Drumsticks with Dates

There was only one time on this blog when I focused on perfecting a single dish, Tarte Tatin. And even then I was not so much attempting to perfect a single recipe as I was exploring variations thereof. I am habitually scattered. After Tarte Tatin it seems that where cooking is concerned I want to try many things, and not try, try again the same thing.

Hence while I have been cooking the same core ingredient (chicken drumsticks--they’re cheap) over and over recently, there has been very little work involved. I just try something different every time. What I try is largely dictated by what is around: lemons one day, cherry tomatoes another, and today, dates. The beauty of these things is transient. It lies in the coalescing of an improvisation into something that tastes good, miraculously. Subtlety and discernment are out of the picture. Those finer qualities only take form and may be tasted through repetition. But these dishes, unless they are a disaster, are the best thing at the moment they’re served. Very rarely do they happen again. Yet I write recipes for them.

5 chicken drumsticks
1/2 onion
1 small carrot
~15 pitted dates
juice of 1/2 lemon
1/2 cup water
2 tablespoons cooking oil
1/2 teaspoon cloves
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
~1 teaspoon salt

Two hours ahead of time salt both sides of chicken drumsticks--a generous pinch for each side of each drumstick--and let sit on a plate to warm to room temperature. In a small bowl pour lemon juice over pitted dates, add cloves, cinnamon, and black pepper, and mix together with a spoon. Slice onion half in half against the grain, and then chop into small pieces with the grain. Slice carrot in half lengthwise and then chop both halves into small pieces. Set oven to 450 F. Oil a small square baking pan, place onions and carrots in the pan, and put it in the oven. In a large saucepan on medium-high heat with a bit of cooking oil, quickly brown both sides of drumsticks (this should only take a couple minutes per side). Move drumsticks and date-lemon-spice mixture to baking pan, mix everything together in pan, and let it continue to bake at 450 F. After twenty minutes, flip over drumsticks, stir vegetables, add 1/2 cup water, and continue baking. When drumsticks are done and the bottom of the pan has turned to a thick sauce, it is done.

Soup of Leftovers and Throwing Stuff in the Oven

Let’s talk about how meals happen. Because we are sitting down to a nice chat, and you’re the most indulgent listener ever, just dying to hear whatever half-baked spiel that crawls out of my mouth. You see, dear reader, for the most part making food happens out of desperation for me. I am horrible at planning ahead, and when I’m busy as I have been recently, I do the cognitive equivalent of grabbing whatever is within reach. Or I literally grab the nearest things in the kitchen. At such times, some basic forms of cookery are necessary frames to keep it all from getting too unmanageable both mentally and logistically. The past two days indicate that apparently I have at least two such shortcuts on hand: make soup of leftovers, or throw things in the oven. Probably I don’t have them on hand or in head at all, but somehow, thankfully, they happened.

Soup is probably the most well-trod way of using up leftovers. A lot of various things suddenly become commensurate when thrown in a pot of water or stock. I made soup of leftovers because I saw refried beans, fried kale, cooked ground beef, half an onion, a tortilla, and some mushrooms in the fridge, and I thought “soup!” And of course because it’s me, before any water came into the picture I browned onions, mushrooms, and garlic in some oil. And there was quite a bit of chili powder. And some possibly ill-advised cumin. (I couldn’t help but think of the overpowering odor of Rufus’s chili.) I know, these details outside of a recipe have you rapt, don’t they? Little did you know I’m trying to snuff you out in a blizzard of Irrelevant Facts.

A tangent: I actually have no clue what I’m doing when it comes to seasonings. (Or, well, anything really, but seasonings especially.) I am either falling into strange habits, experimenting blindly, or being minimalist (salt, pepper). The thing is, I only understand how flavors go with other flavors in the negative. If I’m putting things together I’m thinking sure, I guess this might taste good together, maybe. But suggest to me a combination and often you’ll get a response of “ew,” or an extremely ill-masked dubious look. I apologize for this particular knee-jerk of mine.

