I was going to wait until summer had really arrived before writing about ribs. My brother Paul is a rib fanatic and he cooks up ribs that make even some vegetarians weak in the knees. We’ll be doing ribs with my brother this summer and I’ll take some pictures and tell you how he makes them when the time comes. For now, I really couldn’t pass up the recipe for oven roasted ribs by Regina Schrambling from this week’s LA Times. A dry rub applied the day before and a very low cooking temperature ensure tender flavorful meat.

I had to change it a little, though. Not because I’m one of those people who can’t follow a recipe, not me. But this one had no garlic. Yes people, no garlic. I really couldn’t imagine these ribs with no garlic. In the end, I decided to add garlic in twice. Once with the rub and again with the glaze. At first I thought that would be the only change to the recipe. Until I went to the grocery store. I wasn’t looking to buy more salt. I’m a total salt junky and I am guilty of having more than 5 different kinds of salt in my cupboard. We’re moving soon, so we’re trying to cut down on the overstock in our pantry. But then, sitting on the shelf in the baking aisle one shelf up from the row of Morton girls was a container of smoked sea salt flakes. How could I pass this up? So, in it went into my cart and into this recipe. I also decided at the last minute that I didn’t like the plain white sugar in the rub from the original recipe and that the glaze also needed some sweetness. I decided on brown sugar for the rub and Asian chili sauce for the glaze.

When it came time to flesh out the rest of the menu, I started thinking about how ribs are both traditional fare of the Southern U.S. and of Southeast Asia. Accordingly, I made these corn fritters with scallions, a sweet sour spicy cucumber salad and an Asian inflected cabbage slaw with grapefruit sections. In the end, I was surprised at the flavor of the ribs. They were nicely tender and because they weren’t flavored by the grill, they tasted a lot more like pork tenderloin than I had expected. We ate the meal accompanied by an Australian Chardonnay that played well with everything.

Pork ribs with sweet chili sauce and garlic

• 1 rack baby back or spare ribs
• 2 T smoked sea salt (you may substitute plain sea salt or kosher salt)
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 2 t dried Mexican oregano, crumbled
• 2 t ground cumin
• 6 cloves garlic, minced and divided
• Juice of 1 lime
• 1/2 cup sweet Asian chili sauce

Rinse the ribs and dry with paper towel. Remove the silver skin (the membrane on the concave side of the ribs). Mix together salt, sugar, oregano, cumin and 3 cloves minced garlic in a small bowl. Lay the ribs on a large piece of aluminum foil and rub on spice mixture. Wrap the ribs in the aluminum foil and refrigerate overnight. Take them out of the refrigerator at least one hour before putting them in the oven. Heat oven to 200 degrees. Combine the lime juice, chili sauce and remaining garlic in a small bowl. Remove the excess salt and sugar with a damp paper towel. Dry the meat well and lay it on a baking sheet. Spread the sauce evenly over the ribs. Put the ribs in the pre-heated oven and bake until tender, 3 to 4 1/2 hours. Once they are done, you can pass them under the broiler for a few minutes to brown them a little. Slice the ribs to separate them and serve.

Cucumber salad

• 1 cucumber, halved, peeled, seeded, quartered and sliced
• 1 carrot, sliced thin
• 1 T sugar
• 1 T rice wine vinegar
• Pinch of red pepper flakes
• 1 T chopped cilantro (I somehow didn’t have any cilantro, so I used a little lime thyme)

Dissolve the sugar in the vinegar, add the red pepper flakes. Mix with the cucumber and carrot. Add the cilantro just before serving.

Cabbage slaw with grapefruit

• 1 small red cabbage, sliced thin
• 2 medium carrots, grated
• 1 T rice wine vinegar or other vinegar
• 1 small red chili, seeded and minced, or dried red pepper flakes to taste
• 2 t vegetable oil
• 1 grapefruit
• 1 T soy sauce
• Freshly ground black pepper
• 1/4 cup chopped chives

In a large bowl, mix together vinegar, chili, and oil. Add cabbage and carrots and toss to coat. Cut bottom and top ends off of grapefruit and slice off grapefruit peel. Divide grapefruit into segments, holding it over the salad bowl to catch any juices. Arrange grapefruit segments on top of slaw. Finish with soy sauce, pepper and chives just before serving.

