When I went to the list to try and find something, I realized that I’ve been fretting about graduate school too much to even update the list properly. It was mostly full of desserts. But near the bottom, I found a recipe I dug up online ages ago that I’d felt too intimidated to make. . . UNTIL NOW. It was a recipe from Post Punk Kitchen that modified a recipe in Clean Eating for Red Lentil Thai Chili. I’d avoided it for so long because of the Thai red curry paste and the coconut milk — both things I’m not used to and thus terrifying. BUT NO LONGER.

The chili sounded like a tasty, spicy alternative to mix up your usual chili, and included some of my favorite things, like sweet potatoes, cilantro, and chili powder. The recipe also used a lot of canned things, which appeals to my lazy side. By the time I actually gotten round to making this recipe, I’d learned from my travels that Thai red curry paste is nothing to be afraid of — it’s super common and easy to find. Low-fat coconut milk, not so much. Apparently the makers of coconut milk want to keep that shit as high in fat as possible. I avoided a near disaster in Whole Foods where I almost bought the kind of coconut milk you put in your cereal, rather than the kind used in Thai food, just to find something low-fat.

At the suggestion of one of the commenters, I decided to cook the chili in my crock pot, rather than over the stove. I peeled and diced the potatoes, cut up garlic, and sliced the red pepper (leaving out the onion, of course). I sautéed the garlic and the pepper, then threw them and the sweet potatoes into the crock pot with the vegetable broth, lentils (I didn’t actually have red lentils, so I used green instead), and all the spices. It felt strange to be sautéing things at noon.

According to the mystery commenter, I was supposed to cook everything on low for about six hours, then add the cilantro and coconut milk and cook for another half-hour-ish. The problem was:

Whoops.

My crock pot was completely full. It hadn’t even occurred to me to measure this out and make sure it would actually fit. The actual, non-crock-pot recipe called for cooking the ingredients in a very specific order. I’d already poured them all in together, so there was no going back. I turned the crock pot on low, and hoped the stuff would maybe cook down a little bit, enough to add almost two cups of coconut milk.

It didn’t. Six hours later, the crock pot was, if anything, even more full than it had been when I started. I decided I’d ladle it out into my biggest pot. I had no idea how many cups my biggest pot could actually hold, so I just went for it.

Success!

To my amazement, it actually fucking worked, coconut milk and all. I let the soup simmer for another half an hour, until the coconut milk was heated all the way through.

I added a squeeze of lime, some salt and pepper, and a little extra cilantro on top. Mine doesn’t look as chili-like as the soup in the photo — the coconut milk thinned the broth out quite a bit. I was worried it would taste watery, but hot damn it was flavorful. I thought all the different spices and the coconut milk might make this a sort of flavor clusterfuck, but it was delicious. The lentils didn’t seem to be quite fully cooked — they hadn’t gotten as soft as I wanted. Next time, I’d cook this on high for an hour and then cook it on low for a few more hours. And cut it by a third. In order to get the more chili-like texture, I could always make it like the recipe actually suggests. But in the end, the reheated leftovers thickened up well. Following recipes is for squares.

—

Jill Kolongowski is a writer and editor living in San Francisco. When she’s not cooking, running, or reading, she sometimes blogs at jillkolongowski.com. Follow her on Twitter at @jillkolongowski.

For those hot summer days:

Other than Jill’s Kolongowski’s recommendation of Julia Child’s My Life in Paris (which is both an amazing book and actually about a lot more than just Child’s life in Paris), the most enjoyable food book you can add to your summer reading list is Bill Buford’s Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. Formerly Fiction Editor at The New Yorker, Buford leaves his magazine job to learn about cooking in Mario Batali’s restaurant Babbo shortly before the release of The Babbo Cookbook. It’s a time when the restaurant is both preparing for fresh critical scrutiny and tweaking the menu to move beyond the soon-to-be-published set of recipes. No one in the kitchen has the time or patience for a rank amateur in their midst, and Buford has to make the most of it — which he does with humor, humility, and aplomb. Heat is a welcome counterpoint for those of us put off a bit by the overwhelming bravado of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, and things just get better when Buford heads off to Italy to study with some of Batali’s mentors.

For those stormy summer nights:

There’s actually some really amazing stuff in even the biggest mainstream comic books right now. Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s work on Batman is unbelievable (and in a different venue, I’d have written that word in all-caps AND bold AND italics), Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang’s work on Wonder Woman is everything the New 52 promised to do, a magnificent re-imagining of a classic (but too-often underutilized) character — the character designs alone are worth cover price — and Gail Simone’s Batgirl is a remarkable and psychologically gripping take on Barbara Gordon that manages to preserve most of what was wonderful about Simone’s time writing the character as Oracle. (This is high praise coming from me. I was really disappointed that DC was abandoning Stephanie Brown in order to bring back the Barbara Gordon Batgirl, although, in fairness, I might just be the only person in the world who feels that way.)

