It seems like every time I click over to the Cook’s Illustrated website, the whole operation has gotten even more oppressive.

Don’t get me wrong–Cook’s Illustrated was an essential tool in my learning how to cook, and I suppose it is still helping many people out there. By “perfecting” only known and classic recipes, however, it had a built-in lifespan, and I’m not sure how the editors are managing today. I know they lost me when they had the recipe for school-lunch-style tacos about five years ago.

And now, maybe because I’ve shaken myself free, it appears to have gone from just geeky and twee (cute bow tie!) to downright evil.

The website livened up with a big splash photo of CI minions hard at work in “America’s Test Kitchen.” Unfortunately, everyone looks like they’re about to slit their wrists. This may be because Christopher Kimball is a pompous ass, and also that cutting things into tiny, tiny pieces all day, and then cooking the same recipe over and over and over is the closest thing to hell on earth.

Don’t you agree?

Assistant equipment editor Liz Bomze tosses beef while testing pans to determine which is best for stir-frying.

The quiet desperation.

Test cook Charles Kelsey calculates how to best position sauteed pears to maximize caramelization.

The tyrant himself:

While filming the next season of America’s Test Kitchen, Bridget Lancaster and Christopher Kimball debate just how much magic is needed for perfect Kansas City Ribs.

A lot of magic, people. A lot would be needed to reel me back in to the maddening world of Herr Kimball.

You already know about my troubled relationship with Cairo. But I do have to admit that if I hadn’t spent the better part of a year whimpering on the bathroom floor there, I wouldn’t be half the cook I am today.

I couldn’t eat in a restaurant there. It was just too risky–who knew where the bacteria lurked? At home, I could douse my veggies in mild bleach solution, and cook everything till the toxic critters expired.

But what to cook?

The year before, in Indiana, I’d become pretty proficient in the weeknight dinners–but that was when I had a Kroger and an international-foods mart both within walking distance. I’d look through one of our 15 cookbooks, and then pop out and buy the stuff I needed. We could buy just about anything, except maybe a whole goat.

Now Cairo is cosmopolitan and all, but the groceries are a little more…limited. In my immediate neighborhood, I had splendid tomatoes, cucumbers and eggplants, and all manner of fruits–but no brown sugar, for instance. We only got that once Livia made friends with a State Department guy, who would buy it for us at the commissary.

So this was my first time cooking with severe constraints on ingredients–after some early frustrations, I finally figured out I had to work the opposite way from Indiana: shopping first, then figuring out what to cook. Turns out this is what everyone in places with good produce does, and what I tend to do more now. At the time, it was a major paradigm shift.

Fortunately, Livia had brought a very useful cookbook with her: The Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home. The essential constraint of that cookbook–no meat!–happened to dovetail very nicely with my own needs that year. Even once my Arabic got better, I didn’t really feel up to the task of going down to the butcher and having him hack me up some flesh. Now I’d relish that, but then, it just seemed like too much of my limited energy to expend in the name of dinner. Vegetarian it was.

I made cucumber-and-tomato salads. I made just-cucumber salads, and just-tomato salads. I made ratatouille. Livia made this great eggplant with tomato sauce and hard-boiled egg.

The things that really kicked us out of the familiar produce rut, though, all came from the Moosewood people. Quick-pickled green beans with dill. A great dish of bulgur, dried apricots and dill, with wedges of feta cheese and tomato on the side. Beautiful-looking and nourishing–even if the “feta” was this strangely creamy Parmalat-box stuff made from water buffalo milk.

Another pilaf recipe called for dates and cinnamon and almonds. It was meant for rice, but since I had lots of bulgur left over from the other thing, it seemed only logical to use that instead. That year, I got very good at dissecting recipes–cutting out the flavors I wanted and attaching them to some other ingredient I wanted, for a sort of Frankenstein dinner.

And it was that year that I first realized how limitations are the best drive toward creativity–imagine The Five Obstructions, but with food. More like The Five Ingredients.

I was also horrifically depressed that year–not just violently ill, but freaking out about how I’d left my boyfriend back in the States, and how I really, really hated studying Arabic, and that it was definitely the end of the line for grad school…but then what? In times of extreme crisis, I pulled myself off my tear-sodden pillow and consulted the dessert section of Moosewood at Home.

Thank Jesus and Muhammad both for Moosewood Fudge Brownies and Six-Minute Chocolate Cake. The first required a single pan to turn out gooey, super-rich chocolate squares; the second was a miracle–a truly tasty cake made only with dry ingredients and a little bit of vinegar. You could even feed it to a vegan, if you needed to.

