From the title of this post, you might expect it to be about battles with food, and that is correct, but not battles in the “why can’t I diet” sense. Because, as we all know, I don’t view the eating of food as a battle. I eat what I want, when I want it, in the amount that I want.

No, when I talk about losing battles with food, I mean literal losing battles, as in foods which I have tried to cook and failed at. I think we all have tales of spectacular cooking failures; the roast that just didn’t work, the chicken that tasted weird because it was just…off, the salad that wilted because it got left in the sun. Those are accidents and they happen to anyone, and it’s not any sort of failing on the part of the cook, usually.

But there are a few foods which I just cannot cook, despite my best efforts. And it makes me really sad, because for the most part, these are foods I really like and want to be able to eat. It’s a source of sadness to me that I can’t seem to make them.

It starts with eating a successfully cooked version prepared by someone else, which piques my interest and titillates my appetite. I get a recipe. I try it. It doesn’t work out. I try it a few more times, tweaking details to try and capture that quality that made it appeal to me in the first place. I try other recipes. It just doesn’t come out right.

So I seek instruction. I get someone whom I know can make this dish to show me, step by step. It seems so simple. I try again. It doesn’t come out. I get the person to watch me. Ou says I’m doing everything right and I think at last, success, and then I take the first bite and no. Or I pull it out of the oven and it’s a disaster. I just…can’t…make it.

Take snickerdoodles. I LOVE snickerdoodles. Because I love cinnamon, sugar, and cookies. I have tried making snickerdoodles from innumerable recipes, and every time they flatten out into the pan and turn into a disgusting mass which ends up in the garbage. Puff, in San Francisco, used to make delectable snickerdoodles. I’ve tried her recipe. My snickerdoodles are not delectable.

So I developed what I call the fakerdoodle, which is a cookie akin to the snickerdoodle in some ways, but which I can actually make. It’s not quite the same, but it’s closeish. Because I’ve wasted too many batches of dough to try making snickerdoodles again. I just accept that I can’t do it, no matter how hard I try. Maybe I’m overthinking it or something. I’ve even read up about the chemistry behind the snickerdoodle, in the hopes that this information would prove to be the key to unlock the mystery, but no.

Indian food is another thing I struggle with. I love Indian food with a deep and abiding intensity. I cannot make it. Not from any recipe, not under the tutelage of accomplished Indian cooks, not with any prepackaged mix. Every time I make Indian food the results are nothing short of horrific. There’s some missing element which I just can’t incorporate, and it’s infuriating, because I would eat Indian food all the time if I could.

There are some foods which have a learning curve, and once I got over that curve, everything turned out all right. The first beef stew I made, for example, was definitely lacking in deliciousness. But I learned from the experience, consulted some sources, tried again a few months later, and ended up with something quite good. Once I understood how to do it, I could start branching out and playing with different ingredients and settings. It just took that one failed try to get over the hump, as it were.

I don’t mind foods with a learning curve. In fact, I find it kind of fun to experiment with foods in the beginning, to try and salvage a recipe gone awry or to retrace my steps so that I can explore how I went wrong, and how I can avoid it in the future. With practice, I can start to disregard portions of the recipe which are not as critical and I can start to make predictions about how the food is going to behave so that I can play with it.

But foods which I just can’t make frustrate me. I try to fit the pieces of the puzzle together and I come away emptyhanded because I am doing everything right. It should work and it’s just not. There’s not really any fun in that, now is there? And I can’t figure out why this happens with some foods and not others, what it is about particular recipes or cooking styles which just defeats me.

I normally like a challenge, and I always say that I am game to try pretty much anything three times. Once to get used to it, twice to explore it, three times to confirm that I really do or don’t like it. I can’t even count the number of times I have made snickerdoodles, following the recipe, optimistically sliding the pan into the oven, and then pulling it out again to see that, once again, the cookies have run together into a spongy, foul smelling mass which I will have to scrape off the bottom of the cookie sheet and throw away because it tastes so revolting.

It’s like the fates are mocking me. “No snickerdoodles for you,” they say.

I normally really, really, really hate disability simulations. But I can’t think of a way to make this point more clear, and I think that there are cases in which disability simulations can actually be very helpful for people who are having trouble grasping some key concepts.

Food policing is an area in which all sorts of assumptions are made about class and ability status. It goes hand in hand with the idea that people have an obligation to be healthy, that all bodies are the same so there’s only one way to be healthy, and that there is virtue in eating “right” as dictated by current authorities in the food world. Like, say, Michael Pollan, who is editorialized fawningly in numerous publications all over the planet for his “simple” and “helpful” food rules.

