sybarites

This weekend I re-read Bella Tuscany by Frances Mayes for about the hundredth time. Reading that book, her writing almost poetry, is like wrapping a warm and comforting blanket around me. I had seriously considered bringing that book with me when we travelled because of its ability to distract, comfort and calm. (As it turns out, there was absolutely no room for the book and I had much less need for it than I had anticipated.) There is a quote that I came across on Sunday that now seems more poignant than when I last read it 18 months ago,

“Setting off to see another country, I set off to see what is more grandly other- whole cultures, geographies, languages. Who am I in the new place? And who are they who live there?

If you settle in, even for two weeks, live in a house not a hotel, and you buy figs and soap at the local places, sit in cafes and restaurants, go to a local concert or church service, you cannot help but open to the resonance of a place and the deeper you go, the stranger the people become because they’re like you and they’re not.”

How true! How exactly, perfectly, succinctly true. I read that and instantly thought of Istanbul, how when we were there, we rented a flat for two weeks and indeed shopped for figs and soap at local markets, played backgammon and drank tea at local cafes. There’s no question that we still stood out as the stupid foreigners we were, there was hardly any chance of us blending in, but going for groceries, or visiting the hardware store, or briefly getting to know the patterns of our neighbours and internalizing the Ramazan drumming at dawn to the point where we were no longer woken up by it, made me feel like I was just slightly less tourist and very slightly more a resident. The difference is the thickness of a strand of hair but it made me happy to carry a jug of milk instead of a camera and to think that the people who saw me perhaps thought “There is a foreigner who lives here” rather then “Look, another tourist”.

A little of that feeling remains now that we are living in the United States. I am barely noticeable as a Canadian; until we speak in metric or use the word “toque” or have to show someone our ID, we are the Canadians that walk unnoticed amongst them. Most of the time, we are easily mistaken as Americans and I’m glad to blend in, the same way I was glad to blend in a shred in Turkey. I’m always especially pleased to be able to offer someone directions, and I’m asked often enough while walking the dog in the more touristy areas of town. Surely he makes me appear more a resident and occasionally, I am actually able to respond to a question in such a way that sustains the illusion; I wish I never had to say “Sorry, I’m not from around here…” and then not even be able to direct a visitor to a gas station for directions. But the longer we stay, and the more exploratory walks we take, the closer we will come to resemble San Franciscans, though I doubt we’ll ever shake the metric.

Meanwhile, in an effort to rekindle some of the travel vibe, and to use some of our souvenirs, we made a splendid curry. While in Udaipur, a man that we met, Krishna, set us up with a private cooking tutorial which involved an early-morning trip to the market and a lesson by his grandmother’s neighbour, a woman who cooked in a tiny, concrete kitchen tacked onto the rooftop courtyard of her building. After our lesson, Krishna obtained two sets of spices for us; we had told him we were not married so he had assumed that we lived apart and would, therefore, each require our own samples of curry, turmeric, cardamom and saffron. As a result, we have alot of spices to go through, a pleasant enough chore. This curry ploughed through a fair portion of the turmeric but we used whole cinnamon, bay leaves and cardamom pods. We also used two burners, which is one more than Krishna’s grandmother’s neighbour had. There’s no way we could’ve remembered and/or duplicated the chapatis she taught us to make- that will take an afternoon of patience and practice someday, an afternoon when we can invoke some travel memories of what it was like to cook in someone else’s kitchen.

I don’t think I’ve consumed as much maple syrup as I have ever since we moved to the Homeland of Security. Ironic, really, that as soon as we leave Canada, I feel the need for that sticky taste more than I ever have in the past. Maybe it’s because I had hardly explored the possibilities of maple syrup. Beyond pancakes, who has a need for that crusty Canadian bottle in the fridge? Lately though, I’ve been adding it to my morning cream of wheat instead of sugar (delicious), adding a little splash to morning tea (interesting, perhaps it won’t be repeated), and slipping some into plain yogurt, mimicking the maple-flavoured yogurt we once bought from the Berkeley Bowl. I think I’ll take the experimentation further and start adding it to cocktails; perchance it goes with dark rum..? We shall see.

Otherwise, our lack of cooking and/or any kind of culinary creativity lately borders on unacceptable. Not to mention that fact that we sorely neglected our beloved blog. There is no excuse, but as an explanation, I can offer: in the last two weeks, we were accepted as legal aliens in America, signed a lease and moved into a new apartment across the bay, into the depths of the fog, and poor Marc drove all our belongings from Canada to California. Lately, we have been doing nothing but working, unpacking and washing the mould off of everything we own. At least we are beginning to feel at home now; Sammy is happy that his day bed is in our office so that he can keep an eye on us all day long. We are here to respond to his every whim.

