Fat, flour, water, and salt. Everything I've been told leads me to believe that this is all I need for a perfect pie crust. I just don't know how much of each I need, or how I'm going to put it together. I went through about eight different pie crust recipes, and they all disagree, so I'm going to wing it and hope for the best.

Pie crust, unlike most baking, does not appear to be a matter of strict formulas. The fat-to-flour ratio in the recipes I looked at ranged from 2-to-3 to nearly 1-to-1 by weight. And pie really is a creature of the home kitchen, where the baker's scale gets less props than the coffee-can scoop. Fannie Farmer would not weigh flour for her pies.

I settle closer to the 1-to-1 end of the spectrum, using just over 3 cups of flour with a half-pound of lard and a stick of butter. I sift the flour with a healthy pinch of salt into a stainless steel bowl. I cut up the cold fats into rough chunks and toss them into the flour. I wash my hands in cold water to chill them, and set myself to working the flour into the fat. You're supposed to use your fingers as much as possible when mixing pie dough, because allowing the fat to rub up against the palms (which are warmer) can melt it, preventing you from creating the odd-sized lumps of fat that will eventually create the flaky layers in the pie crust.

Maybe I've never had a really good pie crust before, but I'm not so clear on the whole "flakiness" thing. My guess is that it works basically like puff pastry, which I think I understand. These doughs take advantage of two scientific principles: (1) oil and water don't mix; and (2) water expands as it is heats up and converts into steam. In puff pastry, a water-based dough is wrapped around a block of butter, and then folded into hundreds of alternating layers. As the puff is cooked, the water expands, but each layer of dough is prevented from breaking through to the next layer because there's oil (butter) in the way, and oil and water don't mix. The fat, held in place in its solid state by the structure of the dough, eventually melts and goes whither it will, and the steam rushes in to fill (and even stretch) the void left behind. In the process, the layers (which get lightly browned in the melting fat) get pushed apart by the pressure of the steam, and you end up with mille-feuille, a thousand layers of golden flaky pastry expanded to several times their original height.

Presumably, pie dough works on the same principles, only on a smaller scale. Flour particles are surrounded with blobs of fat. A little water is added to hold the mess together. As the crust is cooked and the water expands, the flour is kept from absorbing it by its protective layers of fat (with which the water cannot mix). As the blobs of fat melt away (browning the flour in the process), steam rushes in to fill the empty space left behind. The result is lots of little air pockets in the finished product. And when two pockets of steam press against opposite sides of a fat-shrouded bit of flour, the result is a thin layer of golden pastry surrounded by air - in other words, a flake.

Puff pastry is just fine by me, so I'm guessing a flaky pie dough will be plenty good too. I make sure to leave lots of blobs and streaks of fat interspersed throughout my dough. When the fat and flour are mixed in to my liking, the result looks like wet, clumpy white sand, streaked here and there with little swaths of yellow and white. I have a glass of ice water at the ready, which I drizzle in a few drops at a time, trying desperately not to shatter the delicate balance of textures I've worked so hard to achieve. When the dough feels like it's just starting to hold together, I toss it in a ziploc bag and stick it in the fridge. The flour will continue to absorb the water for a while, so it isn't necessary to have a solid mass of dough at this stage. After it rests for an hour, it'll be cohesive enough to roll out and fill with my stash of hand-picked apples.

Posted by jeremy at 01:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Shun Lee always includes a little packet of glazed roasted walnuts with your delivery order. I don't know how they make these little fuckers, but I'm damn well going to find out. I just tore through a bag of them in about 90 seconds, and I can't justify placing another order tonight. I've got to develop an independent supply, to reduce my dependence on foreign nutmeats.

Posted by jeremy at 08:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's that time of year again. Lisa came to see me this weekend with a cold, poor thing. Of course, that means I now have a cold. Add to that the recent monsoon, the four vials of blood I'm missing since my doctor's appointment yesterday, and the flu shot I'm getting this morning, I can pretty much count on feeling like ass for the rest of the week. I've been popping zinc and sudafed and aspirin like tic tacs, and washing it all down with quart after quart of orange juice. But at times like these, every son of a Jewish mother knows that the best medicine is a big bowl of homemade chicken soup. Here are a couple recipes for a week's worth of soup, the first for colds without tummyaches, the second for colds with tummyaches. Now eat up, darling.