Anyway, throwing stuff in the oven seems initially like a wonderfully lazy option. But I always end up babying the stuff. Tonight the stuff was pork chops, onion, red pepper, and mushrooms. Pork chops cook quickly, apparently, because they were done in about half an hour, at which point I thought nooo they must be browned! and turned the oven to broil for five minutes. Then I put them on a plate, and continued to bake the soupy vegetables. Of course, I may as well have put them in a pan on the stove for all the stirring I did. Must’ve opened the oven five or six times. The problem was that the vegetables released a lot of water, thus stewing the pork chops rather than roasting them, and thus no sear. Maybe pork chops roasted with vegetables is just not to be. The only viable method I can think of is to suspend the poor things on a wire rack above the roasting vegetables, and basting them in the vegetable juice a few times. But that just sounds wayyy to involved. Although it can’t really be more involved than what I did this time.

Sorry, no recipe. Come on, you don’t really want a recipe for Soupy, Overcooked Pork Chops With Roasted Vegetable Topping, do you? There was once a time when this blog was about perfecting techniques and recipes. It has since devolved into me babbling about whatever the hell I feel like, sometimes connecting it to what I happened to have cooked recently. The defining change is that intentionality has left. I no longer cook things to post them on my blog. I cook what I cook, and sometimes take photos to keep the possibility of blogging about it open. In this case I forgot to take a photo of the roasted things, and instead you just get these photos of the uncooked ingredients arranged in the pan to go in the oven.

The Cooking Blogger's Nondilemma

I began composing this post, including this sentence, in the shower, which both is and is not an ideal place to compose something. It’s ideal because there aren’t many distractions and because there is no actual page upon which what I’ve written is visible. It is possible to crystalize by editing and editing, without really having to edit anything because nothing is set down. But the problem with composing things of any length in your head like this is that they never come out onto the page as you’d hoped. For one thing, it’s very easy to forget what you never actually wrote. Writing in general is not much different; composing in the mind rather than on the page just delays the problem.

Sometimes writing this blog is a pain. It has to be thought about (tragic, I know). It’s not anything like, say, Alicia in “The Good Wife” typing out an additional argument to a Legal Aid appeal in 48 minutes with a crowd looking over her shoulder and talking over each other to give her information. It is at least somewhat believable that one could actually do such a thing because the form and content of the document would be largely, I imagine, determined in advance. (Law students, correct me on this?) This blog, on the other hand, while it has vaguely defined a genre for itself, has not really settled into a consistent form, and its content often comes from intangible sources. Generally I just cook something, take a few harried photos, and hope that something a little bit interesting will suddenly befall me when I finally sit down to write about it. Often coming up with something to say about whatever I’ve cooked means writing in the most over-the-top way.

But what tires me about this blog is not the actual writing. It's that sometimes when I cook I think must I really think about what I’m doing? One of the pleasures of cooking, to me, is losing myself in a nonlinguistic activity. If I’m to post about what I’m cooking, not only do I probably have to take mental notes on techniques and measurements of ingredients, but I have to (well, okay, I want to) think of some way to frame the post other than “I cooked this. It was interesting. Some things went well and others did not.” This turns cooking into a queer experience: I have to create the frame and be within it at the same time. I get tired of being in-frame.

I may be making a mistake in, well, framing the problem this way. While being split between inside and outside, observer and actor may be awkward, is there really any time when one isn’t?

I have experienced the fatigue of framing in another way, through photography, in which there is literally a frame. I always say that I got tired of photography because I didn’t like that my vision was turned constantly into a search for a good composition. The problem as I saw it was that whether I not I had a camera, photography never really went away. Photography was a scene of anxiety: I didn’t want to miss an opportunity for a good photo. This put me in a very odd relationship with the passage of time. While every new moment afforded the possibility of a photo, I didn’t want each moment to pass because even when I took a photo to record the moment I was never sure it was the right photo. But I think what I ultimately ascribed my dislike of photography to was how it demanded that I objectify my visual experience. Things seen were there for one purpose: to be photographed. From inside my photographer’s gaze, I felt that this collapsed the experience of seeing. My complaint was that I didn’t want to see for a purpose, I wanted to just see. I wanted out. There is something paradoxical about this. In the politically naive way I approached photograph y, it was the most purposeless way of seeing possible. It created a fascination with form for form’s sake. But this purposeless seeing, I thought, became unbearably purposive. So I stopped, and considered myself free from the frame.

