The Cooking Critic

My mother likes to send me forwards. Some of them are adorable (like the old tortoise that adopted the baby hippo left motherless after the tsunami), some addictive (pictures of celebrities as children), some occasionally pointless (sorry, Mom, I still love you!) and some completely invaluable and amazing. Ziploc Omelets fall into the final category.

She timed the omelet forward well since I was looking for something to fulfill my monthly breakfast recipe promise to the world. I’m sure the world would have noticed and been very angry with me if the promise went unfilled….

Ziploc Omelets may sound a little baffling, so a quick explanation: they consist of an egg mixture zipped up in a Ziploc bag then cooked in boiling water for thirteen minutes. And this may lead you to wonder, as I did, why would anyone make omelets that take thirteen minutes when you can make omelets in less amount of time the normal way? My short answer: the novelty of it! Also, maybe you can make omelets the normal human way, but I cannot. I can’t flip them without them falling apart. Inevitably, I give up and make a scramble.

I decided to make a Spinach, Tomato, and Feta Omelet, as described in The Foster’s Market Cookbook, substituting Trader Joe’s Artichoke Jalapeno Dip for the artichoke aioli mentioned in the recipe. Then I fretted about how much spinach to include because I am astounded every. Single. Time. When I see spinach cook and shrink to ridiculously tiny quantities. I threw a large handful (or thereabouts) of chopped spinach into the Ziploc bag along with the ingredients and wrote my name on the bag as instructed. This is recommended if you have a Ziploc Omelet party, as people are apt do sometimes (people are so crazy), so everyone can keep track of their personalized omelets. No one else was at my Ziploc Omelet party, but I wrote my name on my bag anyways:

(Bear with me as my omelet goes through its awkward, ugly stage.) Next, I put it in boiling water and worried about whether or not it would cook through since it was floating. I think I didn’t push all the air out of the bag as instructed.

But it did indeed cook. And as promised, the omelet rolled out of the bag just like the instructions said it would. As a bonus, I was please to see I accidentally used the perfect amount of spinach.

You may notice it resembles a small log. No matter. I slathered on some artichoke dip, topped it with sautéed tomatoes, and had myself a substantial little omelet log.

And here’s the inside:

Color me impressed.

Assessment: Despite my doubts, thirteen minutes in boiling water makes for a perfectly cooked omelet, and Ziploc Omelets get my seal of amazement—they’d be a great activity/conversation piece for a brunch. And I also liked the suggested omelet combination from Foster’s Market as well as Trader Joe’s artichoke dip on this, even if it was a bit of an intense flavor fight between the dip and the feta in the places where the feta had grouped together in the Ziploc bag.

Overall, I highly recommend this. Please let me know what you think of the Ziploc technique if you try it (or even if you don’t.)

My father had a request for Father’s Day: a story about his father. Surprised, I asked, “A non-fiction story?” “Of course a non-fiction story,” he replied. In retrospect, I’m not sure why I was so confused—people order up stories from me all the time. If I can create an article on bathroom fixtures, a boring subject I know nothing about, surely I could write a memoir about my grandfather, a man infinitely more interesting than bathroom fixtures. Still, it was a daunting task to pull off a decent gift of a story about someone so close to me in just over a week. But here’s Dad’s promised story. And here he is with me on the first day of being a father (or maybe the second)—he’d like you to think that he did all the work and my mother was just there to take pictures:

To give this piece some focus, I determined I’d cook a food in honor of my grandfather (who my brother and I called Daddy Drew when were young and just Drew as we got older). The foods that came to mind were: gumbo, mincemeat pie and dog food, in that order. Gumbo because of his Cajun heritage, but then, the month of June doesn’t exactly shout out for a hearty stew served over rice, even with the dank overcastness we’ve had lately and especially with the pounding heat that followed. Then I contemplated a mincemeat pie, a dish often made with dried fruit preserves and no actual meat. I was surprised when I discovered Drew’s affinity for this dish a few years ago, especially since I recently had encountered this dessert in Wales and was so put off by the word “mincemeat,” I didn’t even try it. I can’t say the thought of making one is anymore appealing to me now, although I’ve since tasted it and discovered that there were, in fact, no traces of meat in it. But if I’m going to spend time in the kitchen creating a pie, it certainly isn’t going to be filled with mincemeat. After rejecting making a mincemeat pie, dog food came to mind because Drew once claimed to have eaten it and that “it didn’t taste too bad.” But then again, Drew was known for tall tales. That and big sneezes. And an extremely competitive nature that kept my brother and I from ever beating him at ping pong. But since I wasn’t about to do any experiment cooking with dog food, I decided to write about carrots. Because he hated them, and I did too for a long time, and it was strangely bonding.

Carrots typically showed up at Sunday suppers at my grandparents, and Drew would simply ignore us when we’d jokingly suggest he eat some. I too turned my nose up at carrots for a long time. I think I refused the puréed version as a baby, which carried into an aversion towards cooked carrots and their mushy texture as an adult. I’ll eat cooked carrots now if they’re served, but I can’t say I ever go back for seconds. Raw or barely cooked carrots are a completely different story for me, but I don’t know if Drew’s dislike of carrots had nuances.