Last Sunday, I drove to the Berkshires in a horrible snow storm. I did it for cheese. Google told me that Ashfield, Massachusetts, where I needed to go, was a mere 117 miles from my house. Driving in what I hope was the last nasty weather of the season it took me more than 3 hours. There were a couple of times when the mix of rain and snow was turning to sleet and freezing on the road and I thought I wasn’t going to make it. I almost gave up and turned back, I didn’t think I could make it, but I kept going, creeping slowly along, tempted by the cheese. You see, I had signed myself up for Cheesemaking 101 at the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company. There was no way I was going to miss it. As I climbed up the last of the very steep hills, I found myself repeating, I think I can I think I can I think I can…

When I arrived, I was about an hour late and it took me a few minutes to catch my breath and recover from the white knuckle car ride. More than 20 people were seated around three big tables in the kitchen area of a large and colorful Queen Anne house. Ricki Carrol, my cheese siren, was already finished showing the class how to make queso blanco and a whole milk ricotta. I was warmly welcomed and got straight to work with my classmates on the recipe for farmhouse cheddar that we would finish by day’s end. We also watched and helped out as Ricki demonstrated how to make mascarpone, fromage blanc, mozzarella and true ricotta using the whey from the cheddar. Ricki’s assistant Jamie was also there to help out and make sure we avoided disasters.

This Ricki has a mass of curly hair and a quick laugh. She started the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company in 1978 and has been converting people ever since. According to her website, she is also an artist, an activist, a mother, a teacher, a writer and party organizer. They call her the cheese queen. Her popular book, Cheese Making Made Easy has recently been updated, expanded and re-issued with the new title, Home Cheese Making, offers great instructions for 75 different kinds of cheese and 25 other dairy products. After seeing the book, I wanted to see her in action. That’s how I found myself on a snowy Sunday in Ricki’s kitchen as she talked about how you need to take time to smell the cheese, all the while measuring, stirring, explaining, showing, correcting, watching. Slow food is fast and fun at Ricki’s house.

Cheese is not as mysterious as it seems. You take milk and encourage good, tasty bacteria to grow in it while making sure that you don’t get too much bad bacteria in there to spoil the party. For many fresh cheeses, like ricotta, you just add citric acid or vinegar for coagulation, heat the milk until you have curds and whey, then drain it. Ricki let me know that my previous attempt at ricotta was actually paneer, because I made it with lemon juice, so now I’m thinking I need to correct that one. For other cheeses, you also add a starter culture, the good bacteria. Adding rennet causes coagulation, a necessary addition for more solid cheeses. This is something that people have been doing for thousands of years all over the world.

But if you can buy it in the store so easily, why would people want to make cheese at home? That’s a little like asking why make a cake when you can buy one already made. Sometimes you want a better tasting, homemade version without all the nasty chemicals and trans fats hidden in the grocery store versions. Maybe you just don’t want to eat a cake with bright blue frosting. Maybe you don’t want bright orange cheddar either. The people who signed up for the class all had very different reasons for being there. One guy told me that his wife was a chef and they have all these foodie friends. He didn’t know how to cook and was happy that his wife and their friends made delicious things to eat. But he didn’t want to feel left out, so he specialized in bread. This class was his attempt to branch out. A woman from an Italian American family told a story of a cookbook she wrote with her nana’s recipes, her recent quest to the old country to meet long lost family and her newfound desire to revive culinary traditions. Another woman, a pretty petite blond, was there because she has a farm in Connecticut where she’s been offering CSA subscriptions and bringing her produce to markets. She just acquired more land because the neighboring dairy farmers were retiring and she’s decided to continue running it as a dairy farm and wants to make cheese from the milk. Impressive. There were a lot of us talking about The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Ricki had this one figured out thirty years ago and seems amused that so many people are just getting it.

At around 2 p.m., we had a break for lunch, a feast of salads, roasted vegetables, a stir-fry made with the queso blanco, cubed and treated like tofu, and of course, dozens of different kinds of cheese. All delicious, all local. I slipped off to the bathroom and saw evidence of Ricki’s artistic soul. Playfully decorated in the style of a rococo boudoir, this ‘petit coin’ has a gold finished shell-shaped sink, clouds and cherubs fill the walls. Quotes from Alice in Wonderland in lacy gold letters popped out at me:

“There’s no use trying,” she said: “One can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

After lunch, we took the cheddar out of its press and flipped it over. The press removes the last of the whey and gives the cheese its shape. You have to turn it several times in the early stages so that the moisture level will be even throughout the cheese. At the end of the day, we took it out of the mold and marveled at this impossible thing. Three gallons of white liquid transformed into a solid pale yellow cylinder. After the first couple of days, the cheese will only need to be turned once a week. It will get more yellow as it ages. It’s ready to eat after five or six weeks, but would be really good after a longer aging. Have you seen cheddarvision? Check out the link to see cheddar maturing. You can also see a youtube time lapse version of the first three months. Will I ever be able to make a cheese on my own like that one? Seeing is believing.