Also hovering on the edge of unacceptable is the volume of objects that we have unpacked that are meant to reside in the new kitchen. How, why!, do we have five corkscrews? Who could ever find a need for so much tupperware? How did we end up with 6 boxes of glassware? Vaguely, I remember packing this stuff up 16 months ago in Calgary. At the time, it must have seemed logical to have wrapped up two fondue sets, even though we never have fondue, and to keep three sets of steak knives, six ladles, two tea sets and ten mixing bowls, but frankly, I am now a little disgusted with the amount of our material possessions. I guess this comes with any move, one is meant to filter, sort and purge- now that Marc and I have moved more than four times in the past two years, I would’ve thought we’d now be pared down to a minimum. Au contraire.

But before the stuff moved in, before we were wading through boxes and boxes of dishes and pots and pans, I made a lasagne. I’m reading Best Food Writing of 2006 right now and there was one piece in the collection that prompted a yearning for pasta. Laura Taxel wrote a short piece about the time she was in the grocery store and, after answering a stranger’s question about tomato paste, ended up providing a whole lesson on how to make homemade spaghetti and meatballs. She talked about the kind of tomatoes to use in the sauce, how to start with a mirepoix and add ingredients, spices, herbs and then the meatballs. It tasted marvelous in my imagination but because I didn’t have the energy to do meatballs and because I knew neither of us would have the energy to cook at all in the middle of all the unpacking and cleaning, I made a huge, tasty, cheesy lasagne. The process was yet another adventure: I had to find a grocery store in our neighbourhood (there is a Safeway on Market street), find the beautiful, organic produce that I have come to expect of California grocers (impossible in a Safeway), drag it all home and find parking (impossible in San Francisco) and then build a lasagne in a kitchen nearly devoid of cooking utensils (I used folded paper towels on baking sheet in lieu of a cutting board). The circumstances under which I cooked approached unacceptable but the lasagne has kept us happily fed for two weeks.

P.S. I uploaded more photos of our place here.

After the failure of the ciabatta recipe I wasn’t psychologically prepared for another failure of loaves, so I tried out the pizza dough recipe instead with toppings from a phyllo pizza recipe we made in our first year of this blog. It was the best pizza crust we’ve ever made, much better than Oprah’s chef’s recipe. Though my gluten development still needs work, it did stretch over my fists without tearing. I wasn’t daring enough to actually toss it into the air. Perhaps next time.

The thin crust baked perfectly on our sheet pan without need for the pizza stone we’ve been eyeing for weeks. The slices were crispy enough to hold without collapsing, yet were still chewy just under the golden brown surface. Perhaps this was due to the cookbook’s directions to cook the pizza at the highest temperature possible for only 5 to 7 minutes.

Now I just need to find some exceptional mozzarella and a recipe for great pizza sauce.

If you look carefully, you’ll notice one item on this list is not crossed off; we finally found a food that the magical land of Berkeley could not provide.  Of all things, goat.  I even called around to butchers and halal meat markets, and the artisan butcher at the market;  the best response I got was to “try again around Easter”.    And I’m not sure, but I think that’s because the Muslim holiday of Id-al-Adha, at which much goat feasting occurs, might fall in early April(??).   I could be wrong, maybe that’s just when baby goats are at their most tender.  (Meat is Murder.  Tasty, tasty murder.)

The reason I went to the trouble to find a goat’s shoulder  is because of the annual article in Food & Wine magazine on the Best New Chefs of the year, in America.   The youngest of the 2007 crop is Johnny Monis who makes this Pappardelle with Milk-Roasted Baby Goat Ragù at Komi in Washington, DC, and the description made it irresistible.  Nevermind that it is the middle of summer and hot as an oven inside our west-facing kitchen in the evenings, I could just imagine the delicate, slightly gamey,  savoury taste of this slow-cooked, oven-braised meat over pasta.  It had to be done.