My idea regarding both cooking for a blog post and photography, I suppose, is that there’s a great blossoming of depth and complexity when I step out of my framing mechanisms. The problem is that this blossoming can only be felt in relation to what I want to distance myself from. So a few nights ago when I made dinner and I thought how sick I was of this blog business, I had a nice, peaceful time cooking. Cooking can be a good time to reflect in a non-deliberate way on things other than cooking. And while cooking my world consists of more than cognition; I feel, smell, and taste ingredients. But because I insist on an ill-defined idea of “the grass is always greener,” I have to wonder if what I liked about the experience was any positive feature at all, but rather what it was not. It was not a cooking experience destined for a blog post. (And here I am writing about it.) I liked the way the distance from blogging felt. It felt like privacy, which is not something that can be felt on its own; one can only feel private from some form of visibility.

Facebook is a massive nexus of transparency. It’s monstrous, and turns its users into monsters. We are there to be seen and to peer at others. Thus not posting anything on Facebook feels like privacy. But if there were no Facebook, I could not have privacy from it. And it produces privacy in another way: you may show all sorts of things about your life there, and yet live outside of your publicity. You may live bits and pieces of a private life because it is so publicized. Similarly, because I write a blog that is largely about my life, I am afforded privacy.

(If I say “privacy” one more time you’re going to kill me, aren’t you?)

An Overused Metaphor

This blog has a shadow, or maybe it is the shadow of something else. Each entry is motivated by another entry that's never written. And there are still more unwritten entries which have simply been forgotten. And sometimes what I want to write is never even at play in a written entry. It just slips my mind, and I'm left to type out unbidden words only because I've cooked something and photographed it and ought to have something to say about it. Despite being obligated like this, there are still plenty of photos of food I intended to write about but never did.

As the blog trundles forward entry by entry, it does so in an attempt to recapture what it has left behind, and, fumbling, yet more slips out of its grasp. These movements do not necessarily result in repetitive content. I leave trains of thought like "recipeness" behind, wishing I could still write more about them but can't, don't. My nostalgia for them just pushes me to write about something else with similar zeal, even though my writing on any one topic is vague and unfinished.

To write this blog is to find new ways of describing how food is disgusting.

I hate cooking. Have I mentioned that? Also I want to do nothing but cook.

On the one hand, the need to eat is an obstacle to the rest of life. I don't want to have to eat. But I'm always eating to preempt hunger--not so much a a desire to eat as a visceral awareness that I need to eat. Hastily and begrudgingly I try to fill myself with adequate food so that I can get on with life. Can’t I get this over with?

Most mornings all I really want is tea. I want to have my time with tea, or I should say of tea: it is supposed to pull me out of time’s regular flow into tea time. Tea is in this way a kind of pastry. However tea is in reality never enjoyable by itself. One has to be enjoying something else--to be enveloped by, focused on, or occupied by something else for tea time to happen (or not happen) at all, if it does. Usually, lacking in some other enjoyment, tea time really is no time at all, in the wrong way. It passes quickly, bringing me almost immediately to tepid sloshings of acrid, camel liquid--then out of (in the sense of having run out) but very much in time and out of tea. So, dispassionataely, I cook breakfast out of necessity. This is how I hate cooking.

On the other hand I want the same impossible thing from cooking that I want from tea. I want to escape through cooking. I want the process to be involving enough that I forget everything else. I want a kind of productivity for which there is no need. The taste of the results, really, is not all that important.

