Sprung At Last

A Room at the Inn, Part 3

01.23.2017 by J. Doe // Leave a Comment

We arrive at the hotel, but can’t find it: We go to the spot where GPS dot says it is, behind the local curling club and the signs for other hotels, but we still don’t see it. After circling through several pothole-ridden parking lots, we simply pull up to one of the hotels, and ask at the front desk, and are directed to the back of the building.

It turns out that we’re at the right place. Our hotel was a different hotel until recently, and is now being renovated. We wait patiently in the crowded temporary reception area, as the line of people ahead of me complain about their rooms, or request extra towels for the pool, which isn’t indoors as I had thought. It is outside, sandwiched between an asphalt parking lot and an empty field, behind a chain link fence.

My cousin says he’ll wait, just in case.

By the time I get to the front of the line, The Child has decided we aren’t staying there, and I have realized we are; everything is prepaid, and I cannot afford a second hotel bill. I ask the desk clerk what we should do about that if our plans change – you know, family – and she nods and smiles and says we can arrange a refund for nights we don’t use. The Child wants to go elsewhere now, but I am too tired, and point toward the pool.

If we don’t like it, we’ll go elsewhere tomorrow. Or maybe the next day, since tomorrow is July 4.

Our room is serviceable, at best, but it’s fine by me, so my cousin takes off in his vintage Trans Am, leaving me a serviceable Saturn, in case I want to go somewhere.

I don’t.

We sit in the hotel room for a while, and I send a message to my one local friend, who I’ve known since second grade in New York City, and who somehow landed here as a college professor. He drives over, and gamely sits with me at the hotel pool, chatting and swatting mosquitos and watching The Child do handstands in the pool, until finally we are all exhausted and call it a night.

We sleep well, and the next night watch fireworks over the lake with my cousin, singing patriotic songs with people we’ve never met, making room on the grass so that everyone has a place to sit, just as they made room for us when we arrived, without so much as a blanket to sit on.

Dominique Ansel’s Banana Bread

01.21.2017 by J. Doe // 10 Comments

My friend Toby over at Plate Fodder suffers from a dire affliction: He has an advanced case of Food Fad Fatigue.

I relate. I spent New Year’s Day canceling email subscriptions and unliking Facebook pages of food magazines and newsletters I once enjoyed. Goodbye Bon Appetit, goodbye Tasting Table. I think they’ll miss me about as much as I’ll miss them, which is to say, not at all. It’s been quite a long time since I read any of their posts, mostly because what I want is dinner, while what they are trying to do is entice me to try something trendy and inedible.

Please click, they beg repeatedly, but I don’t want to and eventually I get tired of being asked. Unlike, unfollow, breathe deeply and exhale.

Toby’s approach is less passive than mine; he’s threatening to write a book called Quinoa, Kale, and 50 Other Foods that Taste Like Ass. He wants to know if I’d buy a copy, and the answer is, of course I would, and not just because he’s a friend. I refuse to eat things just Because They’re Healthy. I like to eat healthy things that taste good.

The food faddists are rapidly ruining those, too. I like cauliflower; in fact, I love the stuff, as does The Child. But somewhere along the line, cauliflower became a substitute for carbohydrates (cauliflower rice, anyone?), and somewhere after that, someone decided it was also a good substitute for lime sherbet. I’m joking, but only a little. The PBS blogger who wrote that article, oddly, appears to be serious.

Also being serious is the blogger who gave us Frambled Eggs, a post that Epicurious, in a cruel jab at people with some knowledge of basic culinary skills – not to mention, good food – filed under “Expert Advice.” If rubbery eggs are your thing, then by all means, use his technique. Bon appetit!

I feel like I’m in a small minority that is getting smaller every day. I went to an actual bookstore not long ago (remember those?), and spent some time checking out the cookbooks. Pioneer Woman? Check. The Minimalist Baker? Check. In fact, there were lots of pretty cookbooks by familiar food blogger names, while actual cookbooks by trained chefs (Dorie Greenspan, Mario Batali) were in somewhat short supply. No, the cookbook section in question was not a small one.

Turmeric may well have healthy properties, but that doesn’t mean anyone can or should eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, even if one truly believes it is sourced from the Fountain of Youth. Given its increasingly frequent appearance in recipes and food blogs, it must be. But if I die an early death, will it be because the only bottle of turmeric I’ve ever owned has never been opened and dates to the pre-barcode era?

I’m willing to take that risk, and opt for a bit of cumin, or oregano, or some variety. Variety, I hear, is the spice of life. Not turmeric.

Another minority I belong to: American Citizens Against Zoodles. I’ve never used a spiralizer, and I’ve never eaten a zoodle. As much as I like zucchini, it isn’t a substitute for spaghetti, and at my house, never will be. If I want to be hungry an hour after I eat dinner, I’ll order Chinese food. It’s much less work.

I love to see classic recipes improved upon, and there are many good reasons to do this, such as simplifying a technique or using ingredients for that can be found easily by a home cook. This is not the same thing as throwing a new ingredient into an old classic and pretending it’s a wonderful, modern update. The world needs both dill pickles and chicken piccata, but it most assuredly does not need a recipe for Dill Pickle Chicken Piccata (something Toby swears he saw the other day but which Google, in its merciful and infinite wisdom, refuses to find for me).