But, assuming that you might not be the sort of person who visits a comic shop every month, let me recommend Grant Morrison’s current run on Batman, Inc. as the culmination of a story he’s been telling since 2006. Morrison is a writer whose work actually often reads better when it’s been collected into a trade volume where the reader can pick up all the visual and story clues he weaves together from month to month (which can often seem a bit obscure when you’re only getting 20ish pages at a time, with 30 or more days between installments). Morrison’s saga starts with Batman and Son (with a jaw-dropping first issue where Batman fights ninja man-bats in a Roy-Lichtenstein-inspired pop art exhibition), and continues in The Black Glove (with art by the no-less-than-absolutely-brilliant J. H. Williams III), Batman R.I.P., Batman & Robin Vol. 1: Batman Reborn (where Dick Grayson steps into the cape and cowl), Vol. 2: Batman vs. Robin, Vol. 3: Batman & Robin Must Die, and finally, the pre-New 52 Batman, Incorporated. (Completists will include Final Crisis and The Return of Bruce Wayne, but you can get away without reading those two. Just know that Bruce Wayne dies, sort of, and then comes back.)

Like many “difficult” writers, the trick to reading Morrison is to just keep going. With Morrison in particular, you’ll get totally lost if you worry about making sense of everything. I think the big secret is that Morrison spends a lot less time worrying about whether he makes sense than building and keeping up a sort of narrative cadence and momentum. When you really get into him, you don’t so much read as excavate, digging up all the things that you didn’t realize were there at first, and finding yourself pulled into the most neglected and maligned corners of a character’s history, suddenly shown (well, skillfully retconned) to have been the most interesting and important thing all along.

But, having said that, you don’t need to know anything about Grant Morrison or even Batman to pick up Batman and Son. (Although, good luck putting it down once you’ve started.)

For getting away from it all:

Being the sort of person who tends to talk about narrative video games, I’m going to recommend a game rather than a book on games. (If you’re looking for a fun AND smart book on video games, there’s always Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives, which I’ve written about before, or you can do what I do and crib from The Brainy Gamer‘s bookshelf.)

If you haven’t played it yet, go download Thatgamecompany’s Journey right now. There’s a collector’s edition disc coming out at the end of August (which will also include Flower and Flow), but don’t wait. Hell, download it now AND buy the disc in August. Anything to encourage people to make more games like this.

For the foreseeable future, Journey will only be available for the Playstation 3, so my apologies if you don’t own one. For everyone else, we can count the new Mass Effect 3 endings as narrative, right? Just for the summer?

—

Gavin Craig is co-editor of The Idler. You can follow him on Twitter at @craiggav.

A few months later, I saw that nectarines were finally back on the shelves. It was time to grocery shop and to commence panicking.

The gist of the recipe was to slice up the polenta, grill it along with the chicken, and then grill the nectarines and mix those up with the blackberries to make a strange salsa with cilantro and hot sauce. I was already starting off on the panicky side because we don’t have an actual grill to cook with, only a George Foreman. I set up the grill on the counter and went to work.

The first thing to do was halve the nectarines and remove the pits. As it turns out, nectarines would really rather not be parted from their pits. The first one I tried got hopelessly mangled, and even after some internet research on how to actually do it, I still came close to ruining them all.

Poor things.

Next, I started to chop the blackberries. Blackberries are also reluctant to be chopped. I managed to splash purple juice all over myself and all over the kitchen. Several hours later, I found purple splashes on several of the kitchen outlets and on the inside of my arm.

Next up was to rub the chicken and the polenta with a cumin mixture. Before I started, I turned on the grill to heat up for a few minutes. I was feeling good; the chicken was ready for the grill and I sliced the polenta so that it could go on next. While I waited for the grill to heat up, I thought I’d be a fucking efficient chef and multitask by chopping the cilantro and squeezing the tablespoon of lime juice for the salsa. I looked over to check if the light on the grill had gone off, and smoke was pouring out of the sides of the grill. Apparently George Foremans are way more efficient than I am.

I yelled something like FIRE and unplugged the grill. I hadn’t even added any food and I had already managed to burn something. In an ideal world, I could put all the things on the grill at once, but the Foreman was way too small, so I’d have to tag-team the polenta and chicken and nectarines on and off the grill and it was all becoming so complicated I wanted to dump it all in the trash and order a pizza. But nectarines are expensive and I’d already nearly set the apartment on fire, so things could only get better.