I like food that can be made in big batches and served again later. Our freezer is full of single serving frozen lunches. In the morning we just grab a couple of those and some fruit and we are set for lunch. I also like cooking things that have secondary applications. Call them leftovers if you like, but as I’ve said before, planovers are part of the standard repertoire around here. David at Cooking Chat has asked me to host the Leftover Tuesdays event for this month and I am happy to participate.

This is how it works. The basic idea is to have a leftover item on hand as a result of your cooking (or other dining) between Wednesday, April 18 and Monday, April 23. Make something new with the leftover items and blog about your new creation by Tuesday, April 24. I will post a round-up by the end of the week.

To enter:
Post your blog entry by midnight EST on 4/23/07 and send me an email to ceres at ceresandbacchus.com with the subject, “Leftover Tuesdays.” Please include the following information.

Your name and location
Your blog name and URL
URL for your Leftover Tuesdays entry
A 100 x 100 jpeg photo if you would like it included in the roundup

If you don’t have a blog, send me your recipe and a picture and I’ll post it along with the others.

Yesterday, we took leftovers from a couple of meals and came up with a hash. A little olive oil and butter in a skillet and some finely chopped lamb, potatoes and asparagus were all it took. We ate it with a side of leftover ratatouille and some arugula dressed with vinaigrette. A happy Tuesday night dinner. I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

I’ve been tagged for the first time with a meme. And this meme is also an award; Mimi from French Kitchen in America tagged me with a Thinking Blogger Award. Now that I’ve been called out as a thinker, I can’t just give you a wikipedia link to explain this meme phenomenon, I’ve got to tell you a little more about it. So here goes, hang on tight.

A meme is a term created by Richard Dawkins in his book on evolutionary theory, The Selfish Gene, first published in 1976. Dawkins was looking for a word to express his idea that cultural information is passed from one person to another in a fashion quite similar to how genes are transmitted. He took a Greek word, mimeme, which comes from ‘mimos’ to imitate, where we also get the words mimetic and mimesis, and then he shortened it to just ‘meme.’ In his book, Dawkins writes:

The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene.’ I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory,’ or to the French word m?me. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream.’ Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears or reads about a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. (The Selfish Gene 192)

Boy am I glad about that making pots thing. And I like the soup of human culture metaphor, don’t you? When I first started reading blogs, I was surprised to see the term meme used for what is actually more like a chain letter. But I do get it that we are supposed to make connections with other bloggers by flagging them and telling them to pass it on. I think it might be fun to have a meme that is associated with a recipe or an ingredient, so we could see how it is passed from one person to the next, like in the game of telephone. Do have a look at the wikipedia link for this one, and make sure to check out what the French call it; you’ll see that the Brits aren’t the only ones with a politically incorrect name for this game.

A better project would be to see how certain ingredients or ideas in the food blog world are passed around really quickly, like the no-knead bread, how they go from one country to another, like verrines, mangosteens and salted caramel, or how one ingredient seemingly pops up all at once in several places like the asparagus and rhubarb posts that have been growing all over the place. For asparagus see here, here, here and two of them here. For rhubarb see here, here and here. We all associate asparagus and rhubarb with early spring, we’ve got it in our brains already passed to us from years of eating them at this time of year and when we start seeing them again, we either imitate what we see or come up with something of our own using the same idea, a mutation of the original, in either case a meme. I like asparagus simply roasted or grilled, though I’ve been known to blanch it for crudit?s and those prosciutto, goat cheese and asparagus roll-ups I made for Easter, those will be on the table again before long, especially if I can find a bottle of the Viognier that my favorite (living) philosopher Eugene brought for Easter. As for rhubarb, I’ll give you a post soon about that, I promise. I’ve definitely caught the rhubarb meme.

It’s very flattering to be nominated for an award, even if it’s a sort of ego stroking blog promoting chain letteresque type of exercise, and even if it’s embarrassing to trumpet my award here on the blog. At least I don’t have to give a speech or anything. But, it does come with a catch. You see, I’ve got to give this soup to five other people, that’s how memes (rhymes with creams) work in the blogosphere. I would have nominated Mimi, because she’s definitely a thinking person whose blog I read a lot, but since she is the one who gave it to me, I should choose other people to spread it to. Not like it’s an STD or anything, au contraire, thinking is something that should be more contagious.

Here are my award winners.

Clotilde from Chocolate & Zucchini. She was my first inspiration and the reason I am swimming in this food blogging broth.

