Partly it was the 12 deliveries of kale involved in last year’s CSA, and partly it just seems like the thing everyone is doing. Must be  zeitgeist.  But mostly it’s because I’m writing a cookbook called the All New Square Foot Gardening Cookbook. This year, if all goes as planned, I’ll be growing my own in my Square Foot Garden.

It was fate, I believe. In November or December we decided not to sign up for a share from a local organic farm. Just not enough of what we like (broccoli, green beans, fennel, carrots) and lots of vegetables that make the family grimace. I like okra, but they don’t. I like the occasional eggplant, and the family will eat it once a year, which left about 10 more to deal with. Etcetera with squash, kale, and more. Every Tuesday night was a cooking marathon to make room in the fridge for the next delivery. Every dinner time was a power struggle to get even a bite or two past the lips of Sweet Cheeks. I know, I’m a bad parent. Pass the margaritas. And hand me that lighter.

In February, the garden spot — there’s only one in my shady yard — was plowed up. In mid-March I was days away from starting a row of lettuces when I was approached about writing a cookbook to follow the zillion-selling All New Square Foot Gardening. Was I familiar with the book? You bet — I had a job at a Waldenbooks in the mid-1980s, and we sold a lot of SFG in its previous edition.

Since I’m writing a book about gardening, I need to walk the talk. I built garden boxes from patio bricks that were pulled up last year for our master bedroom addition. Most people build wooden boxes, but I’m going for decorative as well as functional. Plus, I can’t build stuff. If I’d been a pioneer on the prairie, I’d have frozen to death before I got a cabin built.

Because I can’t build stuff, the most daunting task was building the uprights. The author of All New Square Foot Gardening, Mel Bartholomew, is a genius (more about him in another post) and developed a method of growing vine crops vertically. It’s incredible — cantaloupes hanging 4 feet in the air. They develop a hugely thick stem to support themselves. Anyway, Mel’s frame design is simple enough for most people, but I’m an idiot if the task involves more than a drill and a screwdriver. I didn’t have to decide for several weeks, thank goodness, because the winter squash and cucumber plants sulked in the cool, overcast and rainy days.

Finally, though, the rain stopped and the sun returned, and the day of reckoning came. I had to build the supports for the upward-training of the cukes and squash. And hey! It went exactly like the directions said: just a screwdriver and maybe a hacksaw.

The first cucumber is one inch long. The first five arugula salads have been eaten. So far, so good. I’ll be writing about the garden this summer, probably every 10 days or so. Drop by again soon — I’ll have something for you.

I’m nothing if not curious and tight-fisted.

For a couple of years at the start of my cooking career, I made mediocre bread from Mollie Katzen’s book, The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. It starts with a sponge, which is a mixture of yeast, water and flour that bubbles into a puffy foam. Then you mix that puffy foam with 1 cup of liquid and 3 cups of flour and the other ingredients, like flour, sugar, eggs or butter and it puffs up the whole mixture.

Sponge is an old-world way to bake, and presumes you’re skimping on yeast. It just takes a little yeast, less than a spoonful, to make a sponge. The yeast cells multiply in the flour-water mixture, creating more yeast and a greater volume. You can save a little of the sponge from one baking session to another so you always have yeast on hand. Bread was raised that way for hundreds of years until someone figured out how to make active dry yeast.

Unfortunately, it makes dry bread. To me, anyway. Since I didn’t know there was a way to fix that problem, I just kept making dry bread. After all, that’s what butter and cheese are for — making dry bread edible. Katzen came through town on a tour to promote the 20th anniversary of the Moosewood Cookbook, I told  her about my dry results. She said I wasn’t the first person to tell her that.

Looking back, it’s possible that any number of other things were going wrong — sorry Mollie! — but when I switched cookbooks, the breads undeniably turned out better.  The Joy of Cooking has good basic bread recipes, and James Beard’s bread recipes are just about my favorite. When I want to make something Southern or colonial, I use Bill Neal’s Biscuits, Spoonbread and Sweet Potato Pie. It’s the book I used for making the anadama bread.

