Last flight out of Seattle

Anybody else have a shitty week last week? Are you in need of an enormous distraction, a xanax, a martini the size of your head?

Great. Let’s look at a photo of maple sticky buns together.

That’s a little better. 

But maybe we need to really get in there.

Floating over the past

It started in the baking aisle of the grocery store. A package of Bob's Red Mill poppy seeds: An aide-memoire, a coup de foudre, a sudden shock of recollection, and then a drifting, dreaming mind, floating over the past, landing on a specific memory and than a handful of fuzzier ones.

I was standing in a parking lot in the blazing heat, unfurling a twist tie and letting it drop to the ground, then pulling back the crinkly tight plastic that enclosed a sticky loaf of bread, little beads of condensation lining the inside of the bag, the loaf, sturdy and earthy-smelling and laced with black-as-night poppyseed filling.

I remember thinking that I couldn't believe that I had finally found one. That I actually held in my hands what I then thought of as a "poppy seed danish." It must not have been the first time, because I recall the sense of longing; the satisfaction of the surprise discovery; the memory triggers that shot through me. I think I was thirteen.

The romantic in me imagines that my first poppy seed sweet bread came from one of those charming old-world Eastern European bakeries on the lower east side of Manhattan. The ones that were warm and steamy against the cold winter, filled with familiar, heavenly aromas. Stewed fruits. Yeasted breads. Staggeringly sweet fondants. Butter and sugar and ground nuts. There is a little old lady behind the counter with dyed brown hair, a thick accent, and a gentle smile. She is Russian. Perhaps she asks me if I, too, am Russian, because my name is Vera.

I can construct this, and it must be drawn from some elements of truth, but I have no actual memory of the first poppy seed danish, which is odd, because my food memory is solid, whereas I mostly forget other things: family events, the names of my elementary school teachers, what I did yesterday.

For example, I remember the first palmier I ever ate, and the first meringue, and the first zabaglione, and the first time I saw the word "zabaglione," and the first apricot pastry (on the upper east side, from a fabulous, caricatured baker named Frederique). But the first poppy seed danish evades me.

Maybe it's not actually important if I remember it, though it does torture me just a little. I'd like to be able to trace this back, because I know it goes back a long way. I want to capture that part of myself that first tasted this unusual thing and was immediately transfixed.

But I am a better baker now than I was ever before, and so I can posses this thing today, in 2015, in my Oakland kitchen.

Let me describe it a little: It's a sturdy, yeasted bread, just slightly sweet. After rising and resting, the bread gets rolled out into a large rectangle, over which you spoon the most heavenly black mass—a paste of poppy seeds that have been ground together with nuts, honey, dates, and a little milk. You then roll this into a log, split the log lengthwise, twist the inverted pieces around each other, and nestle them into a loaf pan. You wait, you glaze with egg, you bake. What you get is an earthy, sticky, sweet bread filled with poppy seeds. It's the poppy seeds that make it. You will search out the dense crevices that deliver only a little dough and a mouthful of filling.

It's weird and completely wonderful.

It'll keep you going back for more slices, until the whole thing is reduced to a handful of crumbs. It'll make your kitchen smell like the most grounded and lovely place on earth. And it'll freeze great too, which allows you to be nice to your future self, some days off, if you can wait that long.


Poppy Seed Sweet Bread
Adapted from here and here

Dough:
1/2 cup warm water
4 teaspoons active dry yeast
1/4 sugar (scant)
1/2 cup whole milk
1/2 stick unsalted butter
2 egg yolks
3/4 teaspoon salt
3 1/2 cups flour

Filling:
1 cup poppy seeds
1/3 cup chopped dates
1/3 cup walnuts
1/2 cup whole milk
1/4 cup honey

Egg wash:
1 egg with 1 tablespoon water, beaten

Prepare the dough: In a small mixing bowl, combine the water, yeast, and sugar. Set aside. Pour the 1/2 cup of milk into a small saucepan and bring just to the simmer. Turn off the heat, add the butter, and stir until melted. Let it cool for five minutes. Whisk in the egg yolks and mix thoroughly. Place this mixture in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook, add the yeast mixture, and combine for a minute or so.