David Lebovitz, the dessert guru who worked for a long time at Chez Panisse and now writes from chez lui in Paris. I found him when I humiliated myself by making a cake using run of the mill chocolate for his chocolate by brand event. He offered his own version of the same thing for that event and called it Chocolate Idiot Cake. Warning: thinking is sometimes embarrassing.

Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon of the One Hundred Mile Diet. Most of us are not currently able to make this lifestyle choice, but these people are at the forefront of a movement that will likely change the way the food chain operates in this country. At least I hope so.

And two blogs not about food.

Writing demands energy and imagination. It also assumes a willingness to put your words out into the world. I’ve been looking to Keri Smith of wish jar for motivation since I’ve been doing this blog thing. I found her through Clotilde’s blog (see above). Keri doesn’t talk about food, but offers a daring attitude and a whimsical artist’s eye view of the world.

Finally, Melissa Summers. She writes
Suburban Bliss, a blog about her life that is funny, smart and irreverent. She makes some people angry, but I’d love to hang out with Melissa and have a cosmo (or two) during her kids’ play dates.

To all of you I say congratulations, you deserve this award. Pass it on. Here are the rules as devised by Ilker Yoldas.

I was going to end this post by tracing the genealogy of this meme back to Ilker who started it, but after going back through 18 bloggers, I got stuck at someone’s on-line diary that is posted privately, so I couldn’t get any further and my e-mails to the people involved haven’t been answered. So, I’ll have to wait on that and tell you about something unrelated to this meme in particular, but related to the transmission of kitchen knowledge.

My mother is a foodie inspiration to many people and if she had a blog, I’m sure I’d have put her on my awards list. She loves having old kitchen gadgets that nobody can identify. Something in a conversation will remind her of some item or another and she’ll pull it out of a kitchen drawer and then she’ll create a little suspense. She’ll just hold it up at first. Someone will always say, “What IS that?” She’ll get a twinkle in her eye and wait. She’s really very good with the timing. She’ll also make the person guess at least once before giving it away. When she lets you know what it is she’s showing you, she gets a look of triumph over sharing her knowledge with you. She loves creating the “aha” moment, when you finally figure out how useful some object is that you’ve never even seen before. I think this is one of the reasons I love the feature in Cook’s Illustrated magazine where they identify objects that people send in pictures of and then explain their usefulness. My mother could write that column. She has inspired me to purchase a very useful strawberry huller, she’s given me a (less useful) spring loaded pickle picker and this pot scraper is the kind of thing I get from Santa Claus, one of the most useful kitchen tools in existence. Maybe my mother will know already what the item is in the lead image here and the nifty uses it has. Do you?

When is it going to be salad season? I’m over the stews, the roasts, the soups. I’m ready for fresh, light, colorful food. Every year around this time, my friend Mercedes says, “J’ai envie de manger frais.” The word frais is great in French because it means both fresh and cool, so what’s she’s saying is that she feels like eating something cool and fresh, but with just one word it can mean both of those things together. So that’s what I’m wanting right now, and the spring weather that goes with it. Instead, it’s gray, cold and wet outside. What to have for dinner?

This is an increasingly important question. I’ve already written quite a bit about how I usually choose fresh ingredients over things from cans and if you’ve been paying any attention at all, you’ve seen that I try to make things from scratch whenever I can. I’ve been following discussions about eating locally and like a lot of other people, I’ve read Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History in Four Meals and his article, “Unhappy Meals” in the New York Times. I’ve followed the debates between him and Brian Mackey that were in the news in the last month. These people have me thinking.

Currently, I don’t go to Whole Foods because there isn’t one in my area. When I did live near a Whole Foods, I didn’t go there much because I couldn’t afford it. I’ve always been suspicious of the organic movement, because I’ve always felt that all the food for sale should be stuff we’d want our kids to eat and everyone should be able to have access to healthy food. Labeling food organic and charging a lot more money for it feels wrong. This new attention being paid to local eating is more to my liking.

To my mind, the arguments for eating local are all good ones and seem fairly logical. Eating local is good for the local economy and keeps local farms in business. Locally produced food is fresher, riper and tastes better. Locally produced and distributed food is better for the environment. If food weren’t flown, trained or trucked thousands of miles before it hits our plates, the environmental impact would be enormous. Buying local keeps us in touch with the seasons. This one I get. There’s nothing better than a tomato in the summer that has just been pulled from the vine. Except for maybe a strawberry. Eating local protects our food supply. Huh? That last one threw me for a loop the first time I heard it. Bio-terrorism was a new term to me. The thinking goes that in the event of an attack on our country, the less the food needs to travel to get to people, the more likely it will be that we will have enough food, especially if we are able to sustain ourselves without help from other countries. I understand the thinking here, but I’m not so paranoid that this would become my number one reason for eating local.