The English muffins were made from Beatrice Ojakangas’s Great Whole Grain Breads, about which I’ve gushed many times. Nearly every recipe in it gives great results, which is really kind of a feat, since she’s working with dozens of cultures and dozens of different flours, bread shapes, rising and baking techniques.The book hasbeen in andout of print twice, and is now back in print. If you’ve ever published a book, you knowhow easy it is to get lost in the crowd, and how good the book has to be to get back into print, twice.

But I digress. Some time between the anadama bread and the English muffins, the kilo bag of SAF Instant yeast sort of lost its fizz. I never pay attention to expiration dates, especially on yeast. Because archaeologists, like, find yeast in the pharoahs’ tombs that can still be used to make beer. So I didn’t hesitate to buy the kilo of yeast in mid-2006. I really like SAFG yeast — it powers dough mightily upward, smells better than other yeasts and gives that nice smell to the bread.

Then the amount of baking in my house slowed greatly for work and dietary reasons.

When I cracked open the yeast again for English muffins in the fall of 2008, Inoticed that most of it didn’t “bloom” in warm water. So I tried again, using warmer water and setting the bowl on a warm stove. A little more bloomed. But then the dough didn’t rise well — after 3 hours it still hadn’t doubled. I used it for English muffins, so that worked well.

But I’m still left with about a pound of lame yeast. WTF? What to do with lame yeast? Anyone else ever have this problem?

People ask me, “What does a cookbook editor do?”

And now I have a good answer that everyone can see.

It started before Christmas when my friends and CSA-splitters Chris and Lisa suggested that we buy a gorgeous 7-bone rib roast, split it, and dry-age it ourselves. Dry-aged beef is not that commonly found, because it’s time-consuming to produce, requires a lot of individual attention, and the USDA regulations make it even more challenging. When you can find it, the price is astronomical. So, sure, I’m game to take a $10.99/pound roast and turn it into a $45/pound roast using only a spare fridge, a calibrating thermometer, and some clean kitchen towels.

Aging beef seems easy enough, too, and kind of foolproof if you keep changing the cloth towels. You don’t even really have to pay attention. I once saw a beef slab in a meat-aging locker in Vegas that had developed mold on the fat cap. Right there in public. From a big name steakhouse. I assume it was aging to that state on purpose — surely a fermenting steak is a boast: “We know meat so well that you can trust us that this $100 mold-kissed steak is going to be the best thing you ever, ever ate, if you’re lucky enough at the blackjack tables to afford it.” It looked pretty good to me, anyway: I’m a fan of mold, yeast and fermentation — it’s the magical heatless cooking method.

Chris was using Alton Brown’s technique, for dry-aging and then cooking the meat. In typically stylish Alton Brown fashion, there’s a luscious sage jus that is made after the roast is complete. But I used Merle Ellis‘ method for aging, because I had read it often enough to feel familiar and comfortable with it.

I aged my beef just 5 days. (Merle’s method allows for up to 21 days of aging.) By then, my beef was dry on the outside, had clearly shrunk in volume, was sort of hard and unappetizing  in places. The fat covering was waxy, not moist, and if I’d never seen the Vegas steak, I would have been a little worried. There was a little hitch at cooking time when I found that Merle’s technique didn’t include a recipe for cooking the beef, so I just went to Alton Browns recipe. Easy decision.

And here is where the editing part comes in. Brown’s recipes can be a little over the top. So I skipped the excruciatingly detail part that calls for a new, clean, azalea-size terra cotta pot for roasting the beef. A roasting pan and 3 layers of aluminum foil would be fine. And after rubbing the roast with oil then packing on some kosher salt and rubbing in pepper, you put it into a cold oven, turn the temp to 250 degrees, put the roast in. And here are the rest of the directions, verbatim, from the Food Network site.