So.

Before you criticize the food choices of others…

• Prepare a meal which takes an hour of being on your feet in the kitchen, with a 100 pound (45 kilogram) sack of flour across your shoulders. Welcome to an inkling of what it’s like to try and prepare a meal when you have a condition which involves chronic pain and fatigue.
• You have exactly half an hour to prepare dinner, with no help. GO! Bonus: Dinner for four.
• Prepare a meal which doesn’t include: Corn, wheat, eggs, nuts, bell peppers, fish of any kind, cheese, soy, milk, or peanuts. If these ingredients slip in, say hello to your friend anaphylaxis.
• You can’t hear kitchen timers or any other noises associated with food preparation (like your pasta water boiling, the sizzle of meat searing, etc.). How do you plan to gauge doneness or the appropriate timing for the next step in a recipe?
• Prepare a meal which doesn’t include anything crunchy. (Alternatives: Nothing with a strong odor, nothing soft, nothing slimy, nothing squeaky, nothing viscous, etc.) For people with sensory sensitivity, both handling food to prepare it and eating it can be challenging.
• You’re hungry. Wait five hours. You’re still hungry. You’re really hungry! Wait two more hours. You’re still hungry, but you still can’t make yourself eat (or you can’t prepare food, or you can’t go out for food, or you can’t afford to order in food).
• Start cooking something. Get distracted and leave the kitchen with water boiling/pan on high. Come back half an hour later. Now what?
• Prepare a meal which doesn’t include heavy oil, spicing, flavoring, or strong ingredients. Mess up? It’s ok, you don’t have irritable bowel, Crohn’s, or other gastrointestinal conditions which would leave you writhing on the toilet for the rest of the night.
• Sit on a low stool and try preparing food and cooking at counters which are all too high for you. (You are allowed to prepare ahead of time by moving utensils to your level, as folks with kitchens which are too high tend to lay them out in a way which is accessible for them, even if they can’t afford the modifications needed to make a kitchen truly accessible.)
• Wear heavy gloves or bandage your hands during food preparation. This includes opening containers, chopping, and everything else.
• Work in a kitchen which is extremely hot (or cold). Some folks with disabilities have poor temperature regulation which can make tasks like baking extra fun.
• Try preparing a recipe out of order, or with missing steps. Folks with attention and focus issues often have trouble following recipes, especially if they are complex.
• Make a meal. Look at it. Feel ill and throw it away. You still feel ill because you can smell it. Take out the garbage.
• You have no clean dishes. Wash your dishes. You are now too tired to cook.
• Recognize that you are hungry and need food. Realize that nothing in your house is suitable. Go to bed hungry.

Furthermore…

• People with disabilities are much more likely to live in poverty. Do your grocery shopping for the week with $20.
• People with disabilities often lack access to big grocery stores (no public transit, store is not accessible, don’t have energy to go to the store after work). Use the corner store for groceries. For a week. You’re also only allowed to bring home as many groceries as you can carry in one bag.
• If you’re more of an eating out kind of person, don’t go to any restaurants which fail to meet basic accessibility guidelines. For bonus points, don’t go to restaurants which are too bright, too dark, too crowded, too loud, too smelly. Also, your budget for eating out has been reduced to 1/3 of what it usually is.
• If you have a shared kitchen, only prepare meals when no one else is there, or eat in your room from food supplies you store there. Some neuroatypical folks have a hard time navigating shared spaces. Alternatively, if you have a shared kitchen, imagine that half your food has been eaten by housemates and you can only replace it with ingredients available from the corner store. Another alternative: You can cook in your shared kitchen, but only if someone hasn’t recently cooked something which smells strong in there and if no strong smelling foods are stored there. Incidentally, any soft goods (like bread) should be considered inedible if they’ve been stored in a kitchen where people made strong-smelling food. Oh, you just bought that loaf? Too bad.

This is just a small taste of what it can be like to eat while disabled. I’m sure that readers can add many things in the comments. And I’d note that many of these limitations also apply to people such as parents and able poor folks.

ETA: I don’t know where all of the Michael Pollan apologists came from, but please stop. I’m not going to be letting your comments through, and they miss the larger point of this post, which is not to attack Michael Pollan, but to discuss trends in the foodie movement and beyond.

An estimated 1.6 million people labour in the fields of the United States.