The Eat Local Challenge has a call to eat locally on the budget of the average American between April 23 and 29. My husband and I have been discussing it for a while. Well, to tell you the truth, I’ve been talking about it and he’s been calling me crazy. The budget they propose is reasonable, it’s about the same as what we actually spend per week on food, but after looking into this, I honestly don’t think we can eat a healthy diet for a whole week eating only food that comes from within a 100-mile radius of where we live. There aren’t enough fresh fruits and vegetables or healthy whole grains produced around here in this season. The farmers market doesn’t start until the end of May. Still, all this thinking about whether or not we could do this challenge and looking into the local products around us made me realize that there’s quite a bit I can eat and quite a lot of local companies I can support by making those choices. So, I think we won’t be doing the April Penny-Wise Challenge, but we will see exactly how much we can find locally that week and we’ll definitely stay within the proposed budget.

What does all this have to do with chicken breast? Quite a lot actually. With the seasonal funk I’m in, I wanted a warm meal, not a salad, but not anything stewed, braised, or otherwise sauced up either. I wanted to keep it simple. Curnonsky is rightly famous for saying, “En cuisine, comme dans tous les arts, la simplicit? est un signe de perfection.” (In cooking, as in all the arts, simplicity is a sign of perfection). So, I bought locally raised, no hormones or any other nasty stuff free range Murray’s chicken breast. Google tells me that Murray’s main office is 46.9 miles from my house. I pounded them flat and put a spice rub on them. I think that the pounding makes for a tender, moist chicken breast. Otherwise, it’s usually too dry and stringy for my taste. The rub is something that I make ahead of time and keep in my cupboard for chicken breast, pork chops or fish that I want to give some flavor and color. We ate the chicken breast with roasted new potatoes from not too far away and roasted asparagus from far away, but they’re in season. An omnivore’s dilemma? Maybe we can just call it dinner.

Chicken breast

• 3 chicken breast halves, trimmed of all fat, cut in two and pounded flat
• 3 T spice rub (see below)
• 2 T olive oil

Place chicken breast pieces, spice rub and 1 T olive oil in a plastic bag or on a plate and mix together so that the chicken is coated all over with rub and oil. Close up the bag or cover the plate and let sit for 20 minutes or so while you get the rest of your dinner together. Saut? chicken in a grill pan or frying pan with remaining oil over high heat for about six to eight minutes until chicken is cooked through, but still moist in the middle. If you’re using a grill pan you can turn the chicken three times so that you get crosshatch marks on both sides. Let chicken sit for 10 minutes before serving. You can squeeze a little lemon juice over the chicken just before serving it if you have some, or you can deglaze the pan with a little water or wine and pour that over the chicken. Or you can just eat it plain. You can also cook this on a grill.

Spice rub

• 1/4 cup paprika
• 1 T onion powder
• 1 T garlic powder
• 1 t black pepper
• 1 t salt

Mix ingredients together and store in an airtight container or jar with a lid.

This blog is 6 months old. Is that a short amount of time or a very long one? Yes. We’ve been working hard at keeping a record of memorable food and also at making the site better. My eyes have been wide open in amazement at what other people are making around the world, and also at the fact that people other than us are as gaga over food as we are. This anniversary of sorts falls on the same day as Easter and I can honestly say that this meal is a tribute to many of the recipes and ideas I’ve gleaned from my virtual foodie friends.

Easter is the only holiday that we host at our house. I think it’s because we never have any time off then, so we aren’t able to travel to visit family. For today’s Easter celebration, we started with several hors d’oeuvres. The asparagus with goat cheese wrapped in prosciutto was inspired by a recipe at Cooking Chat, though I stuck to simply three ingredients, prosciutto, asparagus and goat cheese. We also had escargots with garlic parsley butter wrapped in phyllo dough, a retro recipe from my mother’s 70s repertoire, they were as good as I remembered them. The celery stuffed with smoked gouda mixed with sour cream, mayonnaise, paprika and sundried tomatoes is from a recipe at epicurious.com. I love using this site not just because all of the Bon App?tit and Gourmet magazine recipes are archived there, but because of the reviews that other readers leave there. I wouldn’t have made this recipe except for the fact that everyone was raving about it. And we made the fat-free potato chips that I wrote about and that Luisa posted in the nibbles section of her blog, Wednesday Chef, for about a month, so nice of her.

