After a few weeks’ hiatus, it’s high time that I recommitted myself to what has clearly become the celestial purpose of Orangette: making Jimmy famous. He may be the gay husband of my former employer Rebecca, but he’s also much more, and that’s where I come in. My commitment to Jimmy is truly the highest of callings, a fanatical devotion to a church where a choir of deep-fryers sing sweetly from the altar. On the seventh day, some rest and some go to Sunday school, but I go to Jimmy’s. And then I write about it. This week’s episode began with a rather enthusiastic e-mail from the man himself. He’d been on a mission, he explained, to replicate New Orleans’s…

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Like so many others who love the warmth of the stove, I once thought that I wanted to be a chef. One of my half-brothers had gone to cooking school, so it seemed only natural. Never mind the fact that said half-brother does the least amount of cooking of anyone in our family; chefdom was clearly in my blood. To test my reasoning, I took an internship one summer at Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, the city’s oldest, most well-known vegetarian restaurant and the birthplace of several celebrated cookbooks. I knew next to nothing about restaurant kitchens, much less that I would be told to “fire” this or that, slice onions as “thin as an angel’s eyelash,” or distinguish among…

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Over at Saucy, the second installment of “Cook and Tell” is up and available for consumption, titled “Have Your Beefcake and Eat With Him Too.”* Please forgive me the pun; I couldn’t resist. I mean, really, could you? While you’re there, I hope that you’ll take a moment to peruse Saucy’s other features and news, updated daily, Monday through Thursday. Saucy pulls together a bit of something for everyone, from(cook)book and magazine reviews to columns on drinks, gardening, baking, host(ess)ing, and practical cooking. Plus, there’s a cheese of the month feature! If that doesn’t make you happy, you’re just a very picky eater. I hope that you’ll make Saucy a part of your daily rotation. *Special thanks—long overdue!—to Gigi, for…

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My father loved to play in the kitchen. For him, relaxing after a long day of patients and paperwork meant pouring a Scotch and taking up residence at the butcher-block island. Sometimes Burg would scour our overflowing shelves of cookbooks for ideas or techniques, but mainly he’d work by feel and taste, stewing, sautéing, melding this and that—and never keeping the slightest note of the path that led him from start to finished dish. Somewhere there may be an index card in his blocky handwriting, detailing the ingredients for his trademark vinaigrette or summertime potato salad, but it’s unlikely and, anyway, hidden forever in the dark recesses of an overfilled kitchen drawer. His experiments were many, and most were fruitful,…

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Back in September—a lifetime ago in blog years, it seems—I wrote about a Seattle nonprofit called FareStart and its weekly Guest Chef Nights, in which local chefs work with FareStart’s students to produce impressive three-course meals. Last night I had the pleasure of attending my second Guest Chef Night—this time in the company of fellow food blogger B (of Culinary Fool), B’s friend E, and my ever-faithful Keaton—and once again, I can’t keep it to myself. Everything about FareStart just feels so good that it would be a crime not to share. Consider this a public service announcement. Our evening began with a tour of the bustling kitchen, where the students were hard at work in their chef’s whites, plating…

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Alright, I admit it: I’m kind of boring. I love routine. I’ve never been good at change—which is to say that I’m actually rather bad at it. My poor, long-suffering mother can attest to this: during college, I called her at the beginning of each and every quarter, sobbing and sniveling incoherently about my new schedule and new classes and the end of life as I knew it. I’m also the girl who took the same brown-bag lunch to school every single day for the first fourteen years of her life: Peter Pan creamy peanut butter on mushy Home Pride whole wheat bread (no jam, jelly, or other gelatinousness; no crunchy peanut butter; no natural peanut butter; no white bread;…

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Dearest Seattle, Every now and then you’re really spectacular. It’s usually something small and subtle and a little gritty, something I would have missed if I didn’t have a nasty habit of staring, a keen ear for other people’s conversations, or a weakness for your Patagonia-meets-post-punk fashion sense. It’s the chatty produce vendor at Pike Place Market, a gin and tonic at the Alibi Room, a romp in the ravine at Ravenna Park, or your Space Needle glowing on the night skyline like some sort of majestic wizard’s tower in a sci-fi movie. You’re everywhere I want to go. To hijack the Frank O’Hara poem “Steps,” “oh god it’s wonderful / to get out of bed / and drink too…

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When one of your (half-)brothers is a restaurateur, paying him a visit means consuming quite a bit of good food. When one of your (half-)brothers is a restaurateur with many reasons to celebrate—a new house, a new restaurant in the works, and an upcoming wedding, for example—paying him a visit means consuming completely unreasonable amounts of fantastic and fantastically rich food all over the Washington, D. C. area, nonstop, for three and a half days. Add to this equation Easter, a holiday synonymous with sugar, and the whole mess is downright obscene. I’m still recovering. Though Veuve Clicquot is fine and Dom Perignon is dandy, at this point I’m very pro-water. But, as I tripped down this path littered with…