Most of them were born outside the United States. Many of them are undocumented immigrants. Educational opportunities for them have been limited. The vast majority of crops grown in the United States are harvested by people who lack a realistic chance of achieving “the American dream” of which we are all so fond. In fact, it is abuse of these very people which allows other people to get their little slice of the dream, the slice with the big house and the multiple business holdings and the private schools, the slice with the access to health care, a college education for their children. Agriculture in the United States is a system in which a handful of people stand on the backs of others in the name of profit, and it is widely tolerated despite the fact that this seems to go against the very grain of supposedly American values.

The labour is grueling. I’ve done some farmwork. It is not enjoyable. My father worked on farms a lot when he was a kid, and he has some hair raising stories about it. There’s a reason that labourers try to get out of farmwork as quickly as possible, setting up a revolving door; there’s a constant demand for new farmworkers and that makes it difficult to track them. It makes it difficult for them to connect with each other. It makes it difficult for them to organize.

The agriculture industry makes it hard to get out. Farmworkers have their documentation taken away, and are told that they can get it back at some unspecified point in the future. They are told that if they leave, they will be reported to immigration authorities. They are kept in isolation so that they cannot interact with people who might have information about opportunities elsewhere.

And when they get sick, when they are injured, they are dumped and replaced. There’s no reason to provide care or support, because someone else wants that job and is willing to take it. There’s no reason to wait and give a farmworker a few days off when others are clamoring for that spot, for the privilege of working 12 or 14 hour days in high heat. The rain. Snow. Frost. Ice.

Farmworkers are, quite literally, treated like tools. Disposable ones. There are always more available in the teeming mass of humanity which is trying to get into the United States, to get a foothold here, to carve out some chance at something better.

Companies which have fields in the United States have gone to great lengths to ensure that as few labour protections as possible are extended to farm workers. They’ve got all sorts of arguments for it, of course, but what it really boils down to is that they want to retain their source of cheap, disposable labour because they want to make more money. They sometimes claim that no people born in the United States want these jobs. Not strictly true, actually, but beside the point: Why should that be used as an argument to pay people less than minimum wage? They say that paying fair wages would drive the cost of produce up. Yes, well, that’s how capitalism works, when the costs of production rise, they are passed on to consumers. Does that mean that we should not pay people a fair wage?

And all of these arguments ignore the fact that it is fellow human beings we are talking about. These justifications focus on money and logistics, and they do not address the very real problems involved in using, abusing, and discarding people.

Produce has hidden costs. Produce in the United States may be kept relatively cheap (although prices are rising at the moment), but it’s more than the cost out of your pocket. There’s a cost in human lives that goes with it; the lettuce I used in my salad yesterday was probably cut by someone working for less than minimum wage. Someone who works overtime, every day, and receives no compensation. Someone with a back which is aching from bending and straightening with a lettuce knife. With fingers which are scarred and gnarled from work. Someone who may have been underage. Someone who might have been sick, but too frightened not to come to work.

There wasn’t any other lettuce I could buy. All the lettuce in the store comes with that hidden cost.

Reform isn’t about buying the better thing, because there are no better alternatives. It’s about looking at the way agriculture in the United States works, and asking ourselves if we are willing to live with it. Are we? Are we comfortable with this?

Are we comfortable with the fact that farmworkers are kept ignorant of their rights? That they are intimidated into remaining on farms where they don’t want to be with threats of deportation and other legal problems? That they are rarely offered assistance or aid, even in disasters, because they are deemed undeserving? That documented immigrants with the paper trail which says they are entitled to be here are deported by accident? With the fact that farmworkers and their children are denied healthcare and education? With the fact that the agriculture industry apparently sees nothing wrong with treating people like machines?

All this for a cheap head of lettuce. Is it worth it?

When we lived in Elk, we used to make a fair amount of pasta. My father would work in the woods a couple of days a week, but on other days we would putter around the house, working in the garden, cooking, and doing odds and ends. I remember making pasta vividly because we used to use the spare mangle to roll out the dough, since we lacked a pasta machine, and it seemed like a kind of frivolous purchase when we had a perfectly good spare mangle sitting around.

We used to feed great wads of dough through the mangle, finishing up with pasta which would end up nearly four feet long, and sometimes even longer. After we ran it through to the desired thickness, we’d cut it, and then hang it for drying, usually coiling it so that it would be compact during storage. We’d eat some fresh, of course, but part of the fun of pasta making was the creation of little nests of dried pasta which we could cook up quickly on nights when there wasn’t much time for fussing about; dried pasta cooks quite quickly, and you can slap some butter on it and call it good, especially with greens from the garden.

This was in part made possible because the house in Elk was fairly large, and had room for pasta operations. In a smaller house, undoubtedly it would have been a colossal mess and a big hassle. Making pasta dough itself is fairly easy; throw an egg and some oil in some flour, and go to town. We also used to make spinach and tomato and other flavors of pasta, which were a bit more complicated, but not that hard.

