For any of my long time readers, perhaps you remember my late summer trip to LA. Bagels were eaten, stars were spotted, and I even took a trip through the greater LA area, in search of programmatic architecture. Fun was had by all (well, maybe just me).

This morning while doing a bit of research on-line, I found out a most disturbing turn of events has occurred. Tail o’ the Pup, that long-standing, ever-loved restaurant, serving up greasy hot dogs to multitudes of adoring, hungry diners, is no longer. The owner has sold the land to builders planning a retirement community. The Tail o’the Pup closed in early 2006.

There has been some talk of reopening the Pup in a parking lot in Westwood. But no plans have been made as of yet. Might I make a suggestion? Load the Pup on to a giant, flat-bed truck, strap it down, good and tight, and bring that baby up to the Bay Area. We could use a bit of true Americana right in the heart of the Gourmet Ghetto!

But until then, goodbye sweet Pup! You will be sorely missed! But hopefully this will not be the end…

There is just something about homemade yeast bread. The earthy, slightly sweet smell eminating from a lump of dough, as it gradually warms and rises on your kitchen counter, there is nothing homier. For all of my waxing poetic about the miraculous discoveries of yeast products, let me put out the disclaimer that I am not a baker. Far from it in fact.

Baking was always too fussy for me. It was all about timing, chemistry, and temperature; I favored the freedom of cooking. And I still do– I just realized that at a certain point, I would no longer be fulfilled being either one or the other– a cook, or a baker. A good bourgie would have to be, at the very least, proficient at both. Slowly I have begun to bake more, and I actually love the sweet treats bounding from my kitchen. But yeast, with all of its temperants, is the final frontier.

So I bought a book, and I’m schoolin’ myself. Bernard Clayton’s New Complete Book of Breads is a massive compendium of bread products, from the regional, to the hearty, to the rich and sublime, even the non-yeast varieties, this book has a recipe for whatever type of bread you desire to make. For my inaugural baking, I selected a yeasted, Portuguese corn bread called Broa. With pulverized corn meal, as well as wheat flour, this bread sounded unusually delightful. And it was!

I would definitely classify this bread as a corn bread, not a traditional wheat flour one. Hearty and substantial, with a coarse crumb, this bread was lovely eaten still-warm, fresh from the oven, slathered with more than a bit, of sweet cream butter. Flavored with little else than salt and corn meal, the bread had ample opportunity to let the true corn flavor shine through.

There were so many other recipes that looked tempting in this book, and the directions were so clear and concise– very user friendly, I am sure to use this book over and over again. Atkins dieters beware, bread is making a comeback in the bourgie kitchen.

Beans can be perfectly bourgie! I was so entranced by my earlier bean discovery, I decided that beans were it for me, and that more of this perfect legume should be incorporated into my diet. So, flipping through Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, I stumbled upon a recipe for Mashed Fava Beans and Greens, that sounded like just the thing to pile on slices of grilled country bread to be eaten as an open-faced sandwich.

Crostini, or as we like to call it in America, The Open-Faced Sandwich, are a thing of beauty. Ideal in their composition, with just the right ratio of filling to bread, eaten perfectly civilized with a knife and a fork, or gobbled up by hand, I think it is true to say that I enjoy them more than I do the traditional sandwich…and this crostini was no different.

Garlicky and flavorful, these beans when doused with some good, green olive oil, and layered with shards of crumbly Italian cheese make for a wonderful lunchtime treat. This was the first time I had worked with dried fava beans. I love the fresh variety, despite the dreaded double shuck, but found the dried heartier and earthier. The delightful green color of fresh beans was missed, but I would cast aside my bias in color, in the name of a lip-smacking, midday meal.

If you are up for smashing beans to oblivion, try it out. Eat up!

Mashed Fava Beans and Greens
adapted from How to Cook Everything

In my youth, I always avoided garbanzo beans. Clammy and peaked, resting in some avocado colored, melmac bowl, next to the pickled beets, and the rosy kidney beans at salad bar, they were always so slippery and unappealing. But I have grown, and my tastes have changed. While I can’t say that I now love those garbanzo beans of yesteryear, I can say that I rather like them in various other forms– like roasted.

