COOKING FOR LISA-Episode Two

Chicken Soup For The Bowl

In order for this post to make sense, you have to imagine a little white ball in a little yellow pool. There's nothing wrong with this little white ball (a matzo ball, matzah ball, matzoh ball, or however else you want to spell it) in this little yellow pool (an image I found online, everywhere),

but I wondered, during Passover last month, if something could be done to make it better (and to make an immense mess in the kitchen) as I continue to cook for Lisa.  To be fair and truthful, this one was really cooking for ME, though Lisa did eat and enjoy the result, if not the mess.

To begin, I had to address the little white ball and to see if I could make it more interesting. Let it be said here to anyone who has made and served these little white balls to me that I have no problem at all with them. Still, here's a path that readers of The Peerless Ear might find worth reading and even following. 
It starts with stock. Most recipes call for water or chicken stock, Well, water tastes like water, and most stock that you buy in a can or carton (or that you produce by dissolving powder in water) is uninteresting, at best, and horrible much of the time. So, I began with a version of Mark Bittman's roasted vegetable stock. I roasted a pan of vegetables in a 425 degree oven (a package of mushrooms,  two or three ribs of celery with leaves,
two onions,  six cloves of garlic,  two or three carrots, and  a couple of potatoes). If I'd had some leeks or parsnips, I'd have thrown them in as well, all of it tossed with some olive oil.  About an hour later, they emerged. At this point in the recipe (actually, about a paragraph earlier in this recipe), it's a good idea to go upstairs and close the doors in the bedrooms, unless you believe (as I do) that it's a good thing to have your pillows smell like The Carnegie Deli. In an hour, the vegetables will emerge, fragrant and lovely.

Plop them into a pot with lots of water (8 cups or so) and some parsley, thyme, peppercorns, and a half cup or more of white wine. Bring to a boil and then simmer with it just barely bubbling along for another hour or so.

Now here's the first safety precaution of this section of "Cooking For Lisa." If you like the pan that you used to roast the vegetables, do not do what I did the first time I tried this. I always like to clean as I go when I'm cooking for Lisa, so, after I'd scooped the vegetables into the pot, I put the pyrex pan into the sink and rinsed it off. This was a very bad thing to do. The glass cracked instantly with a bang that alarmed the dog. Try to avoid this.

Anyhow, with the stock safely simmering away and the pan cooling off in one piece, I turned my attention to the soup itself. Using the insert of a large crock pot, because I don't have a large casserole any longer (having rinsed mine, which was hot at the time, as I recall, with cold water one time, a while back, with predictable results), I began to construct the soup. I started with chicken thighs,

and then I added tomatoes, vermouth, onions, carrots, celery, a bay leaf or two, salt, pepper, garlic, parsley, and tarragon. Many of these performers have appeared earlier in this particular episode, but that's perfectly fine.

It will look something like this, I suppose. Stick it in a 375 oven, covered, for about 90 minutes. If you haven't broken your large casserole, it can be a bit less time. My crock pot bowl is huge, but things take a while to cook in it, even when it's in the oven. 

The stock is bubbling and the chicken is cooking, and now it's time to get to work on your matzo balls.  You'll need matzo meal for this, but you can easily make some yourself with some matzo and a food processor.  I started with the recipe on the side of the box and then went from there. The proportions are four eggs and some pepper and a teaspoon of salt to a cup of meal,

with 1/4 cup of vegetable oil (no, I didn't use schmaltz, which is rendered chicken fat and would, I'm sure, have been wonderful) and then you add not water but  a quarter cup of SELTZER,

which makes you feel a bit like a crazy person but, in theory, makes the results lighter somehow, though that hardly is the point for a recipe like this. 

Anyhow, in it went, sparking away and, I expect, rather surprised not to be in a glass with a slice of lime or a splash of pink grapefruit juice. Life is hard for seltzer, probably.