And I think it was a Moosewood recipe–the really basic Pasta Fresca–that made me go looking for basil. In Egypt, basil is not a food–it’s a plant you grow on your balcony to keep the mosquitoes away. We had one of our own for a little while, but it quickly withered and died. A little while after that, I happened to notice a big bush of it growing in a parking lot on my way to school. It was a little dusty, but it was definitely basil. All through the next seven hours of Arabic classes, I was thinking about basil–a sixth ingredient!

On my walk home, I stopped and snapped off a bunch of it. If I hadn’t already been the crazy khawagaya (Egyptian for gringa) already, that sealed the deal. The parking-lot attendants, with their droopy uniforms and empty machine guns, laughed and laughed–probably because they’d been taking a piss on that bush just a few hours earlier.

But whatever–that’s what mild bleach solution is for. After that, I paused every few days to pick basil, and it added a little extra interest to the cucumber-and-tomato salads, to the various eggplant things, and to a pasta dish I began to eat a few times a week: I made a basic tomato sauce, with lots of garlic, then stirred in a bit of that buffalo-milk feta, and all the chopped-up basil. Toss and serve.

What a luxury now, when I think back–to always have good-quality fresh tomatoes at your fingertips. It makes me wonder why I went to such lengths to get any other ingredients. In one of my last Arabic classes, our teacher asked us all to give a short presentation on what we’d miss most about Cairo. I talked about the produce.

About nine months into the year, my stomach was fairly stable–and I honestly think my regained health was due to the fact that I began drinking heavily and frequently. Whether it killed the bugs in my gut, or I was just less of a stress case, I don’t know, and I don’t really care. Never mind that cooking was an exciting process that drove me into exciting foraging situations and small triumphs nightly… It was also a way to save money–money that I could spend on booze.

I guess it’s the upcoming Cairo trip, but I’ve been in a very nostalgic mood recently. In preparation for another project that’s brewing in my head, I’ve also been thinking more carefully about how I learned to cook. I owe a lot of it to one book.

Back in February, when the nostalgia was first starting to swell, I was overcome with an urge to cook Indian food. Whenever anyone asks me what my specialty is, I shrug and say Indian, even though I haven’t cooked it in years, and I could tell you less than Wikipedia about the history, culture, roots, etc. of it. I’ve never been to India, and I have no ancestral connection to Southeast Asia whatsoever.

But in culinary-education terms, India is really where I started out.

I find it hard to believe that I haven’t bitched about my broke winter in London on this blog, but here’s the summary: 1994. Demoralizing job. Nasty boyfriend. Awful roommate. Chronically cold. Nescafe. Drunks galore. No money.

So, because we couldn’t actually afford to go out and see London, my boyfriend began cooking dinner (a single saving grace). He picked up a copy of Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cooking, and when we broke up, I got the book.

Actually, now that I’m telling this, I’m a little shaky on when that book entered the picture. London was a blur of bad weather and “bacon misshapes”from the cheapo bin at the butcher, but I’m pretty sure Madhur was already there, a steadying force that sensibly broke down a highly complex cuisine into the basics: Toast spices. Make ginger-garlic paste. Fry. Commence with particulars.

After London, I moved to Bloomington, Indiana, for grad school. Madhur got some stained pages that year–the ex had been extremely finicky about books, so I took satisfaction in breaking this one in. The next year, I moved into a huge house with three other people (far better boyfriend, exceptionally good roommates), and whole chapters were made greasy and sticky for posterity.

Sometime during that second year, when I got truly-o sick of medieval Arabic poetry, I started reading Cook’s Illustrated, which I still heartily recommend for anyone who wants to really understand why cooking works. But it wasn’t until I got an issue with a story about curries that I realized what a clash of civilizations I’d waded into.

Nearly every paragraph had some variation on “that’s not how I learned it in France”–pretty condescending by the third column. I could practically see the editors shaking their heads in wonder that this curry business worked at all, what with not browning the meat, and not thickening the sauce, and throwing spices in hot oil, and all that crazy business.

I guess knowing “French technique” is important. I owe them for my gravy-making skills, even if my dad never presented it to me in those terms, and the concept of white sauce (‘scuse me, bechamel). And boiling down wine is a good idea.