Pressing out the pasta was a pain, though. You had to hold it carefully to support it as it moved through the mangle, so that it wouldn’t break. And you had to flour everything so that the pasta didn’t stick, and the longer the sheets got, the more challenging it became, because of course four feet of pasta is kind of a lot to handle. Cutting also had to be done with care and precision to get reasonably evenly-sized strands, and then there was more flouring and coiling and hanging to dry. It was definitely a procedure, something we did on Saturday mornings when several hours stretched ahead of us and we knew that we would have time for everything, including cleanup.

I was aware, on some level, that pasta also came in boxes, and occasionally I would have box pasta at a friends. It was different. Not necessarily bad, mind you, just different. Homemade egg pastas, as many readers are no doubt aware, tend to be softer and denser and much richer. Box pastas are chewy, a texture I like, with a more light flavor. When we moved to Caspar, we started using box pasta because the mangle didn’t come with us, and I probably acquired a bit of a taste for it, although I always had a soft spot for fresh pasta, because nothing really compares. Box and fresh are like apples and oranges, both good, both different.

I acquired a pasta machine a few years ago and started making fresh pasta on a reasonably regular basis, something which people seem to view with astonishment. It’s really not very difficult for me, and it’s much, much cheaper than buying fresh pasta at the store. A basic package of fresh fettucini is easily $6, and the cost for producing that at home is much lower. Yes, it requires some work, I’m not going to lie, but if I tend to make a big batch and dry it, and thus the labor doesn’t seem quite so bad, especially when I’ve had a long day and I just want some good food and I throw a little pasta nest in boiling water and it unfurls and cooks in minutes.

I tend to make a lot of things from scratch, because that’s how I was raised, and if there really is a quality difference, or something can only really be made from scratch, I’m willing to put in the effort. Clearly, my upbringing had a profound impact on my tastes when it comes to food, and I certainly developed a taste and liking for things made from scratch, as opposed to packaged foods. It’s not a snobbery thing, although I used to be quite snobby about it, it’s just that I know what I like and I feel fairly confident about it. And I have the ability to make things I like, so why not make them?

And, you know, this probably sounds odd, but I don’t feel like cooking is work, for me. I haven’t been feeling very inspired about food lately, but it’s not because I dread the thought of the work of cooking, it’s because I can’t think of anything that I want to eat. For me, being in the kitchen is enjoyable, and I like working on “projects” like home made pasta. Sometimes I put on some Buffy or something to entertain myself while I do it, but it’s still not really work, for me, or for my body, for the most part. And I like cooking things for other people (but not with, I have learned, I prefer to cook alone), and I like to take pleasure in cooking.

That definitely puts me in a position of privilege; I have the time to work on cooking projects which might take an hour or more, I’m only satisfying the needs and tastes of one person instead of a group, I don’t have a disability which makes cooking a burden. I can stand for an hour in the kitchen, I can handle heat and steam. The recognition of my cooking privilege, so to speak, has really changed my position on cooking. I used to be snobby about it because I didn’t recognize that, for other people, cooking from scratch actually is work and it may not be work that they are able to do. Which gives me a deeper appreciation of the fact that I enjoy it, and can do it, and can make fresh pasta if that’s what I want to do.

And it makes me especially happy when I can feed other people who may not be up to that level of work. It’s turned from a sanctimonious act for me in which I prove the superiority of cooking my way to a gift to someone else, and I think that’s a much nicer approach to cooking for people, don’t you?

Over Christmas, Linnea generously gave me a huge stack of old recipe books and pamphlets, filled to the brim with unfortunate recipes. She didn’t want them anymore but couldn’t bear to get rid of them, and she knew they would find a loving home in my house. If by loving you mean “they would be photographed and published on the Internet so that people could mock them.”

Tonight, an undated promotional booklet from Kellogg’s:

That’s right, kids, it’s Cookytime!

I’m intrigued that Kellogg’s still holds and uses the “Special K” brandname despite the fact that I more commonly hear that name used in slang references to ketamine. This cookbook, of course is from a more innocent time. And, believe me, you do not want to see the recipe.

More old news today! I’m on an old news roll.

Recently, a fair amount of attention has gone to a study conducted at the University of California in which participants were fed diets high in either glucose or fructose for two weeks. During the study and at the end, changes to their health were carefully tracked. The study noted that people on a high fructose diet appeared to have trouble processing the sugar, and that deposits of new fat cells appeared around their digestive tract.

