29 July Saturday

And so July becomes August. Cherries are over. Tomatoes and corn on the cob are here, and the glut of strawberries continues unabated. I finally got the oven fixed, and cleaned the kitchen so everything is in order to return to serious cooking. A couple of friends recently returned from a trip to Turkey and brought for me three bags of vacuum-sealed spice blends, and I simply couldn’t think of a better way to reopen the ole kitchen than to whip up an ole fashioned menu. In addition to this palava, with a separate pair of friends I’ve been listening to a young adult fantasy novel called The Dragon with the Chocolate Heart, which features vivid and lengthy descriptions of the making of various hot chocolates, chocolate creams, chile chocolate drinks, leaving all listeners craving chocolate like never before. Amazing. The way the reader says Chocolate, almost like it has five syllables. So, the dinner would be Roast Chicken with Turkish spices, a Syrian herb salad, Saffron rice, and Chocolate-Cardamom Tart. The trouble started almost immediately.

The chicken, long dead, bathing in yogurt, saffron tea, a hearty handful of a red spice blend, I don’t what’s in it, except oregano buds, and mild pepper flavors. Just chillin’ on a summer’s day, waiting for his margarita. You see, a meal like this is a cinch if you begin two or three days before, a luxury I didn’t have this week. Every time I went to get ahead, the universe pushed the pause button.

The first casualty- the pie crust. It wasn’t merely time that wasn’t on my side. I recently did a wonderful cleaning of the pantry which had an unintended consequence of knocking the labels off two identical plastic containers of flour. One had bread flour, the other all-purpose. The flours looked too much the same for me to guess which one was which. As I have had accidents with using the wrong flour in the past, I decided not to risk it, though many opined that it wouldn’t make any damn difference. I cut the crust and settled on Chocolate Cardamom Pudding.

The second thing was the chicken. I should have mentioned this before, but a lot of the ideas and recipes came from Salt, Fat, Acid Heat, which is a great fantastic book that every person should read if they care about anything. I was going to Spatchcock the chicken, and author Samin Nosrat insisted that the skin needed to be seasoned the day before and the chicken I pulled from the freezer hadn’t fully thawed by the day before, so there goes that dream. Even more friends opined that it didn’t make a damn difference, even more that the flour thing. So, I decided I would roast the chicken in the normal way but first marinade for several hours in yogurt, saffron tea and etc.

There he is, deader than ever. The yogurt worked wonders, keeping the meat moist, tender, and lighter in color. The skin, as you can clearly see, got very dark and crisp. The flavor was and tender and mild like the holy infant, and I guess I wanted a wee bit o’ the devil last night.

Cherry tomatoes, Persian cucumbers, red onion, and full head each of parsley, cilantro, mint, and dill. In the bottom of the wooden salad bowl, juice of a lime, red wine vinegar, salt, pepper, olive oil. Za’atar. Fantastic.

Saffron Rice. Above is a picture of the early stages of the cooking. The rice is cooked al dente in heavily salted water, mixed with a little yogurt mixed with saffron tea, and cooked in the pan till the bottom is deep brown and crunchy. Not crisp, but absolutely crunchy. It is heavenly delicious. The people were surprised to learn it had no butter or any other added fat. If you don’t make this dish, you should. It should be in your regular repertoire. Children love it, grown-ups too. Animals are known to be more docile and peaceable when this rice is sizzling on the stovetop.

Now, it is Saturday, and all is right with the world. James Cagney is dancing and singing his way to a Congressional Medal of Honor as George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy. A great work of American propaganda if ever there was one. Wow, now the film musical 1776, one of my least favorites of all time. Anyway, the guests enjoyed the dinner and all left in a state of blissed out tipsy tryptophan, even not having eaten the pudding. Huh, I didn’t know Blythe Danner was in this movie. Anyway.

While I was making the pudding, I dipped my cooking thermometer into the pudding and it (being digital) starting acting weird and going all over the place, an act that later turned out to be the death of an ion battery. I think I must have not gotten the temperature to where it needed to be because the pudding never set. Not after three hours, seven hours, fourteen hours. Finally, this afternoon, I took it out of the custard cups and reheated it, added a slurry of cornstarch and water, and thickened it a bit. Then, I put it back in the custard cups and popped it back in the fridge. Now I wait.

It occurred to me that I may have made another mistake with the pudding. The recipe called for three cups of half and half, and I only had two cups of half and half, the third cup was whole milk. You don’t think that would result in a too thin pudding do you? Do you? Sheesh, how I torture myself. Enough, it’s almost eight o’clock at night. Let’s look at that pudding. God, this movie is terrible, but the music is better than I remember. It’s like a made for TV movie from the late 70s.

Hmm, film musical 1776 and this chocolate pudding have something in common. It’s not as simple as saying both are terrible, but neither is pleasant though I want to like them both. I just can’t. And it looks like the pudding is still not setting up properly. It forces me to deliver my last confession. I didn’t use cornstarch, I used arrowroot, which until just yesterday I thought were interchangeable. I read somewhere today that arrowroot can create an unpleasant texture in preparations that contain dairy. The old adage holds, my darlings. Making fragile dishes you must use exactly the ingredients that the recipe calls for. I am holding out. I will give it one more hour to set up. That’s 9PM.

HA! So, at 9:06PM, I pulled a pudding from the fridge and decided to taste it. The pudding has still not set and I don’t think it ever will. It is delicious. Wonderful. It’s like melted ice cream. Wonderful. It coincides with one of the most delightfully awful scenes I have ever seen in any film in my entire life. Some hot, 20-something stud playing Thomas Jefferson in a horrible orange wig that doesn’t fit in a pique of frustration at not being inspired to write the Declaration of Independence picks up a violin and begins wildly improvising in the worst imitation of a person playing a musical instrument in film history and while the music coming from the fiddle sounds like Bela Bartok going mad in a Yugoslavian Satanic Orgy Tom stands there slowly sawing the bow back and forth a good two inches above the bridge while the other hand strangles the neck to death like a duck. The pudding is vastly superior to the movie at this point as the one got better while the other was getting worse.

OK, kids that all the news from the Willows. More to come soon. Oh God, the singing in this movie. Wretched, just twisted, sick, horrible.