Upon giving up on the goat, I settled on veal (because something young and innocent had to die in order for me to eat).   But there was a pleasant surprise in store for me at the gourmet grocery because when I went to pick out a can of tomatoes, I was amazed to find Rao’s canned tomatoes.   I hadn’t thought about that place for years but for awhile, I had kind of had an odd fixation on that particular restaurant in New York.  I’ve never been there, never even seen it, but I’ve read enough about its legendary status to be more than a little curious.   I read somewhere that reservations are nearly impossible for mere mortals (i.e. me) to obtain and quite hard to get even for immortals (i.e. celebreties).  What made the place even more curious is that, if one has enough money and clout, one can own a table at the restaurant, which will be made available immediately upon request.  Imagine!  Owning a reserved table at a restaurant!   Anyway, the idea of an eatery taking things to such an outrageous level stuck with me so when I saw their tomatoes on the shelf here in California, I knew that if I bought them, I could eat like an immortal.

I did indeed braise the meat in milk, as per the recipe, and I let the ragù rest overnight so as to allow the flavours to properly meld, but did not go so far as to hand-make pasta without a pasta machine.  I am dedicated to cooking, but not crazy;  we picked up dried, organic papparadelle.

Did I mention that I made bread to go with it?  My first ever attempt at bread making:  pain à l’ancienne, a crispy, chewy baguette which, by the way, turn into rock solid pieces of fossilized bread if you leave them out overnight wrapped in  towel.   But I digress.  The resulting meal that we enjoyed the following day was marvelously decadent and the only thing that could possibly have made it better was if it was cold outside.

I was left to figure something out for supper after having forgotten to go to the grocery store. I failed to find a use for the jar of kimchi or the fennel, but managed to put everything else together into a fine frittata. Thyme, Chili powder and salsa were added to the beatten eggs. The potatoes were well boiled, having learned a lesson for the last time I tried to make a frittata.

We had finally purchased a heirloom cast iron frying pan at Sur La Table a few days ago after repeatedly eying it over the past two months. It did an excellent job of frying the red onion, leeks and green beans in a generous amount of butter. After heating up the potatoes in the pan, I stirred in the eggs until almost scrambled, sprinkled some Parmesan cheese on top and then put the pan in the oven for 15 minutes to finish. There wasn’t actually any basil in the frittate, but it made a good garnish visually when placed on the plate with some sour cream and salsa.

Although thyme with Mexican and Spanish ingredients wasn’t a perfect compliment, I did manage to clean out the fridge.

Please allow me a moment to indulge in negativity. I shan’t be long.

Top 10 Most Hated Kitchen Tasks

10. spraying oil
I detest this task on several levels. First of all, I hate using this stuff because it comes in a pressurized can which one cannot recycle. In fact, I’m not even sure how one is supposed to conscientiously dispose of such a thing- does it get tossed in the pile of noxious substances that go to the fire department for disposal? or le landfill? At any rate, it’s not the recycle bin. Secondly, it sprays evenly only when it is held upright which goes against its purpose entirely. Thirdly, using it creates a circumference of oil slicked surfaces that always goes beyond the intended coverage. Example: spray a muffin tin while it sits on the counter; the result is an oil slicked tin plus counter top plus backsplash plus, as a bonus, any tools sitting in the near vicinity. So maybe you pick up the tin and hold it perpendicular to the floor, thereby trying to outsmart the can and reduce the spray radius but the result is a slick tin and, worse, a slick floor in the area of the spraying. I imagine that in commercial kitchens, where people where shoes and it is someone else’s job to swab the floor each night, the oil slick thing is not a nuisance but for those of us who wear socks on linoleum and who clean slightly less frequently, the oil slick area is a slippery, slippery hazard for days.

9. thinly slicing cheese without a cheese slicer
In truth, this task could be called “doing anything without the appropriate tool for the job”. Never, never will I ever be able to slice perfect, thin, even slices of cheese with just a knife. It is mathematically impossible.

8. toasting nuts
It’s not so much the toasting of the nuts that I hate but rather, the inexplicable forgetfullness that accompanies this task and which results in burned nuts every time. Manually toasting while cooking is a perfect example of multi-tasking at its worst. This delicate technique of gently coaxing the oil and flavour from the nuts requires both eyes and undivided attention, at least in my case. If there is any deviation from this formula, and there always is, the nuts will burn.

7. desparately dealing with frozen phyllo that hasn’t yet thawed completely
There are several layers to this mistake, the first of which must be obvious. The second layer of stupidity follows, in which I try to speed up the thawing process with a microwave/low oven/sunbeam, etc. This practice only produces mush, still frozen in the middle. If I am still desparate enough to try to use the phyllo at this point, there is only descent into frustration, vexation and surrender.

