every bite tells a story
Jan 27th, 2010 by Marilyn
The people have spoken, and the people like dessert.
From seven food teasers in Random Acts of Blogness, the S’mores Tarts emerged victorious. My first thought was: “I have to…make those? Again?” But for you, I’ll fire them up. Just give me a few days – I have to make marshmallows, write a story, get some matches. Please sir, may I have s’more?
Silly illustration, above, from several years ago. Finally, a place to put it!
Jan 22nd, 2010 by Marilyn
Here’s what they don’t tell you about blogging: it’s random. Crazy random. Unless you have a mission – you wish to share model railroad layouts, or describe one cloud shape per day – blogging is ebb and flow. What to say, what to cook – and why? One answer came from What Would Katharine Hepburn Do? where the wonderful Susan Champlin recently tagged me to reveal things. Random things. Oh, luck! A randomness mandate. I thought it would be fun, free-association yammer with no tale, no recipe, no point. But no. I made a list, and then lists. I listed by food, by year, by feeling; I struggled to shape those bits until it became clear they were no longer random at all.
This is not new. If given a deliberately vague task I freeze and wait for purpose, which often doesn’t show but finally did, when I carved a mission from this meme-me-me: I’d share seven foods from my past, each with a small story. You, dear reader, pick the one you like – or the least boring, whichever comes first – and the most-voted food gets cooked and blogged here on Simmer, recipe, story and all. Thank you, Susan for your too-kind words and, indirectly, the gift of one blogging day made a little less random.
S’mores Tarts Baking at an upscale Chicago pastry shop, I was expected to devise new desserts for the case. New desserts that would please both customers and our novelty-driven boss who, if he sensed a trend, would have sold chocolate-dipped pig ears and motorized cake. I came up with S’mores tarts, novel in 1995, composed of graham tart shells, milk chocolate ganache and fluffy house-made marshmallows which we would – big finish – set ablaze in front of the crowd. Seemed like a winner, and all went great until we actually blew out flames, and a lady in the window shrieked heavenward that she’d seen our spit hit the tarts. So much for blaze theater.
Curried Mushroom Soup In high school Behavioral Science class, we had a semester-long project in which we’d be pretend-married to another student, and live on a budget, and work out issues, and all types of situations designed for maximum teen discomfort. One assignment required hosting a dinner party with other “couples,” and after planting my pink Converse Hi-Tops at mom’s stove to make Curried Mushroom Soup – a mature-sounding dish from her files – I served it in our dining room to twitchy, bickering pairs who’d rather be somewhere else. Dabbing soup off my ripped jeans, I considered that this might be how adults spent their days.
Stuffed Leg of Lamb In a combined young-bride and young-chef disaster, I once pounded, stuffed and rolled a boneless leg of lamb to entertain Greg’s law firm colleagues. The evening started with our crotch-sniffing Dalmatian and a clogged sink, continued with undercooked, untied lamb and finished with a wailing fire alarm. In truth, the mustard-garlic-whatever stuffing was delicious – but who among you would ask me to do it again?
Tortelloni with Gorgonzola Sauce In the post-college summer of 1990, Greg and I backpacked around Italy. One night in Bologna we splurged on a real restaurant, a place called The Black Cat, set on a square with flickering jar candles, wrought-iron tables and people in clean clothes. After slurping cheap red wine we ate carpaccio with parmigiana, lemon and capers, fat cheese-filled tortelloni in Gorgonzola sauce, and tiramisu. It may be the wine, the summer or the fact that an argument caused me to leave, walk away and come back, but it is still, many dinners later, the best I ever had.
Linzer Torte The classic Austrian dessert is just fruit jam under latticed almond crust, but the buttery dough is tricky, melting, fragile. Especially if you’re rolling dough in a small city bakery in July, and daft owner lady won’t pay for air conditioning, and still takes orders for Linzer Torte. You might get heat stroke and threaten to quit, right there over the breaking dough. Yes you might. But you’d never blame a torte this good.