“Finally, place a probe thermometer into the center of the roast and set for 118 degrees. Put the roast and the bake-ware dish onto the pizza stone, cover with the terra cotta pot, and return to the oven. Turn the oven down to 200 degrees F and roast until internal temperature is achieved. Remove the roast and turn oven up to 500 degrees F. Remove the terra cotta lid and recover with heavy-duty foil. Allow the roast to rest until an internal temperature of 130 degrees F. is reached. “

So here’s an excruciating detail that would have been helpful: how long do you cook the damn thing? Would it be too much to ask for a ballpark figure?  Like, is it going to take 30minutes, 90 minutes or 5 hours? If it were a baked good or a casserole, you might guess based on experience. But if you have no experience of cooking 18-pound slabs of meat, and no experience with cooking at 200 degrees, you maybe at a loss. I know I was completely at sea, and I do this for a living. I put the roast in as the first guests were arriving at 5 p.m. Just guessing.

By 8 p.m. the guests were drunk but jolly, asking frequently about the entree, and really, really hungry. The meat thermometer, plunged into the center of the roast, read 74 degrees. My friend Lisanne, who is a shameless eater of steak at least once a week and knows cow flesh better than most people, called it: “Cut the ends off and give those to people who like it less rare. Let everyone else eat it rare.”

Of course, it was delicious, if raw. Iwent back to the site the next day to make sure I hadn’t just missed the directions. But it wasn’t just me — a lot of the comments on the site read like onefrom “Dorothy”: “Perfect, but took forever.” In her case, 6 hours. It doesn’t seem like too much to ask of an editor to put the cooking time in the recipe. That’s what editors do. You shouldn’t have to read through the comments to figure out how long to cook something.

The next day, we finished the remaining roast — another couple of hours in the oven, then a 500-degree blast to create a crunchy crust. We’ll definitely get it right next time. If there is a “next time” when you’re talking about a $90 piece of meat during a recession.

I’m very particular about cookbook indexes. It’s not something most people think about, and you could say it’s a little strange to beobsessesd with indexes. But at a cookbook company, it’s not.  I want to find “barley pilaf” under “B,” even if it’s called Burlington Barley Pilaf or Joe’s Aunt Cindy’s Barley Pilaf. I wanted it to be listed as “Barley Pilaf, Aunt Cindy’s.”

For years, I’ve tried to hone my vision of a perfect index into a few sentences, such as “pity the poor reader” or “help a cook find things no matter how her thought process works.” I’ve also spent a lot of time explaining and justifying it to someone who thinks every dish should be under a heading by shape (casserole, burger, salad, pie), function (starters, side dishes, brunch) or flavor  profile (lemon, parsley, cheese), and that headings should be very general rather than very specific. Unfortunately this person controls the means of index production so the indexes appear with barley pilaf listed under “grains” or “side dishes.”

Some recipes should be listed by their full name, like “Passover Spice Cake,” in the “P” section or “Larb Gai” in the “l” section, in addition to a listing under “Cake” or “Salad,” for reasons that seem logical. Passover cakes need to stand out, Larb Gai is what it’s called on menus. The other indexing professional insists that if some recipe are to be listed by their titles as a single entry, then all recipes should be listed that way. Consistency is the hobgoblin — you can look up the rest of the quote, and it’s no less true, even if it was uttered by the lightweight Algernon Swinburne. You can sense that I’m treading carefully here.

This book, Jewish Cooking in America, has my favorite index. Dishes are listed under their full name, whether it’s Brooklyn Egg Cream, Grandma Lina’s Roast Goose, or Tschav, so if you happen to know the full name or the original ethnic name, you can find it there. But they’re also listed under “egg cream” and “sorrel.” Rather than a category called “Soup” that lists the soups, the category says “Soups, pages 305-310. And see individual listings.”

Here’s my cookbook withthe worst index.

