Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

In which we cook the roast beast

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My sister has always hosted Christmas because a)I was living in LA and since the rest of the family lived in SF, it seemed better for me to go there rather than require them to all come to me and b)my parents lived in SF and it was easier to get them to ma sœur than to me.

This year, though, it dawned on me that we could have it at my house: they would only have to transport my Mom (and, of course, the acres of presents). “Hey, do you want to have Christmas at my house?”

She said, no, it was fine to have it at hers. Then she stopped and said, “But next year we can have it at yours.”

Hum. A year away. Just enough time to practice.

See, every year my sister puts on a pretty good spread: prime rib, potatoes, vegetables, rolls. Evidently Andronico’s in the City has a nice Buy Your Christmas Meal dinner package. It’s very tasty.

I, however, am getting so crazed obsessed interested in cooking that I want to do my own. Since I have never cooked a piece of beef on my own before (save making meatballs for spaghetti, which isn’t exactly the same thing), I decided I need to practice at least three times before the big day.

Yesterday I said to Darin, “Hey, I invited Mitch over to dinner tonight. How about prime rib?”

Darin: “‘Kay.”

The menu I decided on:

  1. prime rib
  2. Yorkshire pudding (mais oui!)
  3. a kale-and-polenta pie (why? because the CSA had delivered kale on Friday and I was like, What the f is kale?, followed by, I’d better f’ing cook this stuff)
  4. chocolate souffles

Yes, I decided to go whole hog and cook four things I had never cooked before.

Needless to say, by the end of the night I was certifiable. (Also, I have no pictures.) Going completely nuts taught me a few things, however.

Thing #1: Prime rib is f’ing expensive.

Not that I don’t love Mitch a lot but…I nearly plotzed when I saw how much the 5-lb. roast I picked up was. And I would need 8 or more pounds for next Christmas, depending on the number of guests. Holy Jehosophat. Not that Lawry’s and other beef places aren’t raking it in hand over fist with the prices they charge, but I think we got 7 or 8 pieces out of that roast and each one cost about $8 bucks, without the oven charges or cook salary. Whoa.

I was determined to get the prime rib right. For whatever reason, though, I decided to go with the recipe from How to Cook Everything instead of Barbara Kafka’s Roasting. (The recipe from The Best Recipe, which involves cooking the meat over a Bic lighter for 8 to 10 hours, was Right Out.)

Now, I will ruin the suspense: the prime rib turned out magnificently: perfectly medium rare, juicy, flavorful. We had to check it with the instant meat thermometer about 5 times before we hit the right temperature though—the instant-read meat thermometer is your friend and knows better than you or the recipe does—and I was completely off on how long it was going to take to cook. But I have a feeling I would have been more in charge of the situation with Barbara Kafka’s book. I must consult her book in depth the next time I will be doing a large meat roast.

Thing #2: Take the meat out before you’re ready to cook it.

“Oops, there’s a step I forgot,” I said.

“How bad is it?” Darin asked.

“I forgot to take the meat out. Dinner’s going to be an hour later than I thought.”

Which is, you know, deadly when you have kids. You can’t just give them hors d’œuvres—that becomes their dinner.

The meat stayed ridiculously cold after a long time in the oven. I think we sat down at the table at 7:30 when I’d planned for dinner at about 6. Urg.

Thing #3: Learn the difference between soft peaks and stiff peaks when whipping egg whites.

I decided to make the chocolate souffle recipe out of The Complete Cooking Light Cookbook. One of the steps is to whip the mixture of 6 egg whites, cream of tartar, and sugar into “stiff peaks.”

“Darin, what are stiff peaks?”

“Well, you know what soft peaks are, right?” Pause. “Okay, I begin to see the problem you’re having.”

Yeah, I decided to make a souffle without knowing what “soft peaks” or “stiff peaks” or “overbeating” is. I ended up with a tremendous amount of souffle mix, which completely filled the eight ramekins. When we cooked all eight (why did I cook eight when only five people were eating? Volume), all eight rose alarmingly high in the oven; the four on the bottom shelf fought the rack, and the rack won.