Add the flour and salt gradually, with the mixer on low, until combined. Mix for eight minutes on medium speed. It should become a smooth dough.

Cover the dough (in the bowl) with a dishtowel and allow it to rise for one hour, or until it has doubled in size.

While the dough rises, make the filling: Place the poppy seeds, dates, and honey in a blender (or food processor, or mortal and pestle) and process until the nuts are ground, the poppy seeds are somewhat crushed, and the dates bring the two together as a paste. Place this mixture in a small saucepan, and add the milk and honey. Simmer over low heat until it thickens, about 20 minutes, stirring intermittently.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Prepare the egg wash. Prepare the loaf pan, by lining with parchment.

After the dough has risen for one hour, punch it down, and turn it out onto a lightly floured work surface. Using a rolling pin, roll it into a rectangle, roughly 10 x 20 inches and 1/2–3/4 inches thick (it doesn't have to be precise). Spread the poppyseed filling over the rolled dough, leaving a half-inch border all around. Brush the exposed edges with the egg wash.

Roll the dough tightly into a log, starting at one of the short ends, as if making a jelly roll. Cut the log lengthwise down the center, so you have two halves that expose the interior filling. Twist these two halves together, keeping the filling facing out, and then arrange it in the prepared loaf pan.

Brush the surface of the bread with the egg wash, cover with plastic wrap, and let it rise again for 1 hour to 1 hour and a half.

After this second rise, remove the plastic wrap, brush it with egg wash again, and bake the bread at 325 degrees for about 1 hour, or until the top is deeply brown and glossy (begin checking it at 45 minutes).

Allow the bread to cool in the pan for about 10 minutes, and then continue cooling on a rack. It is wonderful warm and equally good at room temperature. To freeze the bread, slice the loaf and then place the slices in a freezer bag. I ended up defrosting mine after only one week, but I imagine it would keep longer than that (maybe a month?). Defrost by warming in the toaster.

Only the suggestion

It’s in a section of a book called, “How to Have Balance,” this recipe that I am going to tell you about. Balance—something that exists for me, in large part, only in concept. It is an elusive concept, somewhat taunting. It’s mentioned in my “about” section as something I’m trying to “shift,” though I’ve never been good at it, really. I’ve always been much better at dramatically hurdling myself into or against whatever thing might have captured my interest or disgust at that very moment. 

Luckily for me, this section about balance has more to do with eating armfuls of bread—stale bread, bread ends, pieces of neglected crusts, squishy insides that have turned rigid and unbending—than it does with “balancing” in grander philosophical terms. It starts with the ethos put forward by M.F.K Fisher in How to Cook a Wolf: “Balance the day, not each meal in the day.” This gives us more flexibility in our notion of balance—we have more time to get there. It also gives us permission to eat meals solely of one ingredient, or primarily of one ingredient. It allows us to focus, more than it asks us to balance. The scales don’t have to weigh evenly at the same moment—they can even out over time. Bread, then, doesn’t have to be taken as an aside, and it also doesn’t have to be banished entirely from our culinary repertoires. Bread can find it’s place in the meal, as the meal. It can come back to us, transformed, in a new molten expression of its prior self. It can, interestingly, become soup. 

Bread soup as a concept is immediately intriguing on a textural level, because it requires, to conceive of it, a sense of transformation that is whole and complete. I don’t really like the idea of balance, but I do really like the idea of transformation. Unlike balance, transformation doesn’t ask for a firm ending; nor does it, I think, want a clear beginning. As Tamar Adler writes in her introduction to An Everlasting Meal, which I mentioned last week, and from which this section on balance comes: 

“Great meals rarely start at points that all look like beginnings. They usually pick up where something else leaves off. This is how most of the best things are made—imagine if the world had to begin from scratch each dawn: a tree would never grow, nor would we ever get to see the etchings of gentle rings on a clamshell.”

This sentiment makes the task of beginning much more manageable—that we will begin not to finish, but so that we can continue later; that things will lead one to the other and elapse over time; that, cumulatively, we will reach a point which, in its apparent finality, asks to be another beginning, or a happily unresolved end. We won’t have to start from scratch, because nothing ever does. 