I put in some parsley as well, though fresh dill would be a nice idea,

and then I put the whole thing in the fridge to chill for a few hours.  Now would be a good time to walk the dog. The stock will bubble responsibly, the chicken will cook on its own, and the matzo will cool off nicely.  Go ahead. Walk the dog. He's probably going a bit crazy due to the smell.

When you get back, it'll probably be time to take care of the stock.

Strain it into a bowl or a pitcher or something, and press the vegetables through the holes in order to get as much out of them as you can. It will be fragrant and dark. Make sure that the bowl you're pouring it into is larger than the colander you're using, or you'll pour stock all over the counter and the floor, not that I'm speaking from memory. Only the dog knows.

Then, reluctantly, discard the veggie goo.  What you've got left will be wonderful. Make a lot and use it in everything. Indeed, in a few episodes of "Cooking For Lisa," the veggie stock

will make a brief but crucial appearance in some braised short ribs, which turned out to be almost alarmingly good.

 We're now at the messiest part of the process: the forming of the knaidlach, or matzo balls. By the way, there are even more spellings for "knaidl" than there are for "matzo." Deal with it. The mixture will have settled in the fridge and will be ready for sculpting. 

First, I put some saffron in a pot with half water and half vegetable stock and brought the whole thing to a low boil. Then, I formed the matzo balls into spheres about the size of slightly large ping pong balls

and plopped them in. If you pack and squeeze as you form them, they'll wind up being able to bounce like ping pong balls, which is fun but not so appetizing, so try to have a light touch. There's no way to avoid making a mess, but it's a good idea to keep your hands wet so they won't get sticky as you scoop and roll.

Let them cook for about 30 minutes, rolling around in there. They'll get larger as they cook and absorb the stock. You'll consider making HUGE ones as you watch them grow. Resist the impulse if you can.  

 By now, the chicken will be done,

and it's time to assemble and eat. First, fish out the chicken (Can one "chicken out a fish"? I think not) and cut it up. Discard the bay leaf. Every recipe always says that, and who am I to disagree? If your chicken had bones, remove them. Mine did not for this recipe, but it will be even more rich if yours does. So, cut it into pieces that correspond to the mouth sizes of the people you're cooking for and put the whole thing in a pot.

If you're moving smoothly from task to task, you'll be able to use THE SAME pot for the stock, then the balls, and now the soup. Go for it. Add stock so that the soup seems like soup. Remember, you'll want liquid so that the matzo balls have something to swim in. And now, there's really nothing left but the fun part. Put a matzo ball in a bowl. OK, put TWO matzo balls in a bowl. Who am I trying to kid?

Then, cover it with the soup and enjoy. Oh, and don't go swimming for a while. Yes, there's seltzer in the matzoh balls. They'll float. You, however, will definitely sink. 

Thanks for being my unseen readers. Next up is the second installment of "Cornered and Kicked," which will cover the beginning of the North Branford Legends' spring season. As I write this, we're 1-2, having lost a 2-1 heartbreaker in our last match. We play on Sunday mornings, and I can never walk until Wednesday or Thursday, but that shouldn't keep me from writing. 

dml

TELLING STORIES-Episode One

BONFIRE

During the day, the pile of wood had looked very much out of place: an unruly heap in the middle of the hill next to the precise lines and angles of the soccer field. In the evening, though, it seemed to Brian that the darkness had made room for it. Sometimes the wood was like a shadow against the deep blue of the sky, and sometimes, in Brian's view, it was the sky that darkened  behind the pile, and what he had seen before as a mysterious mountain became distinguishable again as logs and planks and a cardboard dragon as he stood alone and watched. People had always talked to Brian, to everyone at Choate, in fact, about being lonely.  The first few days at school, all of the teachers, peer counselors, and team captains gave speeches; everyone, it seemed was on the lookout for people who were lonely.  “You can be lonely, even in a crowd,” they’d say, again and again.

