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.

From December 7 to December 27, we spent just 4 nights at home. The rest of the time, we were either going to a party or throwing a party or cooking something to take to a party or sleeping off a party or washing clothes to attend another party. On the 20th nearly-consecutive night of parties, we attended a “festive casual supper” of 42 people, all relatives of ours, stretching to second cousins once removed and ex-step-aunt-in-laws.

One efficient party-giving gesture is cooking big pieces of meat. For one party, we semi-smoked a turkey (more on that below). For another, we made gumbo from the turkey. For another, we made our own homemade honey-baked ham. And finally, the beef roast, but that’s a story for another day.

Semi-smoked turkey was a huge success. We roasted a 12-pound turkey for about 3 hours, so it wasn’t yet done, but approaching it. We fired up the smoker and stoked it with mesquite, then put the turkey in a roasting pan and into the smoker for an hour. When it registered 150 degrees, we called it “done,” tented it in foil for a while, then  rushed it to the cutting board. It had  just the right amount of smoke flavor and was perfectly moist. And truly, I did not hing but oil and salt the skin, then put it in the oven, then transfer it to the smoker. People were arriving in minutes, so we didn’t shoot a photo.

You may be one of those people, like me, who love flavor pyrotechnics, so here’s one we conjured around the party table. A hunk of semi-smoked turkey, a swipe of wasabi mayo, a single zinfandel-simmered cranberry and a chunk of pickled watermelon rind. Searing hot, sweet, firm, chewy, tender. Da-yum. Took a photo of it, but accidentally deleted it.

(Just an aside on the smoker itself: my brother bought it from a guy who sells them from the empty lot near the 12th Avenue branch library in Nashville on Saturdays in good weather. The guy is a welder from Mt. Juliet. He converts discarded water heaters into smokers just the right size for civilian use.)

It’s not every day that someone tosses their best easy recipe your way.  The home-baked honey ham was one of these. My mother-in-law makes a refined-tasting ham for holiday breakfasts, and just rattled off the formula one afternoon. Buy a canned ham or a semi-boneless ham. It should say fully cooked, or ready to at, which you wouldn’t do under normal circumstances. Wipe off or rinse the ham, dry it a little so the honey will stick, then coat it with honey. Wrap it in two layers of foil and seal it well. Bake it in a roasting pan at about 300 degrees for 3 hours. Cool and slice. Two steps, great ham.

If I’d shot just three photos per party, that would have been 48 pictures. Besides the professionally shot photos of party number two, I only have two to offer. This is Spicy Nut Mix from recipezaar. Despite the name, it’s not especially spicy, and it’s a nice offering for the noneaters of sweets.

It was a good party season f0r homemade baked goods: this year I discovered some great cookies. This is our cookie tray from last night’s party.

Starting at the top and moving clockwise: lemon-butter wreaths from our cookie gun; Maida Heatter’s Chocolate Cracks; black walnut bars made with black walnuts from our yard; shortbread with a caramel-pecan top layer; lemon-glazed persimmon bars; jubilee wafers.

We learned a new way to “frost” the chocolate cracks, which by themselves aren’t so Christmasy, but they’re really chewy and fudgey, so you want to invite them to the party.  We add peppermint extract and frost them with Shirley Corriher’s technique: roll the dough balls in granulated sugar first, then in powdered sugar. The granulated sugar layer prevents the moisture in the cookie from wetting the powdered sugar, so the cookies stay frosty-looking.

I only make black walnut bars every couple of years. Black walnuts, they’re a lot of work. You have to gather them in either a basket (that you never want to use again for anything else) or a paper bag. Let them sit in the basement until the hulls soften and turn dark brown (and the bottom of the bag disintegrates). Pour  them onto the driveway in the tracks of the car tires. Run over them to remove the hulls. Wear gloves to pick them up and wipe them off, or even rinse them off. Back in the basket to dry. Crack with a heavy rock. Pick meticulously. One hour of picking will give you about 1 cup of nuts. Hardly anyone sells black walnuts — they’re a pain and they don’t keep well — so if you want them, you do them yourself. Their dark, almost fermented flavor is ideal for adding to a toffee cookie bar.

Lemon-glazed persimmon bars: I’ve looked for years for something to do with the persimmons that are abundant most years in the yard. In the past, I sometimes made persimmon pudding, which is a pudding in the English sense of something baked and of a soft, spoonable texture. The bars are easier to eat, to transport and to serve. They are nicely spiced, and dates add some extra chew. The recipe is from Epicurious and I love it so much I wish I could move to a persimmon island and eat them full-time.  A photo of persimmon puree.

Jubilee wafers came from the 1973 Joy of Cooking. I wanted a refrigerator dough that I could make in advance, then shape and decorate later. I’ve made every roll cookie in the Joy, I thought, but somehow I overlooked Jubilee wafers.  Jubilee wafers call for a lot of honey, a lot of spice, and half a cup of bourbon. Jubilee, I’ll say. They were also supposed to have nuts and fruit, but I left those out. It’s a chewy, spicy cookie with a little touch of jubilee. A keeper.

Not on the tray were Jennifer’s little miniature gingerbreads, made from a great Williams Sonoma Thanksgiving cookbook recipe. Good molasses flavor, lighter texture than most gingerbreads, with a little orange flavor. And Ashley’s layered stacks of sugar cookie alternating with jam. They looked like accordions, sort of, and I admired all the work that went into them, and how good they were.

I live on the same street where I grew up. Different house, other end of the street, and 30 years later, but same street.

It’s one of those epic streets: hidden in plain sight near two excellent schools, close enough to shopping but not close enough to be part of the gridlock at holidays, a great sledding hill, spectacular autumn foliage, older houses, nice but not flashy, not too distant from downtown. Some of the neighbors have been here  more than 30 years.

