Strata Various - Best in Brunch

I once joked with another holiday season baby that we should write a book called “The Yule Tide Birthday – Buy This Book AND SOMETHING ELSE”. As a kid, I hated the dual occasion present. Now I’m much more mature. (I’ll wait ‘til you finish coughing.)

When my friend Don seemed particularly bummed out at our mutual birthday season, I suggested I host him a brunch with guests and menu of his choosing. Now I’m the daughter of a woman who maintains that chocolate is a vegetable (and that she needs her five a day), but even I thought French toast followed by chocolate cake might be edging into too sweet. Plus, I worried about getting everyone served promptly . . . the answer came to me in layers.

Stratas were an ideal solution because they could be made the day before and meant we’d all eat at the same time. Stratas are a variation on a quiche and bread pudding. I used my own pain de mie (see Square Loaf in a Round Hole, April 12, 2010), because I’d found it was ideal for French toast in individual servings. The bread is toasted dry in a low oven for about half an hour, then soaked overnight in a mixture of egg-milk or cream-seasonings and possibly cheese. I did two, the French toast strata was topped with brown sugar, cinnamon and pecans; and, just in case not everyone felt up to unremitting sweet, I made an egg, sausage and cheese strata. These were accompanied by a fruit salad and a green salad. The cake, which I have now made for Marion, Naomi and Don’s birthday is a chocolate pound cake layered with a milk chocolate ganache with a hint of cinnamon, covered in a dark chocolate-espresso glaze. No complaints to date.

Wrong, wrong, wrong and reading in 2011
A recent Skeptics in the Pub podcast featured an interview with Kathryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong, Adventures in the Margin of Error. I asked for it for Christmas, because never having been wrong . . . ararararar . . . it is a fascinating study of our attitudes to being wrong, and perhaps most interestingly why we cling to ideas and beliefs when we know them absolutely to be wrong.

In 2011 I look forward to reading the rest of the Inspector Montalbano series, The Return of History by Robert Kagan, Simon Gray’s The Last Cigarette, his final book in the Smoking Diaries, and many more of the many books that line my bedroom. They provide R value only in the sense they insulate me from life’s chaos.

In 2011 may you read many wonderful things, eat many wonderful things, may you recognize your wrongs, forgive and be forgiven.

Square Loaf in a Round Hole

Someone once described pain de mie as what Wonder Bread wishes it could be. To get this bread right has been a goal of mine since I was introduced to tramezzini, luscious over-stuffed sandwiches that I first encountered in Venice.

Tramezzini are never grilled like their skinny cousins the panini. You see heaps of them on display in bars, cut in triangles to reveal their plentiful fillings. It is understood that one would never order two halves with the same filling, any more than the Italian electorate would censure a politician for having a wife and a mistress. Such homogeneity would be an offense to the spirit of dolce vita, but as usual I digress.

Pain de mie should have a thin golden crust and tight, fine crumb. It doesn’t compete for attention, but is strong enough to hold up under the temptations of silky mayonnaise or a hunky slab of vine ripened tomato. I have tried two or three recipes, but was not truly happy with any of them.

Then I stumbled on a recipe by the venerable Beard. It produced a loaf of perfect proportions but unpleasant density. I scaled back the flour from 6 ½ cups to 4 and . . . perfection. Fun for a beginner, this bread is baked in a Pullman pan which is straight-sided with a sliding lid to give you a perfectly square loaf. I believe the name Pullman is a corruption of pain de mie, but I have also read that this bread was served on trains and christened in Pullman in honor of the cars (you will also see this bread called a Pullman loaf).

Give it a try. Slice it thin, fill your sandwich generously, then open wide and say mmmmmm.

Page turning podcasts redux

As promised, here are some more great book-related podcasts.

· NPR Topics: Books – this is a fiction and non-fiction potluck, with authors and topics drawn from all over the NPR network.

· World Book Club – BBC World Service – typically each episode features an author and one of their best known works, with an interview and readings followed by questions from the audience, via telephone and e-mail.