This study had 32 participants. With a sample size this small, you are obviously laying the groundwork for more research. The study results seemed to suggest that there was some interesting stuff going on, and that it might be a good idea to explore the idea a bit further. I haven’t been able to find specific information about exactly how high the diets were in fructose and glucose, respectively, which would be helpful when looking at the results, but, as a general rule, I would describe the findings as “interesting.”

That’s not how the media described it.

“Study Shows High Fructose Corn Syrup May Cause Obesity, Diabetes, Heart Disease” “Child Diabetes Blamed On Food Sweetener” “Too Much Sugar Is Bad”

This is a common trend that I see with science reporting, and it’s starting to piss me off. I get that people want to use sensationalized headlines to attract attention, and while I am not exactly pleased with the use of misleading headlines, I understand why it is done. Commonly, however, the errors in the headline are repeated in the article; the entire piece becomes a laundry list of sensational and ludicrous claims which are based in a gross misreading of the study.

“Study Shows That More Research Is Needed Into Dietary Sugars,” I admit, does not have the same ring. It doesn’t grab the eye and demand that people look at the article. But it would be more accurate. And the contents of the articles could have been much more balanced. They could have focused on the small sample size, they could have talked a little bit about variables, they could have discussed the implications of the study without necessarily stating that fructose causes things. There appears to be a correlation or link which suggests that we should learn more. That is not the same thing as identifying a cause.

Errors in science reporting irritate me both because I don’t like to see studies mischaracterized, and because I think that they do science a disservice, and they create unreasonable expectations in members of the lay public. Not describing science accurately, not taking the time to write a more nuanced piece, leads people to come up with some very odd ideas about science and how scientific research works.

Most people aren’t familiar with how scientific research is performed, how to analyze the results of scientific studies, and how the scientific community regulates itself when it comes to publishing results and making statements. Thus, they can’t read articles like these critically, looking between the lines for the real information and perhaps noting to themselves that the story is actually more complicated than it appears at first glance.

We are increasingly a society in which members of the lay public are very uninformed about how things work, and this is actually quite damaging. When people don’t understand the mechanics behind scientific research, how economists think, what’s really going on in Congress, it’s hard to have an informed opinion on it. It’s difficult to make an informed choice.

Misreporting of scientific information in particular around food has, I think, created a lot of faddish attitudes. People are constantly changing the balance of their diets because the latest study says this, or that, or the other thing. Sometimes studies actively contradict each other and people struggle to balance them. This is because they read headlines like the ones above and go “oh, high fructose corn syrup is bad, I need to eliminate it,” instead of seeking out more information and making a choice about what they want to do; reduce, cut it out altogether, wait and see what further studies show, etc.

Fad dieting has been shown in a number of studies (including studies with very large sample sizes, and studies which have been conducted over years and sometimes decades) to be harmful. There are clear signs that jerking the diet around, not eating in a balanced way, and eating a highly restrictive diet are all potentially harmful and sometimes even dangerous, depending on whether or not someone has underlying health issues.

When science misreporting sends people off on another tangent of fad dieting, I’d argue that it’s harmful. Reporters who discuss science issues need to be more conscientious about how they report science, to make sure that they are representing information reasonably, fairly, and accurately. To make sure that they are not leading readers to conclusions which were never actually reached in the study being covered.

To write about a study like this and to conclude that high fructose corn syrup is bad and evil is food shaming, of a form, and it’s also wrong. What this study shows is that in 16 people, eating a diet high in fructose appears to be linked with the formation of fat deposits (fatty liver in particular is a health concern). Which seems to suggest that maybe we need a more focused long-term study including people who eat varying amounts of fructose, with controls for assorted variables, to see if it is indeed fructose that is causing these problems, and at what level fructose in the diet becomes a cause for concern.

One of my favourite childhood foods was timbale; actually, it continues to be one of my favourite foods, and I recently made one, and while discussing it with someone, I realized that timbale is one of those foods which is actually quite difficult to define. It’s not like “a hamburger,” which everyone understands. Some people don’t know the meaning of “timbale” at all, and others have their own versions of what it means.

Literally, a timbale is a baking dish which is used to bake molded foods, often in layers. Foods baked in a timbale are often known as timbale, and they come in savory and sweet varieties, native to a wide range of cultures. When I did a search for “timbale,” I ended up with all sorts of interesting and creative variations; basically, if you can fit it into a large baking dish…

But in our house, timbale meant only one thing, and the closest I can come to describing it is “frittata.” We made it by sauteeing onions and spinach together, and mixing them with beaten eggs, milk, bread crumbs, cheese, and spices. Then we poured it into a mold and baked it, in a water bath, and then carefully unmolded it and ate it.