This makes it acceptable to start something again or to pick it up where you left off. It makes leaving off or setting aside a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It allows you to gather the scraps of old bread that, hard as stone, were doomed for the compost, and to simmer them until they melt, in a warm sputtering tangle of leeks and onions and garlic and stock and parmesan rind, yielding soup. Soup that your ancestors would be proud of for its economy, and that your loved ones will lap up heartily for its richness. 

The recipe for this soup is a very short paragraph in Tamar Adler’s book that contains no measurements, and only the suggestion of a rough timeframe. I will give you something more precise, but I can guarantee that you won’t need it. You will do much better if you cook this simply trusting yourself every step of the way. How much rosemary will make the soup taste medicinal? Is there enough bread? Should I add more oil? More salt? Will fennel work in place of celery?

Smell and feel your way toward these questions, because, quite simply, you’re not going to screw it up. Also because, significantly, it’s just stale bread. When you work with ingredients that are not precious, you immediately have permission to experiment and approach your task lightly. You will learn more about cooking this way, or at least I have, then if you were locked into a recipe whose precision makes you terrified to lift a spoon or to alter a proportion. I don’t like to cook under such rigid circumstances. It makes me feel estranged from my food and from the act of cooking itself—something that, at its best, is an intimate proposal for community. 

Bread soup, as Tamar writes, is “somewhere between soup and solid.” I will also add that it is thick and moderately gelatinous; shimmering with olive oil and flecked full of herbs. The quality of your bread will contribute to the overall quality of the soup—I used a country levain which gave the soup depth and body from the sour, chewy loaf. A parmesan rind, thrown in to simmer with the rest, lends nuttiness. Fresh herbs balance the whole thing. Optionally, you can also whiz together in the blender a quick parsley sauce to drizzle over top. You know when the soup is finished when, as Tamar writes, it “thwart[s] attempts to classify as one [bread] or the other [soup] and, instead of trying, take it off the heat when it tastes good.” 

She’s right. You will just know. And it will taste good. 

Bread Soup with Herbs (Adapted from An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace)

1/2 cup olive oil

2 leeks, washed well, bulb end trimmed, cut in half lengthwise, white and pale green parts thinly sliced, the rest reserved for stock

1/2 small, yellow onion, halved again and thinly sliced

3 garlic cloves, smashed with salt against the blade of a chef’s knife on your cutting board

1/2 fennel bulb, thinly sliced (the original recipe calls for celery, if you have it)

4 cups stale bread, crusts removed, cut into large cubes (you can save the crust for croutons)

4 cups chicken stock (or any other kind of broth or stock you may have)

1/2 cup Italian parsley, chopped

2 small sprigs rosemary, leaves taken off the stem, and then chopped

Parmesan rind (any size piece you may have)

Heat the olive oil in a large soup pot, and add the leeks, onions, garlic, and fennel. Salt the vegetables right away, so they soften rather than brown. Cook until tender, about 10 minutes. Add the herbs and bread. Give it a good stir and then add the stock and the parmesan rind. Season with salt and pepper. Cover, turn the heat down to medium-low, and cook the soup for 25–30 minutes, or until the bread is completely broken down and transformed. It should no longer resemble bread, nor should it look entirely like soup. Add water or other cooking liquid if the contents stick.

Taste the soup for seasoning, and remove the parmesan rind just before serving. Drizzle with olive oil, top with grated parmesan and cracked black pepper. Or drizzle with parsley sauce, parmesan, and pepper. The original recipe states that leftover bread soup can be formed into patties and fried in olive oil. We ate it the next morning for brunch with fried eggs on top. 

Parsley Sauce (Adapted from An Everlasting Meal)

This sauce was excellent on the bread soup, and then incredible the next day when we brought it on an oyster-eating excursion. To have it on oysters, thin the original with a couple tablespoons red or rice wine vinegar and lemon juice.

