Just sayin': Cake Wreck

Ah crap. Look what happened to the cake I baked my neighbors for National Night out!

In the fridge, a precarious cake edge collapsed. Le Sigh. I knew I shouldn't have put that layer on the top. Normally I would never dare show my cake, or my face, in public ever again. But meh. When your cake is a wreck, the least you can do is wreck it in style. How do you like me now:

F.

Today’s post is brought to you by the letter F.

F is for French fries, but also for Failure and Fantastic Flop. F stands for the Fry-shop my house smells like. It stands for

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUn words I am going to say now.

What words can I say that start with the letter F?
Cover your kids’ ears.

Pineapple vinegar? The hell you say!

10:00 PM, 29 May 2012

Fail.

I screwed my courage to the sticking point today and tasted the foetid brew. Not pineappley. Not vinegary. Just washed-out, watery, and vaguely beery.

Here is a picture of the pineapple not-vinegar. In the background is the sink down which the not-vinegar is about to get dumped. In the foreground is a beadwork snail who will be the sole witness to the dumping.

“About time," says the beadwork snail. “To the sewers with that nasty crap.”

The experiment was a flop from start to finish. Its fruit-corpse odor never gave way to the clean vinegary tang I wanted. The white scum on the top and the thickening dregs of yeast on the bottom make it resemble nothing so much as... well, if I tell you, I’ll have violated my own comments policy. Maybe, instead of the kitchen sink, this should go down a porcelain drain in a different room.

You know that when even a pretend snail is talking smack about something, it’s time to cut your losses and move on.

4:54 PM, 20 May 2012

There are actually two installments today. Scroll down for the news at the three-week mark.

I skipped taking a picture at the four-week mark because it was just getting grosser and grosser in that jar. But at Week 5, I can't take it anymore. I no longer wish to pretend that the pink and white scum on top is a vinegar mother.

I skimmed off that nasty crap, strained out the solids, washed the jar, and put back the liquid. I don't anymore believe this is turning into vinegar, but I have little to lose and it's hard to shake the effects of the sunk cost fallacy. We'll give it more time.

4:56 PM, 6 May 2012:

After the Week 1 picture, I found a small plate to drop in there. At three weeks, the vinegar was growing a pink and white cap. I surmised the cap was made of mold, yeast, and/or bacteria. Does anyone know what a vinegar mother looks like?

Quite a bit of bubbling going on in there, too. A big old bubble of what can only be carbon dioxide was collecting under the plate:

I do not approve. But rather than make time to deal with it, I left it alone.

11:41 AM, 22 April 2012:

At one week old, the proto-pineapple-vinegar is cloudy. It smells yeasty and sickly sweet. I had to fish some moldy pineapple bits off the top, and I failed to convince the rest of the pineapple to submerge. Maybe I can find a plate or something that will fit inside this jar.

Assessment: This is not fun yet, but it’s no skin off my nose. To be continued.

****
7:09 PM, 17 April 2012:

So.

Diana Kennedy, one of my food heroes, writes in The Art of Mexican Cooking that I can and should try to make pineapple vinegar. That Mexican cooks make escabeche (lightly pickled things) in it. That a fair substitute is half wine vinegar and half rice vinegar, but it’s not quite right.

She says it takes six weeks or more but that it is well worth the wait. A likely story. We’ll just see about that.

This is actually my second attempt. The first time, I stuffed the pineapple and liquid into a half-gallon juice bottle with no headroom and then screwed on the cap. On the fifth day of fermentation, I opened the cap and most of the liquid fizzed up and out of the bottle. FAIL. So I got a better jar.

It occurs to me that, for a person acting all skeptical and dismissive, I am investing rather a lot of resources in this idea.

Pineapple Vinegar
Peelings and core of 1 pineapple, plus some chunks of the good part
4 T brown sugar
1½ qt water

We mix it in a vessel. We set it in a sunny spot. We wait. Fizz happens, then stops happening. A viscous disc is to form, and then firm up, at the top of the jar. This is mother of vinegar and should be retrieved, then put in with the next batch to hasten the process. The other solids should be strained out and discarded. The liquid is supposedly the deliciousest thing ever.

I’ll keep you posted.

Thoughts for some friends

On Sunday I was so preoccupied with thoughts of a friend that I forgot a grocery item. That’s maybe the least bad thing that cancer ever did to anyone.

In the past month, I’ve found out that three of my friends have the disease. (Four, if you count the neighbor’s cat.) I learned about two of them within 30 seconds of each other while checking my email on the treadmill at the gym. So I guess cancer ruined my workout. Another not-very-bad thing that someone else’s illness did to me.

Of course it’s self-indulgent to get mad about such minor inconveniences. But listen: it’s just the tip of an iceberg we’re all going to crash into someday.

I’ve been thinking constantly about all these people. The friend with the worst prognosis is the one farthest away, the one I can do the least to support: phone calls, cards, emails. The friend with the best prognosis just wants to hang out, something I’d gladly do anyway. The friend in the middle has rallied her community for help, and I’m happy—even relieved—to pitch in.

Listen: nothing I can do for any of them will make this go away. The best anyone can do is heft a corner of the burden.

Listen: all of us, maybe from the moment of our creation, carry the seeds of our own undoing. They sleep inside us—latent in the tissues of organs, bones, blood. We go about our lives, never knowing when the silent seeds will germinate, grow, and bear their fruit: the horror of the body’s corruption, the perverse self-betrayal of sickness.

Listen: the whole time I’ve been friends with each of these people, a secret hand has been winding down a count known only to God. None of us knows what will happen, nor when, nor to which of us. What can one person say to another under such circumstances?

