The other day when I picked Eli up from school, he grabbed my hand and started to pull me back inside to the lunchroom.

“C’mon, Mama! We need to get a recipe from Chef Ric!”
“What recipe?”
“Wacky cake!”
“Wacky cake? Is that like our crazy cake?”
“I don’t know. I just know it’s a good chocolate cake.”

So we found Chef Ric and we compared notes. Indeed, his wacky cake is just like our crazy cake (or your cockeyed cake, or 6-minute cake), except he uses apple cider vinegar and I use raspberry. I’ve always imagined that the raspberry vinegar gives the cake a little fruit note in the background, perhaps deepens the chocolate flavor a bit, but suddenly talking to our school chef I wasn’t so sure. Does it really make a difference, or is it all in my head? Tonight, with no particular investment in football’s Super Bowl, Eli and I decided to test the theory by making three different crazy cake batters: one with plain white vinegar, one with apple cider vinegar, and the last with raspberry vinegar.

we labelled the batters according to each type of vinegar

I gave Tony and the boys coded servings of each cake

they took careful tasting notes

we tallied the results; the sheet with the red dots is the key to my code

Tony then served me my own coded cupcakes and the results from our limited sample are pretty decisive: the vinegar doesn’t matter. The kids and I each identified only one vinegar correctly and Tony didn’t even get one. The vinegar Eli and I got right (apple cider) was also our least favorite, so we won’t use that again. But given that white vinegar is less than a quarter of the price of raspberry vinegar, from now on, I’ll save it for salad dressings and other places I can really taste it.

Now, I’m really not a Cooks Illustrated, recipe-testing kind of cook. I am fairly imprecise in my baking, I measure casually, and I am always tinkering with recipes. But I do love a cooking project inspired by my children, and I love it when the cooking includes a bit of science. It was a nice change to be more careful baking these cakes so that each one would differ only in its vinegar, and fun to think about how best to keep track of which was which. But Eli definitely summed up the experiment best: “The thing I like about it is you get three cupcakes.” No argument here.

Edited to add: we shared some sample cupcakes with Chef Ric and his kitchen staff and (drumroll) we are impressed — but not surprised — to report he identified the three vinegars correctly!

Apparently some folks out there have strong feelings about coconut. I have even heard the H-word bandied about. Not in my family, though. We put it in granola, in cake, in amazing no-bake brownies and ice cream, quick macaroons and muffins. And while mostly we bake with it (and I admit it was fun sifting through the archives to find all our coconut recipes) we also put it in savory dishes like curries and kale.

So of course I was going to try this cookie recipe from Sunset Magazine, which incorporates three of our favorite winter flavors: orange, cranberry, and coconut. If you’re a coconut fan, you’ll want to give them a try.

1 1/2 cups (3/4 lb.) butter, at room temperature
2 cups sugar
1 tablespoon grated orange peel
2 teaspoons vanilla
3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups dried cranberries
1 1/2 cups sweetened flaked dried coconut

Preheat the oven to 350.

In a large bowl, beat the butter, sugar, orange peel, and vanilla until smooth.

In a medium bowl, mix flour, baking powder, and salt. Add to the butter mixture, then mix until dough comes together, about 5 minutes. Mix in cranberries and coconut.

Shape dough into 1-inch balls and place about 2 inches apart on buttered 12- by 15-inch baking sheets.

Bake until cookie edges just begin to brown, 8 to 11 minutes (shorter baking time will yield a chewier cookie; longer baking time will yield a crispier cookie). Let cookies cool on sheets for 5 minutes, then use a wide spatula to transfer to racks to cool completely.

I spotted this salad on the terrific Food52 blog and had to try it. I am not yet tired of kale salad in all its variations, and this one wisely adds cheese. I’ve linked to the original recipe so that you can see some specific amounts, but this is how I did it:

For 4-6 servings
one small kabocha squash
one bunch of kale
2-3 handfuls of chopped almonds
4-6 ounces of sharp cheddar (I used a caramelized onion cheddar I find at Trader Joe’s)
Extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and freshly ground pepper
Fresh lemon juice

Preheat the oven to 425.

Peel and seed the squash, cut it into bite-sized cubes, and toss with some olive oil. Roast for 30-40 minutes, stirring occasionally, until tender and brown around the edges.