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“Will you bring dessert?”Now that is one of my favorite questions to be asked. It’s right up there with “Can I kiss you?” and “You’re from Oklahoma?” But unlike the latter two, it can almost always be counted on to produce an outcome that’s angst-free, a result in which sweet conquers sour. Dessert doesn’t lead to sleepless nights of overanalyzing, or to nightmarish memories of afternoons at the Cowboy Hall of Fame. There will be no broken hearts and no teepees. Dessert is pleasure guaranteed, with no explanations needed. When delicious, dessert is its own best answer—especially when it’s as delicate as frilly lingerie and as rich as a Plains-state oil tycoon. Lemon soufflé tartlets are both. Light and sweet…

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Here in Seattle, something is going on. Sunlight is pouring in through my bedroom window at an obscenely early hour (sunrise: 6:05 am), daffodils are sprouting from every yard and florist, and my portly bus driver—the year-round optimist—is no longer the only one wearing shorts. This has nothing to do with the vernal equinox or that start-of-spring nonsense everyone is twittering about. No, dear reader, Seattle is aglow because it’s Pork Week. By most accounts, the first celebration of Pork Week occurred five years ago, when two transplanted Southerners decided to consecrate 1/52nd of their year to uninterrupted praise of the pig. Inspired by a pig roast held by some friends, Mark and Justin—sharing slightly twangy accents and, at the…

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When my former employer Rebecca and her gay husband Jimmy promised another buttery breakfast, they meant business. As I learned in the Dutch babies episode, Jimmy fears no fat. He is a firm believer in butter, cream, and all things buttercreamy, and his waffles are no exception. Not content to settle for a normal version, he makes a shortbread waffle that is, as one might expect, heavy on the butter. In fact, the batter is rich and thick enough to be dolloped onto the waffle iron with an ice cream scoop, awe-inspiring in a way that’s both very beautiful and completely terrifying. Rebecca’s straight husband—and comic straight man—John nearly hyperventilated at the sight. Jimmy closed the lid of the iron…

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My mother loves Paris. This should not surprise you; after all, I’ve already made it clear that she is a genius. She speaks nary a word of French, but she swathes herself in head-to-toe black (which is, after all, her daily uniform), laces up one of her many pairs of tiny (size 5 ½), aerodynamic, Euro-style Pumas, and hits the streets with the air of one who knows. She is unafraid. She can decipher menus; she can tackle the Métro; she can go into Monoprix with a grocery list and come out victorious. She plays the part so beautifully that Parisians have even been known to stop her on the street to ask for directions—and then stare in open-mouthed surprise…

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Dear reader, exciting things are afoot, and it’s not just that I’ve baked two loaves of bread, a deadly chocolate cake, a buttermilk banana cake, and a batch of granola in the past 72 hours. No, this is even better, if you can imagine such a thing. About a month ago, I was contacted by Jessa Crispin, illustrious editor of Bookslut, a whip-smart webzine of book reviews, author interviews, and the like. [“Bookslut,” by the way, is also my new favorite word. I say it as often as possible—three times fast, for extra pleasure.] Jessa has been putting together a new webzine—this time focused on food—and she asked if I might like to contribute. Quicker than you can say “bookslut,”…

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It’s that time again. Behold a reprise of geekiness. I’m a sucker for social theory. Really, there’s nothing sexier than the name “Michel Foucault,” and that’s a non-debatable point. A close second goes to a man I once knew who, between sips of beer, spoke the words “Baudrillard” and “simulacra” so suggestively that I blushed, broke a sweat, and nearly passed out. He didn’t stick around for long, but by god, social theory did. In fact, the two of us have just begun the arduous process of writing a Master’s thesis. Unfortunately, I’m not sure we’ll make it through.Despite its smart, sexy, and enticingly knotty qualities, social theory is a fickle partner. At best, we together produce only somewhat incoherent…

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My French host mother was tall, trim, and proper, with a sing-song voice and a name that skipped and chimed and rang off the tongue. She moved through the house as though on pointe—softly but decisively—and she wore silver bracelets that clicked delicately against each other when she lifted her hand to secure the barrettes in her long brown hair. She was also very Catholic, with four children, ages 9 to 17; a Labrador puppy; and a husband who’d gone—or rather, all but moved—to Canada to find work. It was complicated and exhausting. She did an admirable job, and she often fell asleep in the bathtub after dinner. But most importantly, dear reader, my host mother was the French equivalent…

