Wordless Wednesday: Summer

I've never done this before, but I've always liked the whole Wordless Wednesday thing. I thought I'd give it a shot.

Toasted Cheese

Laurie Colwin writes about her first New York City apartment in the essay "Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant." Hers was a tiny studio that fit a twin bed, a night stand, a small desk, and a wicker chair. The kitchen consisted of a metal counter, a little refrigerator, and a hot plate. "The ceiling was fairly high - a good thing since a low one would have made my apartment feel like the inside of a box of animal crackers," she writes.

I reread this essay a number of times last year, while living in my own miniature New York apartment alone. Mine was in Brooklyn, not Greenwich Village. I had an oven and four burners on my stove. But, like Colwin, I had very little room. Just enough space for a bed, a desk, a chest of drawers and a little folding table that pushed nicely up against the window. My bathroom couldn't fit a sink; the kitchen one had to do. "Many thought I must be insane to live in so small a space," Colwin writes, "but I loved my apartment and found it the coziest place on earth." Me too.

In her essay, Colwin writes about what she ate while she lived in that breadbox apartment alone: soup, spaghetti, eggplant in all forms. One time, her mother gave her a toaster oven to augment the two-burner stove. "I began with toasted cheese," Colwin writes, "that staple of starving people who live in garrets." I love the word garret. It reminds me of home.

Sunday afternoon in Boston was rainy and cool. Sitting in my new apartment, which is much bigger than any place I've ever lived before, I thought about Colwin, about coziness, about toast and cheese. I began to miss my cramped studio in Brooklyn, the one that kept me so snug while Matt was in Afghanistan, the place where I made many solitary meals, where I carved a life on a very limited budget alone. Then, I ate a lot of toasted cheese. Suddenly, I wanted more.


I find that toasted cheese is best made in the oven, on fresh crusty bread. I like to eat it with just a little sprinkling of Worcestershire sauce, like my mother used to make me as a child. Yesterday I sliced a sourdough loaf from the farmers' market and shaved some Gruyere off a thick hunk I had been saving in the fridge. I ate it alongside a mug of coffee, over a well-worn copy of a good book.

Chiles

My mother and her boyfriend, Charley, went to Colorado for a long-weekend hiking trip and when they returned, they brought me a bundle of dried chiles. I hung them on a vacant nail above the kitchen archway, one that had been hammered in place by the last tenant and not quite in the right spot. As a result, they dangle a bit awkwardly—half above and half below the wood, a blip in the peripheral vision, like mistletoe.

Matt doesn’t want me to use them to cook because, bright red and just a bit wrinkled, they are beautiful against the faded green of the wall. But I can think of little else I need when dinnertime rolls around. I sneaked one into a quick ginger-beef stir-fry. I sliced one to add to a sweet-and-sour marinade for pork. Tonight I’m making enchiladas and, well, you know. These chiles are intense and spicy, not for those with sensitive palettes. I love their not-so-subtle kick.

I am looking at the bundle of them now. They remind me of when I was small and my family took a trip to New Mexico during one summer vacation. There, we stayed in a small house with an adobe roof and sandy walls. I remember the burnished shades of orange and gold on the carpet in my bedroom. I remember the dry heat of the desert sun and the sharp prick on the soft flesh of my palm when I grabbed a cactus with my bare hands. I remember returning to Boston with the same kind of string of chiles, which my father hung in the archway between the kitchen and living room of my childhood home. I wasn’t interested in cooking then. I didn’t pay much attention as they slowly dried and then crumbled.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

A few weeks ago, on a bright afternoon smack in the middle of that odious national heat wave, I decided to bake. I’m not sure why. The small air conditioner installed in my bedroom window certainly didn’t reach the kitchen, which shimmered at 95 degrees.

But one of Matt’s good friends from the Army was just about to return from a year-long deployment in Afghanistan. I couldn’t be there at the airport to greet him as well, and I wanted to send something sweet in my stead. So I pulled out a cookbook, my mixer, and a glass bowl. I set to work.

I wanted to bake something simple, something that filled my kitchen with the scent of butter, something that reminded me of home. The decision was easy: chocolate chip cookies.

I decided to use a different recipe than I normally do—one from the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion, a cookbook that was given to me as a present last Christmas and never before used. I opened it to one of the still-unstained “essential” recipe pages. There were two options for this particular cookie: crunchy or chewy. I compared them.

The crisp cookies required more fat—both butter and vegetable shortening opposed to only butter—which, writes Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking, "lubricates the solid particles of flour and sugar and encourages the cookie to spread and thin." The crunchy cookies used less flour and fewer eggs, loosening the dough and reducing the moisture. They also called for a higher proportion of sugar—which, says McGee, can cause more sugar to dissolve while baking in the oven. "Then when the cookie cools, some of the sugar recrystallizes, and the initially soft cookie develops a distinctive snap...." The chewy recipe, on the other hand, included corn syrup to retain moisture and an additional egg for a more cake-like texture. Interestingly, both called for a tablespoon of white or cider vinegar—to temper the sweetness of the sugar, I read in the cookbook, and to react with the sodium bicarbonate in the leavener to give the cookies a bit of a lift in the oven.

I had never given much thought to the science of chocolate chip cookies. In the end, I made them both.


For each, the ingredients came together swiftly. I had chocolate on my fingers and trays of mismatching rounds cooling on the counter within an hour or two. The crunchy ones emerged as advertised: crackling crisp, not too sweet, and full of butter. They were bold cookies. Heat wave cookies. Perfect in a cold glass of milk. The chewy ones, however, turned out to be quite cake-like. They were tamer cookies, quiet attempts at miniature scones. Ones that should be eaten in autumn, while sipping hot tea. Both were very good.