While the squash is roasting, strip the kale from its stems and slice the leaves into very thin ribbons. It’s easiest to do this by stacking up a pile of leaves, rolling them into a cylinder, and then cutting across the rolled-up leaves. Toss the leaves into a large bowl and squeeze the lemon juice over the leaves; I used a whole lemon.

When the squash is done, add that to the bowl of kale, and toss with the almonds, cheese, and a generous drizzle of olive oil. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

If you’re pressed for time, you can heap a couple spoonfuls of salad onto a slice of bread, smashing the squash and cheese, and make a fine bruschetta to take on the road:

I’m continuing to use bread recipes as my gateway into Turkish cooking, because I love to knead bread and my family loves to eat it. This delicious loaf is called pide, a flatbread which is sold with toppings like minced lamb, egg, vegetables and or cheese, although for our first encounter with it, we kept it plain. It’s a much easier dough to work with than last week’s simit, and produces such a soft, chewy loaf, we are just looking for soupy stewy things to dunk it into.

2 1/4 teaspoons yeast
1/2 teaspoon sugar
4-6 oz lukewarm water
1 lb flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons Greek yogurt
2 tablespoons oil or melted butter
beaten egg for egg glaze
1 tablespoon nigella seeds (I’m calling these optional because I didn’t have them)

Sprinkle the yeast and sugar into the water and stir; set aside to let it bubble and foam.

Combine the flour and salt in a large bowl. Add the yeast mixture, oil and yogurt, stir well, and then dump out onto a lightly floured surface to knead until the dough becomes fairly smooth and elastic. This can take five or ten minutes, mostly depending on your interest in making it your upper body workout.

Let the dough sit while you wash out the dough bowl, then drizzle a bit of oil or wipe a pat of butter in the bowl. Put the dough into the bowl and give it a couple turns so it’s nicely coated with oil. Cover the bowl with a damp towel and let the dough rise till doubled, about 90 minutes.

Toward the end of the rising time, preheat the oven to 450.
Punch the dough down and divide it in half. Knead each piece well, then flatten each into a disc.

Let the dough rest a moment while you prepare a large baking sheet with parchment or a bit of olive oil and put it in the oven to preheat. Now finish shaping the dough, stretching each disc out into a large round. Indent the dough with your finger tips.

Place the discs on the hot baking sheet, brush with a bit of beaten egg and sprinkle with nigella seeds (if you have them) or salt. Some sesame seeds or rosemary would be nice, too, depending on what you’re making to accompany the pide.

Bake for 10-15 minutes, until golden and the crust is crisp. Transfer to a wire rack to cool, though wrap the discs in a dry towel while warm to maintain their soft texture. If your family doesn’t devour the pide instantly, you can resuscitate it the next day, by sprinkling it with a bit of water and putting it in a hot oven for a few minutes.

One of the contributors to this anthology is a freelance writer I met when I first moved to San Francisco. Liz hired me for an administrative job at a translation agency, despite the fact that I failed the math test she gave me to see if I could accurately calculate bids on jobs. Luckily for me, filling the office with congenial people mattered to her – and, the office had a proper calculator.

Work at the translation agency didn’t last long, but our friendship – built on our shared interests in writing, food, and raising our kids – has. She is the source of our go-to chocolate birthday cake, and recently gave me her recipe for jam bars. I made them with half raspberry jam (to please Eli) and half orange marmalade (to please Ben). Eli, who doesn’t like much of anything right now except apples, carrots, rice and tofu, didn’t like the cookies, but his loss. I think they’re great and offer the recipe just as Liz wrote it up:

Jam Today cookies
“The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.”
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

I created these cookies as a way to utilize the jars and jars of marmalade given to me by a friend, but it has become my most versatile, crowd-pleasing cookie. You can make it with dried fruit, with store-bought jam of any kind, or with the homemade jam of your choice. Bitter marmalade is especially tasty, but apricot is a close second, followed by a never-to-be repeated combination of the tail ends of three jars of jam: peach, apricot, and cherry. As an added bonus, this recipe is ridiculously easy to make, and ridiculously easy to double if you happen to be feeding a crowd (or running a bake sale). The results are especially delicious served for tea, but we have been known to eat these cookies for breakfast, too. You got a problem with that?

Preheat the oven to 350° degrees. Locate your 9×9-inch baking pan (glass or metal) and lightly grease the bottom and side.