1 bunch Italian parsley

1 garlic clove

Olive oil

Lemon

Crush the garlic clove against the side of a chef’s knife with kosher salt until it forms a paste. Put the garlic in a blender or food processor with the parsley, another pinch of salt, a squeeze of lemon juice, and a hefty pour of olive oil, about 1/4 to 1/2 cup. Blend until mostly smooth. 

Here's What Happened

It’s been coming on slowly, this feeling that I have. Slowly, over the course of this year in which I have been coming here to write—that I would eventually make this blog more explicitly personal. I’m still figuring out exactly what that means: what it means to be writing as I do, in this way, to a group of anonymous readers and also to dear friends. We’ve been figuring it out together, you and I. That is the sense that I have.

I figure it’s time to recount some history. I’ve spoken obliquely about a number of things. And last week, I wrote about my sister in the most explicit way that I’ve ever done before. I received emails and personal notes about it. It lifted my spirits and reminded me why I like to come here and what makes this experience profound.

I think it has to do with a level of trust in oneself. Because if I’m not here, if I’m not really here, all of me, there won’t be much for either of us to hold on to.

So, here’s what happened: I started this blog on November 25, 2011. I was a nervous wreck when I did. I picked it up and abandoned it in my mind a number of times. Then, at the end of January, my fiancé (and boyfriend of 10 years) and I ended our relationship. What followed was a series of tumultuous months, a parade of meaningless dates, a reconnecting of many friendships, and a stark turn inward.

What can I say about that relationship here, now, in this way? We grew up together, he and I—that’s the most honest thing to say and the most true thing to recount. We lived overseas together, we traveled, we became recluses in a cottage in upstate New York for a period of time (in a house that was so quiet that one could hear, physically hear, the sound of a snowfall); it was a red cottage, across from a beautiful farm; I made drawings at the kitchen table in the mornings and watched the deer come to the stream to drink; it was an idyllic but also profoundly sad time for us both. We grew up together, and then, I think, we grew apart, in very different, but also oddly connected ways. Some part of ourselves is still in that little red cottage, and that’s the best that I can do to think of what happened between us, and where whatever it was—what it had been—still resides.

When it happened, I found myself coming to this blog more and more. I can’t describe what I felt or why I knew it was important, but it was. This was the place where I came to ground myself, and it always worked. There is something about seeing something that one has made, right there in front of you, that affirms to the soul that one has a home in the world. I suppose this was the reason I decided to become an artist so many years ago now. I think it was Heidegger who said something to that effect: that we make art, we create things, as a way of making a home in the world. It is something that I think we all strive for. We tear each other apart in our quest to find some bit of grace and solace. We never, ever stop searching. 

My life now is very different than it once was, and mostly for the better. I live with two lovely roommates in a quiet little house on the edge of the Mission District in San Francisco. I come here to write and to cook, and when I go home, I play my guitar and nuzzle my roommate’s little orange cat, and I drink with friends, and spend time with old acquaintances, and generally, live. I’ve forged some powerful connections to people who are now very dear to me; some from my distant past and some from a nearer present. I’ve let certain things go. I laugh a lot more than I used to. I take that to be the best sign.

I still haven’t figured out how to escape the waves of sadness—a sort of drowning that takes hold of me from time to time—but I’ve stopped trying to prevent them entirely. Yes, I wake up some mornings with tears in my eyes. It has always been this way. Sometimes I feel so stricken with sadness that I feel literally incapacitated. I feel that I simply cannot move—where my mind refuses to stop, my body will. But there is also this other thing in me; it’s the thing that makes it possible, the night after some deep moment of sadness, to get up the next day and make apple-cinnamon pancakes for my roommate. To listen to her when she tells me, “you should photograph this, Vera.”

These are the dueling impulses. I suppose, no… I trust, that we all have them.

What appears in this post, what’s been scattered throughout, is a sort of chronicle of my week. It’s incomplete, as all memories and experiences are; because what I really want to say is un-writable and un-photographable.

I inch toward it bit by bit.

This weekend I will paint my room the color of fog; that’s the best way that I can describe it. Sebald writes: “There is mist that no eye can dispel”; but we can let it envelop us, and find some bit of freedom there.

Next week, when The Moon in My Kitchen turns 1, we will celebrate with some cake. The real kind, the birthday kind, all frosted and shiny and new. 

