I was looking forward to the New Year; last year didn’t go well, yet even so, managed to deteriorate further at the end. I hoped a new year would be a clean start, but only two weeks into the year, it doesn’t seem to be headed in the right direction: Too much work, too much rain, a call from the principal.

I have lots of woes, none of them interesting in the slightest.

My coworker – the one who keeps me sane – isn’t having a good time either. This past week, his teenage daughter got her driver’s license on Monday morning; Monday afternoon, she got pulled over and cited for the second-worst violation one can commit where they live. No one was hit or injured, but she will likely lose her license, and as for my coworker, well, his car insurance is likely going to increase.

I’m not going to win Father of the Year, he tells me.

No, probably not, but he does win bragging rights: His year is off to The Worst Start of anyone either of us knows.

I’m not sure those are bragging rights I want, but I still feel like I lost out somehow.

It has to get better. Cooped up indoors, listening to rain drum against the roof, I root around the refrigerator and find some oranges that I bought to make something or other, so I spend a Saturday afternoon making the Orange and Campari Marmalade recipe from Buvette: The Pleasure of Good Food, which turned out nicely, somewhat chunky and a bit bitter, which I like.

I woke up on Sunday wanting English muffins to slather with butter and marmalade, and I had none, nor any motivation to leave the house in the still-pounding rain to buy them. No, I would make something suitable for my lovely marmalade instead.

I had previously tried an English muffin bread recipe from Simply Classic, a Seattle Junior League cookbook I picked up somewhere, and it didn’t go well. The recipe seemed to call for too much flour, so the bread was a bit more dense than I would have liked. But it struck me as a good idea, so I researched it a bit, and found a Cook’s Country recipe that appeared on the Lottie + Doof blog, which has yet to let me down.

I followed the instructions to the letter, and the dough refused to rise. It just sat there glaring at me from the loaf pan in the oven. When I finally gave up and turned the oven off, I heard it laugh.

Since I still had a craving and just enough bread flour left for one last attempt, I researched a bit, and learned that bread does not rise well when it is too dry, a problem I encountered with both recipes. So, for my final effort, I used the Cook’s Country/Lottie+Doof recipe again, but heated up extra milk, just in case the dough became dry.

In the end, I didn’t use it, because I tried mixing it up a bit differently. I mixed four cups of flour to the remaining dry ingredients, but added the fifth cup of flour only after the milk had been thoroughly mixed in. The last cup was added in stages, with more flour only added in once the last addition was fully incorporated. I didn’t use any extra milk, and the dough was plenty moist, and rose, and even bubbled a bit, which you’d expect from a well-behaved English muffin dough.

This dough baked into beautifully browned loaves that sliced and toasted perfectly, even though I couldn’t wait an hour for it to cool down like I was supposed to. I started baking at nine in the morning and didn’t have bread until 1:30, which in my world is waiting quite long enough already, thank you.

It was lovely with marmalade. The Child sliced off a piece and ate it – untoasted, heresy! – with the last of the Rhubarb-Strawberry Jam I made last summer; she pronounced it delightful. It is fortunate the recipe makes two loaves, because although a loaf will keep on your counter for several days, it surely won’t last that long.

For whatever reason, some things are doomed to failure, and no matter how hard one tries, all the effort expended to prevent that outcome ends up being a waste of time, or money, or energy, or in the case of the Mini, a waste of all three.

This is not unlike a manuscript that was recently sent to me by my good friend Toby over at Plate Fodder – A Taste For Italian: Celebrating Italy’s Cuisine, Music and Language. The title is the first clue that all is not right here; I’ve managed to get past the irritating lack of an Oxford Comma, but not the fact that it sounds like the author has a hankering to eat the country’s people, rather than its food.