After 8 years of dating, Charlie has a fine-tuned ability to sense my building panic and to help me calm myself before I start getting upset that EVERYTHING IS RUINED. When he saw me frantically running around and opening windows to keep the smoke detector from going off, he came over and casually put the nectarines on the grill. I had a sous chef.

One by one, Charlie helped me to grill all the things that needed to grill while I mixed the nectarines, blackberries, lime juice, cilantro, salt, and hot sauce for the fruit salsa. I didn’t know how I felt about hot sauce with fruit, but I was getting too hungry to care.

Grilled nectarines.

Grilled polenta slices.

In the end, I was more of an assistant, chopping and mixing things while Charlie did all of the actual cooking. For a hot minute I thought about feeling like a failure, but in reality I was just happy to be as far away from the smoking grill as possible. Once everything was finished, we put the chopped chicken on top of the polenta slices, and topped it with the salsa.

As we sat down to eat, the power blinked and then went out. If I’d been flying around trying to manage everything on my own, I wouldn’t have been able to finish cooking at all. We lit candles and sat on the couch to eat. Even without power, we had a dinner to eat and I’d had a chef to keep me from melting down or setting things on fire. I was all ready to feel adorable and accomplished.

Instead, the dinner sort of sucked. Between the cumin, the hot sauce, and the cilantro, there were too many strong flavors battling it out for superiority. I think the salsa was supposed to be a spicy/sweet combination, but the blackberries and the nectarines weren’t sweet enough to balance out the hot sauce and salt. Next time it might be better to just go ahead, give up, and order pizza. If we’re going to be nursing heartburn in the candlelight, I’d rather have eaten pizza.

—

Jill Kolongowski is a writer and editor living in San Francisco. When she’s not cooking, running, or reading, she sometimes blogs at jillkolongowski.com. Follow her on Twitter at @jillkolongowski.

But I started to get sick of those recipes. We always keep a few packages of shelf-stable gnocchi in the cupboard to make gnocchi with chard and white beans, but when I went to make it last week, I realized I was groaning about the idea of eating it again. That recipe makes a TON of leftovers that don’t taste as good as the fresh stuff, and I just did not want to be eating that shit for the next week. Not to mention the sort of middle-aged sadness of doing the same thing over and over again and aren’t I supposed to be young and doing new things and OMG WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME. Eventually the fear of monotony won out over my lazy ass, and I decided to break out of the rut and find something new.

None of that changes the fact that I already had gnocchi in my cupboard and that gnocchi is delicious. Lately I’ve been sidelined from working out by a fucking TOE injury, so I’ve been trying to eat more vegetables to keep myself from losing all the health. I normally sauté some zucchini in olive oil when I make honey-soy broiled salmon, but otherwise I have no idea what to do with it. I found this recipe for gnocchi with zucchini ribbons (?) and parley brown butter from eatingwell.com. I had no idea what zucchini ribbons were or how butter got brown, but it sounded pretty so I went with it.

I wanted to get out of the rut but I’m still lazy, so I also chose this recipe because it doesn’t have a lot of ingredients: zucchini, tomatoes, gnocchi, parsley, butter, parmesan cheese, some spices, and I swapped out the shallots for garlic because ew shallots. To make the zucchini ribbony, the recipe said to use a mandoline slicer. I have no idea what that is, so I just used a potato peeler. I sliced off the ends of the zucchini first so I could stand it up, and cut thin slices downward until I got to the seeds. I didn’t expect mine to look as good as the picture, but they did look pretty cute, if sort of unsettlingly fish-like.  I chopped everything else up while I boiled the gnocchi.

Next, I had to brown the butter. The recipe said to cook it for about two minutes until it starts to brown. That sounded straightforward until I actually started doing it, and then I got worried that “brown” was too close to burn and that I wouldn’t know the difference and then EVERYTHING would be RUINED. While the butter started to melt, I furiously started googling “what does browned butter look like please help” and found something of Alton Brown’s. Most people on the internet, including Alton, seemed to be browning huge pots of butter for some nefarious purpose, whereas I was only doing a tiny slice.

Shrug?

After a few minutes of running between my computer and the stove, I decided to wing it. I waited until after the butter was foamy, when it looked maybe a little bit golden, and decided that was good enough for me. Anything cooked in butter is going to taste fine, anyhow. I added in the cute zucchini:

Aw.

From then on, the rest of the recipe moved super quickly, only cooking each ingredient for a minute or two before adding the next. The strangest thing about this recipe was that it wanted me to add nutmeg. NUTMEG. Isn’t that like, for coffee and hot cider and desserts? But I figured the people at Eating Well probably know what they’re doing, so I stirred it in along with a few red pepper flakes, like some of the commenters suggested.

