*I probably did.

Here are some thrilling, scintillating updates. I’m talking to you, people having trouble falling asleep!

1. How the same half lives: I have been going to open houses and some of the apartments have been empty and some not. The ones that are not all share a similar theme to my current apartment, that is, they are stuffed to the gills. With some of them, you can’t open the closet door without the stateroom scene happening to you. The one I saw this afternoon took the cake, though. This woman had inserted into every available space a piece of furniture meant to hold things. Sometimes, there were shelving units affixed to the smallest empty square of wall space. The brokers always apologized for this in a way that made you feel they hated their clients. “Of course I would have gotten rid of these things…” they say helplessly, voices full of disdain. I am considering leaving a recording device somewhere in my clutter when this inevitably happens to me.

On the other hand, it has really inspired me to declutter somewhat.

2. I made these fabulous things recently.

Lemon-ramp butter – I have been consuming loaves of bread so that I can have something upon which to slather this. Are ramps everywhere? If not, maybe leeks?

Tres leches cake – really improbable as I am not a cookie dunker. I do not like liquid in my baked goods and am not fond of whipped cream. But this is awesome! I call it “Three Lactaid Cake.” It’ll be perfect for Shavuot.

3. School is almost over! The end is in sight. I have been planning my break including some travel, some learning, and probably a lot of house-hunting and/or selling.

4. I was never a big Beastie Boys fan; I think they reminded me of all the immature prankster Jewish guys I knew in my real life. But they outgrew that, mostly. And I forgot until this weekend how many songs of theirs I knew and liked. This song was a big part of my early teen years. They played it late night on my station, WLIR, I guess because of the profanity. When Beastie Boys later came out with License to Ill, I remember thinking, “this cannot be the same people as that Carvel song, can it?” RIP, MCA.

Title comes from Beastie Boys – Cooky Puss:

(title is the hint….)

In the meantime, will we all fit in there?

Most of these are old standbys, but here goes, around the horn:
1. At top, brown sugar poundcake. So easy, so tasty.
2. At right, chocolate chip crack, everyone’s favorite (seriously, people at work want to marry this).
3. Mid-bottom, Hamantaschen, in my traditional raspberry and Nutella (I found better quality seedless raspberry jam this year – hurrah!).
4. New entry this year, although I used to make them all the time, orange spritz cookies. I love these but getting the cookie shooter out and then cleaning it is always a pain. Making up for that slightly is that the cookies are super-quick to actually form (that’s the “shooter” part of the thing). Also, that they’re fabulous, with fresh orange taste. Zesty!

Guest-starring: various Israeli candies, a tea bag.

So there we are, hope you had a happy Purim or live near someone who shared cookies!

Title comes from a comment I saw on Slate in response to someone who made that tedious “I don’t even own a television” comment someone always has to make on posts about modern life.

I got this new crockpot to replace one that died when I was making lunch for me and Pious B (it’s OK, a Dutch oven saved the day). I like it because it’s programmable so when I make a shabbat cholent, which is a stew that cooks forever, aka, 12-18 hours, I can have it just keep warm for the rest of it. My first recipe, unless there’s a big sale on brisket, will be this one from Alfa’s blog. I love baked beans.

FYI, the disembodied hand did not come with the slow cooker.

I also received some money and so I finally purchased a decent phone, the Galaxy SII from Samsung. I spent five days setting it up. I didn’t really use my last Android phone as anything but a phone and wireless hotspot for my Apple devices so there was a steep learning curve in how to configure this thing to be The Device. But I put all my music on it and it has Freecell and the subway app, so I guess I am good to go. By the way, if you remember how much I complained about the ineffectual indicator light on my last phone, you will be interested to know that this phone has no light at all. I no longer have any dealbreakers with phones; I just go with the best of the lot that’s out there. Or maybe I’m still sort of in “whatever” mode.

This book about the history of MTV is fascinating if you are a person who watched a lot of it back in the day. I have it on Kindle and I have taken to reading right on my computer which means I can watch all the videos as they talk about them. It’s really important so that when the guy from Ratt says he nailed the landing on the table, you can check that out, or for when Martha Quinn says she had a cameo in Going Back to Cali. So far, the thing that amazed me the most is that the woman from the Kajagoogoo video ended up marrying Dennis Miller. Did not see that coming.