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It was a birthday celebration Nicho–style, with a rousing hike among towering trees, plenty of guffawing, an afternoon rest in a sunny hammock with a chainsaw roaring sweetly nearby, homegrown lamb grilled over an open flame, and apple cake with cream-cheese frosting. Happy birthday to a man who truly knows how it’s done. The celebration began early. I arrived at Kate’s at 9:30 Saturday morning in the finest in hiking grungery wear, with an apple cake, a parka, and a car. Kate and her old friend Mike (visiting from Maine) piled in, and by 10:15 we were far from the city, already among the sheep, llamas, and yelping dogs of Nicho’s family farm in Sultan. The birthday boy was (appropriately)…

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One night last week—after five glasses of wine, a deep-fried breaded soft-boiled egg, and a Freudian slip about a man who once fed me a meal consisting only of sprouts—my former employer Rebecca invited me to a breakfast of Dutch babies with her gay husband Jimmy. Knowing a good thing when I hear it, I accepted immediately. After all, I like nothing so much as a Dutch baby pancake, hot and puffy from the skillet, on a Sunday morning. And so I arrived at Jimmy’s at nine o’ clock to find an industrial steel table set for two, Jimmy in an apron, and Rebecca with wet hair and her usual morning iced tea, obligatory straw in place (she always uses…

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Dear reader, I’ve been wielding the tools of anthropology haphazardly again. Lately I’ve noticed that every time I cross paths with women of a certain age, the conversation ends the same way. After a few moments of pleasant exchange, talk comes to an abrupt halt with the following exclamation: “Oh Molly, you’re baking? I used to bake bread too! For years, I baked every loaf we ate!” Without fail, in the seconds that follow, her eyes glaze over, her pulse visibly quickens, and she lets slip a telltale sigh that settles into silence. This is more than a simple fit of nostalgia. I know, because I am what these women used to be. What they wistfully recall, and what I…

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I know it’s been said about all sorts of things, but this is the stuff that dreams are made of. I mean it. Our recent discussion of eating, sleeping, and breathing food got me thinking, a dangerous activity that inevitably ends with me hunched over a pile of open cookbooks and recipe clippings. In that post, I’d mentioned a roasted-onion tart that once came to me in a dream, beckoning from a shelf in a bakery window, its thick topknot of translucent onion gleaming under the lights. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen its exact likeness in my waking life, but dear reader, I’ve come close. If the onion tart in my dream was, let’s say, the Platonic form of onion tarthood,…

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After a weekend of cream puffs, a girl’s got to take a breather.Moderation is horribly unglamorous, I know. But, dear reader, I also know that you’re the sort who values truth—ugly, unwashed, morning breath and all. I’ll give it to you straight: I channel the USDA food guide pyramid. I don’t mean the new recommendations announced last month, which are well-meaning but unrealistic at best—three cups of dairy products per day for the average adult?!—but rather the concept of the food pyramid. I’m not sure how this came to be, but I’m crazy about the five major food groups. I love them equally, the way a mother loves her children. Brussels sprouts speak to me as sweetly as crusty bread,…

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“My dowry has just increased exponentially,” Kate announced, smirking audibly into the receiver. “I made cream puffs!” I could hear Kate’s sister Margot and their mother Linda in the background, shrieking with glee. “Mom says to tell you that we’re saving the potatoes for you to do, since you’re German.” “Polish,” I corrected. “Yeah, yeah,” Kate laughed, “Too bad we don’t have any Polish sausages. But hurry up! We’ll see you at three.” Another Knight family event was in the offing, and the occasion was even more momentous than last summer’s lamb roast, which is saying a lot: this time we were celebrating five years of Linda’s being cancer-free. I’d been commissioned to help with the food, and I happily…

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My friend Doron might lust for a more well-endowed kitchen, but he can make a mean meatball. I should have guessed as much. After all, last summer Doron, Elizabeth, and I happened to find ourselves together in Paris for five weeks—quelle coïncidence, non?—and there was much, much meat. The man knows his stuff. Doron and Liz were sharing a sixth-floor walk-up in the tangled heart of the Marais, and I was a mere ten-minute walk to the east, in a studio on the edge of the artsy 11th arrondissement. As luck and geography would have it, halfway between our apartments was boulevard Richard Lenoir, where each Thursday and Sunday row upon row of covered stands would magically sprout from the…