LADIES AND GENTS — I cannot tell you how effing tasty this is. I don’t know whether it was the nutmeg or if browning the butter makes it extra delicious, but it was so good I made it again the next night. The recipe is supposed to be 4 servings but Charlie and I ate the entire panful in one sitting. The zucchini hardly tastes like a vegetable at all; it was almost like a sort of noodle. Even the picky 8-year-old version of me could probably have been tricked into eating this. I might use a little bit less parsley next time, but even that is barely worth mentioning. Instead of being my usual modest self I could not shut up about how good this was and how awesome I am. I was happy to be out of my rut, but I’ll gladly climb into a new, butter-filled one.

—

Jill Kolongowski is a writer and editor living in San Francisco. When she’s not cooking, running, or reading, she sometimes blogs at jillkolongowski.com. Follow her on Twitter at @jillkolongowski.

Because of my irrational breakfast rules, I was never interested in biscuits and gravy for breakfast. While I love biscuits, I could not handle the thought of gravy in the morningtime. I realize that it’s gravy made with breakfast sausage, but I couldn’t separate it from the kind of gravy that belongs on turkey and mashed potatoes, and that kind of gravy should get the right the fuck out of my breakfast.

Then I stumbled on this recipe for homemade biscuits and vegetarian sausage gravy. I’m not a vegetarian, but I love Morning Star’s sausage patties because they’re easy to make and a little bit healthier than regular sausage. The pictures on that blog post looked so amazing, they sold me. More often than not, I reject food outright for no good reason at all, so I decided to give this a try.

First came Alton Brown’s biscuits. I’d never made biscuits from scratch before, and the recipe was asking me to do some awfully strange things. I read and reread the recipe to remember what to do. First, I had to mix the fats (butter and shortening) with the dry ingredients WITH MY HANDS. I had no idea what I was doing. I sort of vaguely smooshed the stuff around until it seemed mixed, though it was hard to tell. Then, I made a well in the middle of the bowl for the chilled buttermilk, as instructed:

I stirred the dough until it was just combined, and plopped it onto the cutting board. In order to keep the biscuits fluffy, you’re not supposed to knead the dough very much at all. I got extremely paranoid about over-kneading because WHAT IF THE WHOLE THING IS RUINED. I formed the dough into a circle (a challenge because the dough was so sticky it didn’t want to move where I wanted), and asked Charlie if it was one inch thick.

“No,” he said, “That’s less than an inch.” I have such poor spatial reasoning I’m incapable of seeing what an inch looks like without getting out a ruler. I folded the dough over, but the flour from the cutting board kept the two halves from sticking together. I immediately started swearing and complaining that I’d screwed it up. The dough did not look cute at all.

The oven was already preheated and there was no point in quitting while I was so far along. Apparently there’s some sort of tool you can use to cut the biscuits into even circles, but I didn’t know such a thing existed. Instead I used a cup to make biscuit slices, putting the leftover scraps together each time to make new biscuits. They were wildly inconsistent.

Into the oven they went, and I started to make the gravy. I cooked the Morning Star sausage patties, crumbling them up as I went, and put them on a plate off to the side. The recipe told me to whisk the flour in with the butter once the butter started foaming. But the pan was so hot from the sausage that the butter started foaming almost instantly, some of it burning in the center of the pan. I panicked and dumped the flour and milk in at once, whisking like it would all be okay if I just WHISKED FAST ENOUGH.

Meanwhile, I’d messed up the timing, and the biscuits were done earlier than I expected. But they looked delicious, if a little lopsided, so I started to feel like perhaps I hadn’t screwed up everything.

It turns out gravy is really simple, guys. I thought you had to add a bunch of spices or corn starch or something, but it’s just milk, butter, flour, salt, and pepper. I added the sausage back to the gravy, and let it thicken. I called Charlie over multiple times to check if the gravy looked edible, since he’s much more of a gravy expert than I am. Eventually, it started to look like it should.

We split open a biscuit, and between how fluffy they turned out and the way the gravy smelled, I was willing to admit I’d been totally wrong about sausage gravy.

I worried that it might be bland with just salt and pepper for spices, but hot damn was this hearty and delicious. I wanted to put on some flannel and go split logs when I was done. My apologies to sausage gravy for shunning you for so long. We will have to make up for lost time.

—

Jill Kolongowski is a writer and freelance editor living in San Francisco. When she’s not cooking, running, or reading, she blogs at jillkolongowski.com. Follow her on Twitter at @jillkolongowski.