Marjolaine When I ran a catering company, The Happy Ending, I supplied restaurants with Valentine’s Day desserts. One year I filled an order for 300 pieces of Marjolaine, a labor-intensive classic made with hazelnut meringue, genoise, and two buttercreams. At the time I worked out of my house, and with no catering staff and a sleeping toddler, it was just me and Marjolaine in the all-night kitchen. For hours I baked, whipped, stirred, threw spatulas and wept. All the while I Love Lucy played on my tiny kitchen TV, the Scotland episode where Lucy dreams it all. I know this because I saw it three times; I was at my table so long that Nick at Nite ran it three full times before sunrise. Three. If you vote for Marjolaine, rest assured it will be well-planned. One cake, no Lucy and Simmer off to bed.
Spaghetti Carbonara When I returned home on college breaks and my sister was in high school, we liked to whip up this spaghetti-bacon-egg bonanza late at night – and for a short obsessive time, every night. When I picture the bubbling cream and parmigiana and yolks it boggles my mind, a mystery how I made it through those snack years without total stomach collapse, or gaining 500 pounds. Because that would surely happen now if, at 42, I began lounging with midnight TV, two-liter Diet Cokes and pasta straight-from the-pot. Iris was my Carbonara ringleader, insisting the more cheese, more spaghetti, more talk shows the better. Our parents were asleep, we had metabolism on our side and to flop down and share one blue bowl again, even a few strands, my stomach would gladly say yes.
So. One of these memories gets cooked. If it’s Marjolaine or lamb, please give me plenty of notice so I can prepare, respectively, with extra sleep and string.
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Update 1/28: WINNER! S’mores Tarts it is, announced here. Voting over, but if you wish to leave a request – like lamb, oh you people – feel free. And thanks for playing along.
Jan 20th, 2010 by Marilyn
Hard to say what’s best here: those groovy pants, or my sister’s ratty, drooled-on, one-eyed Big Bird?
Apologies for my absence. Simmering away and back soon, with more than a few words.
Jan 9th, 2010 by Marilyn
Home exactly one week, and with jet lag behind me (and snow shovel in hand) I can look back now and smile on a glorious time. Vienna was magic, Salzburg was alpine, and Munich – Munich was fascinating, with many faces: historic, kitschy, lively, stony, colorful, both wholly modern and mired in its past. We climbed hills, crossed bridges, walked cobblestone miles and prowled markets full of horseradish-heaped wursts, Eiswein and cheeses, rugged brown bread, wild honey and truffles and beer.
And…beer. Did I mention the beer? Like an amber line on the map, beer, serious bier, trailed us all through Bavaria. Beer is somehow beautiful over there; all hefty steins and tradition and frosty hopped-up light. That, or I was just on vacation. Either way me and beer, we’ve not always been friends. As an eager college drinker I’d throw up – Greg’s hair-holding skills sealed our deal – and later, a moderation-minded adult, I’d try excellent “artisan” beers and my nervous stomach would think it ate three loaves of bread. An uneasy truce, at best.
On this trip we traveled with my brother-in-law Stephen and his wife, Moa, a native Swede whose sociable, even-handed beer skills could put most European men to shame. She was happy. Greg and Stephen were deliriously happy. They were all three happy to explore the sudsy maze of cafes, cellars and stubes. And me? Come follow the amber line:
In Salzburg we visit Zum Fidelen Affen, which we thought meant something about a loyal monkey, but a waiter reveals it’s The Funky Monkey. Actually, the waiter says, it’s “funny” monkey, but “I just like to call it funky.”
In this friendly, wood-beamed room I discover the joys of rotwein gespritzt - red wine spritzer – and also free, fresh-baked pretzels. I will find out fast in other places that free pretzels don’t always mean good pretzels – but here they are both free and good. I suddenly feel great loyalty to The Funky Monkey, and resolve to become a great Austrian beer drinker, and get more pretzels.