Brian liked being lonely, though. At least, he liked being alone. The basement of the library, the laundry building, even the back corners of the cavernous dining hall always teemed with students: students studying, students playing tag in the math building with its enormous windows, students hurrying to this and that. People were always watching you, sitting down with you, and talking to you. His room didn’t help either. First of all, Brian had been assigned one of those happy, chatty, effervescent roommates. Energetic at any hour of the day, Fred had come to Choate with dozens of friends already—friends from summer camp, friends from his old school, and friends that he seemed to Brian to make without any effort at all, and their dorm room, even though it was all the way up on the third floor, was seldom quiet and never empty. They called him “Bri,” and  “B-dog”-which he loved and hated at the same time.

Besides, Brian’s idea of solitude wasn’t about being hidden. He could have done that easily enough by finding a desk in the language lab, putting on headphones, and pretending to be fascinated by Spanish verbs. What Brian liked was to be somewhere, a real place, a place with space in it, but still to be alone, to look at things without worrying about other people getting in the way. His favorite moment at the school so far was one Tuesday when his English teacher cancelled class, the last period of the day, and Brian went down to the gym early for soccer and found the building silent and vacant. He kicked a ball against the wall of the basketball court for half an hour or so, listening to it echo until the crowds appeared, first in a trickle, then a flood, filling the building with their clomping cleats, and he fled to the fields. With the whole school, it seemed, at the Pep Rally in the Arts Center, Brian examined the wood that was waiting to become the bonfire from every possible angle. Every now and then, he could hear laughter or applause from across the street, and every second or two, the pile was illuminated in time with the blinking lights on the security car as it waited for the hundreds of students to rush across the street, as they would, inevitably, in a matter of minutes, taking over what Brian had already come to think of as “his” place. 

“Everyone’s inside.”

Brian looked up. 

He had not really assumed that he was totally alone. That never happened. There were so many rules, it seemed to Brian, and most of them appeared to him to have been invented in order to prevent his solitude. He was almost always afraid of getting in trouble by accident, like by waking up too early and leaving the dorm before he was allowed to, or by wandering off "campus" without knowing where the boundaries actually were. Anyhow, there were security people and firefighters somewhere nearby, and there were people whose job it was to keep the woodpile unlit until the students arrived. It would be, Brian admitted to himself, pretty funny if someone were to burn down the bonfire before everyone got there. Still, from his spot on the hill, Brian had thought that he was observing unseen, if not actually alone. The voice startled him, and he turned around, almost losing his footing in the mud.

“I’m sorry?” Brian’s apology came out sounding like a question. 

“I said ‘Everyone’s inside.’”

She was almost invisible, with a dark blue sweatshirt on that read “Welcome To Skullcrusher Mountain” and the hood up, so that she had practically blended into the darkness.

“You’re not inside.” Brian felt like they were somehow in the middle of a conversation, not the beginning, and he wondered momentarily if he just hadn’t been paying attention.

“Well, I’m special. What’s your excuse?”

“I’m sorry, but do I know you?” he said.

“Why do you keep apologizing? That’s twice, and we’ve only been talking for like a minute.”

“Sorry. No. I mean, it’s just that I thought I was alone.”

“You’re at a bonfire. There’ll be about eight hundred screaming people here in ten minutes.”

“I’m not at a bonfire yet. Nothing’s lit. I’m at a pile of wood.”

“And what makes that worth staring at? Anyhow, you do know me.  I know you, that is.  I’m Max’s sister. Bethany.” She said it with three very distinct syllables.

Max was one of Fred’s friends, the pack that surrounded Brian’s roommate, night and day. They were always nice enough to Brian, and he was grateful for the fact that he never had to enter the dining hall with its high ceiling and its frightening choices of tables without being summoned and welcomed to Fred’s group. Brian certainly liked being alone, but not in the dining hall. Never in the dining hall. Sitting alone would be the sort of public solitude that Brian couldn’t even imagine, the kind that he and his mother had discussed that summer, getting ready for the new school year.

“What if I’ve got nobody to eat with?” he asked, over and over.

“Well, you’re nice. Make new friends,” she had suggested. “If you just walk up to a stranger and say ‘Hi, I’m Brian Decker,’ I’m sure it will all work out.”