Funny thought:it is a good thing I no longer do iPod Song of the Week, as for the first time since 2002, I am not using an iPod to listen to music on the go. Weird. And speaking of former aspects of this blog, it’s David Nalbandian’s birthday. He has hit the ripe old age of 30. To mark the occasion, I’m taking down his page, since I no longer update it and there are far better sites on the web to find out his schedule, which there weren’t when I started. (This is my favorite site and it has a good listing.) But it had a good run, and God knows it brought me far weirder searches than I would have expected (or wanted). ¡Adiós!

I leave you with this video, which Billy Squier says destroyed his career. I don’t remember it at all, but it would seem that’s a good thing, since Squier would like everyone to know that he is heterosexual. Happy new year!

I did just want to share this fun recipe I made for Thanksgiving because it is really, really excellent, and next year, when people Google for “Thanksgiving cookie,” this is what I want them to find. Because I have been searching for a proper cookie for Thanksgiving for years and there just isn’t one. Someone at our meal always makes a pie, so pie is out. Then someone makes something chocolate, like a cake or a mousse our a torte, so nothing like that either. That leaves me the cookie or bar and I have never found anything right…. until this year.

It’s the Pumpkin Whoopie Pie! And it turned out awesome. I actually combined two recipes because I liked the cookie part from one and the filling had to be non-dairy so I took it from another. This is where I’d put a great picture but I didn’t take a great picture, just a bad picture. But go to these pages and find delicious looking pictures. They were a big hit and people have already asked me to make them again. According to Niece2, they smell like “pancakes and waffles and everything good.”

Here’s the cookie part, and I’d really like to make it with its original filling, maple cream cheese, at a later date.
Pumpkin Whoopie Pies with Maple-Cream Cheese Filling

And here’s the filling I did use: maple marshmallow.
Pumpkin Whoopie Pies with Maple-Marshmallow Cream Filling

When I make the other version, I’ll let you know! Yes, we’d all like a taste test but I have to work. And fit into my pants.

Happy baking!

I have long wanted to write about this woman’s blog because I can’t figure out what to make of it and the way I sometimes do that is to write about those kinds of things here. If it was merely a cooking blog, I doubt I’d subscribe. I mean, I do have lots of baking blogs on my feed reader and maybe a couple of food ones, as well, but the recipes on this one, I think, wouldn’t be enough to draw me. Each post, though, begins with some photos of her past and description of some wonderful time with the band in Ibiza or modeling for a fancee fashion house or being painted by a famous artist. And I wonder why she does that. Is it because the past was so much better than the present for her? If I had been a stunning model married to a glamorous rockstar and was now cooking for a living, I too would miss the past. But somehow I don’t think so. I think she is savvy. I think she knows people like me (and there were a lot then and a surprising number who still exist today) want to hear tidbits about what it was like to live that life and see pictures of it. Sometimes she repeats the pictures but I don’t mind. Sometimes there are pictures of their child who is now an adult, but I don’t think that’s a calculated gesture.

I thought about her as I made the salmon and I wondered if it would be better or worse to start out living a fabulous life and then end up as someone living an ordinary one. And I wondered if I were her if I would make my blog a repository of old memories. Every time I read her posts, I think, “I can’t believe you’re showing another picture from 25 years ago!” while simultaneously devouring it and knowing I wouldn’t be reading if she hadn’t. And so, maybe, it’s really me who shouldn’t be wallowing in the past. Too bad it’s so addictive.

By the way, she still looks great, and much more naturally beautiful than she was then. He has not aged as well.

Title comes from a song by a band I saw on that vacation in New Orleans.
Echo & The Bunnymen – Back of Love

Unrelatedly, I did just want to tell this story. When I was a freshman in high school, someone in my high school had a party and I wanted to go but felt like I didn’t have the right thing to wear. So on the night of, I told my mother that I changed my mind and wouldn’t go. She told me that when she was in high school, the same thing had happened, she didn’t go, and the next day everyone told her how great it was. She still remembered and wished she had gone. So I went. And had a great time. I remember very well dancing to this song. RIP Nick Ashford.
Ashford and Simpson – Solid

But it’s Passover and I miss my Chik’n nuggets and tangy BBQ sauce snack/quick meal. So I went to my local Kosher shop and just knew that they would have pre-made chicken nuggets and they did. But even if you are like me and are well aware that all the extra costs of cleaning for Passover are built into your food, you might not be prepared for the fact that they were selling four chicken fingers (maybe about the size of 1.5 nuggets each?) for $5.15. Seriously. The mind boggles. So instead I walked away with a package of chicken breast and a box of the Passover equivalent of Shake n’ Bake which is made of the ubiquitous mix of matzah meal (or matzah mel as my mother called it; I think that’s Yiddish), potato starch, and spices. Then I went home, cut up the chicken into nugget size, and proceeded to create some semblance of what we call chicken nuggets. And they tasted fab!