As usual, though, I decided to bake my heart out and charm Charlie with something neither of us should be eating. In general, we eat pretty healthy, so I like to use as much butter and sugar as possible when I make a treat. I’d had this recipe for Double Rainbow Coconut Cupcakes from the wonderful Bake It in a Cake website saved on my computer for months. If you would like to salivate over some amazing recipes, go there. She literally bakes things into cakes and cupcakes. It’s genius.

The recipe is immensely complicated, which is part of the reason I chose it. Baking feels natural to me — with all its exact measurements, way easier than cooking — so I like to try something difficult and see if I can do it without screwing up too badly. And this recipe has MARZIPAN RAINBOWS baked inside coconut cupcakes, topped with buttercream frosting and rainbow coconut. It needed three and a half sticks of butter. The only answer is yes.

A warning: If you want to make this yourself, marzipan is EXPENSIVE. I paid $14 for two packages, which only made 12 cupcakes. Another warning: Cream of coconut is near impossible to find. I tried three different grocery stores, including Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. On the morning I planned to make the cupcakes, I drove back to Safeway with my hair disheveled and without having eaten breakfast and tried to recall all the research I’d done. At last, I found a sad, discounted squeeze-bottle of coconut cream next to the liquors — in addition to baking, it’s also used to make piña coladas. I went home triumphant, rolled up my sleeves, and began.

Marzipan is almond candy dough. I divided it into six sections, and started to dye them. I had no idea how much food coloring to use, so just squeezed some on and started smooshing it around like Play-doh. The red made my hands look like I’d murdered someone. It was fun as hell, even though it took an immense amount of time. I kept having to stop and wash my hands to keep the colors from bleeding and to sprinkle powdered sugar to keep the marzipan from getting too sticky.

Then, I had to roll out the each of the colors into long strips, which I’d then stack in order to make the rainbows. I don’t have a rolling pin, so I did the civilized thing and rolled the dough into little snakes with my hands, then used a plastic cup and my fingers to roll it flat. I’m completely incapable of measuring anything spatially, so I used a tape measure to make sure each strip was as close as possible to the 12 inches x 2 inches the recipe recommended. The dough stretched and broke a lot, and I worried that the rainbows wouldn’t look very cute and ALL WOULD BE LOST.

Pre-trimmed rainbow.

I trimmed the end and the sides with a butter knife to make right angles, anxiety-eating most of the leftover dough as I went. Then, I cut the rainbows into 12 pieces. I shouldn’t have worried, because they turned out so fucking cute.

The recipe had called for toasted coconut. While on my quest for cream of coconut, I’d looked for pre-toasted coconut, but I have no idea if that actually exists. I never did find it. How hard could it be to toast my own coconut? While I was playing with the dough, I’d put a cup of coconut on a baking sheet and put it in the oven for five minutes at a time, according to the internet. I used a near-empty bag of coconut that had been in my pantry for longer than I care to admit — I figured it would be safe after it had been toasted, then baked. The coconut was done after only ten minutes. It probably could have toasted longer, but I was afraid it would burn.

Next, I mixed the dough and poured it into the cupcake pan, two tablespoons at a time. I used skim milk rather than the whole milk the recipe called for, as if that made up for the three and a half sticks of butter. I’d also used wheat flour — not because it’s healthy, but because I’m lazy and it’s what I had on hand. Then, I pressed the rainbows into the batter. They looked enormous, especially on top of the two tablespoons of batter in each cup. The cups nearly overflowed even before I topped the rainbows with dough.

Oh dear.

The recipe told me I shouldn’t press the rainbows all the way down to the bottom, but I had to press them in a little to keep the dough from running over. All my alarm bells were going off like YOU ARE SCREWING IT ALL UP but there was no stopping the rainbow cupcake train. I put the cupcakes in the oven.

Ominous, very full cups.

While the cupcakes baked, I started to dye the coconut for the topping. I almost skipped this step because it’s so pointless, but I knew it would be so effing adorable that I couldn’t resist. My food coloring is made of gel; I couldn’t get it to mix with the coconut. I decided to mix the gel with water, and dumped the water in the coconut. It was pretty and soggy. The coconut probably wasn’t supposed to be wet, but at least it looked good.

I whipped together the butter and powdered sugar to make the buttercream frosting, and checked on the cupcakes. They were HUGE. I sat in front of the oven and watched the batter creep toward the edges of the pan like it was going to fall off a cliff. It was all very dire. After 25 minutes, I pulled the cupcakes out. The kitchen smelled incredible, but they were some ugly, lopsided fuckers. I could see the rainbow peeping through the wrappers and worried that the marzipan had melted.

It's okay, inner beauty is what counts.

Feeling disheartened, worried that I’d wasted too much time and money on this ridiculous idea, I was decidedly un-Valentiney. Once the cupcakes were cool, I frosted them and sprinkled the dyed coconut on top in miniature rainbows. They were cute as fuck, even if they still looked a little wonky and I had no idea how they would taste.