One rule of indexing that is pretty indisputable is that if an ingredient is in the title, the recipe is indexed under that ingredient. Even a computer program can do that. Somehow, Spicy Tofu Omelet is indexed under “spicy” and “eggs” but not tofu. Since “eggs” isn’t in the title, it’s clear a human hand indexed this book. How could it have missed Tofu? Or did someone decide that tofu wasn’t a valid heading? Or did they run out of space?

Space is always a problem in an index, and when it is, the first thing to go is the entries by recipe title. Yet here, every recipe is listed by its title, no matter how unhelpful. Two dozen recipe titles begin with the word “Spicy,” so they’re listed that way. The word tells you something about the dish but doesn’t help identify it in the same way that adjectives like “Passover” or “Singaporan” help.

Recipes with “Name” titles like “Violet Oon’s Chile Sauce” or “Thai Cucumber Sauce” are listed under the name, and under “sauces” but not under chile sauce or cucumber sauce, as some other chile sauces and cucumber sauces are.

 If you feel queasy about people writing in books turn away, because the way I solved the index problem in the Southeast Asia Cookbook is to mark up the index myself. It looks like hell but I can find things.

I know it isn’t just me — you have a favorite or least favorite index, or at least you know what you like. I know you do.

I’m about to break Rule Number 2 of food writing: “No animals and food on the same page.” Sanitation thing.

I say this to prepare you for the photos you’re about to see. We have a strange cat, who came to us after a death in our extended families. She was one of a pair of rescued cats, and when the other cat met his maker, Gray Cat’s personality began to blossom. She’s very affectionate and well-socialized. She likes to be near people, meaning she stands directly behind or beside people, so you have to watch before you step. She wants to sit either on your person, or at the same height. So chairs at our house tend to be in pairs so the cat can sit with us. We call her “Bar.”

She understands the change of voice tone that signals a question, and will answer, because she assumes you’re asking whether she’d like a little of the gourmet canned cat food. Sweet Cheeks and I were playing 20 Questions. I was in one room and she was in another, shouting questions over the rattle of pans. Sweet Cheeks would lob a question, the cat assumed the question was directed her way, and mewed. Over and over. Hysteria ensued.

Lately, the cat is behaving strangely. Exhibit A: Usually an indoor cat, she’s spending day and night outside. Her coat is a little shaggy-looking and unkempt, and she grooms constantly. Exhibit B: Her appetite seems off, and by “off” I mean in every way.

For better light, I went outside to photograph Butterscotch (Squash) Bread (another of my deceptive foods) But what else are you gonna do with all those yellow squash in a squash-hating household?

From here, the photos tell the story. That’s a gray cat ear in the foreground.

You can clearly see the bite marks in the second-to-last photo. I guess the butterscotch flavor really does cover up the squash taste.

Oh, and Rule 1 is, “No diseases or body parts on the page with food.” You’d be surprised how many hospital auxiliaries do cookbooks to fund a kidney center. It’s the sidebars that get them every time.

If you’ve ever worked in publishing, you know the old joke that everyone’s an art director. Because everyone knows what appeals to him/her, and there’s no disputing taste. (Hey Diana, non est disputandum de gustibus!)

Same goes for recipe editing — everyone’s a recipe editor, because so many cooks feel they know the only proper way to express a particular technique. It makes my job challenging. There was the cookbook committee chairwoman from the mega-school whose headnotes invariably read, “This is great!” or the kicky variation, “This is great for families!” for 256 long pages. There was the civic group that declined to change a single recipe title, including the “One-Pot Dinner” that used a skillet and a soup pot, so if you can count, you’ll already know that’s two pots.

There was another committee that similarly clung to its titles, often in flagrant violation of a “no names in titles” rule designed to prevent unhelpful monikers like “Beth’s Cookies” and “Anne’s Steak” because what does that tell you about the steak? Or Beth? (And anyway, a lot of “Anne’s” recipes come directly from “Southern Living” or the Food Channel, so they’re not really “Anne’s,” are they?)