Brian was just as sure that that would lead to failure and humiliation. "Hi, I'm Brian Decker"? He'd rather not eat. He'd rather never eat. Only once, so far, had he gone to dinner without a plan and a table full of guys he knew, and it turned out to be a disaster. It was a crowded day in the room, and he sat at a miraculous empty table, only to be joined by one of the faculty families, complete with a toddler in a high chair and a sleeping baby in one of those plastic things with handles that they wound up plopping right in the middle of the table: a bizarre centerpiece.  Then, because such people were too nice to simply ignore him, which he would have preferred, he wound up having to talk about where he was from and how the first few days had been treating him to this lady whose husband taught Physics and who paid most of her attention not to Brian but instead to the baby, who woke up with a roar and attracted the notice of everyone in the room.

He’d been more careful since then, making sure to be ready to head to dinner whenever Fred and what seemed like a herd of others were heading out the door. He’d tried to make it seem natural, and only once he’d felt conspicuous in his worry. 

“Are you guys going to dinner soon?” Brian heard himself ask one evening, while Fred and his gang were discovering just which sorts of YouTube videos the school’s internet filter had banned (sex and violence involving people) and which it had not (the exact same acts involving cartoon animals). He’d meant, as he did every night, to work his question into the social flow of what was going on in the room: lacrosse balls bouncing, music, various pings and beeps from computers. However, Brian’s words found one of those pockets of silence that sometimes happen, even in noisy places, and it was his question, all alone, that everyone heard. His voice rang, high and awkward. Everything seemed to stop. "Are you guys going to dinner soon?"

There was a pause.

“B-Dog’s hungry!” someone said.

“He’s a hungry dog!” 

"Feed the B-Dog!"

“FEED THE B-DOG!!”

That night at dinner, everyone at the table scraped leftovers onto Brian’s plate.  Fred barked.  Max, whose sister was even at this moment looking at him with amusement in what were lively eyes—he could see that even in the darkness of the evening—scratched his ears and asked, “Who’s a good boy?” to the laughter of the table.  He didn’t mind terribly; if you were the family pet, you were still in the family. It was just that he tired of it long before everyone else did.  Two months had passed, and, if anything, it had only gotten worse.

“You’re the one my brother bought the dog biscuits for.”

“I guess,” Brian answered.  “I mean, somebody put them by my door one night.  Another time they were under my pillow.  I didn’t know until you said just now that it was Max.”

“Max is an idiot.”

“It’s not a big deal.”

“It’s a big deal to me.  My brother’s an idiot, and I share his DNA. It’s clear neither of us is adopted.  I mean, look at me.  I look exactly like him.”

Brian looked at her.  Even in the dark, Bethany certainly did resemble Max.  They had the same wide open eyes, the same curly brown hair.  Brian didn’t look anything like his brother, who was a freshman at Cornell.  Will was taller, with red cheeks and hair that was almost black. By three in the afternoon, every day, Will needed a shave.  By evening, it looked like he’d been working on a beard.  Brian was, in contrast, fair, with long eyelashes that made him look even more sensitive than he was.

“Are you ever going to answer my question?” Bethany asked, standing next to him and looking, instead of at Brian, down the hill at the pile of wood.  The hill was just steep enough so that they both had to lean back, just a little, onto their heels in order to keep standing up straight. 

“Which was?”

“Why are you looking at an unlit bonfire?” It was a fair question, Brian had to admit, as the two of them stood, side by side, watching the wood and the grass and the trees and the sky in dark silence, or what would have been dark silence if it hadn’t just then been broken by drums and horns from across the street as students burst from the Arts Center and turned into an army that advanced across the street and up toward Brian in the startled November air.