In the end, I sent a towering plate of the crisp cookies away with Matt, who soon left to meet his returning friend. Intense experiences require intense flavors, and I could think of little else to welcome him home.


Crunchy Chocolate Chip Cookies
Adapted from the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion

1 stick unsalted butter
1/2 cup vegetable shortening
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon white or cider vinegar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 cups all purpose flour
3 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly grease or line two baking sheets with parchment.

In a mixing bowl, cream the butter, shortening, sugars, vanilla, salt, and vinegar. Add the egg and beat until combined. And then add the baking soda and flour. Stir in the chocolate chips.

Drop the dough by the tablespoon onto the pans. Bake 12 - 14 minutes, or until golden brown. Remove from the oven and transfer to a rack to a cool.



Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies
Adapted from the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion

3/4 cup unsalted butter
2/3 cup dark brown sugar
2/3 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons light corn syrup
1 tablespoon white or cider vinegar
2 large eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
3 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Lightly grease or line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

In a mixing bowl, cream butter, sugars, corn syrup, and vinegar. Then, beat in the eggs. Beat in the vanilla, salt, baking powder, and baking soda. Add the flour and chocolate chips: stir.

Drop the dough by the tablespoon onto the pans. Bake for 10 minutes, until just set. The centers will look underdone. Remove from the oven and set on a rack to cool.

New York Minute

I walked down Broadway early on Wednesday evening, a fleeting free moment in a whirlwind forty-eight hour trip to New York City. It was hot and humid, and despite my light summer dress, I felt like I was swimming through the air. I had taken the bus from Boston that morning, carrying only a small computer bag and my purse. It was my first time back to the city since I moved two months earlier, and I was surprised to find that most things there were exactly the same (the vendors in the farmers’ market, the cracks in the asphalt, the scent of the café near where I once worked) and also a little bit different (new restaurant signs, strappier summer outfits, earlier hours at that same café). I had a dinner scheduled that night and meetings throughout the next day, but with a couple of hours to kill before it all began, I decided to walk. I love to wander.

I walked around Gramercy, past the line for the Shake Shack snaking through Madison Square Park, amid the honk and screech of taxicabs and the rumbling of the subway beneath my feet. I lingered at the market in Union Square, checking out the boxes of fuzzy peaches and shiny purple plums, apricots almost neon in their orange. I bought a book at the Strand, and flipped through the racks at an overpriced thrift store or two.

Around 5 p.m., I stepped into a familiar bodega downtown, looking for a moment of air conditioning and perhaps something sweet, and picked up an icy coconut popsicle, one of dozens of flavors stacked in the freezer in rows. I peeled off the plastic wrapper and ate quickly as I walked. It immediately began to melt.

Weaving there among tourists in baseball caps and business men in suits, I remembered how much I love Manhattan on a summer afternoon—meandering and anonymous, my neck damp with sweat, my tongue frozen with the taste of sugar and vaguely tropical fruit.

Wild Blueberries

I have a lot to write about. Nothing big. Nothing life changing.

This has been a slow summer, one taken day by day, moments at a time. Now that Matt is home from Afghanistan, I’m remembering what it’s like to be in a relationship. Now that my book is almost done, I’m remembering what it’s like to take time away from work. This summer I’m trying to concentrate on the small stuff, the tiny things – the smells and tastes; recipes and meals; the best pulled pork sandwich I’ve ever had, last week at a roadside diner in East Tennessee. But it’s been more than a year since I’ve written regularly here on the blog, and I find myself unable to sit down at my desk, open my computer, and simply begin. It’s all about taking small steps, I suppose.

To start: Matt and I rented a tiny cabin on the coast of Maine for one week in July. We hiked mountainous trails in Acadia National Park, and bicycled miles and miles around the seascapes of Schoodic Point, which smelled of salt, sea and pine.


In the evenings we drank whiskey while sitting on our porch, reading books and watching the sun as it went down over the bay. Sometimes I cooked in our miniature kitchen: pastas with sausage and kale, frittatas with onions and peppers and Gruyere. Other nights we went out for lobsters or lobster rolls, fried oysters or fish and chips. There was a lot of vanilla soft ice cream and a couple of blueberry-flavored beers.




One day we drove north on Route 1 to Lubec, Maine, the eastern most point in the continental United States. We stopped at the lighthouse at West Quoddy Head. It was dark with fog and cold with the ocean breeze. I felt like I was standing at the edge of the Earth.


Later, we ate turkey sandwiches with mustard and Swiss cheese while sitting on our car, overlooking the sea. We shared an oatmeal cookie – one studded with wild blueberries and a soft sugar cream, which we had purchased that morning at a neon-blue, dome-like building called “Wild Blueberry Land” on the side of the road.


The cookie was nondescript—a medium sized oval, brown with sugar and blue with berry juice. But it tasted so unexpectedly good that I stared at it, distrustful for a moment. It was tender and moist, spiked with cinnamon and nutmeg, perfect-fruit sweet. It reminded me of a blueberry crisp, a huckleberry buckle, a cookie I once ate at a State Fair near my aunt’s summer home in Pennsylvania.


On our way home we stopped at Wild Blueberry Land again to buy more. But the tray on which the cookies sat before was empty except for a piece of parchment paper and a few stray lines of grease. We asked for the recipe at the counter and watched as a young baker wrote it out on the piece of notebook paper now sitting crumpled in my bag. Back in Boston, I keep telling myself to bake them. But I haven’t yet, and I’m not sure I will.

I’m afraid that was a moment that belonged only there, on the wind-swept coast of Maine.