There was the cookbook where the headnote writer used the word “refreshing” in the headnotes of some 15 of the 200 recipes, including a fish recipe. Nothing like a refreshing fish, is there?

But now I have a new arrow in my quiver, because I am a newly minted Certified Culinary Professional, granted and acknowledged by the International Association of Culinary Professionals. And that means I know about culinary stuff, and no one can deny it because I have letters after my name.
Go on — ask me about selkirk bannock.

Or how to stuff a mirliton or how much miso soup can be made from a 8-gram packet of kelp broth. There are more neurosurgeons in the United States than there are CCPs at this point, so it’s a little like the old punchline: “Stand back! I don’t know how big this thing gets.” Not sure where this particular path is heading, but there’s so much work to be done in food policy, food distribution, and agriculture right now to make sure there’s good, clean, adequate food for everyone. But for starters, now that I’m queen, I’m going after recipe titles.

Huge news flash, Feb. 21, 2008 — well, for me anyway. The Kraft company has stopped making Garlic Cheese Roll. A call to the Kraft consumer hotline confirmed that “not enough consumers were buying the product to justify continued production.” In other words, the passion of millions of people in one-fourth of the US for cheese with grits meant nothing to a company with hundreds of product lines. Social chaos is likely to ensue in the Sunbelt. What will Southerners serve at Christmas morning breakfast and wedding brunches. Did the company consult one single Southerner before they discontinued it?

It’s like a whole way of life coming to an end. First they came for the garlic cheese roll. Can whipped topping and mushroom soup be far behind? Without those basic ingredients, there could be no community cookbooks. I better dust off my resume.

If you reached this page looking for a substitute for Kraft Garlic Cheese roll, try this recipe I found on the Kraft chat boards. I modified it so the roll sizes match the Kraft 6-ounce roll.

Garlic Cheese Rolls
1 1/2 pounds sharp cheddar cheese, grated
1/2 pound processed cheese product such as Velveeta

3 ounces cream cheese

1 teaspoon seasoned salt

Garlic powder to taste

Soften cheeses and mix all together well. Shape into six rolls and wrap securely in foil or plastic wrap.

As a younger food writer, my chirpy demeanor was geared toward reassuring everyone that they could cook everything. I know it’s not true now. Some people just aren’t ever going to cook some things. In that spirit, I’ll just be honest with you — this posting isn’t for everyone. It involves a pressure cooker. Even the word scares me. All those bits on it scare me. The loose thing that wobbles scares me. How many pots do you know of that have a diagram this complicated?

Pressure cooking has the same hint of danger as grilling, but is way less predictable. It seems like everyone’s mama/aunt/granny once exploded a pressure cooker and nearly lost an eye and they liketa never got the grape jam/corned beef/whatever off the ceiling.

My friend John moved away and left me his pressure cooker. It sat in the cabinet for two years.
However, I am a person who rides a bike through the park in the winter without a headlamp, so I know that everything is a calculated risk, and at least pressure cooking is done in the house, with the lights on.

My first pressure cooker encounter was chick peas, since they never seem to cook to a tender texture in a regular pot on the stovetop. Twelve minutes later, the softest, butteriest chick peas I had ever eaten. Next, kidney beans. Twelve minutes to red beans and rice bliss.

A cookbook I’m editing is very pro-pressure cooker. It included this recipe for pressure cooker risotto, which called out to me. I’ve gotten all zen about cooking in my advancing years — when you’re ready for a recipe, it finds you. That’s what this one did.