WHILE I CAN STILL REMEMBER-Episode One

Dipping A Cookie In Tea

While I can still remember, I'm going to write everything down. While I can still remember, I'm going to write about when milk cartons in the school cafeteria cost two cents and milk at home got delivered by a milkman in glass bottles, sealed with foil. That's the milk that was in the glass bottle and the bottle sealed with foil. The milkman was neither in a bottle nor sealed in foil. He may, in fact, have been wearing a uniform. In my memory, he was. While I can still remember, I'm going to write about a lunchbox shaped like a Volkswagen bus and the firehouse siren that went off at noon and five every day. Does it still?
     I'm talking about the days and years of photographs, so many of them in black and white that my memories of those times are, somehow, also in black and white, as if color didn't even happen until the late sixties. My own children's memories, I expect, will be associated with videos, as they can watch themselves read and play and sleep again and again on their laptops. Will their children, if and when they appear, have little holograms of their birthday parties and ballet recitals? Here I am at six, cutting a cake that I can smell and taste just by looking at it.

The cake was cool and sweet on that hot July afternoon, a year to the day before the moon landing.
     While I can still remember, I'm going to write about the smell of rain on the bricks at that house on Homeland Avenue and about watching the chipmunks scamper outside my bedroom window after we moved to Maple Road. In a week or so, I think, I'm going to drive to town and look around, as I haven't been there in more than a decade, but I want to begin the memoir section of The Peerless Ear by relying only on my memory. Looking at things may be precise and specific, but remembering them is its own sort of truth, so I'm going to hold off as long as I can before making the trip, and I'm going to concentrate instead on what I recall. James Joyce wrote Ulysses while living abroad, in voluntary self-imposed exile, and yet he boasted that if Dublin were destroyed, it could be rebuilt, brick by brick, from the details from his memory that he put in the novel.  Could I do that with Cornwall, New York?

What do I recall? There was only one traffic light in Cornwall. You could say to someone, "I'll meet you by the traffic light," and that would have been enough. Is it still enough? Is there still only one light? There wasn't even a movie theater in Cornwall for most of my growing up, though I remember that there was one, very briefly, the summer I turned nine. I definitely saw The Barefoot Executive there in 1971, a movie that (and I promise that this is true) is about a monkey that can predict what television shows will be hits and gets a job in Hollywood. Perhaps this is why that particular movie theater closed so soon. If you wanted a hamburger in Cornwall, you had to go the next town, to Carrols, which served burgers that I remember in black and white. It became a full-color Burger King right around when Neil Armstrong took that one small step.

While you couldn't get a hamburger in town, you could always get very good pizza. At least I remember that you could, and I'm going to sample some when I make my journey. You see, in Marcel Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, the narrator begins his journey into the past by dipping a madeleine—a little cookie—in some tea, and the taste brings memories flooding back to him, enough to fill a seven-volume novel.  I'll have to see if a slice at Prima on Main Street can have the same effect. As for the houses I lived in and the schools I learned in, I'll have to settle for looking at them from the street in the case of Homeland Avenue and the schools I attended, though my high school has become a middle school and the Cornwall students of today attend high school in what I assume, with the indignation of nostalgia, is a sterile and horrible new building. It's not even in town! As for the Maple Road house, someone else lives there now, of course, and the driveway is far too long and twisty for me to be able to see anything from the road. The driveway takes a curve in the woods about a hundred yards in, and I'd rather remember the pool and the big maple tree as they were than drive down that road and see for myself.





    
 Next up is "Bonfire," my initial piece of fiction, which is episode one in the "Telling Stories" section of TPE. I'll post in a couple of days. Then, it's back to "Cooking For Lisa," where I shall tackle the mysteries of chicken soup, followed by "Cornered and Kicked" and the beginning of the North Branford Legends' 2016 soccer season. Thanks for reading.

dml

CORNERED AND KICKED-Episode One

THIS IS MY BODY

I weigh 171 pounds. That's according to the scale in the locker room at the YMCA. I trust that scale, as I've come to believe the things I learn in the locker room at the local YMCA. This came after I doubted the story a guy in the steam room at the Y told a couple of months ago.  He said that the nuns who were overseeing his Catholic school class trip accidentally extinguished the eternal flame at JFK's tomb by dousing it with holy water. That may be the greatest story that anyone has ever told in a locker room, and (according to Wikipedia, which I instantly checked when I got home), it was true. So I suppose I can believe that I weigh 171 pounds. There will be 171 pounds of 53 year-old me taking on the challenges of this, the athletics section of The Peerless Ear. My weight can and will fluctuate over the course of these pages, but the age will go only in one direction, as much as I might travel backwards in memory.