Summertime

Early on Monday Matt and I drove through the empty streets of Cambridge and then the highway crowded with commuters, our road bikes bouncing on the rack strapped to the back of our car. We drove an hour south in the glossy morning light to Plymouth, Massachusetts—home of the Mayflower (II) and the town’s namesake rock, a smooth little stone housed under a portico on the water. The tourists were just beginning to hit the streets when we arrived, but we weren’t in town long. We were there to bike.

We began our cycling route from the parking lot of a supermarket. The sun was already thick in the sky when we entered the Myles Standish State Forest, where we spent hours riding: Up and down, up and down. Hill after rolling hill, small pavement bumps that passed like hiccups, but ones that made my legs burn. It was close to 90 degrees and I could soon feel the salt on my skin, layered like a mask.

On our ride we passed through miles of forests and fields. Zipping along, I could smell stagnant ponds covered in algae, pine trees, the fresh turned earth. I caught whiffs of car exhaust and concrete. The hesitant green of plant, or maybe flower. Fried dough in town, and briny ocean water to its side. Human sweat. Gatorade. Always: The soft sweet of summer air.

Matt and I have been bicycling a lot since he returned from Afghanistan. A long-time runner, I love the challenge of a new sport. I love its speed. I love how hungry I am when we’re done.

On Monday evening we returned home from Plymouth sweaty and starving. I was surprised when Matt, who loves to eat but has never been one for the stove, offered to cook. He grilled bratwurst, heated a pan of sauerkraut and steamed bright green broccoli florets, which he served with Parmesan cheese and lemon juice. We ate the sausage with mustard, and sourdough rolls warm from the oven. There were a few cold, cold beers. I can get used to this, I thought.

Crisp

I spent last weekend with my family on a lake in rural Pennsylvania. We stayed in the same cottage where my mother and my aunt spent the summers of their childhoods. It smells now as it did then: Of varnish, sunscreen and musty beach towels faded from the sun. It echoes with the sound of crickets at night. We attended a pig roast and drank red wine while sitting on the dock. Canoeing around the murky waters, we didn't put on sunscreen until a bit too late in the day. On Sunday night, we lit sparklers and read the Declaration of Independence out loud. I made a peach-blackberry crisp. It came out of the oven bronzed and crunchy with tiny shards of pecans. We ate it with vanilla ice cream.


Peach-Blackberry Crisp
Loosely adapted from Alice Waters

5 ripe peaches, pitted and sliced
1 cup blackberries
1/4 cup sugar
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
zest of 1 lemon
1 tablespoon amaretto liqueur
3 cups crisp topping

Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. In a mixing bowl, toss together the fruit, sugar and flour. Add zest and amaretto. Mix. Transfer to a large ovenproof dish. Cover with crisp topping. Pressing down lightly, leave no fruit exposed. Place on aluminum foil or a baking dish to catch bubbling juices. Bake 50 - 60 minutes, turning after a half hour for even bronzing. Serve warm, with ice cream.

Crisp Topping

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
6 tablespoons firmly packed brown sugar
2 tablespoons white sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 (heaping) teaspoon cinnamon
2/3 cup pecans, toasted, and then ground in a Cuisinart
12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) butter, unsalted, chilled, cut into small pieces

Stir together flour, sugars, salt, cinnamon and pecans in a large bowl. Work the butter into the flour mixture with tips of fingers, or an electric mixer, until crumbly in texture. Can be made ahead, or frozen.

Boston

I moved to Boston the first week in June. I moved with Matt, who returned safely from Afghanistan in March, early on a Sunday morning. It was hot and muggy, and we were sweating before we began. My brother, Ben, had taken a cab from Manhattan out to Brooklyn to help us load the truck and we ate bagels with cream cheese and drank lukewarm cups of Dunkin' Donuts coffee as we worked. I lifted box after box, and watched as Ben and Matt lugged my bed and dresser down the lopsided stairs of my Park Slope studio—the studio I found in the week after Matt was recalled to the Army, the one too small for a sink in the bathroom, the one overlooking the pear tree newly-blossomed in the back yard.

Matt and I now live in an apartment in Cambridge, close to where he will begin a graduate program at Harvard in the fall. It’s a few blocks from the river in one direction, and from the public library in the other. The apartment has large windows, and lots of light. There’s a view and a fireplace and enough space for both a couch and an armchair. After five years (more or less) in New York City, my appreciation for dining tables and walk-in closets, for multiple rooms and bathroom sinks has grown exponentially. The kitchen counter has enough space for a coffee machine and a dish rack. There are cabinets for all of my pots.

But a new home, for me, isn’t really a home until I’ve baked something—until the kitchen is filled with the smell of butter, flour and eggs. So, last Wednesday, in the humid haze of an almost-rainstormy afternoon, I pulled out my spring-form pan and baked a vanilla cake. I let a bowl of quartered strawberries macerate with a bit of sugar and then reduced the resulting syrup in a tiny pan on the stove. The cake, which was dense and sweet, was layered with the fruit, which I had pulsed in my Cuisinart until they became a bright chunky sauce, and a light frosting whipped with tangy cream cheese. Later, when the sun had set and we could see the church steeples across the Charles from our window, I served it to some old friends. I guess this means that I’m home.

