Booking and cooking

Now that our Après schedule has settled into a routine, I have Fridays off. After a few weeks of sitting around and wondering what I used to do with myself on my days off, I decided that I'll start cooking again. This sounds kind of funny, since obviously I cook the other six days of the week, but I haven't cooked for myself at my house in years. It's not that I'm tired of cooking now that I do it for a job, it's just that I'm usually at work around mealtimes, and I don't feel a need to cook at home any more. But it's always annoyed me when restaurant cooks try to teach cooking classes but they've obviously forgotten what it's like to cook at home, so I don't want to lose touch with the experience of cooking without the 17 saucepans and 100 square feet of counter space that we have at Generous Servings. Plus, I'm a nicer person when I cook.

I'm also a nicer person when I have a lot of good books to read, and I've been totally out of books for a month or so now. I've had to resort to reading the various alumni magazines that show up in my mailbox (amusingly addressed to Dr. Brinig), which are so self-congratulatory that I can only handle a few pages at a time. Then a few weeks ago, I was doing some recipe research online and I stumbled upon Orangette, a food blog written by Molly Wizenberg, and I became completely obsessed.

I've known about Orangette for years, because Molly Wizenberg also writes a column for Bon Appétit, but I've carefully avoided ever looking at her blog. For one thing, I think blogging is self-indulgent, and reading blogs is a little like playing with imaginary friends (yeah, I know, yet here we are). For another, the quality of writing in most blogs is abysmal. And finally, the first of Wizenberg's Bon Appétit columns that I read featured a sappy story about her husband, Brandon, and seemed to be mostly about how cute they were, with a recipe tacked on to the end as an excuse for publishing the essay in a food magazine. As far as I can tell, it's in her contract with Bon Appétit that she will always tell a lovey-dovey story about Brandon, regardless of the supposed topic of the column.

However, now that I've started reading Orangette, I am totally charmed by it. Wizenberg's writing is fantastic, and the Brandon stuff is more interesting when you (creepily) watch their relationship develop in "real time" in her blog. The mushy parts still make me a bit queasy, but the blog has a truer focus on food, and the real hook is that every single dish she writes about makes me want to get up and cook it. Right then. Regardless of time of day, season, or even whether I like the food she's describing. She cooks, takes pictures of, and writes about simple, straightforward food with such passion and clarity that I just can't read enough. I've started going through the archives of the blog from the very beginning (2004), and I've spent at least 20 hours over the past week reading it.

So when I resolved to start cooking on Fridays, I had a bunch of Orangette recipes that I wanted to try. However, there were some unexpected obstacles. First, I have no ingredients at my house. Seriously, none. Anything perishable perished long ago, and even my pantry staples have somehow migrated to Generous Servings during various emergencies. Second, most of my kitchen equipment has taken up permanent residence at Generous Servings as well. Third, I've forgotten how to use my oven.

This past Friday I decided to make this asparagus flan, which is a perfect example of something that I really don't like (custards are a hard sell for me) but chose because it happened to be in the Orangette post I was reading at that moment, which triggered this spastic compulsion to cook whatever she writes about. Inexplicably, I also chose to make braised cabbage, which is more up my alley in terms of flavors, but is totally out of season and really doesn't go with asparagus flan. And the meal was...a disaster. Well, the cabbage was good, but the flan didn't work: it never set, and eventually I got tired of waiting and took it out of the oven, and when I turned it out onto a plate, it oozed into a puke-green, gelatinous, lumpy puddle. Yum. In hindsight I think I could have applied some lessons from my high altitude crème caramel experience, and it might have helped if I had turned my oven onto bake instead of preheat (but how are these settings different? I looked in my user's manual and online and still can't figure it out).

While the flan was cooking (or not), I read another Orangette posting about popovers, and suddenly I had an irresistable urge to bake a dozen popovers at 10 pm (and I had 2 eggs left over from the flan, so I actually could make them). I have a great recipe for popovers that I often teach in my baking classes, yet I decided to make the Orangette recipe without stopping to compare the two. After I made the batter I discovered that my muffin tin relocated to Generous Servings at some point, so I had to bake the popovers in a weird nonstandard shallow tin that I must have inherited from someone. Guess what? They didn't work--there was no pop in my overs. They ended up in the trash, along with the flan, and all I had to eat was cabbage.

So the cooking-for-myself plan is not working out too well so far. Luckily, in the past few days two kind people lent me books to save me from book-deprivation insanity. One was Molly Wizenberg's book, A Homemade Life, which is a lot like her blog. I read it all in one day, like the crazed stalker I have become.

The other book was a glossy coffee table tome from the Chicago restaurant Alinea, which is famous for its molecular gastronomy cooking (you know, all kinds of crazy flavor combinations with ingredients that are gelled, frozen, freeze-dried, set on fire, turned into foam, centrifuged, etc.--you pay $150 for them to serve you 24 courses of items not immediately recognizable as food). I have never paid much attention to the molecular gastronomy fad: for a long time, I had real science experiments to do, and felt no need to experiment on my food. In fact, I sort of hate "experimenting" with cooking: I want my food to work, every time. But I've gotten a little curious recently as I've been thinking about some new garnish ideas for Après, and one thing led to another, and now I'm staring at pictures like this with my mouth open in shock. Is this even appetizing, or simply novelty for its own sake? Do we need pumpernickel ice cream and pickle powder? My brain doesn't know what to do with this stuff.

The juxtaposition of Orangette's homey, unfussy food and the molecular gastronomers' futuristic, complicated compositions is startling. It's making me feel a bit unhinged. But it's also helping mold my own sense of my cooking style, which I've been thinking about a lot while developing dishes for Après. I want to bring out the essence of ingredients while giving our customers a flavor experience they probably wouldn't have at home, and serve food that's whimsical without being silly. But be warned, I borrowed a molecular gastronomy kit from someone and I've got a science experiment in the refrigerator right now...