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This is getting serious.Last week my friend Doron e-mailed to tell me about a dream he’d had in which he’d gone into a store and picked up “any and every kitchen tool in existence.” From microplane zesters to rubber spatulas, food processors, and stockpots, “it was heaven,” he said. I could almost hear him sigh wistfully on the other side of the computer screen. Doron isn’t the only one who’s been eating, sleeping, and breathing all things kitchen. I’ve been known to have dreams involving roasted-onion tarts, platefuls of oatmeal chocolate-chip cookies, and butter-rich cakes stacked like gold bullion. I wake up breathless, touching my belly like a private eye looking for evidence, whispering, “Thank GOD I didn’t actually eat…

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It’s been making the rounds, and thanks to fellow Seattlite Megan of iheartbacon, it’s come to Orangette: the “music in my kitchen” survey. I’m generally not one for these sorts of things, but I’ll make an exception this time, since a) nobody likes a party pooper, and b) music accompanies nearly every moment of my waking life—and especially my time in the kitchen (which, in my experience, easily doubles as a dance floor with a very convenient refreshments stand). So, with no further ado: Q: What’s the total size of music files on your computer?A: Zero. I’m still very loyal to the CD. I like my music to be tangible, for now. Q: What is the last CD you bought?A:…

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Sometime in the early 1980s, my mother discovered exercise. First there was aerobics, with its perky wardrobe of pastel tights and leotards with matching elastic belts, legwarmers, and sweatbands. For many of my formative years, I quite nearly lived at the Workout, an aerobics studio in northwest Oklahoma City. Mom would suit up in her Spandex; pack a bag of books, markers, and Pepperidge Farm Goldfish to keep me busy; and off we’d go. For those who wonder about the origins of my uncanny ability to remember song lyrics of the period, look no further: I owe it all to the Workout and countless hours spent listening to Whitney Houston, the Pointer Sisters, and the thud of Reeboks reverberating off…

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I’ve never been a fan of Chinese food, or at least not the stuff that generally goes by that name in the U.S. When I was little, my family often went to our nearby Hunan Chinese Restaurant, but I remember it less for the food than for the décor: the goldfish in the fountain at the center of the room; the tinkly click-click of the beaded curtains in the hallway to the bathroom; and Shawn, the maître d’ with tight, shiny skin and starchy chinos with cavernous front pleats. As for the food, I’ll admit to a pre-teen’s weakness for crispy egg rolls, sweet-and-sour chicken, and beef with snow peas, but I drew the line there. What I knew as…

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It’s been a long, mundane week. By day, I poke and prod at other people’s punctuation. I cross items off the list. I fall asleep on the bus. And I pass my nights on the couch with a highlighter and a pack of Post-It flags, wrapped in a wool blanket and wearing pink-and-green Christmas gag-gift socks with candy canes and “Sweet Stuff” printed around the ankle. After so much toil and troubling footwear, I’ve earned something very, very good. Short of dashing Frenchmen beating down my door, I at least deserve a glass of wine, a piece of cake, and hours of exuberant hip-shaking and singing to myself. With years of practice, I’ve learned what makes me happy, and although…

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I’m generally very well-behaved, of a willpower that knows few equals. I can bake a whole mess of very treacherous and tempting stuff, stash it in the freezer, and peacefully coexist with it—no boundaries transgressed!—until the next dinner party, appropriate event, or emergency. But, dear reader, I’ve met my match, and it’s a chocolate-covered coconut macaroon. For the first two decades of my life, I associated coconut strictly with the scent of cheap tanning oil, a very nasty substance indeed, and especially for a redhead whose skin has only two settings: pale and burnt. As a child, I had a deep-seated, visceral aversion to lotions in general and put up impressive battles whenever my parents approached with a bottle of…

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Intensive training in anthropology and ethnographic methods has taught me the delicate art of participant observation, and, because it’s a shame to let these things atrophy, I feel compelled to exercise my skills every now and then, or constantly. I’m the one in the grocery check-out line who’s fervently studying the contents of your cart, the one quietly noting behavior on the bus. Most recently, using my best eavesdropping and staring skills, I’ve compiled an informal and quite accidental study, and the results are promising indeed. With a sample size of two and no further delay, I’m happy to announce, dear Seattle, that your children are of unrivaled sophistication. They’re very significant, statistically. For example, I recently overheard the following…

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Every now and then, something comes over me, and I produce. With no real hunger or purpose, I make, say, three mini-loaves of fancy banana bread, a batch of strawberry scones, a loaf of sourdough, and barrelfuls of Italian vegetable soup—all in less than twenty-four hours, and mostly on a Friday night, no less. Behold the pinnacle of geekiness! But because a girl’s got to keep these things in check, I usually make sure that my bouts of industriousness are immediately followed by a good dose of sloth, generally in the company of someone upon whom I can foist some of the products of my labor. Hence Saturday night’s languorous session on the couch, spooning whipped cream and sipping wine,…

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