Recipe: Roasted Chicken and Garlic Soup

Ingredients:
1 whole chicken
9-12 cloves garlic (unpeeled)
3 medium carrots
3 stalks celery
1 medium sized turnip
1 medium sized parsnip
3 medium sized yellow onions
1 sprig rosemary
4-6 sprigs flat parsley
3 sprigs thyme
1 small bunch sage
1 bay leaf
1 small bunch fresh celery greens (from the ends of the center stalks)
8 black peppercorns
3 whole cloves
Kosher salt and fresh-ground black pepepr as needed
Extra virgin olive oil

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Rinse the chicken and cut it up the chicken into pieces, reserving the back and the neck. Season the back and the neck with salt and pepper and place on one side of a roasting pan. Toss the garlic, unpeeled, in some olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper, and place in the other side of the roasting pan. Roast at 350 degrees until bones are browned and garlic is soft, about 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, season remaining chicken pieces with salt and pepper. In a 12-quart stockpot, heat 3-4 tablespoons of olive oil over high heat until almost smoking. Place chicken pieces skin-side down in pot and leave them there until the skin is fairly dark brown, about 5-8 minutes (you will have to do this in batches; just remove the already-browned pieces to a plate while you brown the remaining pieces).

Tie the parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, celery greens, peppercorns, cloves, and bay leaf into a sachet d'epices. (This is just a "bag of spices," and could be some leek greens wrapped around the spices and herbs, tied up with twine, or a pouch of cheesecloth also tied up with twine. If you lack any of these, you can always toss the herbs and spices straight into the soup, but it's impossible to get them out later, so you're liable to crunch down on a peppercorn or get a woody thyme stem stuck between your teeth.) Peel and coarsely chop the carrots, parsnip, and turnip; chop the celery and peel and quarter the onions.

When all the chicken is browned, pour off the oil in the stockpot (reserving the brown bits in the bottom of the pot, unless they have turned black, in which case you should rinse out the pot). Peel the garlic by pulling apart the peel, which should now be brittle and separated from the meat of the clove, or by squeezing the cloves and scraping out the meat with a knife (take care not to mix in any bits of the peel). Place all the ingredients in the pot (with the neck and back on top) and fill with cold water, making sure not to fill all the way to the top (to avoid boiling over). Place on medium-high heat, uncovered, until the soup comes to a boil. Once the boil is reached, partially cover the pot and reduce heat to a simmer. Simmer for 1-2 hours. Remove sachet d'epices, back, and neck (which can be nibbled on but will break into a million tiny bones under pressure from a soup spoon). Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Serve immediately, or let cool to room temperature covered before transferring to tupperware for refrigeration.

Recipe: Old Fashioned Chicken Soup

Ingredients:
1 whole chicken
3 medium carrots
3 medium sized yellow onions
3 stalks celery
4-6 sprigs flat parsley
3 sprigs thyme
1 small bunch fresh dill
1 bay leaf
1 small bunch fresh celery greens (from the ends of the center stalks)
8 black peppercorns
3 whole cloves
kosher salt and fresh-ground black pepepr as needed

Rinse the chicken and season it inside and out with salt and pepper. Place in a 12-quart stock pot and fill with cold water to the ten-quart mark. Bring to a boil, uncovered.

Meanwhile, peel the carrots and chop coarsely. Peel the onions and cut into quarters. Chop the celery coarsely. Tie the parsley, thyme, dill, bay leaf, celery greens, peppercorns, and cloves into a sachet d'epices (see above). When the pot starts to boil, reduce to a simmer and add vegetables and the sachet d'epices. Cook, partially covered, 2 to 3 hours. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Serve immediately, or let cool to room temperature covered before transferring to tupperware for refrigeration.