A bit of back story: A Taste For Italian is a unpublished manuscript that was found in an antique store (like a lot of things related to this book, we’re using terms loosely) by the lovely Julie over at Cookbook Fetish. The manuscript is described by its authors as “preliminary,” and that’s a good word. Julie sent the manuscript over to Toby, who described it as “uninspired,” also a good word. Toby then sent the manuscript over to me, and rather than try to sum it up in one word, I chose my Mini as a metaphor: A lot of time and effort went in, but in the end, it came to naught. It’s the car that everyone trades in.

The manuscript, such as it is, isn’t really a cookbook, or a travelogue, or a cultural history, or an appreciation of things Italian. Unfortunately, it tries to be all of these things, at once, and the result is a stream-of-consciousness hodge-podge of opera snippets and history (Aida was first performed in Cairo in 1871, and one song has “virtually become the National Anthem of Egypt”), Berlitz-style helpful phrases (“Is the pizza ready? I’m dying of hunger!”), and restaurant listings (in case you happen to be in Bologna in 1997).

And recipes.

Julie and Toby each cooked a recipe or two from the manuscript, but I didn’t even get that far, though it wasn’t for lack of effort. I got stuck on a recipe for The Child’s favorite soup, minestrone – it seemed like a fairly safe bet because, at the end of the day, how do you screw up soup?

This is how:

• Don’t list the ingredients in the order in which they will be used, or in any particular order whatsoever.
• Be nonspecific about your ingredients: If you don’t care whether the kidney beans are canned or dried, your reader surely won’t wonder which to use.
• In the recipe steps, don’t use all the ingredients you have listed. (I should probably have listed this last step first, as it’s the most important, but maybe it’s at the end for emphasis?)

If you construct your recipe this way, your reader won’t be able to guess which type of beans to be using or at what point said beans should be added to the pot. They will, however, go back over the out-of-order list repeatedly in an attempt to figure out what else was omitted (the answer is the first ingredient, potatoes). They’ll have to check things off because the list order doesn’t correspond to the steps or any other sequence; in doing so, they will discover that a couple of ingredients are added twice (garlic and onion). Then they will get tired of trying to sort it all out, and will open a can of Progresso for The Child.

I still had the challenge of making something inspired by the manuscript, so I went with focaccia, inspired less by the manuscript and more by Toby’s take on focaccia, but also my recent success with the Saltie cookbook. Saltie is a Brooklyn sandwich shop, which uses focaccia in most of its offerings. I made the recipe twice, and had no trouble following it, and better yet, The Child loved this simple bread with lots of salt. The recipe would easily make 6-8 sandwiches, maybe more, but she just cut large hunks of it and ate them plain.

The downside of a recipe that makes this much is that some is likely to go bad, since it’s only good for about 24 hours. On the other hand, the cookbook suggests that day-old focaccia is wonderful added to soup, and if I can find a recipe for minestrone that uses all its ingredients, I might just make some.

I did find the focaccia made absolutely superb sandwiches, and I tried one of the recipes from the book, the “Ship’s Biscuit”. This blissfully simple sandwich relies on the freshness of one ingredient – use only fresh ricotta cheese, not that packaged supermarket stuff – and the technique used with the other ingredient – the eggs, which should be “softly scrambled.” It took a while for me to master the technique, which is basically this:  melt some butter in a frying pan, then crack two eggs into the warm (not hot) pan. When the whites begins to set, start moving them around the pan with a small rubber spatula but don’t break the yolks until the whites are completely cooked and fluffed up. Then, take the pan off the heat, break the yolks, stirring them in with the whites while letting them cook over the residual heat. You may have to play with this a couple of times to get it right, but when you do, you’ll know – the eggs will be fluffy, yet with a nice softness of yolk.

To make the sandwich, take a piece of the focaccia, slice open for a sandwich, spread some fresh ricotta on the bottom half, and the soft-scrambled eggs on top. Then scarf it down and be amazed by the creamy, eggy texture against the salty, oily focaccia.

I’m thankful to Julie and Toby for letting me share the fun with A Taste For Italian. If you’d like the information on how to join in, or just what the heck is going on, it’s here.

I am eagerly awaiting my instructions on where the manuscript will head next!