Taming the Beast

Time has slipped away. Since I last wrote, I finished the first draft of my book. Matt returned from war. We spent a week drinking wine on a beach in the Caribbean, and then another in New Orleans, where we ate muffalettas, turtle soup and wild cherry sno-balls topped with puddles of condensed milk. I've baked countless loaves of banana bread, zucchini bread, and a few of honey-whole wheat. I've cooked spicy spinach lasagnas, braised short ribs and stewed pots of chana masala thick with spice. I'm currently in the final months of editing my book, a process that has been frustrating and fascinating in equal measure. Over the last year I've created what feels like a wild animal of a story. An unruly little beast, really, one that changes daily - sometimes confusing, often maddening, always inspiring. But it's here. And now I have to figure out how to calm it down. We'll see how that goes. In any case: I'll be back.

Sticky Buns

When I was small my family celebrated Christmas morning with sticky buns. Presented in a white cardboard box from the local bakery, they were fat and luscious with brown sugar frosting and crunchy pecans. I always ate mine in small bites, pulling them apart with my fingers at their seams.

Years later, when I was in high school, my parents split up. As a result many things changed. Among them, our holidays suddenly became disjointed. Many of our traditions—the tiny ones that we'd carved together beneath the tree, beside the menorah—were thrown to the wayside, now relics of the past.

Last week, however, I revived one. I wanted sticky buns for Christmas. This time, I made them from scratch. They were the first I’ve eaten in years.

I began the recipe, which is from Bon Appetit, on Christmas Eve at my mother's house in Boston. I let the dough rise while my mom, her boyfriend, my brother and I ate dinner--sharing a lasagna with spinach and ricotta, salad with pomegranate seeds and pine nuts, and lots of wine.

I kneaded the soft pillow of dough at 11 pm, giggling in the hazy glow of a glass of Burgundy. I rolled the dough into rectangles, brushed it with butter and spice, and then wound it into two tight logs. After cutting each one into tiny rounds, which curled like snails, I placed the buns into cake pans coated with a thick brown sugar glaze. Then I let them sit in the fridge overnight.

I came downstairs before anyone else on Christmas morning, the kitchen awash in a pink post-dawn light. I took the pans out of the cold and let the buns rise on the counter for a second time. Then I stuck them in the oven as my family slowly made their way to join me by the tree. Soon, the house was filled with a sweet yeasty scent, one of hot cinnamon and sugar.

Later, we ate the sticky buns while sitting on the couch and washed them down with glasses of champagne. They were fleshy, flaky and warm. The rich caramel glaze hung over each hump of baked dough like snow. They were just as I remembered. Actually, they were better.

Sticky Buns
Adapted from Bon Appetit

Makes 24

Dough
1 cup warm water (105-115 degrees Fahrenheit)
4 teaspoons dry yeast
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
1/2 cup dry nonfat milk powder
1 1/4 teaspoons salt
2 large eggs
4 1/4 cups all purpose flour (plus more, I found, to get the dough the desired consistency)

Glaze
1 1/4 cups dark brown sugar, packed
3/4 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup golden syrup, or dark corn syrup
1/4 cup water
3 cups pecan halves

4 teaspoons sugar
4 teaspoons ground cinnamon

For Dough:

Mix warm water and yeast with a pinch of sugar in a small bowl. Let stand until foamy, about 8 minutes. Using electric mixer, beat remaining sugar, butter, milk powder and salt in a large bowl until well blended. Beat in eggs one at a time. Add yeast mixture, and then 3 cups of flour, one cup at a time. Using a rubber spatula, mix in final cup of flour, scraping down the sides of the bowl frequently. The dough will be soft and sticky. Sprinkle the remaining ¼ cup flour on the counter and knead dough until smooth and elastic, adding more flour as you go until no longer sticky, about 8 minutes.

Butter another large bowl and put the dough inside, turning to coat. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm area, until doubled, about 2 ½ to 3 hours.

For the Glaze:

Butter two 10-inch round cake pans with 2-inch sides. Beat brown sugar, ½ cup butter, honey, golden syrup, and ¼ cup water in a medium bowl to blend. Spread half of the glaze in the bottom of each prepared pan. Sprinkle 1 ½ cups pecans over each.

Punch down the dough. Divide in half. Roll each piece out on a floured work surface into a large rectangle, about 12 by 9 inches. Brush excess flour off of the dough, and spread the remaining butter over each rectangle, dividing equally. Mix the four teaspoons of sugar and cinnamon in a small bowl. Sprinkle it over each rectangle evenly. Then, starting at the long side, roll each rectangle up into a log. Cut each into 12 rounds. Place 12 rounds, cut side down, in each pan, spacing evenly. Cover with plastic wrap.

You can let this rise now for about an hour, until doubled. Or you can place the pans in the fridge overnight and let them rise the following day, for about an hour and a half or 2 hours.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Bake the buns until a deep golden brown, abut 30 minutes. Run a knife around the edges to loosen the buns, and then turn immediately over on a platter while still hot. Serve and enjoy.

Leave

Matt was waiting for me when I emerged from baggage claim at the airport in Warsaw, Poland, late on the final Saturday afternoon of October. He had arrived on his own flight from Afghanistan, by way of Kuwait, only a few hours earlier. He looked tired under the harsh fluorescent lighting of the lobby. He wasn’t in uniform, which surprised me. We hugged for a long time, and his skin smelled exactly the same.

Matt had two weeks leave from Afghanistan and we spent them together in Eastern Europe. When we first began to plan the trip, we contemplated “normal” destinations like Hawaii or Costa Rica or even New York. But, in the end, we decided on an adventure: One far from the heat of the desert; one close to a history that fascinates us both. “I just really want to see fall,” Matt had told me on the phone.