Posted by jeremy at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

208 West 70th Street (Amsterdam & West End Aves.)
212-875-8600

Last night I took Lisa to the opera. Since going to the opera is pretty much a date, and since Lisa and I aren't really in the "dating" phase anymore, I decided to really get into the date-ness of the evening and make a reservation at a decent restaurant. Nice restaurants are in short supply on the Upper West Side, although if you believe the restaurant reviews in Gourmet's November issue, what few there are have been replicating like a virus. One restaurant which gets consistently good reviews, and which I had not yet tried, is Compass, a relative newcomer next door to the neighborhood's old war horse of a bistro, Cafe Luxembourg. The restaurant that had previously occupied Compass's space went under a couple of years ago, and after eating at Compass, I think I understand why (more on that in a minute). Compass had good reviews, and it's halfway between my apartment and Lincoln Center. A no-brainer.

Compass's menu is impressive, with a decent variety of dishes and preparations - something for the salmon and chicken breast types as well as for the more adventurous diner. Everything we ordered was skillfully prepared, nice to look at and quite tasty. I honestly can't complain about the food at all. But I will never eat at Compass again. (And no, it's not because of the health code violation that closed them down briefly last month. If I made dining decisions based on strict adherence to the health code, I'd never eat anything that came out of my own kitchen.) To be blunt, dining at Compass was a genuinely unpleasant experience, and here's why:

Compass has a lot of space to play with. The main dining room is probably a good 1500 square feet, not including the bar and separate dining areas. But instead of using this space to create a comfortable atmosphere, they've set up the dining room like an upscale mess hall. Postage-stamp sized two-tops are lined up like dominoes down the length of the room, with about 36 inches between the rows and about three inches between the tables. In essence, you're not at a table for two, you're at a table for twenty-four, except twenty-two of your fellow diners are total strangers (and you'd like most of them to stay that way). The menus (big hard-covered monsters) are about two-thirds the size of a table for two, making it impossible to put the menu down until your waiter takes it from you. And speaking of the waiters, the staff (with the exception of the front-of-house managers, who seemed to know what they were doing) was sloppy, slow, and unprofessional. From the moment we sat down, I was anxious to leave.

In fairness, a couple of qualifiers are appropriate. We went to Compass during the pre-theater rush, which at any restaurant will include more than the average proportion of well-to-do seniors who are particular about getting things their way and tend to speak rather loudly. Of course, when you pack several such diners into as tight a space as Compass's main dining room, it's bound to negatively affect your experience. Second, the dining room does have a number of comfortable-looking booths on an elevated level around its perimeter, kind of like guard towers perched over a prison cafeteria. Third, Compass does have a cute little gimmick where they give you a doggie bag with some treats from the pastry kitchen as you're on your way out (we got some decent raisin scones).

I said before I think I understand why Compass's predecessor went under, and it's got to have something to do with the way the dining room is set up. Compass is a decent bargain for the quality of food its kitchen is turning out, which is probably a concession to the thriftiness of your typical Upper West Sider. But the rent on this place must be pretty steep, so to cover it you've got to pack them in as tight as you can. My guess is that Compass's predecessor didn't understand this equation until too late, and Compass understands it only too well. Some might call this a fair compromise, but frankly, the promise of a free breakfast pastry, or even a well-prepared meal (which ours was), isn't enough to get me to eat at Compass again.

Posted by jeremy at 08:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another recruiting lunch at another neighborhood Italian today. The restaurant shall go nameless here, because I'm only interested in one item on their menu: "cantucci e vin santo." When I went to Florence for the first time a year ago, I ended almost every meal there with the classic Tuscan dessert of cantuccini con vin santo. And I have to quibble with this restaurant's interpretation of one of my favorite after-meal indulgences.

Vin santo - or "holy wine" - is a magnificent dessert wine made in the chianti region of Italy. Like most great dessert wines, it gets its sweetness from a beneficial mold known as the "noble rot," which dries and shrivels wine grapes on the vine, concentrating their sugar content so that the wine they yield is sweet and robust, if limited in quantity (it's said that a single glass of Chateau d'Yquem, the world's most famous Sauternes, requires an entire vine's worth of grapes). The best vin santos I've tried combine the honeyed sweetness of Sauternes with the heady aromas of sweet sherry and the warm, full body of tawny port. In short, it's like having all my favorite sweet spirits in a single glass.