I was not won over by the souffle I made. It was way too light and airy and had the barest chocolate taste, even though I’d used 71% Valrhona and Scharffen-Berger unsweetened cocoa for the chocolate.

Then I saw the souffles Dexygus made and I was like, Damn. Those are the souffles I wanted.

Of course, I have to learn about whipping egg whites first.

And I’ll probably make this chocolate cake before I return to souffles, unless I find something to do with leftover egg yolks, in a hurry.

Thing #4: Learn the difference between instant polenta and premade polenta, if there is one.

Pam Anderson (no, not that one), in How To Cook Without a Book, mentions that you should always have instant polenta on hand to whip up some polenta on a weeknight dinner. When making polenta from her book I couldn’t find anything marked “instant polenta” at the store, so I bought some polenta from the bulk bins and cooked it and it turned out just fine.

Gotta remember that whole “turned out just fine” thing in the future.

This time, when preparing for the kale-and-polenta pie (from Vegetables Every Day by Jack Bishop), I asked after instant polenta at Whole Foods and they showed me these plastic sausages full of polenta. Aha! I took my prized rounds of polenta home, cooked the kale, and folded in the cup full of premade polenta.

Which just sat there.

I mushed and stirred and tried to mix and it just sat there.

“You need dry polenta,” Darin said. “What you’ve got isn’t going to absorb any liquid.”

“He says instant!”

Darin read the package. “This isn’t instant, this is premade.”

“I’m pretty sure premade is instant.”

“You need dry,” he said.

I had a teeny tiny bit of the dry polenta I’d made last time still in the cupboard. I threw it in on top of the kale and premade polenta and sure enough: slurp! it drank up the liquid.

I baked the resulting mess for however long the recipe called for and then some. I took it out and let it cool (as the recipe says to do), and when it came time to eat the result was…okay. Good enough for dinner, not good enough to save. Which is why I’m not sharing the recipe; I’m only sharing recipes of things I think I made well.

Anybody knows about the instant-premade axis, I’d appreciate a note.

Thing #5: Stop telling everyone you’ve done everything wrong. Let them figure it out.

Darin actually gave me that feedback during dinner last night. “Everything turned out fine, but you’ve been driving yourself nuts all evening!”

Mitch added: “If you’re not sure it’s great, serve it and find out what your guests think. If you’re sure it’s terrible, throw it away and never let them know. And I would like some more of the kale-and-polenta pie, please.” (Mitch is like Darin: while he is wildly supportive and would eat some of everything to be polite, he wouldn’t take seconds if he didn’t want to. So I was encouraged on that front.)

So, I’m going to work on pretense-of-confidence this year. At least on the, y’know, cooking front.

The future present tense

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In a recent post Tamar quotes a great piece by Michael Lind on how “Europe, China, Russia, Latin America and other regions and nations are quietly taking measures whose effect if not sole purpose will be to cut America down to size” and then adds

Kos calls this article sobering. I have the exact opposite reaction. It gives me tremendous hope. It’s obvious BushCo is on a destructive rampage and will do little to nothing to further the wellbeing of the world at large. How wonderful that other countries are stepping in to fill the breech — not only that, but that they’re cutting the US down to size in the bargain. We no longer have any real balance of power in this country as we drift ever closer to tyranny. Thank god this kind of international balance of power has begun to blossom. The US does not need to be a major world power. At this point, it’s better for the world if this country is not setting the agenda.

And I might agree with her, except for the way this is going to happen isn’t going to be a simple readjustment of the world’s power. The way this is going to happen is going to be violent and awful.

One of the things I’ve wanted to do since we moved into this house is redo the floors. I hate this orange carpeting; I want hardwood floors. We have the savings, I’ve gotten the bids. But as I told Darin this week, I can’t pull the trigger. Why? Because I’m scared shitless of what’s going to happen to the economy in the next year or so. What good are new floors going to do me if we need wheelbarrows of money to take to the supermarket?