6. grating ginger
Loathsome chore, this takes forever, scrapes fingers and knuckles and leaves more ginger on the grater than in the bowl at the end. This fibrous root is barely tolerable when chopping, let alone trying to shave it into pulp.

5. separating paste from tamarind
This was a mistake I will only make once. The vile task of pulling the flesh off the tamarind root (it is a root, isn’t it?) requires more patience than I have to give. I bought tamarind in non-paste form because I couldn’t find it in paste form figuring that it couldn’t be that hard to extract the good part from the bad but I was most seriously wrong. Nobody has any business using whole tamarind so why is it even packaged and sold?

4. slicing soft bread
At first glance, this might seem as though it should belong to Number 9, “doing anything without the appropriate tool for the job”. However, I would argue that even with a long, sharp, serrated knife, soft, warm bread will effortlessly resist every effort to be sliced. It wobbles back and forth with every draw across its back, slowly shrinking under the pressure of the knife and smashing back into the dough from whence it came. Best to tear.

3. peeling fava beans
Who invented fava beans! The ratio of work to flavour is, like, 12:1. Open the pods to fish out the beans, boil the beans only to peel the skin each nugget for the meat. The bean provokes me, actually, because the skin has a seam that looks as though it should easily peel back along that line but it is a bitter, bitter deception. After enough of this torture, my fingernails feel as though they have been peeled back.

2. thyme
Wretched herb! Such delicate little leaves persistantly attached to such a woody stem. If only the leaves were less clingy or the stem more pliable, I wouldn’t bother with the de-stemming production but it cannot be. I must painstakingly peel the leaves off, very nearly one by one, in order to take advantage of them. If only they could be more like their easy cousin rosemary- so simple to fold the “leaves” backwards and pull them all off the stem in one broad stroke!

1. washing lettuce
This is, and has always been, the task I hate the very most in the kitchen. Boring beyond measure, finicky, dull, and time-consuming: washing any kind of leaves for consumption is to be reviled. We used to buy pre-washed stuff all the time but now, here in California, organic fare is never washed and we do not have a salad spinner. Leaves cannot be left wet after washing – it would so ruin a salad as to not bother having salad at all – and air-drying or towel-drying are wiltifying and ineffective, respectively. Without a spinner, I almost don’t want to have salad at all; it is simply not worth enduring my most hated kitchen task of all time.

I was eyeing a bread baking book at Chapters before leaving on our around the world trip. Now that we’ve returned and I’ve been making bread again, I picked up The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, by Peter Reinhart, to further develop my baking skills and fulfill my craving for artisan bread. My ciabatta recipe from Epicurious wasn’t doing it for me–dense and crumbly, completely lacking ciabatta’s distinctive big, shiny holes.

Before trying the new ciabatta I had to try the sticky bun recipe as I have fond memories of a place at the mall in Fort McMurray selling excellent sticky bun knots. Just the sight of the glaze–1/2 pound of butter, 1 cup of sugar, 1/2 cup of corn syrup– nearly gave Janet a heart attack and that was in addition to the 1/2 cup of sugar that was rolled into the buns. Baking the buns was a bit of a challenge because the dough need to cook through to the bottom and the glaze needs to carmelize without turning into rock candy. In the end, most of the glaze was a little too stiff, but still tasty. If I had rotated the pan half way through and took them out five minutes earlier, they would have been perfect bakery-quality buns. Surprisingly, the glaze softened over the next 48 hours.

The ciabatta was a disaster. The book told me exactly what the dough texture was suppose to be and I didn’t have it. The dough was clearly too stiff and not the soft, silky mass they described. It was baked into three edible loaves of dense crumbly bread. Perhaps mixing baking and wine at 11:00 at night is not to be repeated.

Janet’s first experiments in filleting a fish left us with excellent ingredients for fish stock, so we threw the cap and rake (read head and spine) into some water with a bay leaf and leek greens for about an hour. I’m told fish stock only needs a half hour, but I prefer to really work the fish smell into the house. When I’ve gone to all that trouble, I want people to walk into the house three days later and say, “Were you cooking fish?”