Turns out, there was a reason to warn against pushing the rainbows all the way down. The marzipan had sank to the bottom of the cupcake and fused to the wrappers. If you were careful, you could peel the wrapper off and only eat a minimal amount of paper.  But dear sweet Saint Valentine did they taste incredible.

Aftermath.

It took me three hours to bake and nearly 45 minutes to clean up the kitchen, but I believe Charlie’s exact words were, “Holy shit.” That’s love. Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone.

Postscript: For next time, I’d use white flour. It would be so much prettier that way. I’d also cut the rainbows much smaller so they won’t stick to the bottom, and make smaller cupcakes. I ended up with a lot of extra dough, but I’d run out of cupcake wrappers. I had so much extra that I attempted to make more plain cupcakes AND a cake, both of which stuck to the pan. I ended up digging pieces of them out with my fingers and dipping them in the extra buttercream, then throwing the rest away. It was after midnight before I awoke from my sugar coma and was able to eat normal food.

—

Jill Kolongowski is a freelance writer and editor living in San Francisco. When she’s not cooking, running, or reading, she blogs at jillkolongowski.com. Follow her on Twitter at @jillkolongowski.

Unlike your normal griddle-based breakfast joint, The Original Pancake House is known for its liberal use of the oven. Their baked omelets are unlike any omelete I’ve ever had (in a good way — they claim to mix in a bit of pancake batter), and their signature puffy Dutch Baby pancakes are front and center on the web site.

And the big secret about that glorious, puffy, golden brown, marvel of a pancake? It’s incredibly easy to make, and a handy dish to have in your repertoire when you’re looking to impress someone, maybe over breakfast.

The whole thing is really nothing less than culinary magic, where with very little effort, you can produce something spectacular.

I’d recommend (and normally use) Betty Crocker’s straightforward version, but perhaps in a backhanded attempt to prove that simpler is better, I gave the Cook’s Country version a try.

The oven pancake is basically a big, eggy popover. (For more on popover theory, see Alton Brown parts 1 and 2) And like a popover, the one thing that you absolutely must do without fail is to heat the pan before you pour in the batter. The batter itself is fairly forgiving — you can be technical like Cook’s Country or basic like Betty without too much difference in the final pancake, but if the pan isn’t hot, you won’t get a rise.

There’s not much to add to the recipes before you pour the batter in the pan. Unlike a soufflé (or in my house, waffles), you don’t need to worry about preserving the beaten egg whites. Unlike normal pancakes, you don’t need to worry about losing the rise from the batter sitting too long once the baking powder meets moisture. Betty will tell you not to overbeat, but you have a pretty big margin of error.

Cook’s Country called for a 450º oven to Betty’s 400º, and vegetable oil to grease the pan instead of melted butter. I used canola oil, and it was surprisingly finicky. By the time my batter was ready, the oil had apparently spent more time than it wanted above its smoke point and turned green. It didn’t affect the flavor at all (the oil doesn’t really incorporate into the batter), but it didn’t exactly look appetizing.

Happily, that didn’t get in the way of the magic happening.

If making a good impression is your goal, make sure that everyone is in the kitchen. The pancake will deflate slightly as it cools, so the big dramatic moment will be when you pull it out of the oven.

Sprinkle some lemon juice and powdered sugar, and brush up on waffles for next time.

—

Gavin Craig is co-editor of The Idler. You can follow him on Twitter at @craiggav.

I find order in a clean and organized kitchen. Cooking anything is so much better when you don’t have to clean off the countertop first. In our kitchen, we have a mishmash of plates and bowls from different sets. I stack them so that the dishes from the same set are together. Cups are organized by size — juice glasses, wine glasses, water cups, tall glasses. Mugs are in the cabinet over the coffeemaker. Water bottles sit on top of the refrigerator. Pots and pans are stacked in the cupboard by size. Even the spoons in their compartment are divided because I use the big spoons and the little spoons for different things (small for ice cream and desserts, or for stirring coffee, things I want to savor; big for huge bites of cereal or for mixing).

When things are messy or out of order it makes me feel dirty and my brain feel all scrambled. This is a challenge in a shared kitchen where no one else is as anal as me. Here are my rules for keeping the kitchen in order. I’ve never been brave enough to actually tell them to anyone because I know it’s no one else’s business but mine to keep my brain in order, and I don’t want to be THAT GIRL.