Something so simple takes on an altogether different feel with the addition of a bit of heat from the oven. Crisp outside, tender inside these chickpeas are both a wonderful snack eaten out of hand, or they are a scrumptious, hearty side dish with whatever entree you choose. And they are simple to boot.

It seems that lately I have a bit of a fascination with roasting. Maybe it is the blustery weather, or perhaps it is knowing that whatever item I slip into the oven will come out intense tasting, and golden brown in color, but I just can’t get enough of this robust food preparation. Sure we all have roasted potatoes, carrots, maybe the occasional cruciferous vegetable, but how about the legume?

Tossed in olive oil, a bit of minced garlic, a measure of salt and pepper, and popped in a 400 degree oven, the garbanzo bean is elevated from the boring, pale, bean-in-a-can, to the sumptuous, legume-from-the-oven. Once out of the oven I seasoned my beans with a bit of cumin, and some firey hot cayenne pepper. In just 25 minutes you have a nutty, delicate dish that is eons away from that salad bar topping from your childhood.

Jasmine, basmati, brown, California long grain– I love them all. The staple of so many diets around the world, rice is a wonderful side dish alternative. But if you are anything like me, you always make a bit to much of the grain to suffice one meal, so into the refrigerator it goes. Sure the intention is always there, I tell myself, “I will eat my leftovers this time around,” but inevitably they sit, getting chilly in the Fridgidaire. That is until I discovered a new way to use up my old rice.

Wild Rice Pancakes with Cranberry Compote, a delicious, flavorsome dish, complete with just a bit of sweet-tart fruit to round out the menu. These flapjacks use pre-cooked (read: leftover) rice as the main ingredient. Any type of rice should do, but this time around I had made a wild brown rice pilaf with onion, and simmered in chicken broth the night before for dinner, so wild rice pancakes were mixed up for lunch the following day. The result was a deeply savory dish, both nutty and chewy. An altogether fresh use for a staunch stand-by.

Making these pancakes requires just a handful of ingredients. A couple of beaten eggs, a 1/4 cup flour, and 1/4 cup of milk are mixed together with 1 to 1 1/2 cups of cooked rice. Then fry as you normally would breakfast flapjacks. I had some sweetened, dried cranberries on hand, so I made a quick compote. Even though these were savory pancakes, I still needed a bit of something sweet to balance out the hearty flavor of the pancakes.

Into a saucepan went a tablespoon of butter, and few tablespoons of sliced shallots. As the shallots became translucent, in went the cranberries, the zest from one small orange, some water, and a bit of red wine. Simmering the cranberries until they were practically reconstituted, plump, and moist, I knew that this would be the ideal companion for my rice pancakes. Deep crimson and subtly sweet, I served the compote warmed along side the pancakes, fresh from the griddle.

I love rice, and I also love pancakes. Buttermilk, potato, banana, or slim little Swedish style, they are all just fine with me. Now I have another type of pancake to adore too; and I can stand a little taller knowing that all of my leftover rice can be put to good use.

With spring quickly approaching (at least I hope that it is), and those lovely, knobby spears of asparagus making their first appearance at the market, I quickly bought a bunch and hurried home to create a perfectly pleasing mid-week meal. And sometimes there is nothing that pleases a bourgie more than to sit down to an almost monochromatic meal.

Now this might appear to be the standard pasta pesto, slippery and smooth. But in actuality, it was Pea Pesto, making it all the more green, and all the more vernal. I started this pesto out with a bag of frozen peas, because really, who can bear to shuck all of those fresh ones. I simmered the peas in a 1/2 cup of chicken broth for flavor, and after they were cooked, put the entire contents, peas and broth, into the bowl of a food processor. In went just a few leaves of basil leaves (I didn’t want the peas to be overpowered by the basil), a touch of cream, about one tablespoon of olive oil, and a healthy dose of salt and pepper; then I processed until smooth.