We traveled through the foggy chill of Poland, Ukraine, Romania and Hungary over the following two weeks. It was a challenging trip, and a wonderful trip. We learned a lot about the land, and about each other. We rode a rickety bus through the countryside of Ukraine, descended deep into a cavernous old salt mine, and stood solemnly on the grounds of Auschwitz as the sun sank in the sky beyond the electrified fences and barbed wire. We sampled bright purple borscht in almost every city we passed and even made it through a bowl of tripe soup laced with sour cream and garlic at a pub in rural Romania. We walked among castles and monasteries and farms. We drove a tiny car through Transylvania and bought honey on the side of the road. We slept on a number of trains as they bumped over borders, sharing loaves of bread and tiny bottles of vodka along the way. The smells—of steamy trolleys, of sizzling meat, of human and animal and streets—were so strong I vacillated between feeling joyous and physically ill. We saw big things and small things, both expensive and cheap. I found I liked the simple best.






One evening in Krakow, Matt and I settled side-by-side on a wooden bench against the wall of a basement jazz club in the city center. He put his arm around my waist and we sipped thick tumblers of whiskey. Amid the swirls of Polish and clinking of glass, we listened to gray-haired men rock out on trumpets and trombones, a base guitarist who hardly moved and a drummer whose face gyrated with every beat. It was warm and smoky and sweet.

When the show ended, we were starving. We emerged outside to be hit by a gust of frozen wind. I immediately began to shiver and we moved quickly, jogging across intersections, only occasionally pausing to peer at our map. After ten minutes we reached a big blue van parked on the side of the street.

“Is this it?” I asked.

“Yes!” said Matt, excited.

In front of the van stood two men bundled in thick hats and coats. They manned two large metal barrels, which glowed with the lazy jump of flames. Within, they cooked dozens of kielbasa, thick curvy sausages lined up on poles. For seven zloty, or about $2.50, we each received a piece of meat, a splotch of mustard and a crusty white roll on a thin cardboard sheet. A snap to the slightly burnt skin gave way to tender flesh within. We ate them standing at a makeshift wooden table with plastic forks and knives alongside a handful of other silent, hungry men. Walking back to our hotel close to midnight, Matt’s arm linked with my own, I finally felt warm.


You can read more about our trip here.

Happy to be one of fifteen finalists for Creative Nonfiction's blog contest! My entry can be seen here.

Wedding Cake

Ashley and Colin were married last Saturday. The ceremony took place next to the ocean up in Maine. I stood near the lighthouse with the other bridesmaids in a line of deep blue fabric around noon. I watched Colin, who wore a kilt and a yellow rose on his chest, as Ashley walked down the aisle in her gown. I wasn’t sure if I was shivering from the cold or from the intensity of his smile or, later, from the radiance of her tears. Their happiness was contagious.

And I made their wedding cake.

Ashley and Colin asked me to make their cake a little over a year ago, during the cocktail hour of another wedding, which I wrote about here. I immediately said yes. I had had a drink or two and it sounded like a great idea. I’ve worked in bakeries before. I love to feed people. How hard could it be?

The anxiety set in around April of this year, however, and it didn’t let up until last Saturday around 3 p.m., when those two sliced into the bottom tier and fed each other buttercream bites with their fingers.

I learned a lot.

Baking a wedding cake is all about the planning. It requires a lot of ingredients and a lot of equipment. It requires time. More time than I gave myself, really. I left the residency in Woodstock and arrived at my mother’s house in Boston on Wednesday evening. I made a few batches of frosting and went to bed. I began to bake on Thursday morning. It was an intense day: one that began around in the still-dark 6 a.m. and didn’t end until a bleary 11 at night. I got through the final stretch with the help of my mother, who fed me wine and ice cream upon returning home from work.

Early on Friday morning I drove up to Maine with the four frosted tiers, which I had carefully placed into plastic boxes and balanced snugly on the backseat. Around 1 p.m. I arrived at the inn where the reception would be held the following day. I brought the cakes into the professional kitchen so that I could stack them into something resembling a wedding cake. This task required wooden dowels, which I had never used before, and a lot of faith. Before I began I stood motionless for a few minutes, staring at the individual tiers. They were big, hefty cakes measuring at 8, 10, 12 and 14 inches, respectively. I held a pair of wire cutters in one hand and the dowels in the other and I thought: this will never work. The dowels seemed so thin and the cake, so heavy. But finally the teenage prep cook who was working on the mise en place for dinner service behind me leaned over and whispered: “Just do it.”

So I did.

I measured, cut and then stuck the dowels into the cake. I delicately placed the tiers on top, one after another. And it didn't collapsed. It didn't sink into a sticky cloud of crumbs. The cake held just fine. It turns out wooden dowels really do work.

And on Saturday afternoon the 125 guests devoured it all. It was an almond cake, filled with alternating layers of lemon curd and blueberry jam and frosted with a swiss buttercream. I will say: it was delicious.


Ashley and Colin’s Wedding Cake

This wedding cake required patience. It required 10 pounds of almond paste, 10 pounds of sugar, upwards of 60 sticks of butter and 100 eggs. It required 40 lemons, four cake pans and a whole mess of cardboard rounds and wooden dowels. But when I finished and saw it perched on a table and surrounded by pale blue hydrangeas, it looked like a wedding cake. A real wedding cake. True, it looked like a wedding cake made by a bridesmaid and not a professional baker, but I’ve never been so happy to watch a lawn full of people eat dessert. I’ve never been so happy to see two people in love shoving hunks of frosting into each others' mouths.

I am listing only the base recipe of each component to the cake below, which is enough to make one 10” cake. I am happy to expand if there's interest. For Ashley and Colin's I did a lot of guesswork, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t always the most time efficient. But, hey, it worked.

Almond Cake
Adapted from Baking with Julia

Recipe can be found here.