But my life was a lot happier, in a dippy “It’s a Small World After All” way, before I realized how the French barreled in and declared themselves the boss of food. The Italians managed to sneak in before the kitchen door swung back, but it’s still a ridiculously narrow selection when you consider just how many delicious things there are to eat all over the globe.

Years later, when I was considering going to cooking school, I had a hard time finding one that gave more than lip service to cuisines that didn’t rhyme with Wench and Vitalian. I wasn’t too excited about joining a cult that looked at Madhur Jaffrey and said, “Weird!” and not, “Wonderful!”

At one esteemed institute, I sat in on a class about risotto. The guy was explaining how you have to stir to release the starch. I piped up, “Cool! It’s exactly the opposite of a good pilaf, or a biryani, where you rinse all the starch off to start with, and make sure not to jostle the rice at all.” Crickets. Shuffling feet.

My fascination with Indian food started to fade away sometime in 2000. I’d gone freestyle–I could honestly say, “I’ll just pop into the kitchen and whip up a curry!” Not only had I met the challenge, but at that point the Madhur Jaffrey book, and everything I’d learned from it, was associated with two dead relationships. It was time to move on.

I’ve cooked a lot of other food since then, but nothing has given me quite the same thrill of discovery. That single Indian cookbook taught me not just no-fail Potatoes with Sesame Seeds (p. 114), but also how to look at every cuisine as a series of techniques: the same steps that every woman (probably) has been doing for centuries, usually while seated on a kitchen floor and slicing into her hand with a dull knife. The differences aren’t only in ingredients, but in how you slice your onions, whether you add meat stock or water, whether you cook something in a sauce or add the sauce after.

I also learned some skills that apply whatever you’re cooking: Measure the fiddly stuff before you turn on the heat (the French didn’t invent mise en place). And clean as you go, because crusty ginger-garlic paste is a bitch to get out of the blender.

When I opened up Indian Cooking again this February, it flopped obediently open to a grease-spot-dappled spread for The Lake Palace Hotel’s Aubergine (Eggplant) Cooked in the Pickling Style. Page 75, Lemony Chicken with Fresh Coriander, is distinctly yellow, thanks to a little turmeric fiasco. Cauliflower with Potatoes, which made an Indiana roommate named Wayne say, “Whoa, dude–it’s like cauliflower, but funky,” is marked with some mysterious crunchy bits.

The strongest proof of just how way-back these recipes go with me came when I was whizzing up my first batch of ginger-garlic paste for that February meal. Peter, who now seems like he’s always been around, looked in and said, “What the hell are you doing in that blender?”

Fortunately, he didn’t sound like a snooty French chef when he said it. And he loved the eggplant.

————-
Since the Magic Book is now out of print, I feel like I can in good conscience copy (loosely) a recipe here. It’s basically the same as what’s in the book, but frying eggplant is tedious and grease-consuming, so I now roast the eggplant in the oven instead.

LAKE PALACE EGGPLANT
adapted from Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cooking

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Slice up
1 large eggplant (approx. 1 3/4 lb.)
into wedges about 3/4-inch thick and lay on a cookie sheet; drizzle generously with vegetable oil. Roast eggplant in the oven, turning once, until the pieces are soft and lightly browned. Drizzle on a little more oil if they’re looking parched. When they’re done, take them out and set aside.

While the eggplant is roasting, throw in a blender or food processor:
1-inch cube of fresh ginger, peeled and chopped into a couple of pieces
6 cloves garlic, peeled (or more, but not tons more)
1/4 cup water
Whiz up till you have a smooth paste.

Also, measure out your spices. In one small cup, combine:
1 tsp whole fennel seeds (or a little more, if your spices are old and tired, or you just like fennel)
1/2 tsp kalonji (black onion seeds) or whole cumin seeds (kalonji is good, but don’t beat yourself up over it)

In a separate cup, combine:
1 tbsp ground coriander seeds
1/4 tsp ground turmeric
1/8 tsp cayenne pepper (more, if you like)
1 1/2 tsp salt
Put both bowls close to the stove.

In a heavy saucepan over medium flame, heat:
3 tbsp vegetable oil
When it’s shimmery, toss in the fennel and kalonji/cumin. After they’ve darkened slightly (just a few seconds), pour in:
3 medium tomatoes, peeled and chopped (canned ones work fine, but make it 4 in that case)
along with the ginger-garlic paste and the other cup of ground spices. There will be a bit of spattering. Let it all simmer, stirring a bit, until a lot of the liquid is cooked away, and the the whole thing looks pastelike–this takes 5 minutes or so, depending on how high you have the flame set.

