Erik and I had discussed the bread with our friend and colleague, Heather, all three of us having made bread in the past and all three of us interested in trying out the recipe. While I was still hemming and hawing, Heather plunged in and made some bread. She is one of those great spontaneous cooks, never planning too far ahead or measuring, just trying and adapting as she goes along. Well, Heather didn’t measure her ingredients; she just looked at the video. She didn’t follow the recipe, because she already had a sour dough starter in her fridge. So, she made her bread and it was amazing! It had a crunchy crust on top and a chewier, caramelized crust on the underside. Big holes, great flavor. Heather is not only an amazing cook, she is also really generous. She gave me some of her starter and I brought it home and started a batch.

I think I hadn’t made this bread straight away partially because I don’t have the Le Creuset Dutch oven that is called for in the recipe. I’ve got 2 All-Clad Dutch ovens, but they are stainless, and I worried about the bread sticking. Erik reminded me about the Lodge cast iron camp Dutch oven rusting in our basement. He bought it about ten years ago and had never used it and hadn’t even seasoned it. I think this is somehow my fault, though I’m not quite sure why. Before any other steps to my own holey grail, I had to haul this behemoth up from the basement and season it.

I made a first batch of the bread with Heather’s starter and followed the recipe fairly closely otherwise. It was easy. It had the holes. It had the crust. The crumb was a little wet, as predicted, but it dried a little as it cooled and turned out great. It needed more salt, but would more salt inhibit the yeast?

I decided to try the recipe this time with commercial yeast and a little extra salt. The dough rose up a lot more, and I did a better job of not getting it stuck to the towel. I upped the oven temperature as demonstrated in the video. I also measured the flour and water in cups and then I weighed them so that I could give both volume measurements (for normal Americans cooks) and measurement by weight (for non-Americans and people like my brother Paul, who used to be a baker and who would for sure give me some crap about this if I didn’t give the measurements in grams). This bread was indeed very holey and I’ve felt like I’ve enacted my own miracle. I’m starting to feel like I’m living up to my blog’s name.

In the New York Times video, Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery tells Mark Bittman that anyone can make this bread, even a six year old, which has garnered some laughs. The other thing that Mr. Lahey says is that the recipe should be freely shared. This last bit has not been mentioned much, but I take it to mean that I can spread the good news with my own adaptation and you should also tell two friends.

My final conclusions? The starter I got from Heather made a better tasting bread than the commercial yeast. Basically, there are two essential elements to this bread and you can fool around with the rest of the recipe. First, the long fermentation of a highly hydrated dough and second, the cooking method: the closed pot inside of a hot oven gives that elusive crackly crust reminiscent of the best French bakeries. Even if you’ve never been to France, you’ll get the longing for Paris like the rest of us.

No-knead bread: an adaptation

• 3 cups (460 grams) all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
• 1 1/2 cups water (350 grams)
• 1/4 teaspoon instant yeast or 1/4 cup starter
• 11/2 teaspoons salt
• Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed

Combine flour, yeast (if using) and salt in a bowl. Add water (and starter if using instead of yeast). Use one hand to bring it all together into a shaggy sticky ball. Cover bowl with plastic wrap or a damp kitchen towel and let rest about 18 hours at around 70 degrees.

Turn dough out of bowl onto a lightly floured surface and toss a little more flour on top. Fold it over on itself once or twice and quickly shape dough into a ball. Place ball on a smooth cotton towel that’s been covered with a generous amount of wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and sprinkle with more bran or cornmeal. Fold the towel over the top of the dough and let rise for about 2 hours until doubled in size.

At least a half hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 500 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (something that can go in the oven, even a Pyrex covered dish will do) in oven as it heats. Pull pot from oven. Flip dough out of the towel and into your hand, seam side up and toss it into the pot. Don’t worry if it looks a little misshapen. Replace lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until top of bread is brown. Cool on a rack for at least 45 minutes (resist the temptation to cut into this right away; it needs the cool down so that the water can evaporate).