The classic accompaniment for vin santo are the little almond cookies from Prato known as cantuccini. Cantuccini are literally "little cantucci," and cantucci are variations on the classic but often underappreciated Italian cookies, biscotti. The word "biscotti" means twice-cooked, a reference to the two-step baking process that leaves the cookies dry and hard. Cantucci and cantuccini, being loaded with egg yolks, are so hard when dry that you could crack your teeth on them. This makes them a perfect vehicle for the vin santo, with which they enjoy a symbiotic relationship. The cookies are dipped into the vin santo (traditionally served in a small tumbler rather than a stemware glass), which softens them and infuses them with its unique perfume and the warmth of its alcohol. When the cookies are gone, a few crumbs settled at the bottom of the glass lend a gentle almond note to the remaining wine, which can be sipped like any other digestif.

So what's my beef with the "cantucci e vin santo" I had today? I have no quarrel with the vin santo; even mediocre vin santo is still a rare pleasure. No, I'm more concerned with the cookies that were being passed off for cantucci. Half of the cookies were beige, Starbucksesque biscotti, the other half were butter cookies with pine nuts - not biscotti at all, and certainly not cantucci. I've played around with a few recipes I found on the Internet - in English, Italian, and German - and amalgamated them into one that I prefer for making my own cantuccini. Kept in an airtight container, they keep for weeks or even months (there being little to no water in them, there is no medium for harmful organisms to grow in). In a pinch, however, I've been known to pick up a bag of cantuccini from one of my favorite specialty markets; the brand that tastes most authentic to me comes in a white mylar bag with a picture of the cookies on the front and red cursive lettering reading "cantuccini" above the picture.

Recipe: Cantuccini

Ingredients:
500g all-purpose white flour
400g granulated sugar
250g whole, peeled almonds
3 eggs
3 egg yolks
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp amaretto
1/4 tsp salt
small pinch saffron

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large mixing bowl, combine 2 of the eggs and all of the egg yolks with the vanilla, amaretto, salt, and saffron, and beat thoroughly. Add 350g of the sugar and whisk until fully incorporated. Sift together flour and baking powder, and add in stages to mixing bowl, stirring to incorporate until you have a sticky but firm dough. Stir in the almonds until evenly distributed in the dough. Set aside to rest.

Line a baking sheet with a Silpat or greased parchment paper. Divide the dough into two portions, and form each into a baguette-shaped loaf three to four inches wide on the baking sheet. Bake at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes, or until outside is hard and beginning to brown. Meanwhile, beat the remaining egg with a few drops of water. Remove the loaves from the oven, brush them with the egg wash and sprinkle them with the remaining sugar. Cut them into diagonal slices about 3/4 inch thick, space them out on the baking sheet, and return the sheet to the oven for 10 more minutes or until completely dry and golden brown at the edges. Cool completely on a rack before storing in an airtight container.

Alternative flavorings for the cantuccini include cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg, and citrus zest, but I find that amarreto and saffron remind me most of the cookies I had in Florence. If you don't have a scale to measure the dry ingredients, you should (a) get a scale for measuring ingredients for baking, since it's the only way to be accurate, or (b) approximate using standard volume-to-weight conversion ratios.

Posted by jeremy at 08:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

325 W. 51st Street (8th & 9th Aves.)
212-399-9291

It's recruiting season at law firms across the country. Second-year law students are being flown from coast to coast to interview for their next summer job, which will usually lead to a job right after graduation. In New York, it's customary for the firm to send a candidate out to a nice lunch with a couple of junior associates such as myself.

Today it was Vice Versa, a modern-looking Italian on West 51st Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. The dining room is sleek, with clean lines and muted grays and browns throughout, and well lit through the full-length windows in the back surrounding a modestly planted courtyard.