For a 10” cake, you need to use this recipe twice in order to make the four layers. Bake two cakes and them let them cool according to the recipe’s instructions. [I didn’t use any extra equipment in order to help this size cake come out smooth and even, and I had no problems. Only for the 14” cake did I use a baking core.]

When the cakes are cool, slice each in half using a long serrated knife so that you effectively now have four. This can be tough, so work slowly and at eye level, making sure to keep the knife even.

Then, dab the top of each layer fully with moistening syrup [recipe below] using a pastry brush. Use enough so that it soaks into the top, but doesn’t saturate it. I used perhaps 2 cups of the syrup for the entire 4-tier cake.

Moistening Syrup
Adapted from Dede Wilson’s wonderful book: Wedding Cakes You Can Make

Now this is key. I’m pretty sure this moistening syrup, which is just simple syrup with some lemon juice, kept the cake at a perfect just-baked level of moist crumbiness. It worked so well that multiple gray-haired men came up to me after the reception to say they have never had such delicious wedding cake in all their life.

1 cup water
1 cup sugar
lemon juice to taste

Bring water and sugar to a simmer in a medium saucepan. Stir until sugar is dissolved, and take off heat. Let cool to room temperature. Add lemon juice. I used around ¼ cup for this amount.

While the cake is baking and moistening syrup cooling, make the frosting. [Or, like me, you can make this ahead of time.]

Swiss Buttercream Frosting
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen

You can find this recipe here.

For one 10” cake I doubled the medium size recipe that this blog author used, and had a bit leftover. I guess I like frosting. This can be kept in Tupperware in the fridge overnight. Make sure to take it out and let it return to room temperature before you use it. It needs to be whipped again in a standing mixer. Don’t be alarmed if it immediately looks curdled. That happened to me a number of times and I found myself constantly on the verge of a panic attack. Just let it keep whipping. All will be OK. I promise.


And then you can begin to stack the cake layers.

First, I generally take some frosting and put it in a ziplock bag. I then cut a tiny piece off the end of one corner and use it as a makeshift pastry bag. I pipe a line of frosting around the edge of each cake layer before I put on the filling. This helps to keep the curd and the jam from oozing out, so it won’t discolor the frosting later.

Lemon curd [recipe below] goes between the first two layers of almond cake. The blueberry jam ["recipe" below] goes between the second and third, and lemon curd again between the last two. Use a nice thick layer, maybe half an inch or so of curd, a little less of jam.

Lemon Curd
Adapted from Alton Brown

5 egg yolks
1 cup sugar
4 lemons, zested and juiced
1 stick of butter, cut into smaller pieces, cold

Bring about an inch of water to a simmer in a medium saucepan. In a medium size metal bowl, combine egg yolks and sugar and whisk until smooth, about a minute. Measure the citrus juice you’ve squeezed. It should come to about a third of a cup. If there’s less, add water. Add the juice and the zest to the egg mixture. When water in the pan is at a simmer, reduce heat to low and place the metal bowl on top of the saucepan. It shouldn’t touch the water. Whisk constantly until thickened, light yellow and coats the back of a wooden spoon. This takes anywhere between 7 and 12 minutes, in my experience. Remove from heat and stir in the butter immediately, one piece at a time, allowing each addition to melt. Keep stored in a clean container, with plastic wrap touching the curd on top, so as to prevent a crust.

Blueberry Jam

I meant to make this from scratch, but time got away from me. My recommendation in this scenario: Buy it at the grocery store. I used Bon Maman.



And next: begin frosting.

I frost the cake in two steps. First, I do a quick all-round layer, often called the “crumb coat.” I do the sides first, and then the top. I use a knife to spread, or an offset spatula. I get the cake completely covered in this round. If there any dips or dives in the cake, I put a bit more frosting there to even it out. Then I put it in the fridge for a few hours. The second frosting is more important. The second layer comes when the first is already hard, and you don’t have to worry about the crumbs desecrating the pristine white of the buttercream. So for the second layer, again, I do the sides first and then the top. I often dip the knife or spatula I am using to frost into a cup of warm water to help smooth things over. It just takes patience.

Anniversary

Four years ago yesterday I smashed the windshield of an oncoming car with the back of my skull. I broke my pelvis, tore the tendons and ligaments in my left knee, and lost my sense of smell. I don’t remember much about the following weeks. Or months, really. I went from working in the kitchen of a restaurant, on the eve of beginning culinary school, to recovering on a bed in my mother’s living room, enveloped by a haze of pain killers and depression.

This year, yesterday, I baked a cake. It was a simple butter cake. I used brown sugar and eggs, cinnamon and baking soda and flour. I poured it in a pan and I nestled a few neat rows of deep purple plums, cut in half, on top. I popped it in the oven, and when it came out into the kitchen a half hour later the whole room smelled sweet and warm, like fruit and caramel and autumn. A deep purple, nutty brown autumn.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how lucky I am. I lost my sense of smell in a car accident four years ago. With it vanished my ability to taste and my plans to be a chef. But since then, it has slowly returned. It has returned in a curious and fantastic manner, one that ignites wonder almost every day. In fact now, after all these years of thinking and stressing and working on it, I think I can smell better than I ever did before.

I’m lucky because I experienced a traumatic accident, terrified my family and could have died. I could have lost so much more. But I didn’t. I’m here. I’m writing a book about smell and all that it means. The experience, in fact, has given me more than it ever took away. If I lost anything, it was the sense of immortality that at age 22 I really felt was mine. I lost some naivety, and the tendency to ignore the small things in life.