About ten years ago I was a big fan of “Julia & Jacques: Cooking at Home,” hosted by Julia Child and Jacques Pepin. She tended to do Americanized recipes and he classed things up with some fine French cuisine. Although they were always very nice to each other, Jacques definitely had strong opinions on the right way to do a recipe and Julia was casual and confident. He would stir his pot and give her a glance out of the corner of his eye that said, “Whatever, you’re the legend.” Here’s an example of their styles that Amazon uses:

“Not everything I do with my roast chicken is necessarily scientific,” Julia says. “For instance, I always give my bird a generous butter massage before I put it in the oven. Why? Because I think the chicken likes it–and, more important, I like to give it.” Julia sets her chicken on a V-rack in a roasting pan in a 425-degree oven that she then turns down to 350 after 15 minutes. Jacques roasts his bird at 425, on its side, right in the pan. “To me,” he says, “it’s very important to place the chicken on its side for all but 10 minutes of roasting.” After 25 minutes he turns his chicken over, careful not to tear the skin, and lowers the heat to 400. The bird finishes breast-side up for the last 15 to 20 minutes.

Hmm, that reminds me of someone.

I somehow managed to remember enough of their Mediterranean Fish Stew to make it myself and cook it every year or two without ever having written anything down, not that I’ve remembered to add the salt every time. If you can procure fish heads or fish stock, it’s really an easy meal to make and looks impressive when served to guests. Julia favored clams for this recipe, but I prefer mussels due to my east coast Canada heritage. I always shell the mussels before storing the leftovers, not for any specific reasons, but it seemed weird to have those shells frozen into my soup. Shells must not falsely state freshness. Other than that, there really isn’t much to the recipe at all. It’s mostly wine, fish and vegetables with hot sauce and thyme to finish it off.

After googling the recipe for the first time ever, I discover I’ve forgotten the rouille, a spicy sauce made with breadcrumbs and olive oil. It went on top of the soup, or perhaps on bread which were stuck into the soup. However, Janet’s garlic bread adds a very similar element with much less effort—especially when I get her to make it.

Keep reading for the recipe.

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Confession: I bought a chef’s knife at IKEA and I like it.

Not my fault! It was purchased as a temporary stop-gap solution for having no knife at all in the kitchen of the apartment in which we are staying. The thing is, Marc – and by extension me – has a very good knife, one served us well on a daily basis for many, many days. That knife, however, is buried somewhere in one of the slowly moulding boxes in the damp storage unit in Calgary where we keep nearly all of our worldly possessions. Two months ago I made a half-hearted attempt to look for it but ground to a halt when it was clear that we would have to move the barbeque and the bed and the dresser in order to get to the knife. Eventually we’ll see it again, but I don’t anticipate that day coming anytime very soon.

The second option we had, when faced with the no-knife situation, was to purchase a good knife, an exceptional specimen that would be our most valuable tool, like a real knife owned by a real chef. I am a sucker for Wüsthof knives and Marc will always pause in front of the Shun Ken Onion blades. It is so satisfying to hold a well balanced tool, a pleasure to wrap one’s hand around a smooth handle that rests effortlessly in the palm of the hand and which, to quote Quentin Tarrantino, “is sharper than the devil himself”. Until I actually used a knife that was not a piece of crap and that was able to cleanly bite into and then slice through a ripe tomato, I didn’t know what a fantastic utensil a chef’s knife can be. For too long, I blundered along with dull, feather-weight knives, the use of which was made even worse by the fact that I had little idea that they were dull, that they were lightweight. Add to that, the fault that I didn’t know how to properly wield a knife and it makes me wonder how I ever came to enjoy cooking at all. They were pathetic, the knives I had: useless lengths and shapes, dull, serrated, stupid. When Marc and I and the knife moved in together, I threw out those old hags so that no-one else would suffer their inefficiency. Now! Now that I know what it means to whip through a scallion and have all the pieces separated, what it feels like to hold a knife properly, decisively, like I mean to do harm to vegetables, now that I know what a razor’s edge should feel like, I cannot turn back. I continue to work on my technique but it is a pleasure to prep vegetables now- celery especially, the crunch of the stalk as it is quickly diced into clean-edged pieces.

But as people who are unengaged in wage-earning, we could ill afford such dreamy luxury, so we kicked it down a notch and went to IKEA.

They had knives. We bought the least offensive-looking one at $16.99. (I would argue that these are the most offensive.) It came in the door, was unwrapped and washed and soon enough, put to the test. I was wholly prepared to abhor the knife and had ready various complaints about its cheap quality and poor performance, something along the lines of “there must be some assembly required, ha ha”, but none were necessary. I hate that I like this knife! It has a balanced weight, if a little light, but was dead sharp and co-operated very well with the vegetables. The fit is smooth. We bought a smaller version of the same one and it not only completed its assigned tasks, it hacked right through a chicken thigh bone without thinking twice. Mind, neither one of them held their edge for more than a couple of weeks, but I hadn’t expected that they would really have any sharp to begin with so the performance exceeded expectations. Dammit.