Don’t leave dishes in the sink. If there isn’t a dishwasher, then we can talk. But if there is a dishwasher, fucking put the dishes in it. It’s RIGHT THERE. Don’t leave your half-eaten bowl of cereal to get soggy, the old milk mixing with dirty dishwater and the food you rinse off later. Don’t let the dishes pile up so much that you’re unable to use the faucet. By that point, the food will have gotten so crusty that the dishwasher won’t do any good and you’ll have to rewash them by hand anyway. Just. Put them in the dishwasher.

Don’t leave food in the sink. Good job; you’ve cleaned the dishes out of the sink. But at that point you must have gotten distracted because there are bits of food still hanging out in there. This is where you’re supposed to clean dishes. How can they be clean if there’s still food from who knows when in the sink? Fucking rinse out the sink.

Don’t load the dishwasher like an asshole. The dishwasher is a beautiful appliance. It’s meant for plates and bowls and glasses, NOT for the bowl in which you mixed pancake batter this morning. It’s also not meant for the pan you used to fry bacon. All the dishes will come out with little dried-on batter bits or will end up slimy, and you’ll have to run the machine again. Do you like doing dishes twice? I fucking don’t. Load the dishwasher like a logical human being so that as many dishes can fit in as possible. Maybe consider putting the plates in rows. There are even little holders for them! I’d much rather wash a few pots and pans than ten plates. Don’t be an asshole. Think ahead for maybe five seconds before you put things in the dishwasher.

Don’t leave spills. Everyone’s in a hurry, but it’s way easier to wipe up that coffee you just spilled. Otherwise you’ll have to scrub it off later, and by then who knows what’s happened to it. Does coffee curdle? I’d rather not find out. I don’t want to be scraping unidentified substances off the countertop with my fingernails.

Lest you think I’m using this column as a passive-aggressive way to call out current and former roommates, these are rules that I sometimes break, too. Sometimes I really just don’t want to wash the dishes right away and would rather lay on the couch instead. But there is nothing like a clean sink, a full cupboard, and a stack of clean bowls to make me feel like things are the way they should be. So, internet, these are the rules I use to keep order. What are yours?

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Jill Kolongowski is a freelance writer and editor living in San Francisco. When she’s not cooking, running, or reading, she blogs at jillkolongowski.com. Follow her on Twitter at @jillkolongowski.

I am excited about the new exhibit, but I’m not immune to the lure of a pilgrimage, and I wanted to see the kitchen in it’s original(ish) state before it gets repurposed.

Julia Child's kitchen at the Smithsonian

Julia Child is one of my cooking heroes. She’s a food icon in the U.S., but unlike most contemporary celebrity chefs, she was never a restauranteur. For all practical purposes, she didn’t even start cooking until her mid-30s — and you really should read her accounts of her disastrous first efforts in her memoir My Life in France. Child was, however, a force of nature. When she devoted herself to a task, she was unstoppable. Through hard work and force of will, she graduated from France’s Le Cordon Bleu cooking school — you should also read about Child’s struggles with the school’s headmistress, Madame Brassart — and almost immediately set to the task which would in one fashion or another consume the rest of her life, teaching beginners how to start cooking well.

This devotion to beginners and Child’s irrepressible joie de vivre are the secrets of her enduring popularity. Mastering the Art of French Cooking is famously written “for the servantless American cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, time schedules, children’s meals, the parent-chauffeur-den-mother syndrome, or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something good to eat.” Even that “on occasion” is essential. Child and her co-authors aren’t writing for people who never have to worry about money, waistlines, or children. Instead, Child is imagining the audience for her book as people like herself — people who are perhaps not (yet) accomplished cooks, but who want to eat and cook just a little better than they otherwise might, and just need a supportive teacher to help them get there.

And Child was born to be that teacher, telling us that it was okay if things didn’t quite go right, that it’s good to stretch ourselves in the kitchen. It’s not as hard as it seems, and, even better, it’s worth the time and the effort you put in. And perhaps best of all, we shouldn’t be afraid of using too much butter.

There’s more than a little evidence of Child’s impact even today. Her Mastering the Art of French Cooking is still on bookstore shelves next to the Joy of Cooking that Child so revered. (There are two — count ’em, two — copies of Joy on the shelf in Child’s kitchen.)

There are two volumes of Child’s The French Chef available on DVD, and you can still catch reruns of Child’s later series Baking with Julia on PBS. The latter was filmed in the 1990s, and Child is mostly an observer and kitchen assistant to the featured cooks. She’s much older than her French Chef days, with a pronounced stoop in her back, but the voice and personality are still there, and you can still catch her dipping her fingers in the chocolate if you pay attention.