I baked that plum cake in the kitchen of a large, wood-planked house in Woodstock, New York. I’m here for the month of September, quietly tucked away in a small studio to write. There are nine others on the property —writers, painters and composers—all doing the same as part of a residency program up in the hills. It’s so quiet at night I can hear the crickets. I can hear water trickling from down the road. It gets so dark that the moon illuminates the trees, shimmering through the leaves like diamonds, and it’s not hard to imagine all sorts of ghosts waiting just behind the creek.

Morning

I’ve been waking up early since I returned from France. Very early. Like, pre-dawn early. I’m not entirely sure why. At first it was because of jet lag. More recently it’s probably because of too much work. Too much of that now-familiar anxiety, born of book writing and boys at war, which curls up from my toes and shoots through my spine.

Anyway.

In these very early mornings I enjoy watching the sun rise. There is a pear tree that grows in the yard behind my apartment building. It looks nice in the dim morning light, thick with green fruit and leaves. I’m watching it right now, in fact. It’s not morning, but that doesn’t matter. It’s raining like crazy, blustery and dark as thunder claps above my head. The pear tree looks like it's dancing in the wind: something fast and jaunty, like the four-step I learned in Louisiana this spring.

Also in the very early morning I like to bake. This morning, for example, I made zucchini bread. I used my stepmother’s recipe, which is a favorite of Matt’s. I baked a loaf and let it cool. I wrapped it up tightly and put it in a box. This afternoon I brought it to the post office. I’m not sure how well zucchini bread travels, but we’ll see. Next stop for that plump little guy: Afghanistan.

Last week I made cantuccini, a simple biscotti-like cookie, almond-studded and bronze. The recipe came from Julia Child’s Baking with Julia, which now seems fitting with all the press swirling about a certain film. They are wonderful in the very early morning, especially when dunked in a mug of coffee.



Cantuccini
Adapted from Baking with Julia

2 cups flour
1 cup sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon. salt
1 1/2 cups whole, blanched almonds
3 large eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Combine all the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Stir. Add almonds and mix well.

In another bowl, whisk together the eggs and vanilla extract.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir.

Turn the dough out onto a well-floured surface and knead it for a few minutes. It’s dry, but comes together after a few minutes. Add flour if it sticks.

Divide in half and shape it into two 12-inch logs. Transfer the logs to a baking sheet lined with parchment.

Bake for 30 minutes. The logs will rise a bit, turning lightly brown on the bottom.

Transfer to a wire rack and let cool completely.

Once cool, cut the logs into quarter-inch slices. Lay the slices, cut side down, on a baking sheet lined with parchment.

Bake for an additional 10 or 15 minutes, or until the cantuccini are bronzed but not too dark. Let cool completely and enjoy!

Grasse

On Friday afternoon I sat at a table outside of a bistro in the hills above Grasse, France. The pale blue sea was visible in the distance. The air smelled of salt.

Ten of us were there together to eat lunch. An international group, hailing from places like India and Argentina, we are all in the midst of an intensive course on scent at the Grasse Institute of Perfumery. Grasse itself, speckled with fields of jasmine and firms of fragrance, is the birthplace of the perfume industry and remains vibrant and involved today. We spend long days in class sniffing thin paper strips, the tips of which have been dipped into bottles of raw materials like bergamot, lavender, and galbanum. I’m deep into work on my book and on my nose, and thus far I can smell them all. The scent of cistus, an aromatic and woody flowering plant from Spain, brings me straight to the The New England Spring Flower Show, an annual event that filled cavernous rooms in the Bayside Expo Center with the scent of earth and smoke and pine, and where my father brought me every year when I was small.


As we sat around the table on Friday, speaking of little else than smell, a portly man with a shock of white hair tied back in a ponytail brought out a massive steaming plate and plunked it down in front of us all. Paella: a rice dish rich with paprika and saffron, with chicken and mussels and squid. Though originally from Spain, it is the specialty of this coastal French chef. It glowed in orange and red, punctuated with the pink of prawns. Everyone leaned in to sniff before taking the first bite.

Later, we finished with pie. The tarte au citron smelled of lemon and brown sugar. It was light and sweet and tasted of summer.

Salad Days

I haven't slept in the same place for more than two weeks since March.

I moved in the first days of that month, from a dark little sublet in Manhattan's East Village to a tiny studio in Brooklyn. Matt and I traveled -- to Argentina, where we explored the foothills of the Andes and ate more red meat than I thought possible, and to New Orleans, where we saw his family -- before he had to report for duty. Once he was in uniform and I was back in New York, we spent weekends in St. Louis and in Louisiana, a countdown of days before he deployed to Afghanistan.

Since Matt left, I've traveled for work, interviewing scientists and chefs in Philadelphia and Chicago. I've seen family in Boston and on Martha's Vineyard. I attended a bachelorette party on Cape Cod, complete with matching pink tank tops and a sun-drenched afternoon at the beach. I just got back from North Carolina where I spent a long weekend with friends, scouting farms for their distant but approaching wedding, eating heirloom tomatoes and popsicles made of mangoes and chili. Next week I'm going to France, where I'll spend two weeks doing reporting and research for my book. These trips are exciting and fun, and I feel lucky to have the opportunity. But, ack, I'm exhausted just typing it all out.

I stayed here in New York for one weekend in the last month. I sat in Prospect Park with friends on the Fourth of July, a breezy but clear Saturday afternoon. We ate couscous and noodles with peanut sauce, homemade challah with butter and jam. I made a colorful chopped salad with basil and a balsamic vinaigrette. There was white wine and a buttermilk cake studded with blackberries and plums.

It was sunny and calm. Kids played frisbee nearby and I could hear a group of hip-looking twenty-somethings jamming on an acoustic guitar from behind a tree. I felt relaxed for the first time in a while. We watched the clouds overhead and I remembered to breathe. That night, I slept well in my own bed.