So I began my quest for a carrot recipe both Drew and I might have liked. I flipped through my recipe books and found a carrot terrine— “a ter-what?” he would have said. A response that it was a cold, molded pâté probably would have gotten an “I don’t know about that.” Then I came across a carrots Vichy recipe, which is traditionally made with water from Vichy, France. This would have been met with strong opposition—my grandfather was a man who fundamentally opposed bottled water since perfectly good water came out of the tap. Requesting a specific bottled water would have prompted stories about growing up during The Great Depression. Next I considered a carrot soup, a light delicate thing that I was surprised to find I enjoyed when served it at a wedding, but Drew simply would have skipped that course of the meal. In the end I determined the best dish to make with carrots was a carrot cake, a cop-out if ever there was one.

Still, my decision to make a Super-Moist Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting wasn’t completely void of logic. Drew was a man, after all, with a fierce sweet tooth; cookies tended to disappear when they were in his house, and he didn’t seem to mind the nickname Cookie Monster at all. I reasoned, too, he might have liked carrot cake since it has some vaguely similar qualities to mincemeat pie, both being spice-heavy and not overly sweet (if you just forget about that cream cheese frosting for a while.) Also, carrot cake isn’t strange and foreign. It would have been far easier to get him to eat a cake than a terrine.

True to its name, this carrot cake was moist, and my friends raved—thankfully since some mishaps were involved in making it (the frosting oozed out of the center and the top layer of cake started sliding to the right all because of the heat in my un-air-conditioned apartment). But would Drew have liked it? It’s hard to say. He was stubborn in both his likes and dislikes. He was opposed to anything unnecessarily fancy—the carrot cake is borderline on this front, made from the humble carrot but whipped into a two-layer cake appropriate for special occasions. Had he seen my kitchen after making the cake, he would have grumbled about how he didn’t understand why it was necessary to use every bowl in the house, but then he would have started doing the dishes without another word.

But I think, like the cookies, the cake might have disappeared when we weren’t looking.

Drew (1920-2006) with my brother

Most people bring beer to poker night. I bring brownies. But not just any brownies, made from scratch Foster’s Brownies. I’m opposed to brownies from a box, though I’m an avid fan of making cakes from the box. Please don’t ask me to explain this contradiction.

So when you make these brownies, instead of the usually grainy blend, it will be light and fluffy and exciting and will taste as good as chocolate chip cookie batter, I swear. I realize this is not a normal thing to get excited about. I ask that the Peanut Gallery please refrain from making comments, unless they want to make comments about how amazing these brownies are, and in that case, go on ahead. I like to cut the brownies up into large squares then half them diagonally so they look like small pie wedges, then create complicated brownie architecture with them, then dust them with powdered sugar since powdered sugar makes everything look prettier. Perhaps I should dust myself with powdered sugar.

Adjustment: Left out the nuts for those with nut allergies and ran out of vanilla extract and supplemented with Kahlúa. Sarah Kate Levy’s mother once told her (and then SKL told me) that booze was a good substitute for vanilla extract. You have no idea how many times I have thanked them both in my head for this knowledge.

Assessment: So I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised by this, but people love brownies. I brought a plate of them over for poker night, and there was one left at the end of the evening, and that was only because no one ever wants to take the last one. To me, though they did somehow manage to be both light and fudgey (no small feat), these tasted a lot like brownies, nothing outstandingly special. I’m not sure the resulting homemade brownie warranted the extra time in the kitchen—though, granted, they weren’t that difficult. Everyone else who ate these vehemently disagreed with me. They think my spending extra time on brownies is perfectly acceptable when they get to eat a better product. I should probably admit here that I’m not the biggest brownie lover in the world, and my opinion on brownies should be taken with a grain of salt. I simply can’t explain why I feel compelled to make them on occasion. But if I were to make brownies again (and inevitably I will), I’ll opt for the Junior League’s brownies made with melted baking chocolate instead of cocoa like these were—when I get around to making their version again, I’ll post that recipe. Unless the world most absolutely have this particular recipe, and then I may oblige.

So my day started off by making Chocolate Whopper cookies (doesn’t everybody’s?) to give to Karen Schiler and her boyfriend Steve who kindly picked me up from the airport in the pouring rain, flooded interstates be damned! I don’t have a double boiler, so I used my regular makeshift one. Someday I’ll get a real honest-to-God double boiler . . . . one can only dream. That Valrhona chocolate recommended is really amazing stuff. I’m pretty sure it’s one of the reasons why the cookies were so good (but also super rich–they may not be for everyone.)Adjustments: Couldn’t find espresso powder or regular instant coffee (Ralph’s was a huge pain yesterday), so I used Vienna-style coffee powder, though the promise of a hint of cinnamon flavor made me nervous, but those hints went undetected in the final product, happily. Used the nuts I had in the house: about one and a half cup mixture of walnuts and pecans instead of the two cups the recipe calls for–I liked the reduced-nut version. There’s a typo in the recipe that appears in the book, which claims the mixture made 1 dozen cookies when it made double, but it’s been fixed on the linked website.

Assessment: Great for the chocolate lover and special enough to present as a gift. Also the perfect portable dessert for a picnic-type outing involving a bottle of red wine. I may very well bring these to my next Hollywood Bowl stint.