For the filling:
Use a half-pint jar (1 cup) of your favorite jam
Or
Make a filling by combining 1 cup dried chopped apricots and some water to barely cover (add more if it seems dry while cooking) in a saucepan; simmer till soft.

For the dough:
In a large mixing bowl, cream:
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter (at room temperature)
Add:
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar (dark or light, it matters not)
and beat until fluffy. Then add:
1 cup all-purpose flour
½ cup oatmeal (regular oats, not instant)
½ tsp. salt
and mix well. The resulting dough will be crumbly but moist.
Press a little more than half of the dough into the baking pan. Spread the filling evenly over this bottom layer, then crumble the remaining dough over the top.
Bake for about 30-40 minutes. You’ll know it’s done when the whole surface is bubbly and the edges get a little dark. Allow to cool in the pan for at least twenty minutes before slicing.
Makes sixteen cookie squares. I highly recommend sharing them with friends and neighbors or you will end up eating them all yourselves.

As part of our culinary preparation for a trip to Turkey this summer, Tony gave me Ghillie Basan’s Classic Turkish Cooking for Christmas. I’ve been paging through it, making lists of things I want to try (Hosmerim, which translates to “Something Nice for the Husband”) and things I don’t (I will skip Bulgar Juice, thank you very much).

But the first thing I tried was the recipe for Simit, or Sesame Bread Rings, which we will apparently find sold everywhere on the streets of Istanbul. They are easy (though kneading the dough is a tougher work out than any other dough I’ve ever encountered) and tasty — rather like bagels, but less chewy. Now all I need is to brew up some Turkish coffee and we’re almost there!

a package yeast
1/2 teaspoon sugar
150 ml lukewarm water
450 g all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon olive or vegetable oil
1 beaten egg
sesame seeds

Dissolve the yeast and half teaspoon of sugar in the lukewarm water and let it bubble up.
Mix the flour, salt, and tablespoon of sugar in a large bowl. Make a well in the center and pour in the yeast-water mixture, then add the tablespoon of oil. Stir well, then turn the mixture out on to a lightly-floured counter to knead. Add more water as necessary and knead well until the dough is smooth and elastic.

Let the dough rest a moment while you wash out the mixing bowl, dry it off, and drizzle a bit of oil into it. Put the dough into the bowl and turn it to coat with oil. Cover the bowl with a damp towel and leave to rise until doubled, about two hours.

Sprinkle a shallow bowl with sesame seeds.

Punch the dough down and divide into 6-8 pieces. Knead each piece and shape into a ring. Brush the rings with the beaten egg and dip into the bowl of sesame seeds. Place the rings on a parchment-lined or greased baking sheet and let them rest, covered with the damp towel, for 15-20 minutes.

While the rings are resting, preheat the oven to 400.

Bake for 25-30 minutes, until they’re golden brown and sound hollow when tapped on the bottom.

As anyone who follows me on Twitter or Facebook is aware, I have started 2012 not in the kitchen, but in my garage. Like any family, we store plenty of things that we won’t need ever again but can’t quite bear to part with (my wedding dress; the boys’ knit hats from the hospitals in which they were born). We also store things that we only need a couple of times a year (ski clothes; camping equipment); emergency kits; and sports equipment. All of that, I have to say, is fairly well organized in labelled boxes.

Like many families, too, we store things we’ve inherited. My late father-in-law’s paintings and sketch books; catalogues from his shows; artwork by his friends. Also, bottles and bottles of the wine he made. Tony built racks for the paintings and periodically culls the wine, and this part of the garage doesn’t make me too anxious. It’s my late mother-in-law’s things, her address books and photo albums and stock notes and newspaper clippings and jewelry and correspondence, that are, frankly, a mess. She saved everything (I wrote a whole essay once about the abundant supplies in her kitchen) and organized nothing. My own grandmother was known for “filling a desk” and then sending it up to the attic for her descendants to deal with, and Nancy operated somewhat similarly. Anything special was saved in a pile, and then eventually scooped into a box, which ultimately went into her garage. When she died, we were too shocked and sad to do anything but move all her crazy boxes into our garage until we could cope.

