Paulette, Miette, et le chien affamé

Ever since I started looking at food blogs and writing my own, I've been impressed with the incredible skill and dedication of so many home cooks out there. I'm consistently blown away by the complicated recipes people will bravely undertake and then write about, revealing every misstep along with each success. I've read about people curing bacon, making puff pastry, and trying their hand at fresh ricotta. So many cooks seem undaunted by things I see as obstacles: candy thermometers, cooking things under bricks, yeast. As a rule, I pretty much avoid anything that requires deboning or cheesecloth.

I guess we draw lines arbitrarily. Why will I make crackers from scratch but refuse to bake bread? One can't be that much harder than the other, just a bit more time-consuming. I suppose as deep as my love for cooking may run, so runs my laziness, and it's randomly applied. There are certain things I'm just not interested in making by hand. 

While much of this can be attributed to personality, it's also a result of where I live. In San Francisco, there's no reason to make your own dim sum. That's why we have Yank Sing, and any number of alternatives in Chinatown and the Richmond. For good ramen, I can roll down my hill to Hotei in the Sunset. For excellent ramen, I can roll a little further to Tanpopo in Japantown. And then there's the matter of the little French macarons that have become so popular in the last year.

I've seen many food bloggers attempt these delightful little cookies with varying success. Every time I see a photo of a homemade macaron, I feel a surge of admiration for the person's fortitude. I know macarons can be moody little bastards, and can turn out entirely differently depending on how humid it is, whether the egg whites were properly aged, or if the almonds were ground finely enough. It seems that just looking at the little suckers the wrong way can doom you: a hopeful, beseeching glance can send these sweet, chewy mouthfuls into an angry fit, rendering them flat and gummy.

I love these cookies too. But I will never make them. I'm just not determined enough.

Also, and perhaps the more important reason, is because five blocks from our house is Boulange de Cole, where periodically I'll pick up a few macarons on the way home from work. I am particularly fond of their passionfruit ones. Or because from work I can walk to Paulette in Hayes Valley, which packs the macarons in slender, brightly-colored boxes. Buying macarons from Paulette makes me feel chic and French, like Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

And because there's Miette in the Ferry Building, where the husband stopped the other day after a few errands.

He picked up a tidy half dozen: raspberry, hazelnut, and pistachio.

We ate them after dinner, one after the other, silent little termites making our way through the bag. I'm not sure toiling over these myself could equal the pleasure I felt in opening Miette's little cellophane bag to see the delicate macarons carefully lined up so as not to crush each other, but I'm positive it could not equal the happiness I felt that the husband surprised me with them on a plain old Wednesday night.

Chicken with apples and sage (and my mail-order shoes)

Who doesn't love fall? Even if you live in California, where we don't get the brilliant turning leaves of New England, the weather gets decidedly brisker and the light adopts that shadowy, golden slant. Unless you're made of stone, autumn is a beautiful, romantic time of the year.

It's also the time of year for chicken with apples and sage.

I'm sorry this picture is a little cruddy. It really doesn't illustrate the gorgeous golden-brown of the chicken and the tiny flecks of sage which make the dish so pretty. I've been meaning to order one of those staging lights to help with my photography, but recently I ordered some shoes from Amazon which fit so poorly that I only got one on before realizing I would be severely hobbled by keeping them. It was a great disappointment because they were black suede mary jane heels with a little flower on the strap. I had already begun to envision how these new ladylike shoes would start to make up for the fact that I mostly kick around the house in jeans, clogs, and a faded Billabong hoodie. Unfortunately, when you're used to wearing clogs, you're even less likely to put up with pinchy high heels.

Anyway, while it's not Amazon's fault the shoes were a bust, I'm temporarily soured on the whole mail order thing. I realize it's convenient, but that's only true if you decide to keep whatever you ordered. If you don't, it's worse than returning it to a store, because you have to find packing tape and pay for the return costs. Now I have to lug the shoes to UPS and eat the shipping charges. $7 for a pair of shoes I didn't keep! So, it's hard for me to get excited about ordering anything else right now. The light will have to wait, and in the meantime, you'll have to endure a few dimly-lit shots. As great as autumn is, the shorter days that accompany it are no friend to the photographer. Oh well. I can only assume that with the millions of great blogs out there, no one's reading this one just for the pictures.

Let me spare you any further rantings and focus on this recipe, which I have made tons of times and expect to  make for years to come. It's delicious, simple, and totally satisfying on a cool October night. The blend of apples, shallots, sage, brown sugar, and cider vinegar is divine and  versatile--you can serve this chicken with rice, buttered egg noodles, or mashed potatoes. You could even do pork chops instead of chicken.

This time, I served it with thickly-cut roasted sweet potato coins and steamed green beans. If that isn't a pre-cursor to Thanksgiving, I don't know what is.

A strange and beautiful cake

To the husband's surprise, I made a grape cake today.

Well, let me back up. He wasn't completely shocked; I'd been muttering the whole week about all of the grapes we had to use up. It's possible to eat quite a few grapes just as they are, plucking them off the bunch and popping them in your mouth as you go about your day. But it's not possible for two people to eat two big sackfuls. I knew something had to be done with them.

I'd even begun planting the idea of the grape cake. But every time I mentioned it, he repeated, "Grape cake?" in a tone somewhere between disbelief and repulsion.

You may know this, but there aren't a lot of things you can do with grapes. But I kept coming across this one recipe for grape cake, adapted from a Patricia Wells original. I figured now was the time to try it.

First I took a photo of the grapes, which were a stunning deep, dark purple.

Then I set about making the cake, which was nothing too earth-shattering, in fact quite similar to both the raspberry buttermilk cake and the hangover cake I made over the summer. When I took it out of the oven, I was struck by how beautiful and strange it looked. It reminded me of some focaccia I'd once made with black olives and sea salt.

Although the cooking time the recipe gave was off by a good 13 minutes, luckily I am the kind of cook that lives in constant fear of over-cooking and over-baking things. While sometimes this is a certain flaw (like when I realize the pork roast, instead of being dry as I feared is undercooked in the center--trichinosis, anyone?), in a case like this, it's a good trait. I nervously started checking on the cake much earlier than recommended and it was a good thing I did or it would have been hard as a dog biscuit.

The cake itself had a nice crumb, moist from olive oil and milk.

But, to my dismay, the cake was as weird as the husband had predicted. The grapes seemed both unattractively withered and freakishly large, and I couldn't help feeling reminded of Mickey Mouse's nose every time I looked at one.

Also, it turns out hot, cooked grapes don't taste good. They lose the crisp juiciness which makes a grape a grape. Instead they seem heavy and soft in a frankly stomach-turning way.

The husband really gave it a try but couldn't finish his piece.

I finished mine, but only because whenever I make something, even if I don't like it, I feel strangely haughty and protective of it. "It's really not bad," I kept saying, "if you like hot, soft grapes."

Who am I kidding? That poor cake is sitting on the counter right now, enjoying its last few minutes of life. It's compost bin-bound and it knows it. In the future, I'll take my grapes raw, thank you very much. And, of course, in a bottle of wine.