Hey, did you know that you can’t have dishes made with flour or corn, like breaded chicken nuggets, noodles, or corn flakes, on Passover? If so, then you are already ahead of the Pioneer Woman, everyone’s favorite Internet recipe sharer. Now, this is not to take an easy poke at Ree because God bless her for doing a Passover recipe when she’s not even Jewish and I doubt more than 5% of her readers are. For the record, here are her three mistakes:

1. A noodle kugel, and with corn flake topping, for Passover
2. Stating originally that a dairy recipe should be served with meat.
3. Correcting herself to state that the kugel isn’t Kosher for Passover because it’s dairy and the seder is a meat meal. In fact, you can easily have a dairy seder, but either way, serving dairy with meat isn’t not Kosher for Passover, it’s not Kosher, period.

But again, hurray to her for trying, and the inadvertently comical nature was kind of awesome. No, instead I’d like to pick a quibble with the commenters. I should state right off that it’s already my pet peeve when people ewewew others’ food choices (if I had to list my top ten reasons why I’m happy to no longer be at Big Ass Record Company, the guy who said “ew, that is so gross” every time I had fish for lunch would be way up there), but it’s somehow even more disturbing when it’s an ethnic or religious food item. Maybe I’m too politically correct but those “I could never eat that staple of life those people have been eating for forever” comments just rub me the wrong way. That’s all to say that, Ree, I forgive you for your totally wrong Noodle Kugel on Passover recipe and bringing a ham to someone’s seder (really!) but I just cannot forgive your commenters for:

“When I saw the word ‘Kugel,’ I thought you were giving us a recipe for Kegel exercises.”

“this is the first time I’ve questioned your recipe sanity. I twitched a little when you dumped the sugar in the noodles.”

“Well, I cringed when I saw the peaches.”

“Sorry this one does not look good to me at all. Peaches and noodles in the same dish. ??”

“I have a thing about mixing foods together that should not be. Noodles-Peaches- nuh-uh!”

“Umm.. This has got to be one of the most bizarre recipes… LOL… not sure I want to try it…”

“No… nope, nuh-uh, negative. You will NEVER convince me to eat noodles mixed with peaches and baked in milk… blargh”

“Nastiest crap EVER!”

One person even blogged about how this Jewish custom was an aberration of nature. Thanks!

So, a PSA for an Easter-Passover morning: Ashkenazic Jews eat something called kugel. The noodle kind often has bits of fruit in it. Get over it! Learn to live experimentally like this well-intentioned yet spellingly-challenged person:

“I would never think to combine egg noodles with fruit…so different, at least to me. I need a potlock dish, so maybe I’ll try this. Thanks for expanding my pallet.”

Indeed. Remember, we grew up on hummus before PW’s readers could tell it apart from spackling paste. And look at what’s the trendy food now. But even if you could never do that, how about, “I’ve never heard of such a dish, with noodles and peaches. Interesting. Very interesting.” Someone did say that, despite the fact that I didn’t put it in blockquotes. It messed up my unified paragraph. But see how you can say, “I would never eat that” without telling an entire culture that you think their customs are freakish?

Not to mention, realize that things you eat every day would seem gross in abstraction, you are just used to eating them. Dried out, processed grain cereal floating in cow’s milk….ew! A chicken’s unfertilized egg? Blech. Have you never traveled and tasted something that you’d never even considered a food but that tasted divine? No? You need to get out more. This is one of the reasons why Jamie Oliver thinks he needs to change Americans’ food habits. But as much as all that annoys me, mocking someone’s traditions is always off-limits to a well-brought-up person. I’m not trying to be an offense collector, I just think it’s sort of a rude thing to do. I always wanted to call that guy at work’s parents and tell them they missed an important piece of parenting.