I overdo it at The Monkey. At Gasthaus Somethingplatz I start ordering bottles of plain wasser, and by late afternoon in Mozartplatz, at a place possibly called Mozartbar, I start drinking peppermint tea. I am traveling, and careful. I am boring, and this annoys me. So I down a tall Pils, get twitchy, and then go back to sipping tea.
In Munich we visit a true temple of bier, the Hofbrauhaus, founded in 1592. Here, servers (some in traditional, half-laced St. Pauli girl-garb) rush liter beer steins, sometimes eight in each hand, to long wooden tables stuffed with locals, tourists, yuppies and grandmas. They eat weisswursts and clink glasses and have a marvelous time. I am about to succumb to the liter – an optimistic move, at best – when I discover the Radler. Part beer, part lemonade, it’s similar to the English Shandy and a great beer compromise for me, or, as Greg concludes, “a tasty little kid’s beer.” I love the Radler, hoist it with two hands and drink every drop. Greg and Stephen are amused. Now if they only put coffee in beer, I tell them, then you’d see some drinking.
And speaking of drinking, the Hofbrauhaus sees a lot of it. Most don’t get drunk, exactly – a higher tolerance than weak Americans – but the group right behind us, the big table of young, super-buff Italian guys? They gave their best impression of trying to drink all the beer in Germany.
They got more excitable round after round, yelling toasts and smashing heavy steins together. They broke into drinking songs, pounding beers, fists and cameras on the table, and each time they pounded, the beers jumped. Our table mates were Russian, the rowdy boys were Italian and the old ladies at the next table over were German, tut-tutting the rowdies. It was all very cavernous and beamed, cozy and sloshing. I slurped my Radler, smiled at my husband, read the beer-soaked carved initials lining wood planks. We shared another salty pretzel, smelled amber and lemon and hops, and I let that Bavarian afternoon drift away.
Dec 27th, 2009 by Marilyn
It’s true that I gave Mom her Hanukkah present a week late. I gave Cleo her flea meds a month late. I’ve been dragging my molasses keyboard fingers on the would-be book-writing forever and, without question, I’ve been a very lazy blogger.
Still, I must have done something.
Something to deserve being across the ocean, alone with my wonderful, able-to-navigate-any-country, find-any-restaurant husband.
What did I do to be in this city, so full of lights and schnitzel and cake?
Maybe it was those headphones we got Josie for Hanukkah, the ones I don’t trust, as they’ll bring on certain deafness.
Maybe it’s all the extra change I’ve fed the Lawrence parking meters. All accidental, true, but still, paying it forward, no? Or maybe a tolerance reward, for that man next to me on the plane from Dusseldorf, the one who cheerfully interrogated my life’s history, who performed backbend yoga in the aisle, who veered in and out of nausea and ate all my ginger candies.
I don’t know. But whatever I did to deserve apple strudel and snowball-sized whipped cream in my coffee, I’m grateful. And I’ll take it.
Tomorrow we leave this beautiful city, Vienna, and train down to Salzburg. Oh sure, it’s Mozart’s hometown, but it’s also the first place I ever saw in Europe, back in 1990, when I was younger, less brave, and afraid to taste the city. That trip’s highlights: sleeping atop my padlocked backpack, throwing up alone on a mountain and, courtesy of a near-consumptive cold, eating only Fisherman’s Friend cough drops for two days. I promised Greg I wouldn’t trip too hard down memory lane this time in Salzburg; but I didn’t promise you. A few stories to come along with reports on wiener schnitzel, hot wine and enough Palatschinken to feed us all. Happy Holidays with love, from your Simmering correspondent in Austria. It’s professional dessert research, and someone’s got to do it.
* extra credit and a virtual slice of Sachertorte: What does the post title have in common with Salzburg? Hint: jam, bread, and one hot captain with seven children.
