smitten kitchen

Catch-up time! Yet another glorious side-effect of having my nose buried in and my psyche over-identifying with Julia Child’s life in France is that I find myself questioning why so often, we opt for the simple over the fantastic. Why the bagel from Murray’s on a Saturday morning when we could be enjoying our lazy mornings with inordinately good homemade fare? Plus, I tend to wake up hours before my more sleep-skilled roommate, and isn’t cooking a more noble investment of my time than reading the internets and watch the food teevee? Well, we opt for the simple because, unlike Mrs. Child, we have day jobs and I spend my mornings loafing because er, I’m not exactly the most earnest individual, yet sure enough in the last couple weekends breakfast around here had been sublime.

Last Saturday morning, just like my mother did almost every weekend when we were kids, I made pancakes, just plain-old, oat bran, yogurt, nut, seed and dried fruit-free pancakes before running out to catch the last day of the Edward Hopper exhibit at the Whitney. Mark Bittman’s recipe in the New York Times last month was almost exactly like the Joy of Cooking on my mother always used, replete with the confusing step of adding melted butter to cool ingredients, causing odd clumpage, which is of course quickly rectified in a hot griddle, but still. It always made me feel, and still does, like I did something wrong.

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Back when I was still getting daily “are you okay?” and “do you need anything” phone calls from my mother each morning after my little rumble with the stairs, she told me one more she’d just made German pancakes for breakfast. “Oh, you remember them, don’t you? I made them once in a while when you were growing up.”

Well no, I don’t. Do your parents ever do this? Insist you ate something often — it was practically a staple, mind you — and it’s news to you. I have no recollection of these puffy, curly, easy-as-sin goodies but I won’t be forgetting them any time soon. They taste like thick, winding crepes with just a hint of sweetness. The recipe suggests you serve them with butter, powdered sugar and lemon wedges, mom suggests her favorite, raspberry syrup but Alex and I are more the Vermont pure maple and fresh berries type.

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I am the last person on the internet to join the Cute Overload train; I mean, I get it, it’s cute. I love cute, you love cute, cute makes the birds sing and the sun shine and the world go round and tra-la-la. I get it. But man, oh man. Sometime in the last two weeks it hit me like a ten ton truck and people, the cute is killing me. I can’t breathe sometimes, the cute is so strong. I’m tag-surfing snorgle on Flickr, sputtering nonsensicals like “piggle snorgle tiny mouf action ohmy gah! Gah!” when Alex asks me how my day was. I want to take bites of the cute, but I know, I know I’d bite down too hard and take a piece out of the ear. When she added an “I shall leeck you” category it was about all the precious I could take and I had to let Alex in on the Overload, my new time-sucking Internet habit; Alex, who like any man with two eyes pulse, quickly found the Cats ‘n’ Racks and let’s just say, it is not just my redonk little habit anymore.

Speaking of redonk, in my predictable language-sponging manner, I’ve also picked up the slang, the cute-’bonics and it’s having a horrific effect on my ability to string sentences this week. Take our dinner tonight; it was just one of the best, most awesome, breathtakingly lovable weekday night dinners we’ve had in ages and I can just tell, these fritters are gonna be yr new BFF, too!!!1! Do you see? Do you see how that sentence just fell from grace when my enthusiasm kicked in? Let’s hope this passes real soon.

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As you may have noticed, I’m not the kind of person who just throws together things in the kitchen without a map, compass, 637 glowing reviews on Epicurious or a friend’s sworn assurance, sometimes written, that a specific recipe is a guaranteed to blow the ennui right out of your taste buds. Sure, I’ll make small adjustments while I work on something to accommodate our personal preferences, but aside from pasta sauces, eggs and salad dressings, I rarely go it on my own intuition.

You see, my intuition has led me to all sort of unsavory places, in and out of the kitchen, though I’ll save the latter for another time, or say, encyclopedia volume. As for cooking, one time, my homemade oatmeal made me so violently ill, I had to cancel a date. (Though perhaps, that was some conniving intuition, after all, as it was not with Alex. Cue: swoon or nausea.) The milk, as it turned out, was not past is expiration date but most-definitely rancid. (The sniff test on all dairy products, from those from a friend’s fridge to restaurants with $40-entrees, has since been instituted, offended sensibilities be damned.) Another time, I tried to bread and pan-fry tofu – because how hard could that be – and created a dish that was so foul, just the memory of it has killed my hunger pains for lunch. So, as you see, these days I use recipes to anchor my cooking urges to a safe harbor.

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