Apple-Cinnamon Pancakes

Serves 2

This is not really a recipe, it's more of an idea. And now that we've passed through Thanksgiving, I doubt that many of you will be waking up and wanting pancakes. On the other hand, it might be just the thing. These pancakes have all of the taste of apple pie... but better, easier, and with maple syrup.

Mix up a batch of buttermilk pancakes using (gasp) your favorite mix. But if I was going to make them from scratch, I'd use this recipe, which, with the addition of oats, I think would be quite good.

Heat a non-stick griddle until droplets of water dance across the surface. Spoon out the pancake batter to your desired pancake size (I usually make four at a time), and then add thinly sliced apples (about 3-4 slices per pancake) and sprinkle with cinnamon. Wait until the surface of the pancakes bubble and make large exquisite holes across the top, and then flip once. Wait about a minute and then serve immediately, with sweet cream butter and maple syrup over top.

Eating Cherries in Winter

Well, here we are. It’s Saturday. I woke up very early this morning to a still house and a dark sky. Why was I up this early on a Saturday, I lay there wondering to myself?

Within a couple of hours it had begun to rain. It’s now pouring. But “raining” and even “pouring” are too delicate to describe what is really happening out there. Droplets of water are being heaved from the sky haphazardly. The wind is tearing the branches out of a neighboring shrub and hurling them into my window. And the neon pink flowers on the camellia bush to the left of my bedroom are drooping and swaying, drooping and swaying, in ironic, uncharacteristic gestures.

This is what people mean when they talk about the rainy season in San Francisco. We’re getting it a bit late this year. I read there is even a “surf advisory” today—a phrase that hadn’t entered my vocabulary until very recently.

The real point here is that my trip to the farmer’s market, during which I planned to buy armfuls of blood oranges, hopefully some fennel, green garlic, salad greens with nasturtiums, breakfast radishes, and German butterball potatoes, is now but a mere fantasy. I’ll be honest with you: at the moment, I don’t even own a proper umbrella (mine broke for good during last week’s deluge). And, a raincoat, you ask? Something that I imagine those “prepared” people might have, those with “appropriate” clothing, who tend to think ahead, even when the sun is shining and it seems, for all intensive purposes, that the rainy season, this time, is finally over. Alas. Here we are.

So I’m trapped for the moment. It won’t be long. Eventually, I’ll wrap a scarf around my head and brave it to the corner store where I’ll buy a $4 umbrella, which will carry me through for the next week or so.

But in the meantime, I thought that this might just be the perfect opportunity to tell you about something that I’ve been holding on to for a while, waiting patiently for the right moment to write about—a moment, I imagined, when we (or at least I) needed something homey; something homey but also bright and cheerful. That’s what this is: It’s oatmeal, people, but it’s topped with warm cherries, toasted almonds, and demerara sugar. It’s what you want to eat when you’re trapped inside and it’s too early, or too rainy, to go anywhere.

If you haven’t discovered the pleasures of frozen cherries, now is the time to start. Picture this: It’s the dead of winter, you’re snowed in, you’re nutrient deprived because the only fresh thing that you can lay your hands on is shriveled supermarket citrus. You open your freezer door, and there, in that dark, buried corner of your icebox, is a little pink package—inside of this package are organic cherries, frozen at the peak of their ripeness, waiting to be simmered gently and then plunked on top of your oats, or your warm chocolate pudding, or your bowl of ricotta, or your tubful of Greek yogurt…

The possibilities, really, are potentially endless.

I know this isn’t seasonal eating, but it’s close. The cherries, in an ideal scenario, were picked when perfectly ripe and then frozen, their summer sweetness locked away under layers of ice, to be preserved for a later time—a time when, unlike summer, your options are few and your cravings are many.

I had this for the first time on a weekday morning a month or so ago. It was worth the time that it took—longer than it takes to make a piece of toast, but much shorter than the sort of time that you would need to make pancakes.