Every year or so, I dive in and unearth treasures: one box might hold a string of pearls, a menu from Harry’s Bar (circa 1962), newspaper clippings about artist friends’ shows, a few postcards (some blank, some addressed to Nancy), a baby rattle, a pile of Italian stamps. But the way her garage became inserted in mine, it’s like excavating layers of an ancient city. I can only do so much before I need to retreat and gear up for another dig.

This dig, like earlier expeditions, has also unearthed cookbooks. Nancy was a fabulous cook, known for her dinner parties, and among all the letters I’ve found, I’m starting to make a separate file for the “thank you for the wonderful meal” notes. The cookbooks — Elizabeth David’s French Country Cooking (1952), The Perfect Hostess Cook Book (1950), The Brown Derby Cookbook (1949), “Master Chef” Louis P. De Gouy’s Gold Cookbook — with an introduction credited simply to “Oscar of the Waldorf-Astoria” — (1947) — these get to come upstairs. I may never cook from them, but they are fabulous reading, a sweet glimpse back at a different time in American cooking and an insight into another generation.

The cookbook I’m currently loving the most, just for its title, is Mary Hill and Irene Radcliffe’s Food to Make You Famous. I’ve just never thought about food this way. Food to fuel you through the day, sure; food to make your family happy, food to use up leftovers or the new vegetables in your CSA share, but food to make you famous? Maybe I should be thinking about food this way! I’ve paged through to see if I can tell what Nancy cooked from this book. Many recipes have check marks, like Clam Chowder, Hungarian Goulash, Glazed Carrots, Oatmeal Bread (Oatmeal Bread can make you famous?), Chicken Marco Polo and most of the beef recipes (except, thankfully, Epicurean Baked Beef Tongue Stuffed with Sweetbreads, Olives and Mushrooms) and the page with Maitre d’Hotel Butter (COLD) and Maitre d’Hotel Sauce (HOT) is splattered with some of that sauce. Aside from that one bread recipe, there’s not a single mark in any of the baking sections, but as this book leads me from the garage back to the kitchen, that’s where I think I’ll start, and I’ll report back. English Yeast Crumpets? Sweetheart Rolls? Maybe the food will make me famous.

I don’t use a lot of kitchen gadgets. I have a couple appliances which I use regularly — like the ancient rice cooker and my big stand mixer — but otherwise, when I need to chop things I get out a knife, and when I need to stir things, I get out a whisk. Most gadgets just seem to take up too much room in the drawer or be too finicky to clean easily. For a long time I even resisted buying a cherry pitter, but that five dollar purchase has more than paid for itself and the cherry pitter doesn’t get in my way the fifty weeks of the year I don’t use it.

I can’t remember now who gave us the salad dressing mixer and garlic chopper — whether it was Santa or my brother-in-law (who are not much different in my sons’ eyes) — but these two gadgets have been immediately, happily adopted by my sons. Ben just loves a gadget, and Eli thinks they make the kitchen more “modern.” I am happy that these two (small, easy to clean) devices have the boys back in the kitchen, experimenting with various combinations of ingredients and inventing new dressings each day. Last night, Eli mashed raspberries into his vinaigrette (yes, I even bought terribly unseasonal berries to support his dressing habit; tomorrow we’ll try pomegranate juice). The only problem now is the boys’ competition to use the dressing mixer every day — and the volume of dressing they are producing. But these are not problems I’m going to complain about too much, yet. For now, I like having these young scientists back in the kitchen with me.

So I was a bit surprised when Eli, after bounding down the hall and into our bed Christmas Eve morning, said “This dinner is going to be my favorite!” Tony asked, “What are you looking forward to most?” And Eli responded, “Christmas after it!”

Well, who can blame him? And when I asked what he wanted for dinner, he listed stuffing and gravy, so that’s pretty much what we ate (oh, and some brussels sprouts and chard and caramelized onions and roast potatoes… but that’s another story). For dessert, I was planning just to offer up a plate of Christmas cookies, but this is where Eli had a specific idea: raspberry pie.

Ben, by then cuddled in bed with us, too, and thoroughly steeped in the contemporary food ethos, worried, “Are raspberries in season?”

No, but raspberry jam is always in season, and we even had some homemade jam made by a friend. Raspberry jam tart it was.