Our first course of chilean sea bass with leeks on a puddle of citrus sauce is a recipe that has haunted me. I first made something like this from a recipe out of a magazine. It was tremendous. I kept thinking about making it again. I saved the magazine. I also saved lots of other magazines along the way and eventually forgot which magazine had this recipe. At one point, I literally had hundreds of back issues of food magazines that I refused to throw away because I knew that one of them had this recipe in it. But I couldn’t find it. If only I had read about it on a blog, I could have saved it, or tagged it on http://del.icio.us/ and it would have been so much easier. After years and years of this pining for a lost recipe, I finally just tried making something that approximated the long lost gem. It turned out good, but not exactly right. Does anyone out there know where this came from? I’m counting on you people.

For Easter, we celebrate the arrival of spring and inaugurate the grilling season by building the first fire of the year and roasting a butterflied leg of lamb, well, usually two legs, as the center of the meal. To go along with the sacrificial lamb, we made ratatouille, a recipe I developed by looking at dozens of different versions, but I wasn’t absolutely thrilled with it. When I get it right, I’ll let you know. We also made braised fennel with meyer lemon (Luisa, I’ve already gushed over this recipe, but really, thank you) and Greek potatoes with lemon and oregano.

We followed the main course with a salad of Boston lettuce dressed with a walnut oil vinaigrette and some wonderful cheese. Make that some amazing cheese. My friends from France come from the region of Franche-Comt?, so I always try to put out some cheeses that will make them happy. We had a comt?, of course, and also an Edel de Cl?ron, a morbier, a Bleu de Gex as well as a perfectly ripe brie. With all of the above, we ate loaves of the wonderful no-knead bread. Christine at My Plate or Yours just discovered this and raved about it. Maybe it’s time for you to try it out?

Dessert came in stages. We started with verrines layered with lime ice cream, lemongrass ginger sorbet, grapefruit curd and blood orange cr?me fra?che topped with limoncello jello cutouts and leaves of lime thyme. These small glasses layered with a variety of sweet or savory preparations have been all the rage in France lately and will soon be the next big thing on this side of the pond. We followed this with plates of mignardises: biscotti with dried cherries and almonds (based on a recipe from Cook’s Illustrated), Mexican wedding cookies (like tiny round shortbread) and dark chocolate truffles. I’ve been working on my chocolate palate lately, thanks to David Lebovitz. For the truffles, we used a 70% cacoa bittersweet Scharffen Berger. We also had some lovely chocolates brought to us by Erik’s aunt and uncle.

We wrapped up the day with a balloon fight. Also inspired by an internet recipe. You see, I wanted to serve the mignardises in little chocolate cups, as I saw here and here, among other places. This little project didn’t turn out as expected and Erik blew the remaining balloons up and left them all over the living room for us to trip over all day long. This led our young friend Matilda to dividing us up into two teams, the pink team and the green team. The balloon battle will go down in history as the best way to burn some calories after an hours long Easter feast.

Easter was a good one food wise, but a little sad because my parents weren’t able to make it. I’m glad to be able to share a record of it here. I’m thinking that we’ll still be doing this for at least another six months.

I wasn’t really expecting to write about pizza making this week. There are so many sources on-line, and so many opinions about the stuff, I thought I’d just keep mine to myself. But there’s this new blog started by three people who already have their own individual blogs. Beth, Kevin and Susan have invited people to bake along with them for a whole year exploring different methods and types of baking bread and they are posting their experiments, thoughts and recipes for 12 different kinds of bread for a whole year. They’ve called it A Year in Bread.

They announced their project in January and I held my breath to see what kind of bread they’d start with and…it was pizza dough. At first I felt a little let down. Here I was expecting to follow along and bake some perfect bread to go with my Easter feast next weekend and they served up a tomato pie. But then I thought, pizza really is a good way to start. It somehow seems less scary than other yeasty things. People don’t expect greatness from it. Unless of course you are like the guys who write Slice, a blog dedicated just to pizza.

I’ve been making pizza since I was about 14 years old. Back then, it was from some awful mix that came in a cardboard can, kind of like how breadcrumbs are packaged. All I had to do was add water, knead it a little, let it rise and roll it out. I used sauce from a jar and piled on the cheese, pepperoni, ham, bacon, sausage and any other meat that my brothers were begging for. The crust wasn’t very good and I always put on too much sauce. It was really just a topping delivery system. You really can’t blame me, though, this was the 80s in middle America and my family ate it up and begged for more.