To return, then, to my original point: I weigh 171 pounds, and it's this body that will hike, bike, kick, splash, trip, and fall through these tales.  This body—this five foot five inch, 171 pound body—is doing OK after a half-century or so of use.  Its blood pressure always runs a bit high, it sometimes has dizzy spells when it is asked to turn upside-down, and its right eye has recovered nicely enough, though not completely, from a couple of surgeries. It wheezes a bit in the cold air, its calf muscles get sore very easily, and injuries that used to heal in hours now take months and months. It is this body that I've slid into Speedo jammers, topped with a cap and fitted with goggles, and then plopped into the pool at the Y every day this week.

Indeed, though much of this section of The Peerless Ear (hereafter TPE) will follow the fortunes of The North Branford Legends, the soccer team whose season will begin in about two weeks (if the April snow that is falling outside the window as I type ever melts and disappears), swimming will come first. No cleats, no bike, no kayak, no helmet, no teammates, no racquet, no glove: just this 171 pound body in the water, doing the best it can.

Of course, years ago, there was less of me, and the best this body could do wasn't really so bad. I've always been a creature of the water, ever since our dad taught us to swim very early by holding me and my brother by our ankles upside-down in lakes and pools and then letting go. 

We invariably swallowed gallons of water and threw up. I suppose I got used to it in time, and eventually, I became a swimmer. In fact, I swam competitively for eight years, back in the day before anyone wore goggles, coming home every night with weird chorine-induced optical illusions. Go ahead and try it. If you swim in a heavily chlorinated pool at a military academy in the nineteen-seventies without goggles for two hours a night for eight years, every light you see will be surrounded by a rainbow halo. It's like being at a Grateful Dead concert. I'm sure that explains the look on my face in this photo. 

It was taken, as far as I can tell, in about 1978. I was a sprinter, defending my "anchor" spot on the 200 yard freestyle relay. I had a little speed and a lot of attitude and managed to keep my spot in the relay every time someone tried to challenge me, though all that comes from this picture is that I was very aware of the camera, even right before a race. That's a constant with me. Real athletes focus; I look around.

These days, at the Y, I feel either very sleek and speedy (if the pool is filled with 75 year-olds recovering from hip surgery) or lumpy and slow (if I wind up sharing a lane with someone young or fit or ambitious who's in a hurry to pass me again and again and again).  I chug and splash along and do my fifty laps, switching from freestyle to breaststroke and back again, daydreaming so energetically (about Shakespeare, about TPE, about my volleyball team, about cooking) that I generally lose track of where I am in my workout and punish myself by starting a set over from the beginning. When I finish, just to show off, no matter how tired I am, I pop up out of the pool, just the way I did at seventeen, right out of the water and straight onto my feet: no wimpy ladders or steps for this guy! As I grab my towel and head to the locker room, hoping for more tales in the steam room, I can see the records, up on the wall, for the local swim club. My own fifty yard freestyle, back in the winter of 1980, when I was seventeen, was a 26.6.  Not bad, I think, as I look up at the board, panting athletically, and I search for where that would put me against the kids of 2016. Not bad at all. I was a little quicker than Ali Tyler, the record holder for the Wallingford Dolphins. Of course, she's nine.