Crazy Chopped Salad with Basil and Balsamic Vinaigrette
Adapted from Peter Berley's The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen

This salad is large and colorful with the vibrant flavors of summer. I left out the radicchio and some of the herbs, simply due to the contents of my fridge, and a lack of desire to spend too much money on herbs that I would not have time to use again before my next trip out of the city. Even without the dill, mint and cilantro, though, the salad was refreshing and delicious.

Vinaigrette:
3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 teaspoon whole-grain mustard
salt
5 tablespoons olive oil

Salad:
2 ears sweet corn
1 cup string beans, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
4 cups romaine lettuce, chopped
2 carrots, peeled and chopped
2 fennel bulbs, trimmed and chopped
1 head radicchio, cored and chopped (though I left this one out...)
2 ripe tomatoes, cored and choped
1 yellow bell pepper, seeded and chopped
1 cucumber, seeded and chopped
1 small red onion, chopped
5 radishes, trimmed and chopped
2 tablespoons each of dill, mint, and cilantro (I left these out as well...)
10 fresh basil leaves, torn

Garnish: with fresh goat cheese, optional

-In a small bowl, combine vinegar, garlic, mustard and 1 teaspoon salt. Whisk in oil until creamy and emulsified, and set aside.

-Bring a large pot of water to boil and add salt. Add corn and beans when it comes back to a boil. Cook for 2 minutes and then drain. Shock in a bowl of ice water. Slice the kernels away from the cobs, and put both corn and beans into a large salad bowl.

-Add the lettuce, carrots, fennel, radicchio, tomatoes, yellow pepper, cucumber, onion, radishes and all the herbs to the salad bowl as well. Pour the dressing over and toss well. Add the goat cheese if desired. Enjoy!

Taking Scent for Granted

I have an essay in today's USA Today on the sense of smell. It was inspired by the recent controversy over the zinc-based cold remedy Zicam. But it’s mainly about the importance of scent, which is often only realized once it’s gone.

Louisiana

I was in Louisiana last week. I flew to New Orleans early on Wednesday morning and was greeted by Matt, who looked unfamiliar in his dark green uniform, and by a breeze that was much thicker and warmer than New York’s.

After nine weeks of being ferried about from base to base in the US, Matt is now in the final legs of training for deployment and is scheduled to fly to Afghanistan this week. We stayed with his parents in New Orleans for his final five days off.

The first time I visited the city was just about a year ago, when Matt and I stopped for a few days in the midst of an epic drive across the country. I was set to begin work as a reporter for a paper in Northern California in the following weeks, and, we thought, what a great excuse to witness the expansive land along the way. On that visit, we toured plantations, ate fried alligator, and zipped past fishing cabins and cypress trees in a motorboat on a swamp tour. I was filled with happy expectation, on the eve of an adventure out west.

I felt differently on this trip. Though Matt is confident and excited for his next step, I’m scared. I knew little about the Army, about deployments, or even about the intricacies of this never-ending war before I met Matt, now almost 2 years ago. Beyond the newspaper articles and TV news segments, Iraq and Afghanistan are not present in the daily lives of many here in New York City, of my friends or my family. And that unfamiliarity makes being left behind all the more lonely.

But on this trip we kept busy. We had a lot of fun. We ate beignets and snowballs, went on a tour to learn about the “haunted history” of the French Quarter, and attended a pig roast on a humid afternoon in the sun.


To begin, however, we drove south to Cajun country. We stopped for gumbo and iced tea at a diner in New Iberia. We went to Avery Island, a salt dome a few miles in from the waters of Vermilion Bay, where we toured the Tabasco factory. It was hot, a bit drizzly, and smelled of peppers, salt and vinegar. That evening we stopped in Rayne, a small town in the heart of Cajun culture known as the “Frog Capital of the World.” Fittingly, we shared a plate of frog’s legs – crisp fried and meltingly tender – at the Frog City Cafe.


That night we stayed in a small, rustic cabin at Bayou Cabins in Breaux Bridge. As the sun set, we found a table down the road at Mulates, “The Original Cajun Restaurant,” where we ate ice cream with praline liquor and listened to rollicking live music by Lee Benoit & The Bayou Stompers. We watched as a serious group of older couples danced: the two-step, the waltz, the jig. They moved with a practiced but raw elegance. Everyone was having fun.

Matt and I attempted a few moves with some help from those already on the dance floor – “This is the two-step!,” they yelled, instructing us to watch their feet. We laughed a lot.

When the band took a break, we stood on the dance floor, perused their CD collection, and chatted with some other patrons. It came out that Matt was about to deploy and, later, when the lead singer announced that news to the room, everyone clapped. People came up to Matt, one after another for the rest of the night, to wish him luck.

The next morning we woke up early to a thick morning light over the bayou. We went to the main building for coffee, and watched the owners of the cabins make fresh seafood boudin. Crawfish, shrimp and crabmeat, along with rice and spice, were stuffed into sausage casings and carefully tied. As they cooked, they spoke with lyrical accents, remnants of a culture with deep ties to France. A couple that we had met in Mulates the night before was there, too, and we talked about Cajun culture, motorcycles and dance.

After a meal of the fresh boudin, scrambled eggs and toast, we went to pay our bill and begin the drive back to New Orleans.

“It’s been taken care of,” said the proprietor, a warm red-haired woman wearing dark green. “It was taken care of by the nice couple that just left. And by us. We went halves. Good luck in Afghanistan.”

She took us out to the porch and, holding our hands in hers, she said a little prayer.