Vice Versa is a new restaurant that has quickly become a lunch favorite at my firm. It's close to the office, it's nice to look at, and it's expensive enough that you wouldn't necessarily go there on your own dime without being so expensive that it offends the sensibilities of the powers that be. Service is attentive and fast without being intrusive. In short, Vice Versa is to all appearances the ideal mid-interview recruiting lunch spot.

The only problem is, the food isn't that great. My two lunchmates each began with the mixed salad, which you'd think would be tough to screw up. But the poor law student we were with almost had an anxiety attack trying to eat hers without making a mess or looking like a slob, because the greens hadn't been cut down to a manageable size. I opted for an artichoke and calamari appetizer, which was also disappointing. Some rings of squid were tossed together with a few artichoke scraps and deep fried into something that strongly resembled a county-fair funnel cake on a bed of shredded radicchio. The texture of the squid - which was perfectly cooked, I admit - came through nicely, but the artichoke apparently couldn't stand up to the hot oil long enough to keep pace with the raw seafood, and the only thing it contributed was an unpleasant, burnt-tasting bitterness. The whole affair was greasy and underseasoned. In light of the numerous other artichoke dishes on the menu that day, I concluded that my "antipasto" was probably just a ploy to bump up the price of a small serving of calamari and get rid of the kitchen's artichoke trimmings with one stroke.

The pasta was another mixed bag. Two of us opted for a seasonal offering of pumpkin ravioli with butter and sage. Classic autumn comfort food - I've made this one myself a few times. The pumpkin filling was perfectly smooth, if a little bland. The pasta itself was a bit gummy, though, and the sage - a sprig of whole leaves tossed essentially raw on the center of the plate - was woody and unpleasant. Not having been infused into the thick, nearly clogged butter sauce, the sage was totally wasted, and what remained was essentially a plate of pumpkin puree with an equivalent quantity of butter.

Dessert was refreshing, though. There were several offerings, but we each opted for the hazelnut-vanilla panna cotta, a clever two-layer dessert with simple, authentic flavors. The hazelnut was a bit understated but still earthy and warm, the vanilla was clean and aromatic, and the custard had the perfect gelatinous panna cotta consistency. Vice Versa also serves a few small cookies with dessert and coffee, ranging from biscotti to chocolate-covered crisps, which are not overly sweet and a pleasant way to end the meal.

I can understand why people at my firm like to do lunches at Vice Versa, but I'm just not impressed. With so many genuinely super restaurants in the neighborhood, this one feels too much like style over substance.

Posted by jeremy at 09:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From our half-bushel, Lisa picked out about ten apples to keep as snacks for the week, and I brought the rest back with me to Manhattan. There's more than enough here for three or four pies. The lard remains in Lisa's fridge, however, which means it's back to market in search of congealed fats for my pie dough.

I read a fair amount about food, and if there's one thing I've learned about pie dough, it's that everybody thinks they have the secret to the perfect crust. I've read Gourmet, Saveur, Steingarten, Friberg, Julia, Jacques, and Betty Crocker. You can make it in a food processor - no, you should use a pair of forks - no, you need a pastry cutter - no, it's heresy to use anything but your hands. It should have the consistency of sand - no, it should look like cornmeal - no, it should have pea-sized lumps - no, the lumps should range in size from peppercorns to large olives. Add vinegar - no, lemon juice - no, eggs. Use shortening - no, butter - no, lard - no, all three. Add sugar - are you mad? no sugar! At least they all agree that ice water is a must.

I've settled on lard for several reasons. First, I believe it when I read that butter, which has a lot of water in it, can't be the only fat in a pie dough because it throws off the moisture balance. Besides, butter costs about three times as much as lard or shortening. I'll add some butter for flavor, but I also need either shortening or lard. Second, shortening doesn't taste like anything. It's hydrogenated vegetable fat - chemically altered to remain solid at room temperature. It coats your mouth with that greasy, cottony feeling but doesn't add any flavor. I've never used lard before, but lard comes from pigs, and pigs are yummy. Advantage: Lard. Finally, when the entire medical community tells you eating a certain food is very bad for you, but respectable chefs and foodies do it anyway, there's got to be a damn good reason. I'll take my chances.