Thanks for reading TPE. Again, you can subscribe with the link that's at the bottom of the page (at least on the web verson).  The next post will be the first in the "While I Can Still Remember" section, a memoir about teaching and learning. Indeed, it was while taking a Water Safety Instructor class at the Y near my hometown that I first became taken with the idea of teaching people things, so I suppose that the four threads of TPE are going to be woven together like…like… A CHALLAH!   Stay tuned!

dml

COOKING FOR LISA-Episode One

CHALLAH

I started cooking for Lisa on September 16^th, 1984, and I've been cooking for her ever since, even when she's not around. That autumn, I'd practice all week long on a dish in my little apartment kitchen in New Haven and then show off on the weekends when she'd come down and see me from her teaching job in New Hampshire. I had a little plastic box full of three-by-five  cards with recipes my mom had typed out so I wouldn't starve living on my own. I've still got some, like this one: an old-school recipe on an old-school index card with old-school typos. Like me, the recipe has aged a bit, but I like to think it still gets the job done.

So, to begin, if it's Friday, I've probably got flour on my hands. If it's Friday, I've probably gotten flour on the floor, even if the house has just been cleaned. I probably won't even get in trouble, because I'm making a challah. I'm cooking for Lisa, and Lisa loves my challah. This recipe, by the way, got its start with Molly O'Neill's New York Cookbook, which, when it's on a shelf and you're reading the title on the spine, looks like it reads "New York, by Molly 'Cookbook' O'Neill," which is a great nickname, better than "The Peerless Ear."  The recipe began there, and then it evolved over the years.

Challah's not all that hard, since it's the ingredients that do most of the work,
and I've been known (though not today) to plop everything into a bread machine and run to volleyball practice, finding a puffy ball of dough waiting for me when I return. For my first "Cooking For Lisa" piece, though, I'm doing it the old-fashioned way. I've always thought it comes out tasting a bit better when I get my hands dirty, but that may just be my imagination. People, including many readers of these pages, seem to like it a lot, and I try to walk that fine line between saying how easy it is to make and implying that it's really really hard and that I'm some sort of alchemist.

I start with a cup and an eighth of water.

Sometimes recipes will ask for the water to be a bit warm. Too hot, though, and you risk killing the yeast. I tend to make a gesture towards warm water, but in our new house, we have something called "hot water on demand," which sounds like we have hot water whenever we want it, but what it really means, I've discovered, is that we get hot water made for us WHEN we demand it, which means it takes about 90 seconds or so of running to produce. I don't understand how that's environmentally friendly, but I guess it means that there isn't a tank of hot water somewhere in the basement, waiting to bathe me or to be part of a challah. I'm generally not to be patient enough to wait. I suppose I could measure it out and then put it in a microwave. I could use filtered water from the fridge or expensive bottled water. I don't.

Then, in goes the yeast: three teaspoons.
I confess to not completely understanding what yeast is or where it comes from, and the one time I tried to make my own (to capture my own?) by making a sourdough starter, what I created (flour, water, and crushed grapes plus time and patience) was pretty nasty: black oozing bubbles. Lisa made me throw it away before it crawled out of the bowl and attacked us in our sleep. Some recipes have you "proof" the yeast, checking to be sure it's alive by feeding it a little sugar and watching it foam in a few minutes. That can be fun, I suppose, and the bubbles are pretty, but I've never used yeast that didn't work. You can trust it. The only times my bread didn't rise were due to the fact that I was running from class to dog to practice and I forgot to put any yeast at all in the dough. Insert your own Passover joke here, if you'd like.

3/16 of a cup of sugar and an equal amount of oil go in next.

I use something neutral, like canola oil, because I once read a recipe that said that canola oil is "neutral."

I've used safflower oil and even olive oil (which isn't neutral, but is "fruity," I think) instead, when I hadn't shopped. Go ahead and experiment.
I've used brown sugar or even honey instead of sugar. It all works.

Now, add two eggs. You have no choice about this.  I've never skipped eggs, and I can't really imagine a vegan challah, though I'm sure such a thing can be executed. I use honey as a glaze at the end, though, which is also a no-no for lots of vegan recipes.  I suppose that bees would be making honey anyway, whether we ate it or not. Last week, I saw a bee struggling in the pool as I was swimming (on vacation in the California desert), and having read lots of recent articles about the dangers of the declining bee population, I thought I'd do my bit and help the little guy out of the water. He instantly stung me, so I'm going to continue to cook with honey.  And eat eggs.