With the addition of both the chicken broth and the cream, the sauce was velvety and smooth, the perfect consistency to gently coat a ribbon of pasta. To round out my green meal, I pan-fried the asparagus spears until they where just crisp-tender, and added the pea pesto, the cooked spaghetti noodles, some grated parmesan cheese, and a bit of the pasta cooking water, to lubricate and coat the noodles in sauce.

Adorned with slices of prosciutto, for an added saltiness, this pasta was otherwise, perfectly green. Sweet with the flavor of peas, slightly spiced with the addition of perfumey basil, maybe this pesto sauce was non-traditional, but it was a delightful addition to my repertoire of mid-week meals.

There are certain foods that I never eat prepared in a certain way, but truly enjoy when prepared in another. Tomatoes for instance– I avoid them sliced in a sandwich, but savor them roasted as a side dish. I am certainly particular about eggs– never scrambled or fried, but poached or soft-boiled is quite alright with me. And cottage cheese I cannot do served plain, or worse yet, garnished with a pineapple ring– but blended into batter for morning flapjacks, sounds perfect to me.

Saturday morning I was watching cooking shows on PBS, when Everyday Food came on. A cheery, dark haired woman in a solid-colored, red t-shirt (because each member of the cast always wears, coordinating, solid-colors shirts– no patterns here!) was frying up a batch of these Cottage Cheese Pancakes, as a healthy alternative to the typical, dense buttermilk sort. And the pancakes actually looked good to me, light, yet crisp around the edges, drizzled with pure maple syrup, and served with fresh, ripe strawberries, I knew that this would be on the menu for Sunday brunch.

I changed the recipe a tad, making the pancakes a little less dietetic by using whole eggs rather than egg whites, and using a cottage cheese that was slightly higher in fat content. The pancakes were superb, spongy and airy, not too heavy and dense like I find in the traditional buttermilk varieties. Subtly sweet, kissed with both a modicum of sugar, and some pure vanilla extract, these flapjacks were quickly gobbled up in no time.

And the cottage cheese was a welcome addition, adding body to the dish. Now you won’t catch me inhaling those milky curds by themselves, but mix up a batch of Cottage Cheese Pancakes, and I will gladly partake.

Almost all of my hand-selected Brit care package is gone. The Kit-Kats have all been munched upon (including the cloyingly sweet, strawberry-white chocolate ones by my husband), the prawn cocktail crisps have all been marveled at, and the Cadbury Crunchie bars eaten quickly, the honeycomb centers crackling away. But a few choice morsels still remained, among them a box of cake mix, waiting for the right moment to be baked, or the right person for whom to bake.

It was my sister’s birthday, and per usual I was in charge of the celebratory cake. My sister is a woman of simple tastes, nothing too rich, no feats of dark chocolate ganache and spun sugar to ooh and aah over. In December, on our trip to England, we visited Tesco, a truly enormous supermarket chain, and we became enthralled by a Cadbury Buttons Cake mix. So much so, we bought a box. And just what was it that made me drag a box of cake mix home, thousands of miles with me? It was the fact that this was not simply a cake mix, but rather a mix for an entire cake, buttercream filling, a milk chocolate ganache, and the decorations– white and milk chocolate Cadbury Buttons.

I was holding on to the mix, waiting for the correct company to serve it to– people who would not find it gauche, but rather whimsical to make a cake from a mix and, also, to have it decorated with candies. The company of my family in quiet celebration of my sister’s birthday, proved to be the ideal partakers.

And the cake was good. Milky, and rich, and overflowing with that Cadbury chocolate flavor– the precise mix of creaminess and sweetness. Filled with a light chocolate buttercream, and covered with melted milk chocolate, that cooled and hardened to a smooth shell, the cake was definitely festive with its polka-dotted vestment. A perfect birthday cake for a girl with sweetly simple tastes.

Well, obviously these Iced Ginger Cookies that sweetly came rolling out of my kitchen are not in fact a painting, Pollock or otherwise. They are a simply a baked good– but they are in some senses, a work of art. For me, eating and preparing food is a multi-modal activity.