Biscotti are dry, crumbly, tasteless things. Hunks of stuff to have with coffee. By themselves they are blah. Good coffee has a slight aroma of shit. This is an incomplete metaphor that doesn’t work; it doesn’t just leave a slight trace behind, it leaves whole swaths fallow.

One can’t not eat, and one can’t only cook--then one would be a cook, and would have to get one’s jollies elsewhere.

Thanksgiving is not a Great Art

This being a cooking blog, some sort of Thanksgiving post is probably expected. I was going to do one, actually, as I was planning on making pear-ginger tarte tatin. But the pears weren't ripe yet, so I made sweet potato pies again. The pies were good, but was there really anything to say about them? The scope of this blog has mostly only included deliberate experiments (or trying new recipes), and sometimes brief recipes of particularly good improvisations. But in fact "particularly good" is not at all the criterion for which improvised dishes or meals get written here and which don't. There are no criteria really, I just post when I feel like it. Some of the most well-remembered meals, usually those that were made to feed to my family, I never write down at all.

How are these statements connected?
"I'm very nervous when people talk about it as a great art."
"There's a lot to be said for mindless repetitive activity."
"It does not interest me if I'm not feeding people."
Well, Nigella Lawson said all of them. In the same interview she said she was unfazed "when How to Be a Domestic Goddess came out and I was railed against for being, you know, a traitor to the sisterhood, despite the fact that it was so obviously ironic."  Apparently Nigella expects we all share her level of self-consciousness in the nostalgia for domesticity she purveys.

Her story of how she started: when she was working as a journalist, she found space to think in the repetitive activities of cooking.  Making food, rather than a necessity, was in her story a psychological tool and a lifestyle choice.  Instead of feeding people because she's a housewife, she seems to self-consciously enjoy the fantasies that surrounded housewifery.  But obviously this is not the selfless fantasy of classic femininity.  One cooks for the pleasure of feeding, including the pleasure of feeding oneself.  One returns from an exhausting night of partying to make oneself bread pudding in the semidarkness of one's posh kitchen, and one eats it, alone, in bed.  If one is Nigella Lawson, one stages all this on camera and, I imagine, laughs about it.  What makes her so passionate about food, she is asked?  "I'm greedy."

This blog, on the other hand, is more about curiosity than greed or giving.  Although in trying new techniques and recipes, I often take part in a bit of both these pleasures.

Sweet Potato Pie

I made sweet potato pie.  I followed the recipe from the first google hit for "sweet potato pie," with some alterations.

Is this worth writing about?

I made some very broad statements in the last post, as I'm wont to do.  While I was making the crust for the pie, I kept having to look back at the recipe I adapted from Helen Rennie to remember quantities.  Despite making pastry dough many times, I needed that recipe.  Or at least I needed its list of quantities.  The recipe is not disposable.  It's a kind of helper--somewhere to defer my memory.  It's an instance of a cliche of how the internet has changed the nature of knowledge: it's not so important if one remembers everything, so long as one knows where to look.  In the case of recipes however, the internet is not necessary at all--encyclopedic cookbooks have been serving as cyborg extensions of memory for a long time.

So I don't need to know how to make pastry dough.  I wrote it here in this blog.  The blog remembers how.  To return to my question, is this worth writing, let's compare this to my diaries.  I have boxes and boxes of diaries.  Most of them I have read at least twice.  Reading them is at once familiar and surprising--on the one hand, reading them triggers memories and I might also recall writing what I wrote, on the other, I had, up until reading it, forgotten much if not all of what I wrote.  One is almost always remembering in one way or another, but there is obviously nothing cumulative about it.  Reading a diary doesn't add to a collection of things I remember, but puts me in a different stream of remembering.  Through reading the diary some memories come to life again--I think about them again briefly, they might crop up over and over for a long time.  In other words, the diary must be read, and reading happens in time.  Having "saved" (the anxiety of losing memories drove much of my diary writing) these memories in a diary, only in the unread text of the diary might they be saved.  Only without a reader might the text be said to exist as a totality.  But not really, of course--it isn't anything without being read, is it?