First, put the oats in a pot with water, milk, and a pinch of salt, and set this to a low simmer. In a few short minutes, they will be bubbly and milky, steaming and sputtering. While the oats simmer, place a handful of frozen cherries in a small saucepan, and turn the heat on low. The cherries will need a few minutes to lose their chill and become warm and steamy. Don’t cook them too much, though—it is ideal when they are still round and firm, rather than stewed and dilapidated (you want the whole fruit, not a compote). In a dry sauté pan, toast the slivered, blanched almonds until they are just lightly browned and fragrant.

Now you can set yourself up with a bowl—hopefully your coffee is at the ready, hopefully your neighbor has stopped doing Jazzercise next door (!!!). Spoon the hot oatmeal into your bowl, ladle the cherries and a tiny bit of their warm juices over the oatmeal, gently toss onto this your toasted almonds, and then sprinkle the whole thing with a teaspoon or so of demerara sugar (regular sugar, brown sugar, or even maple syrup would also be lovely here). Add a little drizzle of milk or cream, and you’ve achieved, after just a few short minutes, breakfast.

You’ll also have achieved the satisfaction of eating cherries in winter, which is a rare treat indeed, even if it isn’t pouring down rain just beyond your window.

Oatmeal with Warm Cherries and Almonds

For one serving:

1/2 cup rolled oats

3/4 cup water

1/4 cup milk

1/2 cup (or so) frozen cherries

A handful of blanched, slivered almonds

1–2 teaspoons demerara sugar (Turbinado, regular, or brown sugar also works, as does maple syrup)

Milk or cream for drizzling

In a medium saucepan, combine the oats, water, 1/4 cup milk, and a pinch of salt. Put a lid on the pot, and turn the heat on low. Simmer for 5 minutes.

While the oatmeal simmers, place the frozen cherries in a small saucepan and cook over low heat for 3–4 minutes, until they are warm and steamy, but still firm and round. Set aside.

Turn the heat on under a dry sauté pan (about medium-low), and add the blanched, slivered almonds. Shake them around in the pan, tossing once or twice, until lightly toasted and fragrant (about 2 minutes).

Put the oatmeal in a bowl, and top with the cherries and almonds. Sprinkle the sugar over top, and drizzle with milk or cream.

P.S. A poem about being in summer in winter. 

Last Night (and a Morning Pancake)

Last night, unfortunately, brought more disappointment in the heartache department. And this morning, up at 5 am as I was, contemplating love, and life, and the meaning of the universe (I can figure this stuff out by 10 am, right?), I feel, sadly, that the orange-ricotta-pancake high that I was on since yesterday is now but a dim wave, lapping lazily against my ocean’s floor.

But, oh!, look at those photos… billowy stacks flecked with the zest of an orange, bites of airy ricotta, swirling in a puddle of maple syrup and melted butter on my ever-so-slightly-warmed plate! Surely one cannot truly despair when visions of orange and ricotta whipped majestically into a sort of “cake” made in a “pan” are before them? Surely…

It takes a lot of courage to get up in the morning sometimes and to face the computer screen and to think, in one’s solitary state, I can begin again; there will be many more mornings, better than this one; they will be orange-and-ricotta scented; there will be happiness—and in fact, as they always say (those optimistic types), it won’t always be this way, things will get better. And it would all be true. I just know it somehow; perhaps it’s the cook in me—she’s optimistic by nature, she knows somehow that when your first pancake has burned and your butter is a browned, greasy mess in the middle of your too-small pan, that you can scrape it clean and start again. You can find a masculine, nonstick griddle who needs but a little heat (no grease!) to get things sizzling… but I’m mixing metaphors here.

Alas, it was this way with the pancakes. The first batch was a total flop. But it seemed so promising!, I thought wistfully to myself. And it was, in fact, promising and more than that, once I saddled my determination—got the hunger in me to twist itself out of defeatism—and began again, with a new pan and a new strategy that felt, how should I say this?, more like me.