I poked around online awhile and took most of my inspiration from David Lebovitz’s recipe but I had cold butter, not soft (and didn’t see the point in softening butter only to refrigerate the resulting tart dough until cold enough to use). So I pulled my Joy of Cooking off the shelf and followed Irma’s lead. I did borrow Lebovitz’s idea of reserving some of the dough to make an easy top crust, though instead of rolling it into a log, chilling and slicing it, as he does, I pressed mine flat and cut out some Christmasy stars. I predict you’ll see this tart on my table again at Valentine’s Day, topped with some hearts.

This recipe makes enough dough for an 8″ tart (bottom crust and top decorations); if you have a bigger tart pan, it’s easy to scale up.

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 teaspoon grated lemon zest
1/4 teaspoon salt
8 tablespoons of cold unsalted butter, cut into pieces
1 large egg yolk
1 1/2 cups of raspberry jam
1-2 tablespoons of coarse-grained sugar

Preheat the oven to 400.
Butter and flour the bottom of an 8″ tart pan with a removable bottom.

Whisk the flour, sugar, salt, and lemon zest together in a bowl or in the food processor. Add the butter and work in with a fork or pulse in the food processor until the mixture makes coarse crumbs. Add the egg yolk and mix until the dough just starts to come together in a ball.

Reserving about 1/3 cup of dough for the topping, pat most of the dough evenly into the bottom of the tart pan, letting it come up the sides a little bit. Spread with jam. Set aside momentarily while you make the topping.

Taking the reserved dough, press or roll it out on a floured counter or between sheets of wax paper until it’s about 1/4″ thick. Cut into desired shapes, freehand or using cookie cutters. Arrange the shapes on top of the jam, sprinkle them with the coarse-grained sugar, and bake until the crust is golden and the jam is bubbling a bit, 20-25 minutes.

olive pits and rice: the remains of dinner

My older son, Ben, is 9 and a half. For the first couple years of his food-eating life, he ate whatever we put in front of him: eggplant caviar. Goat cheese. Pickled daikon. Chard lasagne. And then bit by bit, he started dropping foods from his diet. It didn’t happen when he started school, as many predicted, but it happened obviously enough that I began to think of him as a picky eater. An unusual picky eater, to be sure; he ate chard and pickled things and bitter marmalade, but no melted cheese (hardly any cheese at all), no milk except a bit to wet his cereal, no tomatoes. Birthday parties, with their ubiquitous cheese pizzas, became difficult. Eating out wasn’t so easy, either. And at home, despite our best intentions to keep cooking the foods we like and waiting for the kids to come around, we found ourselves subtly adapting our cooking to our kid’s appetite, or making modular meals of something new (a different kind of green, squash cooked a new way) topping something familiar (rice or pasta). We have fallen into ruts, and then needed to climb out of them. We get excited about new foods and then exhausted by the problem of needing to make dinner every single night.

But this week we’re on vacation. Even though you never get a real vacation from parenting, we’re all feeling relaxed, spending longer over meals, being a little more casual about breakfast for dinner or eating out. Plus, we’re getting excited about planning our summer adventure with friends: ten days in Turkey! Eli is poring over the brochure for the rental house; Ben wonders aloud what might be growing in the garden in August. Tony has wisely researched Turkish restaurants in San Francisco and last night we went to one. After studying the menu a while, Ben asked for an order of olives (marinated in herbs and citrus); we rounded out his dinner by ordering up a buffet of mezze: hummus, muhammara, haydari, falafel and zucchini cakes. We ordered extra pita and a rice pilaf, just in case.

The olives and pita were a hit. Ben picked delicately at the falafel and took a proper bite of zucchini cake. He scowled, but then said he liked the after taste. Not enough to eat more right then, but enough to try it again. We’ve all agreed to eat Turkish food once a month until we go on our big trip, and to try something new each time we do. They may still subsist on pita when we travel, but we’ll try to familiarize them a bit with the (fabulous, delicious) range of options. We had a great conversation over the meal, so even though I think my children really only ate olives, pita, and a bit of rice for dinner, the memory of the meal is a happy one, and — I hope — bodes well for our summer travels.

So, I think, does this: Midway through the meal, Ben pulled the bay leaf out of his olives and ate it. I didn’t notice until afterwards, when he said, “That leaf on the olives is really bitter!”

“That’s a bay leaf, Ben,” I answered, “It flavors the food, but you’re not really meant to eat it.”

“Oh, well, maybe it’ll flavor my water.” And with that, he stuck the bay leaf in his water and drank it down.