My cookbooks aren’t full of pretty pictures of recipes that don’t work, so they don’t live on the coffee table next to a stack of pristine copies of Architectural Digest. Instead, my cookbooks live in the kitchen and sometimes find their way back to the shelves, usually when I run out of counter space, or back to the library, usually when one been overdue for so long that the library stops sending email notices (which I never see in all the email I receive) and starts sending actual letters (which I always see and am still kind of thrilled to get).

Yes, there is a point to all this, and I hope you will appreciate the irony.

One of the last Facebook posts I saw from Tasting Table was a banana bread recipe by Dominique Ansel, a name you might recognize as the man who gave us one of the largest food fads of recent memory, the Cronut. The banana bread recipe was accompanied by Tasting Table’s standard, overly effusive praise – Ansel took something that, when made by mere mortals, is “pretty good,” and turned it into an “insanely good … delectable treat,” rescuing overripe bananas from a terrible fate at the same time.

I’m always skeptical when someone is presented as a culinary Superman, but as it happens, I had four embarrassingly overripe bananas (I wish the grocery store would send me mail about that, just once), and as luck would have it, when I looked up the recipe, it called for … four overripe bananas. I haven’t had a good kitchen disaster in a while, so I gave it a try, fully expecting my beloved Fannie Farmer standby to win the day.

She didn’t.

I’d like to say I’m sad about that, and of course part of me is, but the other part of me was too happy about eating a joyfully moist cake with a rich banana flavor and a heady dose of nutmeg, and did I mention the butter? Yes, it was there, and lots of it. And while these things are all wonderful, they are not the most wonderful thing about this banana bread. That honor goes to the thick, sweet, caramelized, crunchy top crust that forms as this giant loaf bakes.

It is, in a word, magical.

Here, dear reader, is my point: Life is complicated, but good food is really quite simple.

Go enjoy some.

Dominique Ansel's Banana Bread

Author: Dominique Ansel via Tasting Table

Ingredients

2 cups sugar
2 cups flour
¾ tsp baking soda
¾ tsp nutmeg
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
3 eggs
4 overripe bananas
14 tbsp unsalted butter, melted, plus more for greasing pan

Instructions

Grease a large loaf pan, and set aside. Preheat oven to 350°.
In a large bowl, combine the sugar, flour, baking soda, nutmeg, salt and baking powder. In a separate bowl, mash the bananas thoroughly, then crack the eggs in and combine. Pour the wet ingredients over the dry ingredients and mix together. Stir in the melted butter until fully incorporated.
Pour the batter into prepared loaf pan and bake until golden brown and a cake tester comes out clean, about 1 hour and 10 minutes, depending on how cooperative your oven is.
Allow to cool for 20 minutes before slicing.

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A Room at the Inn, Part 2

01.19.2017 by J. Doe // Leave a Comment

My cousin picks us up at the airport, and we take a long, slow route from Milwaukee to where we are staying. I ask my cousin if he remembers the drive-in we used to go to, and he says it’s still there, so we make a stop along the way, and sit in a car enjoying frozen custard and a root beer float. It is wonderful, but it isn’t what I meant, and I try to remind him of the time we went to the drive-in theater and watched a double feature of Star Wars and The Cat from Outer Space, sitting inside his van, with the rear doors open.

He remembers the van and the theater but not the movies, but remembers another movie we saw, when I was 11, the last summer I spent there. He stopped by the house to give me a break from grandma, but she decided she needed a break from the house, and on his arrival, announced that she was coming along too.

The movie we saw that day was Cheech and Chong’s Up In Smoke. My grandmother sat between the two of us, and each time either of us looked at her, or attempted to look at each other, she whispered an indignant remark about how offensive it was, but when she thought we weren’t looking, we could both see her giggling quietly, too.

We laugh at the memory, as we have every time we’ve see each other, which we haven’t done for ten years. We continue driving toward our hotel, taking local roads, driving along the lake, remembering the time it froze over and we drove out, in a tiny car that was either beige or yellow and which nobody cared much about, an important feature if it turned out the ice wasn’t as solid as we thought. It was, and so we did donuts on the frozen lake, and visited with the ice fishermen, and took photos in front of the car, photos I still have but which don’t resolve the issue of what color the car actually was.

My cousin remembers fishing on the lake in summers, when he was little. He would go with my grandfather, learning fishing and patience. I am mesmerized by the story, a tiny picture I’ve never seen of a past I was not part of. I was too young to go fishing with my grandfather, and even if I had been older, he probably would not have taken me, a girl, with him. I remember the boat, though, leaning up against to side of the garage each winter, providing a shelter against the snow for a family of bunnies that were the subject of much breakfast conversation for my grandfather and me. I remember the fish he caught, too, sitting on the porch step, staring with dead eyes, something to be feared and jumped over until someone finally brought them inside.

We are fairly close to our hotel now, but take one last detour, by the former home of my youngest aunt. It was a tiny house perched between a busy county road and a lake. I lived there for a few weeks, when I was about 18 months old, and my mother left me in the care of her sister while she returned to New York City to find work, to escape working class Wisconsin life. My aunt would recount the story of how a thunderstorm woke me up, and I cried all night, and she could not console me: You wanted your momma so bad, she would tell me. All I could do was hold you while you cried and cried.

That aunt is lost now, consumed by schizophrenia, and the house was lost to unpaid taxes.

My cousin has to point it out to me as we pass by, and I can just barely make out the weeping willow my mother planted so long ago, solid but unrecognizable at the center of the gravel driveway where I once tried, and failed, to learn how to ride a bike.

A Room at the Inn, Part 3

Dominique Ansel’s Banana Bread

A Room at the Inn, Part 2

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