Pressure Cooker (Butternut squash and wild mushroom) Risotto

1 tablespoon butter

1 tablespoon olive oil

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 cup arborio rice

1/2 cup white wine

1 tablespoon lemon juice

2 to 3 cups cubed butternut squash and sliced wild mushrooms, or other vegetables like sugar snaps or broccoli

2 1/2 cups simmering chicken or vegetable broth

Freshly grated pecorino or Parmesan or aged Gouda cheese, optionalMelt the butter and add the olive oil. Saute the garlic for a couple of minutes, then add therice. Saute for a minute or two. Add the wine and lemon juice and mix well. Add all the liquid and stir to mix well. Lock on the lid and top with the pressure regulator. Bring to a boil. When the pressure regulator begins to rock back and forth steadily, start timing. Cook for 8 minutes. Remove from heat and run water over the bottom of the pressure cooker until you hear the lock open. Remove the lid and stir, as the rice will be concentrated in the center, and the liquid at the edges. Add cheese at this point, or after the risotto is ladled into bowls, or skip it altogether. Makes 4 servings.

Just a fraction of the goodies pouring into the office are pictured here. I’m powerless to resist sugar. So a lot of what you see is in my belly heading for my hips.

I may have to cave in and buy some big-waisted “eatin’ pants.”

Then we had our third of three office Christmas parties. I’m not saying there’s more pressure because we are an office of cookbook editors, I’m just saying that we all still talk about the time SOMEONE brought Kroger green beans. At least the veterans have learned to put the takeout stuff in their own dishes.

This is the “protein” end of the table. Here’s the “side dish” end to the right, featuring a bounty of delicious sugar- and dairy-intensive foods.

But I’m a-tell you a secret. I ate dessert first. By then, I was too full for real food, so I didn’t get to taste the grape salad, which everyone said was great. It’s barely visible in the upper right of the right hand picture.

It’s the same concoction my mom used to call White Grapes Divine, and serve for dessert. It’s a staple of the Junior League cookbook. Except Arkansas — two of this year’s crop of books are Arkansas books, and both include this recipe, which has begun making the rounds of the hostess set there. It took 38 years for a recipe to reach northwest Arkansas from Middle Tennessee, and in the process, it changed from a dessert to a salad. There’s a story there somewhere.

Layer grapes in a shallow dish. Spread a little brown sugar and a spoonful of rum over them. Chill thoroughly. To serve, spread a thin layer of sour cream over them. It’s got animal lipids, sugar and fruit, so right there is a winning holiday formula.

Carb counters avert your eyes. Here is the dessert table, featuring pumpkin trifle with a gingersnap layer, cranberry tort in a cookie crust, chocolate chip praline pie and Butterfinger fluff. Moan. Whimper. I’m sorry you have to see me like this.

Rummaging thru the fridge the other day, I found something really old. Which is a real surprise, since the fridge is new. And whaddaya know, it was the same damn item I found the last time I wrote about The Oldest Thing in My Fridge, about 15 years ago. A tub of miso.

Now, this isn’t the same ancient tub of miso from 15 years ago — oh no. It’s a new ancient tub of miso. Seventeen ounces of beany indescribability that’s guaranteed to freak out first-time visitors to my refrigerator. Uh, what is this for? they ask. And I don’t have a good answer.

Miso, miso, why do you tempt me in the store? Is it your promise of good health? That tasty miso salad dressing ? The lure of the exotic?

Finally, finally, I found a recipe that uses large amounts of miso, and it’s really tasty. (It came from the Junior League of Chicago’s latest book, Peeling the Wild Onion.) Like an atheist in a foxhole, I promise that if I can use up this tub of miso, I won’t buy another one. Soon.

What’s the oldest thing in your fridge? Come to Tup and get permission to chuck it!

Miso halibut
From Peeling the Wild Onion by the Junior League of Chicago.
¾ cup to 1 cup white (shiro) miso
¼ cup sake
¼ cup mirin or medium-dry sherry
1 tablespoon dark brown sugar
4 halibut fillets
Olive oil for coating
Combine the miso, sake, mirin and brown sugar in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium heat. Reduce heat and simmer for 2 minutes, stirring occasionally. Pour into a glass baking dish and cool completely. Add fillets, skin side down. Turn to coat both sides. Cover and marinate for 12 to 24 hours. Scrape most of the solids from the fillets and pat dry. Brush with olive oil and grill for 8 minutes or until fish flakes easily, turning once. Serves 4.