Maybe this isn’t “timbale” to you, but it’s timbale to me. I’m not quite sure where my father picked up the recipe, and when, but the process of making timbale was always tremendously exciting for me, because it was a food you had to battle with. You had to outwit the timbale.

This sounds odd, given the description above, but the problem with timbale is that, well, eggs like to stick to things. So the unmolding was always a moment of truth. Would the timbale unmold smoothly and perfectly, in one neat piece? Or would the eggs stick to the pan, creating an unholy mess of broken eggs and crumbled spinach? And could you set things up carefully enough at the start that the timbale wouldn’t stick?

There are two great things about timbale. One is a slice fresh out of the oven; I can gobble down half a timbale almost without thinking about it because it’s so light and flavorful and delicious. The other great thing is a slice fried up in a little butter the next day, with a little lemon juice. The edges are crisp and almost caramelized, but the inside stays creamy and smooth (that’s because of the water bath, incidentally).

This is one of those evocative foods for me; just eating a slice of timbale takes me on a trip in a time machine.

To make timbale yourself, you’re going to need:

• One package frozen spinach or one bunch fresh spinach
• One yellow onion
• One cup (240 ml) milk
• 2/3 cup (~80 grams) bread crumbs
• Four eggs
• 1/2 cup (~60 grams) grated cheese; I like to use Swiss cheese, but pretty much any mild cheese will work, I believe
• Salt, pepper, and nutmeg

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit (177 Celsius). (I actually grew up cooking this on a woodstove, which adds an additional element of complexity to this dish!)

Take a timbale (or pie plate, or bundt pan, any sort of baking pan which is suitable for molding), and cut a piece of parchment paper to fit the bottom. Butter the sides of the pan and press the parchment paper into the pan.

Start by mincing your onion and sauteeing it with a little oil and butter in a heavy pan until it starts to soften and turn golden. When the onion is almost done, throw in either thawed and squeezed frozen spinach, or chopped and washed fresh spinach, toss so that the spinach softens, and then set aside.

While this is going on, start boiling some water so that you will have very hot water when you need it, which will be shortly.

Beat the eggs together with the milk, bread crumbs, and cheese. Add salt, pepper, and nutmeg; I would say “to taste” but I don’t really expect you to taste the mixture, I just don’t have hard measurements because I don’t really measure stuff. Just, er, use your sense of much there ought to be? Sorry I can’t be more helpful with specific measurements.

Add the sauteed onion mixture, and then pour the whole mixture into the baking pan.

Now, for the water bath. Find a heavy pan which your timbale will fit in.

There are two schools of thought about the next step:

1. Pour your boiling water into the pan, and lower the timbale in (or put the timbale in and pour the water around it, but be careful not to splash water into the timbale). Then, slide the whole deal into the oven. Very carefully.
2. Put the pan in the oven, and pull the rack out slightly. Nestle the timbale inside, add boiling water. (Or, add water, then lower the timbale in, but this is trickier when the pan is in the oven.) I prefer this method because I am clumsy and it’s less prone to disaster. Incidentally, I use a cast iron pan for the water bath, in part because it has a little lip which creates some space to pour boiling water in.

Close the oven up,and bake for around…40 minutes to an hour, until a knife or cake tester or toothpick inserted into the middle comes out cleanly. Pull the timbale out of the oven, and let it rest for a couple of minutes. If your house is cold, rest the timbale in the oven.

The moment of truth:

Run a knife around the edges of the pan. Position a plate upside down over the pan.

And…invert. Shake it a little bit to get it to loosen. If the fates are smiling upon you, the timbale will drop neatly out onto the plate, and you can peel the parchment paper off, and you’re ready to roll.

If the fates are not smiling upon you…well, sometimes you can carefully replace the pieces that pull off.

The person who taught me to eat a pomegranate was fairy-like, looking like she had stepped from the canvas of a romantic painting. Slight, sandy hair, large eyes, with a sad and sometimes dreamy expression that narrowed into intent focus on the day she introduced me to the fruit of the Punica granatum shrub, because this is a fruit which requires undivided attention.

It was late fall, it must have been, for pomegranates to be in season, and we went to the store and she selected one with the same care and precision which I imagine surgeons dedicate to finding bleeders before they close an incision. Her long, delicate fingers danced over fruits which seemed identical to me, as she tested them and occasionally lifted one only to set it down again, or to raise it to her ear and listen intently for a moment. She finally settled upon one, weighing it back and forth for a moment before handing it to me and repeating the process, and we went to the 12 items or less lane with our pomegranates, these slightly mottled, dull red fruits which felt surprisingly heavy and solid for their size.