Now, where in Manhattan can one acquire lard? Rendered pig fat is out of vogue these days, the Atkins Diet notwithstanding. I live right around the corner from Fairway and Citarella, which is usually great, but they don't carry anything so gauche as lard (I asked). I've stumbled on the rare instance where the Stop-and-Shop on Route 9 was better stocked than my beloved Upper West Side gourmet grocers. So I try the Upper West Side's grocery-shopping equivalent of slumming. Gristede's just opened up a new suburban-style megamarket under the Ansonia, on Broadway between 73rd and 74th. Their produce feels plastic, their meat is pallid, and their fish looks a little past its prime, but on sheer selection they beat the highbrow outfits hands down. I check in with them before I commit myself to a borough-wide quest for pork fat. Sure enough, crammed into the bottom right hand corner of the meat case, there's about a dozen green and white one-pound boxes of good old Armour brand lard. I'm probably the first person to buy one from them (I make sure to check the expiration date).

Armour's lard is labelled in both English and Spanish (in Spanish it's called "manteca"), which leads me to believe that it could probably also be found in bodegas with a respectable grocery section. Now that I know I can get it around the corner, though, I may just start using it for all my cooking needs. Pork-fried doughnuts, anyone?

Posted by jeremy at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I passed by Dougie's kosher barbecue on my way home from work tonight. For those of you who aren't familiar with Dougie's, it's part of the shtetl of kosher eateries and judaica shops lining West 72nd Street between Broadway and West End Avenue. When I was in college and we all made a habit of ordering take-out from the cheapest, greasiest hole-in-the-wall Chinese delivery joints we could find, there was always some orthodox kid who wanted to order from Dougie's. Every once in a while the rest of us would oblige, and we'd all chew silently on leathery meat while our orthodox buddies went on about how the buffalo wings were the best on the planet (as if they had a frame of reference). I can respect a person who takes their religion seriously, but kosher food just plain sucks.

Anyway, I'm walking past Dougie's, and I nearly run smack into a big blue plastic tarp wrapped around a bunch of eight-foot-high aluminum poles in the middle of the sidewalk. I round the last pole, and I see rows of tables and chairs set up within three tarp walls, where people are sitting and eating their dinners. And it hits me. This week, Jews (that is, more observant Jews than myself) are celebrating Sukkot, a/k/a/ the Festival of Huts (I did not make this up). Basically, you have to build a little hut outside your house, and sleep in it and eat meals in it. The hut has to have at least three free standing walls, and the roof must be constructed in such a way that stars can be seen through it. When I was a kid, we built up the walls of our deck with wooden lattices and covered the top with pine branches. Ours was a respectable hut.

There's an obvious shortage of outdoor decks on the Upper West Side. But the neighborhood is a link in the historical chain of Jewish migration from the Lower East Side to Riverdale and on to Westchester, and the Jews who remain here need huts this week. Dougie's to the rescue! If they can convince my old college buddy that their gray rubbery wings are God's own mannah, I guess it's not such a strech to build a sacred space out of debris from a construction site. I just hope nobody's taking them seriously enough to camp out on the sidewalk on West 72nd Street. Hag Sameach, y'all.

Posted by jeremy at 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just got back from the firm's cafeteria. While waiting for the elevator, a fellow associate noticed that I had picked up a few slices of various ethnic sausages that were being offered as free samples today. He said, "I saw those, and I was debating whether to take some."

Yeah, right. Free sausage never loses a debate.

Posted by jeremy at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Greig's it was back to Lisa's apartment in Rhinebeck. Lisa is clerking for a judge upstate this year, and I like to think of her apartment as my weekend country house, which I guess makes my apartment her pied-a-terre. Rhinebeck is a calculated blend of quaint country charm and trendy pretensions, and Lisa's apartment is a block from the center of town.

I've struggled with Lisa's kitchen for about a year now, and it'll be another year before I'm finally free of it. The electric stove has three burners; the corner of the range where the fourth burner should be constitutes the majority of the kitchen's counter space. Due to some quirks of electrical engineering which are apparently beyond me, the burners can only be used in certain combinations and at certain temperatures. There's no manual, but I've discovered some unacceptable combinations through simple trial and error, resulting in a few undercooked meals and at least one call to the landlord.