Our neighbors were a pizza obsessed family. They ordered delivery a lot more often than we did. They made pizza bagels all the time in their toaster oven. You put pizza sauce and mozzarella cheese on top of a bagel and put it in the toaster oven until the cheese melts. Voil?, you have the perfect afternoon snack. They also always had bags of pizza rolls in their freezer. They are like pillow shaped spring rolls, about an inch long and they have pizza flavoring inside. Kind of. Do those things still exist? I haven’t had them in years. So Sara, the youngest of the family, once got suspended from school because of pizza. She was in middle school and they were having a picnic to celebrate the end of the school year. I think it was supposed to be a pot luck or the kids were supposed to bring their lunch or something. I don’t recall the details. Sara ordered a pizza delivered to the park. For some reason, the teachers at the school got all bunched up because of pizza being delivered to the park during the school picnic. It’s not like she didn’t have the money to pay for the pizza or anything. I’m not sure if this happened before or after Spicolli ordered pizza delivered to his class in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Sara got to stay home from school for three days and her mom had to go to work, so she was home alone. She probably got to make herself pizza bagels for lunch every day.

I started making pizza again after a long hiatus about 8 years ago and since then I make it once every couple of weeks. Other than the rising of the dough, pizza is a pretty easy thing to make and it always feels like we’re having something special. When I tell Erik we’re having pizza for dinner, he never fails to yell out, OH BOY! For a long time I used the recipe out of Moosewood Low Fat Favorites, which is a great book. The dough recipe calls for 1/2 cup whole wheat flour, 1/2 cup oatmeal flour (that you make by whizzing oatmeal up in the mixer, a genius idea) and about 1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour. This is a great healthy alternative to all white flour pizza dough and it’s how I made pizza dough for about 5 years. Then Erik started making baguettes based on the method in Cook’s Illustrated magazine (and some suggestions from my brother who used to be a baker). One day he had several baguettes chilling in the fridge doing their long slow rise and we were trying to figure out what to have for dinner to go along with the bread. After poking around in the fridge one of us came up with the idea for making the “bread” into a pizza instead. This was the best idea ever. It made the ideal crust, the paradoxical combination of crispy, chewy, bready, bubbled up goodness that is so elusive when making pizza at home. So we switched camps and made pizza from this method until the no-knead bread recipe came out in the New York Times and we stopped making our good baguettes and started making awesome boules. But then we stopped making pizza. How could this happen?

So, the invitation to bake bread is well-timed for this household and pizza now seems like the perfect place for us to start. We’ve made three versions this week. On Monday, we had a guest for dinner who told me he doesn’t really like cheese, so we made a focaccia with carmelized onions, mushrooms and rosemary. For the dough, I had just thrown together warm water, yeast and sugar in the bowl of my kitchen aid, let it foam up and then put in salt, a little olive oil and some flour. I let the machine do most of the work, but then gave it about 5 minutes of kneading at the end. I let this rise once on the counter, punched it down after 2 hours and then put it in the refrigerator until I needed it. I stretched it out, slicked on a bit of oil, put in some dimples and scattered on the toppings. After about an hour on the countertop, I slid it into the oven and then…I overcooked it a little, it was too dry. And there wasn’t enough salt. But the toppings were awesome and so were the tapas that Erik made to go with it.

Last night, we made the Moosewood recipe for old times sake and because we’re looking to put more whole grains in our diet. From what I’ve learned about making pizza and yeasted dough in the last few years I figured I could get a lighter, crispier crust out of those whole grains than I had in the past. I was right. I used to just cook it in a rectangular baking sheet slicked with a little oil, but it’s so much better to divide the dough in half and cook it in two separate shifts. The crust is thinner, crispier and has a more authentic feel to it. It’s also really important to let the dough have a good long rise in the refrigerator overnight and to have your oven at maximum heat for about a half hour to an hour before you cook the pizza so that the pizza stone has a chance to really heat up. We didn’t really respect the essence of the Moosewood collective, though, because we put bacon, mushroom and onions on one of them and sausage and mushrooms on the other one.

Tonight we had pizza again. Are we getting boring? No way. You know those people who say they could eat pizza every night? We are those people. Just change the crust and the toppings a little, though, please, and we could probably eat it for weeks straight before craving something else. This time, I followed Beth’s directions from the A Year in Bread site. This dough was awesome. The one thing that was different from the baguette recipe we used to make was that there was no poulish to start it out, but I think that if I used one, it might be even better.