Anyhow, a half teaspoon of salt comes next. I use kosher salt. I have no idea why.
I suppose it fits the sabbath theme, with challah as the traditional Friday night dinner food. I almost never make a challah unless it's a Friday night or Rosh Hashonah or a Yom Kippur break-fast, when I make a round one. I'm aware that kosher salt and regular salt probably measure differently, due to what they're shaped like, the same way that snow and sleet might, in your driveway. Skip the salt, and the dough will rise a bit too much, sort of like the instant pudding in Woody Allen's Sleeper.

Finally, you need four and a half cups of bread flour. All purpose flour will do, but it'll be different, a bit more like cake and less chewy. Use bread flour, if you can. Don't panic if you can't.

I once knew the difference between bread flour and all purpose flour, and I could look it up if I wanted to, the same way I once knew calculus.  As you add the flour, this will all turn into a big, gooey mess, but that's fine. Mix it together, and it will turn into dough, eventually. Add a bit more flour if you're uncomfortable with getting your hands messy.

Eventually, the liquid will get absorbed and it'll turn into a ball you can knead.  Knead it for a while. Again, I have no idea how long. Knead it (adding flour if it gets too sticky) right in the bowl until you have to go somewhere. Five minutes. Fifty strokes. Honestly, I'm just making these numbers up. I knead it until I feel like stopping or until the dog barks or until I really have to leave for volleyball practice. 

When you're done, leave it in the bowl, covered in plastic wrap or a damp towel (again, I have no idea why) in a reasonably warm spot for ninety minutes or so. Longer? Sure, though it may try to escape the bowl (or the kitchen) or get a little crispy on top if you leave it too long.

In a perfect world, you'll have time for a second rise, after you've braided it. If not, that's perfectly fine. Just form it, and bake it. A second rise can make it pretty, though, and Lisa likes it pretty. It's the braiding that took me a while to learn, as I'd never had enough hair to braid and hadn't really done much with braids other than stare at the one on the back of Jeannie Cascino's head in English class in ninth grade, hoping (and fearing) she'd turn around. The first time I tried to make this recipe, I had to go out into the dormitory we lived in and find one of the girls to teach me what to do. Three strands is plenty, so cut the dough into three relatively equal lumps.

Roll the dough into snakes, and then braid them, tucking in the ends. If there's time, cover the whole thing with some plastic wrap again, or a damp towel, and then let it rise for as long as you can. The longer the rise, the more dramatic and beautiful the finished product will be.
 I used to combine egg and honey for a glaze, but it was always hard to mix them in a bowl.

Instead, I just drizzle the honey (take THAT, bees!) right on the dough,

and then brush on the egg. They combine in the oven and make a sweet crust. Sprinkle on some sesame seeds if that's your thing, and you're good to go.

You can go ahead and bake whenever you'd like, at 350, or at least once the oven is preheated, since I didn't mention that yet. Sorry. Wait until the oven is preheated. I often forget, but that just means that the dough gets to rise a bit more.  Nothing wrong with that. 

Finally, it's time to bake the thing. I usually use parchment on top of a baking sheet since the glaze can drip and get sticky, but you don't have to if you don't want to. Bake for thirty-one minutes.

I know that sounds crazy, but thirty just isn't enough, and thirty-two can be a bit much. Experiment.  I imagine that this is the only recipe in the world that bakes something for 31 minutes, but look what you get! 

There are a few variations of this recipe worth trying, like cinnamon and raisins, particularly if you're going to make French toast with the leftovers, which is definitely the thing to do. Challah makes great French toast.

Ingredients:

1 1/8 cup water

3 tsp yeast

1/2 tsp salt

4 1/2 cups bread flour

2 eggs, plus 1 egg for glazing

1 tbs honey

3/8 cup canola oil

3/8 cup sugar

Thanks for reading.  The next installment of the blog will move to "Cornered and Kicked," the athletics series, which will be slightly less centered on carbs. You can comment at the bottom of the page and also sign up to get an email alert when I've posted a new piece. 

dml