She drove us to the headlands and we sat there while she carefully explained to me that the pomegranate is a fruit which demands patience. It is a fruit, in fact, which will reward you for being painstaking and delicate, and will punish you for hurrying. It was sunny, that day, but the surf was heavy because a storm was rolling in and the wind was just starting to pick up, whipping her fine hair around her face.

Using her long, sharp nails, she started the pith of my pomegranate before opening her own, and her fingers seemed to brush the fruit without touching it to slowly peel back the pith and reveal the tiny rubies inside. A transformation; from dead shell to living, resplendent arils inside. I sat there helplessly watching her, until she told me to just peel a bit of the pith back to expose the interior.

She somehow managed to deftly pick out the arils without crushing a single one, her mouth and lips reddening with dark juices and a neat pile of pith stacking up next to her. I, meanwhile, labored over my pith, inadvertently crushing and dropping the innards of the fruit all over the rocks and sand and occasionally managing to extricate one which I could eat. My tongue stuck out of the corner of my mouth as I concentrated intently on trying to replicate her motions with my large hands, one of which could engulf both of hers. My short fingers with nails clipped short scrabbled where hers darted, fumbled where hers were steady and sure.

A burst of juice, sourness, a hit of complexity. A purplish red kind of flavor which exploded in my mouth when I cracked through the outer membrane. Occasionally a single especially tart individual which would cause me to pucker in surprise and astonishment. That slow strange feeling which overcomes your teeth when you eat a pomegranate.

The pomegranate is a highly sexualized fruit, and I could see why, that day, seeing those fingers lifting and separating and plunging a little bit deeper into the mysterious depths of the fruit. Seeing that refined elegance with which she teased out each tiny jewel and popped it into her mouth, juices dripping and fingers reddening. That intent focus, eyes widening with delight when another delicate layer was peeled back.

We never touched each other, not once, but it still felt like a private and secretive moment. Perhaps even a transgressive one. Our companionable silence as we worked, because eating a pomegranate is work indeed, became loaded with a strange sort of tension which would have been impossible to acknowledge or pin down. After all, we were just eating fruit.

Lips swelled with sourness and stained with juices, fingers slowing as the edible parts of the fruit gradually diminished, slowly, carefully, opening curtains and layers and pockets and channels. The “pop” and spurt of juices. I wondered what those fingers would feel like on my hair, my skin, smoothing down the seam of a shirt or pulling a stray leaf out of my scarf. I watched the delicate tracery of her hands across the shrinking globe of the fruit and imagined her hands fluttering over the small knobs on my wrists, I saw a drop of juice caught in the downy hair on her arm and saw a world ripe with possibility.

When we were finished we dipped into the water, briefly, shocking cold and swirling sand, and she emerged from the water like Aphrodite, water and salt running over her skin and her lips still stained and full, and I looked away to watch the pith we tossed swirl away as it was sucked out with the tide.

I cannot help but think of her every time I eat a pomegranate, my own private alchemy, the transmutation of fruit into…something else, something which cannot be articulated, because, after all, I’m just eating fruit. Years later, I heard that she became a piercer, and I imagined those sure, confident, long, cool fingers finding the perfect place and the right moment for the plunge, the transformation.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a post about a particular food item, and I whipped up a batch of Pâte à Choux yesterday, so I thought I would write about it. Because choux pastry, as it’s also known, is really quite easy and fun to make (I have a friend with a five year old daughter who whips up a pretty mean batch of choux paste).

And it’s very flexible. Once you’ve made it, you can use it to make sweet or savory puffs of all sorts: Fill with jam, whipped cream, puddings, macerated fruits, citrus curds, savory creams, stew, whatever. Top with nothing, chocolate ganache, confectioner’s sugar, spice mixes, etc. (Some things I’ve made in the past include carrot-ginger puffs, blood orange cream puffs, Indian-style savory eggplant puffs, and chocolate eclairs.)

It’s also one of those things that people tend to think is badass, so when you bring cream puffs or eclairs to a party/potluck/what have you, they will attract attention. Or you can be like me, and just eat them all. (Hey, I invited my dad over, but he was making lunch or some such nonsense and didn’t want to come.)

Yesterday I made mango creampuffs. I was going to do them with coconut cream, but I didn’t have the right stuff for that, so I just did whipped cream. (Another alternative to coconut cream would be ginger cream, which I think would be outstanding.)