So we shall continue with what we have for the time being. And even though it has already severed a respectable slice off of my left index finger (due to pilot error), I shall continue to take pleasure in a decent knife.

Marc has been baking loads of bread lately. He picked up a hardcover breadmaking bible at the bookstore last weekend and has since been churning out the ciabatta. This isn’t the first time he’s gone through a flurry of baking, it happened just before we left on The Voyage and was cut short because we had to go. We threw out half-full bags of five different kinds of flour and now, though we are only here in Berkeley for five more weeks, we already have four kinds of flour and I suspect we’ll be burdened with even more when it comes time to pack up. When I asked him why he got into bread specifically, he said he liked the feel of it and how a gloopy mass of dough can be transformed into a loaf of bread. When he found a page in the bread bible that used math to explain the ratios of key ingredients, he was – and this is the only word to describe it – gleeful. Full of glee because of math and baking. I like seeing him happy but I don’t think I can really appreciate math in the same way. We both love to cook, though clearly we are drawn to different elements of the practice: where he likes to measure with spoons, I like to measure with my eyes; where I estimate cooking time, he googles the correct boiling time of corn on the cob.

One disagreement that will forever be simmering under the surface of our kitchen dynamic is the difference between dry-measure and liquid-measure. Marc insists that one cup of dry equals one cup of liquid and I insist otherwise; surely there is a reason why they make nested measuring cups and separate ones with spouts. There have been experiments conducted in the kitchen to prove and disprove our opposing views and the result usually ends with a discussion of molecular make-up of liquids and solids and then with an agreement to disagree.

An extension of the Measuring Conflict is the practice of following the recipe. I read the step-by-step instructions and follow along but I’m highly prone to changing the details to fit my preferences. Living in Calgary at a high altitude for so long, I’m well in the habit of adjusting baking recipes to compensate for the pressure and that habit has further manifested itself in my cooking. If it seems silly to add three tablespoons of butter where two would do, then I’ll go with the two; if a recipe calls for fresh tarragon, I’ll double the amount because I love that herb. Marc, on the other hand, is much more scientifc about things. If the interweb says that scallops must be cooked at a temperature of 360°F for a period of time no greater than 2.6 minutes, then we’ll have to go out and buy a thermometer and a timer. His method yields perfectly cooked scallops every timewhile my method may yield perfectly cooked scallops some of the time, with lots of tarragon. Our focus is different, my results vary.

There is a programme that we watch with equal rapture but which also serves to exacerbate his methodological rigidity. America’s Test Kitchen on PBS, with their test kitchens and and their tool comparisons and their “reserve 3/4c. of the cooking liquid” feeds right into his mathmatically logical mind. If the Vulcans had a cooking show, Marc would be their biggest fan, especially if it was hosted by T’Pol. However, as derisive as I’m sure I sound about his method, I have to admit that his googling and his obsessive use of the measuring spoons has added much clarity to our cooking.

But let me further elaborate; allow me to refer to our recent lunch of Kraft Dinner as an example. (I am loathe to admit that we will occassionaly revert to this childish nonsense for lunch, but in the interest of prooving a point, I must proceed.)

I am making KD. Marc walks into the kitchen while the pasta is boiling.

“Sorry- anything I can do to help?”
“Nah, it’s just KD.”
“OK, did you set the timer for the pasta?”
“Of course not, why?”
“Gah! How can you not set the timer? How do you know when it’s done?”
“What – I’ll know it’s done when it’s done. I’ve cooked pasta once or twice before.”
“Let me get the butter; how much do you need?”
“Like the measurement on the package? I have no idea, I’ll just put in enough.”
“How can you do this? It’s on the box for a reason- it was scientifically calculated to taste perfect.” he says, while rooting through the paper recycling.
“Whatever, I’ve been making KD forever and I never measure. You’re telling me you measure every time?”
“Of course! Why wouldn’t you measure?!”
“Trust me,” I say as I toss in a lump of butter, “it will taste good even if don’t measure.”
“But you just put in, like, half the butter it called for.”
“So?! Trust me!”
“Oh fine, I’m monté au beurre-ing mine when you’re done.”
“Oh, fine.”
Miraculously, the KD that I produced without measuring the butter or the milk tasted good. And the bit about the direction on the box being “scientifically calculated” was a direct quote.