Nothing more nor less than what we should say to anyone, anytime: “I care about you. I am glad you’re in my life. I am happy to be here with you now.”

And, “I went back to the grocery store and got that last item because I wanted to cook you this.”

As long as we share this life—however precariously, whether sick or well, and especially if we hope to heal—we still get to eat together.

This is Simplest Farro and a modified Early Autumn Vegetable Roast from Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s The Italian Country Table.

Crocktodogs!

This is ridiculous. It is my guilty pleasure: hot dogs violate every food ethic I hold dear. But I somehow still love them. I wish I knew how to quit you, hot dogs.

You’re welcome/I’m sorry.

There’s a country song in here somewhere

I had a notion I was going to get my heart broken when I walked up to him in the lunchroom.

“John,” I said, twirling the kitchen knife in my hand, “would you help me out with something?”

John looked up and smiled—not at the knife, but at the two large apples I held in my other hand. When John’s not at work, he’s an epicure with a well-trained palate. He was exactly the person I needed. I sat down, arranging the objects on the table between us. “We’re going to do a little experiment,” I said.

“As you know, this is the second year of SweeTango—the controversial new apple from the University of Minnesota. It’s touted as even better than my beloved favorite, Honeycrisp.”

“I have here two apples,” I continued. “One is a Honeycrisp. One is a SweeTango. We’re going to try them, talk about what we taste, and decide which one is better. Then I’ll tell you which is which. I’m too biased to be objective, so I’m interested to hear your opinion.”

John was in.

We started by looking at the apples. They were lovely, their rosy red skins striated with yellowish green. The only way to tell them apart was by size. “Not much difference,” John said.

I cut each in half. One of the apples had yellower flesh than the other. The second apple had a hurt spot in the center, but we dismissed that as unimportant. Texture appeared otherwise identical.

We tasted the first apple. Good crunch! We both found it very sweet, but it also had a contrasting acidic kick. “Nice tang,” John remarked. The flavors were high, sharp, and bright, with a cidery undertone. John gave his approval, and I agreed.

On to apple number two. Upon biting in, John exclaimed, “This has a grapey flavor to it.” He was right. Though sweet and equally crunchy as the first apple, the flavor was more muted and rounded. It was a softer, fruitier taste. Another very good apple, we concluded.

“So,” I asked, “which is better?”

John guessed that the first apple was Honeycrisp and declared that he liked it better.

I smiled sadly. I agreed with John’s judgment. The bright, tangy apple was indeed the tastier of the two. But he guessed wrong: it wasn’t the Honeycrisp.

Cue the music:

Dang you, SweeTango, I hate you
Like I hate the sun in the sky.
I hate you so bad, I hate your mom and your dad,
I hate you so much I could cry.

Dang you, SweeTango, I hate you
Like I hate the stars up above.
They don’t have to flaunt you, I hate you ‘cause I want you
Even more than the one that I love.

Open Letter to Target

It’s my blog, so I get to go off-topic sometimes. Fellow food lovers, I have to get something off my chest.

Dear Target:

I’ve been your loyal customer for literally all my life. As a kid growing up in Minnesota, I formed some of my earliest shopping-related memories in the speckled white linoleum aisles of Duluth’s Target store. In college, that store was my go-to place for everything. Now that I’m climbing onto the bottom rung of middle age, I can’t think of a store I like better. That’s why it breaks my heart to tell you I’ll never shop at Target again.

There are so many reasons why I love your brand and your stores. There’s the merchandise, of course, and the prices. I’ve smugly identified with your cultivated image of the Target shopper: smart and fun; stylish, yet approachable. Yes. I am soooo much cooler than people who shop at discount stores.

I can’t tell you how many times I have defended you to opponents of big-box retail. “Target is different,” I’d say. “They treat their employees like people.” (I know this because as a cash-strapped young adult, I had a second job at the Knollwood Mall store in St. Louis Park.) I have advocated for you to people who think you are corporate drones. “Target cares about communities,” I’d argue. “They give a percentage of their profits to local charities. They send cadres of volunteers.”

And of course, your support for queer people and their causes is legendary. Target has long been a presence at the Minnesota AIDS Walk; AIDS is still popularly, though wrongly, thought of as a gay disease. Target takes up a big corner of Loring Park at Pride every summer. And no queer Target corporate employee needs to work in the closet, as you (inexplicably, still) have a 100% rating from HRC.

Over the years, you’ve made it clear your queer customers and employees are important to you. It’s just as clear that they are not as important as the possibility of an economic climate that might be a little more conducive to your financial growth. For me, your $150,000 campaign donation to a homophobe belied all the good you’ve ever done. I believed you when you said you’re sorry you gave the money. But I can’t help but notice that you did not ask for it back. And I cannot help but wonder if you’re planning to make another such donation in the future.

I have one political dream for my lifetime: to live in a country where I am not a second-class citizen. To live in an America that holds good to the promises in our Constitution: that full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state. That Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. That no state shall make or enforce any law which shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

If I shop at Target, Target will make a profit. And I have no indication that Target will not give some of that profit to politicians who work to defeat my dream. That’s why I cannot spend another cent with you. I will be paying a lot more for prescriptions, for shampoo, for patio furniture and sunscreen and snow shovels and antifreeze and socks and dish soap and alarm clocks. But I won’t be helping you fund my demonization and continued marginalization. That’s what you bought with the money you made while we were doing business together. You’ve betrayed your own policies and you’ve betrayed me.

Honestly, I did expect more.