My three-doors-down neighbor here is … my backyard neighbor from back then. Andrew and his brothers were friends of my brothers. Our back yards adjoined and our doors were always open. They were great neighbors then, and they’re great neighbors now.

The lady of the house, Andrew’s mother, was from the Northeast US originally, and when I was visiting one day, she was baking blueberry buckle. This was the 1970s, and I was maybe 12 years old and had never eaten a fresh blueberry, so it seemed like the most exotic food ever. I went home and asked my mom to make a blueberry buckle. She called the neighbor and got the recipe.

A lot changed after that.  My parents’ marriage ended and my mom’s life went into a slow-mo trainwreck that scattered her possessions across several states. My neighbor married someone very nice, and after 20 years, moved into the house 3 doors down from mine. His wife and I have become close enough friends that we swap gifts often.

I recently found the original recipe card of the Blueberry Buckle recipe, written in my deceased mother’s hand. I’m giving her the card (or a really good copy of it — I can’t decide) for Christmas.

When I look at it, I think of a time when we were all happy. It isn’t just a piece of paper to me — it’s an artifact from a long, shared past. Besides the associations, there’s the intimacy of a handwritten recipe in this day of recipes printed from the Internet and torn from magazines.  And if none of that meant anythingto my friends, it’s still her mother-in-law’s recipe, and makes a really good Blueberry Buckle.

Between the last version and the current version of several beloved kitchen and other gadgets I own, I can read the history of the manufacturing shift from the US to China, and it’s a story that is a real letdown.

Say your company makes blenders and has a great product. But to produce the blender in the US would cost $40. Sell it to the department and discount stores for $60 and they have to sell it for $120. Since you aren’t Waring, and you don’t want to spend the money on a retro-modern design to justify the price, you can’t charge that much. People say they want Made in America products, but they vote with their wallets.

So you put out feelers to China, where you can manufacture it for $15. Your problem seems solved. You outline rigorous specifications, make factory visits and arrange for someone to be on hand occasionally for the manufacturing. The first samples look great. Maybe the housing seems a little thin or brittle, but by this time, the schedule is running out of days, so you green light it.

The blender shipment floats on the slow boat from China to Long Beach for 80 days. During that time, the lab discovers that the blender’s seal doesn’t really seal properly, because even though the right rubber/polymer was used, the tensile strength of the seals made in China doesn’t quite meet what’s needed. So liquid leaks when the unit is set on “low.” But by the time someone discovers this, it’s too late.

I just made up the scenario, but consider it a myth — not true itself, but generally speaking, truthy.  I’ve seen it in my kitchen and in the bath, where a set of hot rollers identical to the previous, 10-year-old set, failed within months. Oh, they still get hot, but the velvet layer covering the searing hot metal wore off within a couple of months. I kept the old rollers, still velvety after 10 years, and threw out the new ones. I couldn’t even find a consumer number for the hot rollers, and I can understand why. You only need to visit Amazon and read page after page of product reviews to see that the China problem affects all kinds of products.

I’ve seen the same thing in book printing, so much of which has shifted to China. Besides price, there are attractive reasons to print in China: hand work is cheaper, meaning die-cut books shaped like frying pans or t-shirts are affordable. Sewn-in bookmark ribbons are cheaper. China hasn’t outlawed dioxin or inks with heavy metals, so the paper is blinding white and the colors are rich and saturated. You can see the seductive logic.

But what if the lavender tablecloth in the cover photo that’s perfectly coordinated with the flower arrangement sitting on it actually prints closer to lilac? If you think the Junior League president won’t notice, then you haven’t met many Junior League presidents in the throes of a book project.

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.

What we ate in Florida, speakable and unspeakable.

Want to start with the unspeakable?feh and double feh

Enough of the bad and the ugly — no offense to people who love offal — I love ya, you nutbuckets. But for me, I love me a grouper sammich, especially waterside.

With a pickle.

And on our way out of town, a quick meal of Spanish Bean Soup, chicken croquettes and a Cuban sandwich at the flagship of Ibero-Cuban Food.

We’ve been making Christmas cookies with our cookie gun. A gen-u-wine Ron Popeil invention, as-seen-on-TV battery-powered cookie gun. It cranks out dough in cookie shapes. For a device from the early 1970s, it’s made like a Swiss watch and performs like a dream. I think my mother-in-law bought it years ago at a garage sale. The back if the box actually says “As seen on TV.”

Anyway, we listen to Christmas radio while we work, and after you’ve heard a song 20 times, you notice there are some stoopid lyrics out there.

Start with Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everybody”

So here it is Merry Christmas
Everybody’s having fun
Look to the future now
It’s only just begun

I’m pretty sure, and people will back me up on this, that the future has always just begun. You’ll have a hard time finding a moment when the future isn’t, in fact, beginning. How this time/space miracle connects to Christmas is another matter altogether.

And then there’s Santa Claus, the oppressor, is Coming to TownYou better watch out/You better not cry/You better not pout/ I’m tellin’ you why…

What kind of emotional blackmailer IS this guy? Crying — it’s a sign there’s something wrong, see. You’re supposed to figure out what is making kids cry, rather than brush it off. Santa? Oh, he’s the guy who makes you repress negative feelings and then rewards you with presents.

And finally, Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer, which begins

…but do you remember
the most famous reindeer of all?

Ummm. Isn’t the definition of “famous” “having a widespread reputation”? Is that how short the American attention span is? You don’t remember the renowned large flying scarlet-proboscised mammals of yesteryear?

Anyway, we had fun, the cookies looked great and we gave them to friends, which felt good.