But this blog is not a diary.  I'm not trying to record the ephemera of experience here.  A recipe is simply supposed to record a procedure in a way that's followable.  Actually this isn't so simple, as I've discussed before.  And thankfully.  Wouldn't it be awfully dull if even just a recipe could be written in the universal register?  This suggests another purpose for a recipe: to not be quite followable.  Not that a recipe writer has to try to do this, but a recipe's potential to confuse, mystify, or unintentionally inspire might be valued.  Because apparently I need to subject recipes to the literary theories of decades ago.

The pie was good.  The crust I thought was a bit too hard, although someone else liked it, called it "crunchy."  I prebaked the crust for fifteen minutes or so before filling it, using the sweet potato pieces in tinfoil as a weight to keep the crust from puffing up.  Improvising a weight was the most enjoyable part.  Next time however I'll just fill the unbaked crust, so that the crust turns out softer.

Ate My Soul and Gave Me The Recipe

As we discussed earlier, dear nonexistant readers, the ostensible purpose of a recipe is to facilitate recreations of the same result.  But of course this is not the whole story.  When you’re most in need of a recipe is when you’ve never made what the recipe tells you how to make.  At such a delicate time you take care to follow the recipe exactly.  Having never followed the recipe before, it is easy to misunderstand the recipe.  Sometimes, by sheer luck, the first time comes out flawlessly.  More often there are some kinks, which over the next few attempts, are worked out, and finally a satisfactory result is produced.  After this point, if you need the recipe at all any more, it is more as a memory map than an instruction set.


What is it you have created?  Your creation conforms to the limited contours that the recipe provides.  If you were after a replica of what the author sought to instruct you to make, however, there is no way of confirming this.  Sometimes there are photos, which often provide a more forceful impulse than the recipe itself--you see the photo and think “I want to make that.”  It’s sometimes easy to make it look right, sometimes it isn’t.

All these masturbatory, death-of-the-chef preoccupations aside, whether or not the recipe changes, you change.  At least, this is one way of accounting for culinary disappointments.  Tonight I made pasta with tomato-cream sauce and shrimp for dinner, and I ate it, but only because I was hungry.  The flavors were weak, and the textures even a little nauseating.  I’ve made pasta with tomato-cream sauce in countless different ways, some less satisfying than others.  And I keep making some form of it because I remember a few delicious instances of this dish.  But this time it’s been long enough I wonder if I have any idea what I’m after.  If I made what to me was a wonderful pasta dish a year ago, and ate it today, would I like it much?  There really isn’t any way of finding out empirically.  If I wrote down the precise recipe for those times when I made a particularly spectacular rendition, I doubt I would be able to reliably cook it again.  And I doubt I would want to.

A recipe is a much more intriguing beast than it may have appeared.


The general shape inconsistently described above also applies to me writing this entry.  Through writing, what I wanted to write changed.  What I thought I was writing changed.  These changes can hardly be tracked by the writing itself to create something coherent.  To me it appears that throughout the entry I forgot what I meant to write, and began on a new, somewhat related tangent.  By the end forgot the import of everything I had just written, summing it up as "intriguing."

Chop sentences well. Pour 3 qts. superfluous detail into lightly greased shorthand.

The economy of recipe grammar that I've been working within is really baffling. Articles must be dropped, but the most obvious steps must be pinned down with the utmost exactitude. And the continuity of labels is sacred, as if I'm writing in a programming language.

Also, what was all the fuss about numbers as words instead of numerals? The idea at first was to make these recipes as transparent as possible, though I sabotaged that supposed goal at every turn, writing "one" instead of "1" was just one way to do that. The first recipe, for lentil soup, appears to be making itself as opaque as possible by making a spectacle of its potential transparency. Really that's what I love doing anyway. The point, apparently, is not to write accessible recipes, but to make a show of it, to be dramatic, to reveal myself hiding.