smitten kitchen

Are you in town this weekend while all the good people of the US and A have jetted to some, any edge of the country? Do you not feel bad because it is so gorgeous out, you have to pinch yourself to believe it is so, and now that the city has emptied out you have it the playground all to yourself for once?

Fine, as usual I am talking about me, me me, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t hope you have it this good. Walking around the city on these three off-days of the year when all the sidewalk-cloggers had the good sense to scatter elsewhere is a dream. You can make pretend, once again, that the land is yours alone, and you’ll put your house right there and your boat tied to that pier and when you’re hungry for a snack, you’ll climb into the cave at Murray’s and whittle yourself a little something to schmear on a tear of a Balthazar baguette. You won’t have to share the swing set with any short people and when you go the Union Square Greenmarket, you won’t be knocked into even once. At 4 p.m., good tomatoes will remain.

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I hate clutter. You might think that this means that I live a Type A sort of white glove test-passing existence, but anyone who knows me can vouch wholeheartedly that I do not. Because I’m lazy. But every so often (er, 28 days or so) I go on a cleaning bender and purge and sweep to my heart’s content. My inboxes get Bit Literate, absurdly insignificant things get vacuumed (dusty ledge around the walls of the apartment, your days are numbered) and things cluttered in this ever-expanding document called “to blog” get purged, well, onto your screens.

I’ve gotten especially behind this month, so I hope you don’t mind that I dump five ideas onto you and then move onto what I really want to talk about, this new awesome thing that rhymes with nacro and nens. Sad but true, this entry is the equivalent of bartering two more bites of broccoli at the dinner table to ensure that you can get a scoop of Breyers Neapolitan for dessert, but like the brown, white and pink-striped stuff always was, I’ll try to make it completely worth it in the end.

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Last month, en route to a cousin’s baby shower in Connecticut, my mother, sister and I realized that we needed a new envelope for the card we’d brought and swung into a strip shopping mall which housed a crafts store. I ran in to buy one, and found myself smack dab in front of something so mind-blowingly awesome, it took me nearly a minute to remember to breathe: as if I couldn’t love her any more, Martha Stewart apparently has a line of crafts products, and people, if there are two things I’m powerless in the face of, it’s a rack that contains not one, not two, but eleven different types of crafts glue and their doyenne. That I walked out of the store that day with not a single MSC product is nothing but a testament to my refuse-to-overstuff-my-tiny-apartment willpower, but it’s been three weeks now, and still, almost every other worth that breathlessly escapes my lips sounds like MonkeyPartyinaBox! or PaperBagPuppetKit! I am nothing if not a sensible, level-headed individual.

Monday, the mailroom guy arrived at my desk with the Biggest Box in the Whole world, and people, it was from Martha Stewart Freaking Crafts Dot Com. I shit you not. I briefly worried that I had in fact lost what was left of my mind and ordered a Leaf Wood Stamp 1 whilst drunk or something. (Hey, some people drunk-dial exes, perhaps drunk-buying multi-colored Evening Terrace Decorative Adhesive could be my thing. Can you imagine what a riot it would be to tell this story at a party?) I mean, this really crossed my mind, and left me so panicked that I went to see if I had an account, or old emails confirming an order, but retrieved nothing. So I IM-ed Alex and confessed that I thought I might be placing orders on MarthaStewartCrafts.com in my sleep, and why couldn’t I just be a normal girl and sleep-shop for Manolos? And do you know what knee-weakening sweet nothing he whispered into my monitor? Do you?

“That’s box one of two.”

Hummuna. Did I score well or what?

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Here in the Northeast, where our winters get frigidly cold and our summers are known to snap into the high 90s for days on end, I have a somewhat sinister theory about the weather, and that is that it’s mocking you. It’s waiting for you to snap and when you do, it has a hearty laugh at your expense. Bust out the ski jacket, 20-foot scarf and Gore-Tex accessories the first cold day in October? Snicker, snicker. Sink down in front of the a/c with a bag of ice on your forehead the first 90-degree, 100 percent humidity day in June? Imagine the sun’s Mr. Burns-ian cackle, muttering “excellent.”

I don’t know what it’s like where you are, but hoo boy, is it hot up in NYC right now–and it’s not even June yet, which means that it’s too soon to succumb to bowls of icy granita and dinners of frozen grapes and proscuitto-wrapped melon. Fold your cards now, and what will you do when summer really steps up to the plate (and God-willing, the Yankees) in July? Nope, no, can’t have it. But it doesn’t mean that tonight is not as good of a night as any to take a step back from the stove with something I fell upon two nights ago that was so gorgeously simple and different, I could imagine it keeping us cool all summer.

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I killed a biga. I didn’t really want to get into it at the time, as I’m not exactly proud of my actions. It’s not like I didn’t know how not to destroy a pre-ferment, it’s not like I don’t like, no love ciabatta bread, yet I made it at the start of one of those weeks that seem easy-peasy from the outset but when the pace picked up, I let it linger, carelessly convinced it would wait patiently for me. It was my neglect that took its life. And yet in hindsight, now that I’m ready to own up to it, it may have also been some passive-aggressiveness on my part.

You see, we were watching Everyday Italian on the Food Network a few Sundays ago, and upon eyeing Giada slicing into large ciabatta loaf in a low-cut blouse, Alex said, “You know what you should make next time? Ciabatta bread.” Except he said in sort of a lingering, elongated fashion, like the tone I might use to say “Baileys on the rocks” or “salted butter caramel.” I know that tone, and I don’t like it in the proximity of television cleavage, television cleavage that I am arrogantly certain I can out-cook with or without a team of food- and hair-stylists. Of course, I didn’t say all of this. I actually said, “Great idea! I’ll start the dough!” And four days later, the biga had been left for dead. Curious, eh?

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