Pizza toppings can be contentious. When we order pizza, we usually have it with mushrooms and onions. I judge a pizzeria by their crust and their mushrooms. Those mushrooms from a can are out the door. When I make pizza at home, I’ll usually make a salad to go with it, but lately, I’ve been into steaming some spinach and layering some on top of my pizza. Back when I lived in Ann Arbor, I knew a guy who worked for the international division of Domino’s pizza (that’s where the headquarters is). His job was to help people start Domino’s franchises in different areas of the world. He had lived in Paris while they were working on operations in Europe and then he had been to Southeast Asia after that. Part of his job was to work with marketing people to figure out what toppings to put on the pizzas depending on the tastes of that country’s population. My favorite French topping is an egg, it’s placed right in the middle of the pizza about halfway through the baking of an individual pie. The yolk has to stay really runny and you sop it up off of the plate as you eat the pizza. I’m not sure if the Domino’s pizza in France offers that option, but it’s on the menu of every pizzeria in Paris. I guess in India they had to develop versions with chicken curry and different kinds of chutney. And I thought I was adventurous by ordering anchovies. Those of you who are vegan in search of things that taste like meat will be overjoyed with the recent recipe for vegan pepperoni posted at the FatFree Vegan Kitchen. It’s on my list of things to try out soon. Not that I’m vegan, I just like those vegetarian things that taste like meat without having all the fat. And I like to make my vegetarian friends happy.

For making the dough, I recommend that you have a look at Kevin, Beth and Susan’s recipes. Their proportions are all very similar, though Susan doesn’t use any oil and all three of them have good advice. I particularly like Beth’s recipe because you make it the night before and forget about it until the next evening, but I’m a plan ahead sort of person, so you may prefer Kevin or Susan’s method. Here is how I make my sauce. I use it for pizza and also as a base for pasta sauce. Sometimes it ends up in other things like osso buco. I usually make lots of it at one time and then freeze it into one and two cup plastic containers. It can easily be doubled or tripled. I used about 3/4 cup of sauce on each pizza.

Marinara sauce

• 1 T extra virgin olive oil
• One onion, peeled and roughly chopped
• 3-4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 t red pepper flakes
• 1 T oregano
• 1/4 cup fresh basil, chopped
• 1 t salt
• 1/2 t freshly ground black pepper
• 1 box Pom? chopped tomatoes

Put olive oil in a pot over medium high heat. Add next six ingredients, onions through basil. Turn heat to medium low and cook until onions become soft and translucent and everything else becomes really fragrant, about 6-8 minutes. Add salt, pepper and tomatoes. Cook until all the flavors meld together and sauce has thickened somewhat, about 20 minutes. If you want a smooth sauce, you can use an immersion blender while it’s still hot, or let it cool and use a blender or food processor. Makes about 3 cups.

Our meal at Blue Hill gave us a yearning for another artfully presented, sumptuously delicious, decadent multi-course meal. We realized we have a place much closer to home where we can have a similar experience for far less money. We went there for lunch and had a great meal.

It started with an amuse-bouche of a trio of dim sum and a tiny mound of braised cabbage. There was a baked char siu bao, and two steamed varieties, a siu maai and a shrimp gow. The pork in the siu maai, which are my favorite, was perfectly textured and nicely salty. All three were piping hot.

The next course was a quintet of sushi. The salmon, avocado and shrimp nigiri were flanked by two inside out maki, one piece of California roll with crab, avocado and cucumber and another, more unusual combination of tuna, avocado and cream cheese. The gari, or pickled ginger, had a nice kick.

Next up was a soup of one wanton floating in a perfectly clear chicken consomm?. The flavors were nicely balanced.

The following course was an impressive assembly of seafood. On one quadrant of the plate, a green lipped mussel with black bean sauce sat atop a tangle of thin lobster flecked rice noodles. On the other part of the plate was a perfectly fried tender scallop layered with one tiny saut?ed carrot matchstick next to three pieces of crunchy tempura style calamari. Finishing the plate was a row of five tiny bits of red pepper.

I got to watch the chef, who is also the owner, as he prepared a spicy pasta with mushrooms, a grilled skewer of ginger marinated chicken and nicely crisp snow peas. The pasta was excellent and not at all oily, but the chicken was a touch overcooked.

I thought that I couldn’t take another bite of food, but then, just as at Blue Hill, the pork course arrived. Two bites of salty sweet lacquered pork were flanked by two florets of broccoli, a strip of carrot and a few droplets of a garlicky emulsion tinged with hoisin sauce and ginger.

Following the pork, I could barely eat dessert. I took several bites of a mille feuille that surpassed my expectations. The flaky pastry was filled with only a small amount of a rich pastry cream. My favorite part, the sugary icing, was more firm than usual and had just the right amount of chew.

A second plate followed with two coconut rich macaroons. I could barely eat one of them, but it was so good I stashed the second one in my pocket for later.

The check arrived with the mignardises and we had only one regret. There had been no option for wine pairings; coffee, tea or soda were the only choices.

Despite this one drawback, we thoroughly enjoyed our meal and we’ll definitely go back. We’re more convinced than ever that plating is as important as the food.