There was of course, far more to Child than her cooking. If you dig a little deeper you’ll find that she was struggling with alcoholism during her French Chef days, and it’s tempting to attribute her bonhomie, as well as that famous dropped chicken, to the drinking. But it’s never really as simple as that. When Child escaped the bottle, she was still the same Julia, and it’s possible to watch her lifetime behind the camera and never dream that her struggles were so severe.

Child's OSS Emergency Signal Mirror

It’s entirely possible to eat well, to cook well, something really special every once in a while, and to be totally, completely awesome even if you never, ever let anyone know.

Child kept her OSS signal mirror in the junk drawer in her kitchen until the day she donated the room to the Smithsonian. As of yesterday, at least, they were still together.

Maybe that’s why Child always had a smile on her face. And if Julia was imagining writing for an audience like herself, then maybe we can imagine ourselves to be a little more like her as well. Maybe getting to know the kitchen a little better can mean being a little bit more awesome too.

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Gavin Craig is co-editor of The Idler. You can follow him on Twitter at @craiggav.

It’s just started to get chilly enough at night to leave frost in the morning, so I decided to celebrate my lack of seasonal affective disorder by making my mother’s homemade chicken and dumplings soup. my family normally spends Christmas Eve at my grandparents’ house, where my grandma cooks three different pots of soup (chicken noodle, chili, and clam chowder). We fill up on crackers and cheese and vegetables beforehand, but we eat two bowls of soup anyway. My grandfather is doing well, but he’s still recovering from surgery and needs to rest, so we’re giving my grandmother a break.

Instead, I wanted to create my own mini-Christmas. If chicken soup cures your sickness, chicken and dumplings soup is the effing elixir of youth. Not only do you have the warm broth and spices, but you have the soft, chewy dumplings. I’d prescribe this for most illnesses—heart, mind, body, whatever.

There’s no link to send you because this is a recipe I actually have written down on a card, in my mother’s handwriting, ending with the word “Yummm!” and a smiley face. I’d share it with you, but I don’t have my mom’s permission and frankly I’d like to keep it to myself. I’ll be coy with the details instead. This will be my only Grinchy moment, I promise.

First, I chopped up chicken, broccoli, carrots, and celery, and added them to a broth with cream of celery soup, some cloves and bay leaves.

To be honest, I was a little disappointed in the simplicity of the recipe. I’ve never watched my mother cook it, but I assumed she threw a bunch of ingredients together—a pinch of this and that, and it somehow came out perfect. Maybe this is part of getting older and realizing that your parents are actually people, but instead of thinking about it too hard, I put a lid on the broth to simmer.

I measured all the ingredients for the dumplings and stirred them into a bowl, then reread the recipe. I was supposed to have mixed the dry ingredients, then added the liquid ones. As usual, I immediately assumed the recipe would be a disaster and went about huffily mixing the dough, though I wondered what was even the POINT, now that it was ruined.

Ruined dough.

Next, the recipe told me to drop the dumplings into the spoon by the tablespoonful. I’d never learned the physics of dumplings, but I’d assumed they would drop in doughy little balls to the bottom of the pot. Not so. All the dumplings floated on the surface of the broth like Michigan’s winter cloud cover. I couldn’t even see the broth. How were they going to cook if they weren’t even sitting in the broth?

Help.

At this point, I wanted to call my mom and cry a little bit over my dumplings and make her promise me lots of Christmas chocolate in my stocking, but it was 11 p.m. in Michigan. After keeping an eye on the expanding dumplings for ten minutes, I turned the heat down, smushed them down with the pot lid, and let it cook.

HELP.

After only a few minutes, I heard a sizzle from the stovetop, meaning the pot had boiled over. I love having an electric stove for all reasons but this—as soon as you spill something, it burns to a crisp on the hot surface and starts smoking and smelling all sorts of terrible. Even with my slight phobia of burning things, I wasn’t entirely surprised. What more was to be expected from doomed dumplings? I switched burners, turned on the fan, and waited a few more minutes.

Somehow, the dumplings cooked. Those that had been pushed to the bottom of the pan were a little doughier, those at the top were fluffy. I couldn’t imagine how that had happened, when most of the dumplings seemed to be above the broth’s surface, but I didn’t question it and ladled out two bowls. As a kid, I used to fill my bowl with more dumplings than soup, and my mom’s recipe had the ideal ratio, with a bite of dumpling for every spoonful. As usual, if I listen to my mom, everything will turn out okay.

I’m writing this from a plane, watching the red rock terrain change to snowy Rocky Mountain peaks, which shrink into plains where Santa would have no sleigh problems. I wish you warmth and a full belly for the holidays and the new year.

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Jill Kolongowski is a freelance writer and editor living in San Francisco. When she’s not cooking, running, or reading, she blogs at jillkolongowski.com. Follow her on Twitter at @jillkolongowski.