Of course there is the act of tasting when one eats. A person detects the feelings of hot or cool, spicy or sweet, mellow or tart, and derives a certain amount of pleasure from these sensations. But for me food is just as much about the visual and the tactile, as it is about the taste. I do not want the food that I am about to consume to be continually toyed with, garnished just so, sauce artfully dribbled about, but I do want a certain level of care to be established.

Take an amorphous dish like beef stew. While the stew could be slopped into a trough, drips and chunks in abundance, isn’t it so much nicer, more civilized, when the stew is placed in a bowl, calmly resting against the smooth surface of porcelain or pottery? This little bit extra, a tiny touch here or there, is what I am talking about when I mention that a food is bourgie. It makes no difference if what I am preparing is Asian and refined, or comforting and American. All of these foods can still be bourgie.

As I was removing these cookies from the oven, the spiciness of the ginger mingling with the warm smell of cinnamon, I was already thinking about what could be done to these morsels to make them a bit bourgie. I remember the Oatmeal Iced Cookies, from Mother’s. The brittle shards of icing stuck in perfect waves to the too-crunchy-to-be-comforting oatmeal cookies, but even with all of the imperfections, I loved those cookies dearly. So why not harken back to my childhood, icing this new, warm and spicy cookie in much the same way.

Dripping, dropping, and swirling smidgens of icing like an action painter on the surface of these cooled cookies was an amusement, and a temptation. Gazing at each intricate design, I could hardly wait to bite into these chewy marvels. They were chewy, bursting with ginger and molasses, and the small doses of white icing (just powdered sugar, water, and a bit of shortening for body) was the ideal sweet foil for the spiciness of the cookie. And, they were a bit bourgie to boot.

With all of the lovely citrus fruit in abundance right now at the market, I purchased a bevy with the intention of making some sort of citrus marmalade. When I arrived home, bags of blood oranges, and Seville sour oranges in tow, I began doing a bit of research on marmalade jam recipes on the internet, only to have my hopes of wintertime jam smashed to a pulp. Do you have any idea just how much sugar is required in making marmalade? A lot. Quite a lot. Some recipes called for a pounds worth of sugar when making simply a few measly jars worth of marmalade.

Now there is nothing wrong with sugar. In fact I love the stuff, some would even say I love it too much, with cakes and cookies (homemade or otherwise) tumbling out of my kitchen on a regular basis. But there is something too sweetly intimidating about pouring not cups, but pounds of the sweet stuff to make a condiment for one household. Properly scared off by multi-stepped, rot-your-teeth-out-of-your-head recipes, I cast all of my roly-poly oranges aside until I could decide what to do with them.

So I made jam– a marmalade of sorts. Crisp and pure, tinged with a subtle bitterness from the juice of many Seville oranges co-mingling with the gorgeous, crimson glow of blood orange juice, this jelly is sublime. It seemed a shame to let all of the oranges go to waste, they simply had to made into something fabulous. But it also seemed a shame to let all of the wonderful sweet-bitterness be drowned out by pounds of sweetener. I compromised.

I juiced all of the oranges, my fingertips dyed a rosy hue from the sanguine pulp of the blood oranges. I zested some of the Seville oranges, carefully tasting the puckery flavor of the skin. I added some water, and a healthy though unremarkable dose of sugar, a bit of pectin (the home canner’s best friend), and vigorously boiled away. With the aid of a candy thermometer, I turned the heat off when the mixture reached 224 degrees (the gelling point). This took about 30 minutes.

Making your own jam always remains somewhat of a mystery to me. As I mindfully poured the jam mixture into the prepared, sterilized jars, I really wasn’t even sure how, or if it would turn out all. After all of the juicing, zesting, and boiling, what I appeared to have was just glorified juice, slightly thickened by the addition of pectin. But I poured away, crossing my fingers as I let the jam cool.

By the next morning I was left with a sunny, honeyed, gelatinous, almost-mass, waiting to be slathered on my morning toast. Now I only wish that I made more.