I’m obviously not the only one thinking along these lines: Stupid over at Altercation is thinking along the same lines:

Name: Stupid
Hometown: Chicago

Hey Eric, it’s Stupid to put my money where my mouth is. I’m not kidding when I say I’m afraid of a dollar collapse. It’s not just that the high deficits and unprecedented foreign control over the economy. It’s all these timebombs waiting to go off. Everyone knows about the baby boomers and Social Security/Medicare, but that’s not going to be the end of it:  Pensions have dwindled or gone bankrupt, homes have been remortgaged, and the adult children who might have helped are in hock like never before. All that “deficit as percentage of gross national product” talk isn’t reassuring. 9/11 proved that a fast-rising GNP is not a law of nature. When the Israel/Northern-Ireland type terrorism begins, it’s safe to say consumer confidence will take a hit.

So yes, I am really scared. I just don’t know what to do about it. Not politically, I mean as a selfish SOB!  For example, with my retirement savings — I called the Big Name Financial Outfit which manages my work’s 401(k) plan and apparently I wasn’t his first “apocalypse call.”  One suggestion was to shift towards European market funds. But if the dollar collapses, other economies will falter too (that’s why the world may take unilateral action to prop up the dollar. Zeesh, I never expected to read something like that, but it was in today’s papers…)  There’s the historic risk-adverse investment: gold. It’s at a pretty high price already, but who am I to argue with history?  (This company also has an investment fund that is indexed against inflation. $20 apples, anyone?)

And what about the present — what am I supposed to do with my life?  Pundits may be safe, but I don’t think there’s going to be a huge demand for quasi-patent attorneys who can handle simple pro bono family law cases. I’ve even considered taking a LPN nursing program at my community college, but there’s a waiting list!  My point is this: as much as we need to fight the good political fight, a little practical CYA is the least the left can do for itself if/when we’re proved right. Suggestions welcomed!

I grew up as the child of Depression kids—and my mother grew up in Ireland, which was really no picnic during the Depression. My Dad, who was 13 when we entered World War II, had a job as a seven- and eight-year-old at a market, bagging groceries, which allowed my grandmother access to foodstuffs that hadn’t been bought, that were going to be thrown away.

Boy howdy. I really want that kind of life for my kids.

But maybe I’m wrong? Maybe I’m overreacting? Let’s hear what Seymour Hersh (who has a longer track record of telling what’s really going on than you or I do) has to say:

Another salvation may be the economy. It’s going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick.

And the third thing is Europe — Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer. The rage there is enormous. I’m talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could see something there, collective action against us. Certainly, nobody — it’s going to be an awful lot of dancing on our graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody stops buying our bonds, our credit — our — we’re spending $2 billion a day to float the debt, and one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians, everybody is going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars. We’re going to see enormous panic here.

But [Bush] could get through that. That will be another year, and the damage he’s going to do between then and now is enormous. We’re going to have some very bad months ahead.

The world can’t let us fall totally apart, because if we go down, everyone goes down. But it’s not exactly in their interest to keep carrying us either, as is demonstrated amply in this Newsweek International cover piece—I would ask, like Tamar, why Newsweek Domestic doesn’t have the balls to print this, but the answer is obvious: we’re so used to saying, “We’re great and everyone likes us!” that we’re not well-attuned to hearing different things. Anyone see that letter in last week’s Entertainment Weekly where one letter-writer was decidedly unhappy with EW’s choice of Jon Stewart as Entertainer of the Year?

…Who exactly was Jon Stewart entertaining this year, other than your magazine staff and buddies on the New York cocktail-party circuit? We “flyovers” find him vicious, one-sided, and borderline treasonous…

Dan Crider
dan0311@yahoo.com
Carrollton, Tex.