I like to get everything squared away before I start to confirm that I have everything I need ready to hand. I ended up making a quarter recipe of choux pastry because I didn’t want to end up with a glut of creampuffs. As described, the recipe made five creampuffs; you can scale up very easily!

I started by bringing two tablespoons of milk, two tablespoons of water, a pinch of salt, and two tablespoons of butter to the boil.

Then I added a quarter cup of flour and stirred it very quickly in to make a thick paste. The Joy of Cooking specifies using a wooden spoon for this, so I did; presumably they don’t want metal because it can be reactive, but I imagine a silicone spatula would be ok.

I immediately dumped the paste out into a bowl so that it would stop cooking, and allowed it to cool for a few minutes, occasionally stirring it to make sure that it cooled evenly.

Then I added an egg. I don’t really know how to veganize this recipe because the egg seems pretty critical to how they set up in the oven; if any vegans here have made pastry puffs, what did they do?

And beat it. For a while. I forgot to grab a snap of the last stage, when it was even and smooth and a bit shiny. So here’s a picture of it partway through, when it is all chunky and gloppy.

Then I plopped blobs out onto a baking sheet (the photo did not come out well) and stuck the pan in a preheated 400 degree Fahrenheit (205 C) oven to let them cook; they usually take around 15 minutes, but you go until they are golden brown, whenever that happens.

While the blobs were cooking, I beat some cream for the filling, and minced some mango.

Tip: To prevent things from getting soggy, if you use fresh fruit as a filling, chop it and stick it in a colander or sieve for a little while to allow some of the fluid to drain.

All done! The next step is to poke little holes along the sides (or underneath, which I will get to in a moment) and then to let them cool in the oven.

You need to let them cool in the oven or otherwise this will happen:

This poor little guy got shocked with cold air when I opened the oven. As a result, it collapsed. If you let creampuffs cool in the oven, two things happen: They get a chance to solidify as they cool, so they will not collapse, and they dry out, which prevents them from getting soggy and is critical if you are not using them right away.

If you are planning on doing filled whole creampuffs, let them cool in the oven for about 10 minutes, and then gently lift them (you may need a spatula to coax them off the sheet) and poke a hole in the bottom of each one. You can use that hole to insert a pastry tip to squirt filling in. If you are slicing the creampuffs in half (like for eclairs), poke the hole in the side so that it will be covered up when you cut through.

If you’re not going to be using your creampuffs right away, you have two options: Let them cool completely (partly in the oven, partly on a tray on the counter), stick them in an airtight container, and either A. Stick them in the fridge to fill that day or B. Stick them in the freezer to fill at some point in the next week.

I, however, was not interested in waiting. As you can see, I dusted the creampuffs with confectioner’s sugar when I was done to make them look a little dressier.

They were very tasty.

It took me around 40 minutes from start to finish (hauling out the Joy of Cooking to devouring creampuffs, in other words). The cool thing about creampuffs is that you can do some stuff ahead of time; for example, you can prepare creampuffs and the filling/s you are going to use early in the day, and assemble them later. As a general rule, it’s a good idea to eat them as quickly as possible after they are assembled, but there’s no law saying that you can’t get everything ready to go and then wait a few hours.

Let your imagination run wild with fillings. I tend not to like stuff which is really sweet, so I kept the sugar in this very toned down. A tiny bit in the whipped cream, and then the sugar topping. You can go the other way and get incredibly sweet, and you can do all kinds of fun stuff with filling. Basically, if it can fit in there, you can do it.

If people do end up getting inspired and making some pastry puffs, I’ve love to see photos! And hear about what you did for fillings. Just drop a link to a post or photo in the comments.

I believe that I’ve written about Adagio Teas before. They’re pretty much won my loyalty as a tea consumer by having a huge array of teas, by having samples, and by having wicked fast shipping.

So, the other day, I went to place an order, and everything I wanted to order was out of stock. Everything. I moaned and gnashed my teeth, and eventually I shot off an email, asking them when they thought things might be in stock again.

Their response was to offer to handpick the order from their New Jersey warehouse (normally they ship to me from their California warehouse). Which they did, and it’s now winging its way across the country to me.

Can I say how cool this is? It might not seem like a big deal, but I think it’s above and beyond the call of duty. And I really appreciate it. It’s things like this which make me want to keep my business with a company. I know that they actually care about my business, and will take some extra steps to keep me happy. They could have written back “we’re having stocking problems and we’re not sure when things will get restocked” or even “we should be restocked in two weeks,” but no, they wrote me with “what would you like to order, and we’ll pull it for you from the other warehouse.”

Truly, people, this is how you win customers for life.