· Writers & Company – CBC Radio – Eleanor Wachtel is a national treasure who has introduced me to authors I would never have otherwise read including Nuala O’Faolain and David Leavitt, but it is Wachtel’s encyclopedic knowledge of literature and profound humanity that make these interviews so compelling.

Diana Athill is another author I would never have read if Eleanor Wachtel hadn’t pointed me in her direction. I began with her memoir Somewhere Near the End and just finished Yesterday Morning, her memoir of childhood. Stet – An Editor’s Life records her nearly 50 years as a director of André Deutsch where she worked with Mordecai Richler and Brian Moore to name a few. Stet, of course, is the now practically obsolete copy editor’s mark for “leave it in” and is as much a reflection of Athill’s honesty as her career.

She reminds me of Orwell in his essays and journalism. They are similar in their awareness of the privileges that are theirs by accident of birth and equally unembarrassed to record their experiences truthfully. They are different in that Athill records her pleasures with zest. She is also without self pity and therefore poignant about the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to – regardless of class – from the effects of being a child of unhappy parents to the losses that are part of aging.

If Diana Athill were my aunt, I can’t help feeling my parents wouldn’t have left me alone with her for the evening without providing a list of topics she was not to talk about, (probably prefaced with “for God’s sake” underscored with eye rolling). Since I no longer need a sitter, but am still eager for provocative observations and tales from a life well and fully lived, I look forward to learning from her latest book, Life Classes.

Of Books and Bread

Welcome to the first post of Read ‘em and Eats, which I intend to be a chronicle of what I am reading and what I am cooking. I’ve never wanted to belong to a book club because I’d hate to be told what to read – there are too many books piled about the place for me to be further distracted from my own meandering path. But I love hearing about what other people are reading and look forward to comments that add to the piles beside the bed, in the office, on top of the toilet, spill out of the shelves outside the kitchen . . . you get the picture. Speaking of the kitchen, my lifelong goal has been to be the kind of cook that if you turned up on my doorstep unannounced I could respond with a meal that would be engaging and satisfying – like a good book? So let’s begin.

Let them eat bagels
I had understood that croissant were among the most laborious of breakfast foods. Bagels can’t be far behind. I attempted them for the first time this weekend. Unlike the usual two rises of your regular loaf, bagels not only have multiple rises, they are boiled before they are glazed and baked. I love to knead and bagels are aces in this department.

I did two batches. One the half recipe from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Bread Bible. As always her recipe was full of intricacies, well-explained and illustrated, and requires commitment on the home baker’s part. If you work to her exacting and preferred instructions this is two day exercise. Was it worth it? Oh yeah. Great crust encases a chewy, flavorful interior.

The recipe for the second batch was from Janice Murray Gill's Canadian Bread Book, which I fear may be out of print; if so, check out abebooks.com for second hand copy. It’s an excellent book for the beginning bread maker and expert alike. This recipe was less complex in process and shorter in working time. The results were also very good, produced slightly bigger bagels, though they weighed the same in both cases. These were closer to store bought bagels in that they were cakier in texture.

Bottom-line, I preferred The Bread Bible bagels (say that six times fast) overall for both taste and texture, but I’d use the other recipe again, not just because of the shorter working time, but because they were great toasted.

Eating for England by Nigel Slater
By pure coincidence I happen to have just finished a food book – and by a man who has a passion for toast, which is the name of his autobiography. This book is a collection of penseés on English food, some as short as a paragraph or two, some running to a bit longer than a page, which makes it a great bathroom book.

Slater is not a trained chef, rather a food lover and thankfully not a food snob – he spends a lot of time on childish delights like store bought biscuits and candy.

The pleasure for this book will definitely be heightened if you grew up English and understand at the gut level, pardon the pun, the delights of roast beef and Yorkshire puddings, jaffa cakes, and the skeleton in my gustative closet, treacle tart. Let me say in closing then, not bon apetit, but “get that down you.”