All week I’ve been trying to work up the nerve to send mail asking, politely, “What is your definition of treason?” Christ, if Newsweek published that story here, someone would firebomb the magazine’s headquarters. (And what’s even more ridiculous is, I don’t even think I’m joking. You can’t joke about that crap any more. Not that magazines are getting firebombed all the time. Just that it feels like it’s going to start happening any moment.)

I don’t know if there’s a way to let us down, uh, “gently.” At least, gently for them. Them being China, India, and the EU. As the Pessimist said over at the Left Coaster:

So now that these foreign central banks are tapped out of enthusiasm for the Bu$hCo Technicolor Greenback, can the private investor be far behind?

And if China floats the yuan…

Everyone points out that instead of savings accounts, Americans have their houses. Which aren’t going to mean jack when interest rates spike, because everyone’s got ARMs. (Ours turns into an ARM 10 years out; we couldn’t afford a 30-year fixed.) And when housing prices fall — they will, even here in the insane Bay Area — what about your savings then? When you can’t get the fucking money?

The only thing that gives me any hope right now is that I am notoriously bad at predicting the future. There are several books out about the growing divide between Europe and America—here is a multi-pronged review in the always-excellentNew York Review of Books—and maybe there’ll just be gradual changes, a diminuation over time of how we live and our place in the world.

But we’ve been living as though we can get something for nothing. And given the deeply insane way* the Administration has been acting, the bill is going to come due any second.

And more: Just a Bump in the Beltway has the cheery news out of Davos:

The day after the White House forecast a deficit of $427 billion this year, some of America’s most prominent economists sounded warnings of a dollar crisis.

Fred Bergsten, the director of the Institute for International Economics in Washington, told delegates at the World Economic Forum that he feared that the beginning of such a crisis could come within days or weeks if President Bush’s budget proposals did not convince financial markets that the deficit would start coming down over the next few years.

“The dollar would come down sharply, US inflation and interest rates would be pushed up sharply and the world would follow a much slower growth pattern. Trade would be a big casualty it would be poison for US trade policy,” he said.

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*Actually, I don’t believe their behavior is insane. I think they know exactly what they’ve been doing. They can see the handwriting on the wall with Peak Oil and adjustments to world power, and they want to get theirs. So what if theirs includes yours and everyone else’s too? They’re fucking set up for several generations. Fuck you, peasants. We’ve got our castles and we’re drawing up the drawbridges.

Hot chocolate talk 2

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I went nuts last night: made spaghetti and meatballs (man, the meatball recipe from How To Cook Everything rocks mightily) with homemade spaghetti sauce (which the kids don’t eat, natch).

Then I went nuts and made candied orange peel. That didn’t turn out so well. Possibly I used the wrong kind of orange peel or didn’t scrap enough of the pith off. (Tried to get it all, didn’t always succeed.) But the result had a terrible orange taste. Tossed the whole thing. Will try again another time.

Then, denied candied orange peel, I made Stephanie Zonis’s recipe for hot chocolate. Oh baby. Oh yes, here it is, come to Mama. Nice, thick extremely chocolatey. I used a bar of Valrhona and half a bar of Green and Black’s Maya Gold (slightly orangey/spicey chocolate). Now, the recipe says it makes 2-3; don’t you believe it. This makes 4 easy, and I say this as someone who really, really likes chocolate. This isn’t so much “hot chocolate” as it is “drinkable pudding,” so be forewarned.

I didn’t use the food processor—I whipped out my chef’s knife and chopped the chocolate up. Seemed to work fine. I also didn’t use any sugar, because I like a darker, less sweet chocolate. I did add the vanilla though.

I took roughly half of this last night, pouring the other half into another cup (which I cooled down in a water bath, than stuck in the fridge with plastic wrap right against the surface of the chocolate, to avoid getting a skin). Half of this recipe was way too much; I would have been much better off taking a third or a fourth. Or, as I say to Darin at moments like this, “Get the syringe of adrenaline ready!”