Lisa doesn't cook; that's why she's dating me. I like this, because cooking for her is one of my favorite things to do, I get to do a lot of it, and I always get a rave review (even when I screw up). However, every time I prepare a meal in her apartment, I have to buy a new piece of equipment. I'm not talking about food processors or mandolines or pressure cookers. I'm talking about sauté pans, stock pots, and kitchen knives. When I met her, her cookware consisted of three one-quart aluminum pots (with two lids), a cookie sheet, and a loaf pan. I covered the loaf pan with aluminum foil to braise osso bucco the first time I cooked for her. It came out great.

Lisa doesn't have a pie pan or a rolling pin, so these are on my list as I head up Route 9 to the Stop-and-Shop outside of town. (Rhinebeckers don't stand for the trappings of suburbia inside their storybook village. They're still protesting the CVS that set up shop on Market Street two years ago - but the parking lot is always full.) I also need a lemon, some allspice and nutmeg (cinnamon we've got already), and some fat for the pie dough. I'd have settled for Crisco, but I found lard in the meat case, and that was the end of that (more on lard tomorrow). Lisa has a five-pound bag of King Arthur flour in her pantry, so I check out and I'm on the way home to bake as many pies as I can before I have to leave town.

Back at Lisa's apartment, I unpack the groceries and head to the pantry. She has three different kinds of sugar, all sealed in ziploc bags, and the flour ... not in a ziploc bag. I already know what's going to happen when I open the bag - I should have known it before I went grocery shopping, but like I said yesterday, I was sure I had everything under control right up to this moment - SPIDERS!!! Not just flour beetles, but honest-to-god spiders, wriggling their little black legs around in the flour like they were making eight-winged snow angels. I've never seen spiders in flour before; maybe they went after the flour beetles which are, ominously, nowhere to be seen.

Baking pies is now out of the question. I could head back out to the Stop-and-Shop, but I have to leave soon, and I'd rather spend the time with Lisa. There will be no pies for her tonight. But at least she got a rolling pin and a pound of lard out of the deal.

Posted by jeremy at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As is true of most food subjects, I know just enough about apples to convince myself I have everything under control right up to the point of culinary catastrophe. It's October, and I want apple pie. And since I've wholeheartedly bought into the cliché that everything tastes better when you make it yourself, from scratch, using only the freshest ingredients, a craving for apple pie necessarily implies a trip to the nearest orchard.

Dutchess County got its first frost recently, which means the clock has started running on apple season. This weekend my girlfriend Lisa suggested we go apple picking, so we made our way to the Greig Farm in Red Hook, which is apparently the county's third most popular tourist attraction. My friend Tony - a fairly skilled cook and equally ambivalent attorney - always says "you need spies for pies" - northern spy apples, that is - and the TV chefs tend to go with granny smith. When we roll into the Greig Farm, I think I know exactly what I need. But the Greigs have complicated what would seem to be an easy mission. There are red delicious, empires, ginger golds, jonagolds, macintoshes, and macouns; but no spies, no granny smiths. I'm now adrift.

Lisa and I made our way from row to row, tasting each variety. I try to think about the characteristics of granny smiths and spies that might make them suitable pie apples, and mostly what I recall is how much I dislike eating them. Both varieties are rock hard and puckeringly sour, and they tend toward mealiness more than most other apples in my experience. So as Lisa tries to pick her favorite (it's macintosh, by the way), I'm looking for the most unpleasant apple Greig has to offer.

No luck. The apples are all really good. We ate about half a dozen of them out of hand between the two of us, and picked as many as I could carry around the orchard without compromising my pretensions at manly strength. And although later research has revealed that red delicious and jonagolds are both perfectly suitable cooking apples, when we left Greig's orchards I had resigned myself to the prospect of baking a less-than-ideal pie. Though I hate to admit it, for a second I considered dropping by the Stop-and-Shop on the way home, with a half-bushel of fresh-picked apples in the back seat, to see if they had any spies.

Posted by jeremy at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)