But thanks, Pioneer Woman, for being inclusive, even if your audience isn’t quite ready to expand their, er, pallets. Just don’t bring a ham to my seder.

Anyway, to mix up my sports metaphors, let’s go around the horn, beginning with the Craisins since those are labeled and clear. By the way, I ran out of Craisins so some people got dried apricots. Those are in 70 calorie packs, which is weird. Could they not stick in a couple more apricots to keep the marketing trend going?

So just below the Craisins are the Cookie Dough Truffles which came out awesome! Just as I predicted but really, how could they go wrong? They actually turned out to be a bit more time-consuming than I thought which would be OK except I was making three other things. Still, totally worth it.

Below those are the Oatmeal Carmelitas and they came out super as well. I once did a bad batch of these and I’ve nightmares ever since. No worries this time. Fantastic!

To the left of those are the Peanut Butter cookies. You can tell from the cross-hatch pattern. What cross-hatch pattern, you say? Oh right, it disappeared. That was so odd, they just faded away in the oven. Now, I have a new oven since the last time I made these but I wasn’t aware that it baked up cookies fluffier than before. Or, maybe it was because I accidentally bought crunchy peanut butter instead of smooth. It was hard to feel motivated to go out and buy a replacement at 3am when I was making this dough.

Lastly are the Hamantaschen in the three flavors. Well, two of them. I had a last minute change of heart with the raspberry and decided to be interesting or something. I did blueberry instead. That’s the one right up front (I like to make the new guy stand right up front). Behind that is Apricot, and Nutella is in the rear, which is where it ends up fat-wise when I eat a lot of it.

Then I threw a bunch of chewy Israeli candies on top to fill it out but this is before that step so you could enjoy the view. I hope you’ve enjoyed the view. And now, back to picking at the baskets from other people that are obstructing my dining room table. It’s a tough job but somebody has to do it.

No song today. Too busy snacking.

I had a task, and that was to make an olive oil cake, something I had heard of but imagined tasted like a bottle of olive oil, not something I enjoy in my desserts. But the theme was Mediterranean and since I don’t do baklava (well, I eat it, I just don’t make it), this seemed the best alternative. Particularly when I Googled and found a recipe from the Food Network, specifically from someone who is supposed to be an expert in Mediterranean food. I don’t know from such things, I only watch Ace of Cakes (one day, I will work at that place), but it had great reviews so I went for it. Actually, the idea first popped into my head from an article and recipe in the Times a couple of weeks ago which involved blood oranges and looked great. But it looked like a pound cake, not a fancee cake you serve people you want to impress (anyone other than myself is someone I want to impress) plus, it involved hacking an orange into pieces, not something I had the patience for.

But yeah, this did not turn out well. I should have known any cake calling for a cup and a half of something you usually put on salad or cook fish in was not something that was going to have a good result. This cake ended up having the texture of an Alaskan oil spill (you know how your fingers feel after eating pizza? yeah.) although I will admit it tasted pretty good. You may wonder how I knew it tasted and felt thus when in theory, I should not have been able to cut into it until serving it. But this is how. You see, this thing WOULD NOT be extricated from the pan. I made it in a non-stick bundt, something I use all the time with no trouble, but this was the cake that would not be released. I slid a knife around, then a sharper knife, then a frosting knife, then a spatula and nothing. I pounded on the back of the pan. Stuck. This was at 1am, so it’s lucky I hate my neighbors.

In the end, as you can imagine, it finally came out with half the cake still stuck to the pan. This is what I call Failcake. It looks something like this:

Ouch. I know.

The next day, I was all set to say, “Fuck the Mediterranean” and make the cake I do best, double-banana, but luckily, Alfa passed along yet another citrus olive oil recipe, this one from Cooking Light, which had tangerine instead of orange (whatever) and more importantly, 1/3 the oil (I guess that’s why they call it light). This one needed a little help releasing but did fine and although it didn’t have any olive oil taste (people just had to believe me on that one), it did taste moist and tangeriney and delicious. Oh, and it looked great, judge for yourself:

Yeah, now that’s what I call cake.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with the Exxon Valdez Uglycake.

Recipes
Good cake

Failcake

NY Times Cake

Title based on:
Donna Summer – MacArthur Park