The recipe is promising and delicious and all of the things that you want out of a Saturday morning when you have a bit of time on your hands (just a bit) and the need for something warm and sizzling to perfume your entire kitchen and the neighbor’s hallway. As I learned from Nigel Slater, from whom this recipe derives, it’s also an excellent afternoon snack, to be taken, preferably, with a good friend, accompanied by a nice chat, some new ideas kicked around, a few hearty sarcastic cracks at the whole enterprise of love, and tea, of course. That was how it was for me. I ate these twice in one day. Once alone, a stack of three warm cakes on the plate, a generous pat of butter, and a drizzle of maple syrup, with my coffee; and then again, later, with my good friend S., with tea and syrup and a bit of Greek yogurt on the side.

Both times were good, for different reasons.

You begin by mixing together ricotta cheese, sugar, egg yolks, and orange zest. Then you mix into that some flour, an impossibly small amount, and then gently fold into this mixture egg whites that have been whipped into peaks. The whole thing at this point is nothing if not luscious—light and fragrant and simply beaming—it will transport you. 

If you succeed at folding in the whites without utterly deflating them, you will also feel proud, as I did (if you didn’t, don’t worry!, you can start again!, no one can see you in there, in the privacy of your own kitchen). You will look at your light-as-air mixture, and you will think, ha! look what I did!

Nigel suggests cooking these in large tablespoonfuls in a nonstick pan with melted butter. Maybe this works for him—I’m sure his pancakes are divine, and I’m sure I would gladly eat them at his kitchen counter any day—but the method didn’t work for me. I tried it, but my heart wasn’t in it from the start. I’ve never much liked pancakes that have been cooked in butter—I prefer the thin crust that forms when you cook them in nothing whatsoever except for the heat of the griddle, warmed until a drop of water dances chaotically across the surface. So that’s what I did, after the first batch came out all manner of burned and blackened and too greasy for anyone’s good.

At first it seemed that the griddle technique wouldn’t work—the pancakes seemed to be sticking… I was beside myself with grief. But I just tried to be patient. I waited, and waited. I waited until the edges of each little cake became slowly outlined in a light brown and until little, discrete bubbles seemed to open, ever so slightly, onto each surface. Then I turned them. And I won’t conceal the fact that I was utterly pleased with myself when I did.

Orange and ricotta pancakes—you and me are back on.

Orange and Ricotta Pancakes (adapted from Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries)

I should say that The Kitchen Diaries: A Year in the Kitchen with Nigel Slater is a beautiful book; if you like simple ingredients lists and honest, elegant prose, this book is for you.

1 cup ricotta cheese (store-bought ricotta works great)

4 tablespoons sugar

3 large eggs, separated

1 orange, the zest of which has been finely grated, avoiding the pith

1/2 cup of all-purpose flour

Butter, syrup, and orange wedges for serving

Combine the sugar, ricotta, egg yolks, and orange zest in a large mixing bowl. You can grate the orange zest directly into the bowl, no need to make this a separate step. Stir in the flour. Beat the egg whites in a bowl until semi-stiff peaks form (see the photo), and then gently fold this into the ricotta mixture. Nigel recommends a “surely but gently” method that I found was a good way to think about this folding process.

Warm a griddle. When a drop of water dances madly over the surface, bringing a smile to your face, begin dropping heaping tablespoonfuls of batter onto the griddle. I got four pancakes on at once. I felt that it helped to delicately smooth the batter into a circle, using a very light touch. You are not looking for perfection here, just rustic beauty. Cook the pancakes 1-2 minutes, until the edges begin to brown and a faint bubble or two cracks open on the surface, then flip them. Continue cooking until the bottom of each pancake is nicely browned and the pancakes are puffed.

Serve them while they are hot—I recommend a pat of sweet butter and a drizzle of cold syrup; Nigel likes a little melted apricot jam and some confectioners’ sugar.

Just eat them how you like them. And marvel at how nourished you feel with each delicate, cheesy crumb.

Notes: I cut the sugar by 1 tablespoon from the original; in the batch I made, I used 4 1/2 tablespoons rather than the recommended 5, but I still felt that it was a bit too sweet, so I’ve cut it further to 4 tbsp. in the recipe above. Use your judgment based on your own taste for sweet things—I prefer desserts and breakfasts to not be too sweet in general, but you may feel differently. These reheat beautifully if consumed later in the day, and I would imagine the next day as well. I heated them on a parchment-lined baking tray in a 350 degree oven.