Now put in the fried eggplant slices and mix gently. Cook on medium-low heat for about 5 minutes, stirring very gently. Cover the pan, turn heat to very low and cook another 5 or 10 minutes–this makes all the flavors meld.

Serve hot or cold. Serves 6, if you’re lucky.

Last week, I actually bought some new cookbooks. You’d think, as a regular cook with a bookish bent, I’d be awash in the things, but some terrible stinginess always takes over whenever I approach a bookstore. (Have I mentioned how much I love the public library? The only problem with checking cookbooks out of the library is that inevitably some jerk has torn out the page for the one recipe you really want.)

But last week I was at Barnes & Noble and had a moment of weakness. Not right at first, though: Once I squeezed past the Rachael Ray endcaps, I was reminded of the paradox of cookbooks: On the one hand, no publisher claims to want to buy them, and yet the racks are stacked with totally unappealing, readership-of-three titles like All Shrimp All the Time, 365 Salt and Pepper Recipes, and Lose Weight Eating Rhubarb.

Amid all the dreck, one book did catch my eye: The Ethnic Paris Cookbook. Intriguing title on its own, but I admit I had gotten a random PR email about it the week before. I’m incredibly suggestible. Inside, there was a lot of the faux-handwriting font I’m not so fond of, but otherwise it looked pretty nifty: low on glossy food porn shots, high on food I’d like to know more about (African, Japanese), useful restaurant recommendations and, and, AND a recipe for Bahn Mi [sic?]!!! It even ended with the words “You can easily make them at home.” Oh, the French–they make everything look so effortless.

So I actually shelled out real cash. Just a couple of years ago, I would’ve hunkered down in a corner of B&N and discreetly copied the recipe into my notebook. I’m bourgeois now, baby!

A while back, Peter and I made a couple of attempts at the banh mi, and they turned out very tasty, though not quite as balanced as they probably should’ve been. Let’s just say ham-handed is a word that’s rarely used to describe Vietnamese food.

So I set Peter loose with this recipe–and he actually followed it more than I’ve seen him follow any recipe in his life. It was a little unnerving. But it was highly successful as the first test of this cookbook, because the recipe yielded some mighty fine banh mi.

The crux of the matter, of course, is the pork. The cookbook recipe, from a restaurant called Thieng Heng, calls for first making a caramel sauce (as my urge had been the first time around), then adding that to a puree of shallots, garlic and ginger in which the pork is marinated for a little while. I never would’ve thought of that technique–and certainly not of adding the ginger. After that, the pork is cooked under a broiler and sliced.

Uh, except we only had ground pork. But that worked fine too. And Peter couldn’t believe that the pickled veggies wouldn’t have fish sauce in them, so he glugged some in there.

Perhaps to make up for these infractions, Peter then did follow the recipe when it said “spread mayonnaise on one half of the bread.” Bizarre. This kind of restraint is not familiar to me. It must be an ethnic Paris thing.

Anyhoo (or Bref…, as I just learned in French), the sandwiches are good. Damn good–good enough, in fact, to make me feel glad I plunked down my $30, which is roughly ten times the price of a banh mi from a deli.

Next up, from the “Africa sur Seine” section: the Bushman Cocktail (cognac, Cointreau, ginger juice, chilled champagne).

RECIPE: BANH MI
(adapted from The Ethnic Paris Cookbook–we couldn’t really stop ourselves from messing around. I mean, who puts one clove of garlic in anything?)

This makes enough for four modest-size sandwiches, or three sandwiches for total pigs. With this in mind, you’ll need four six-inch lengths of baguette. Or, if you’re in the NYC metro area, those small Portuguese sourdough loaves (not rolls) work pretty well–they’re a little bigger, for the three-serving-yield option.

First, for the caramel:

1/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup water

Bring to a boil in a heavy saucepan and cook till dark brown, about 10 minutes. Off the heat, add:

4 tbsp hot water

It will spatter–stand back. Once everything has settled, add:

2 tbsp fish sauce (nuoc mam)
2 tbsp soy sauce

Restrain yourself from slurping this all up. Turn to the marinade:

2 cloves garlic
1-inch piece of ginger, peeled
2 shallots

Dump these in a blender or Cuis (chop ’em up a little if you’re using a blender, to help things along) and puree; add the caramel mixture and

2 tbsp vegetable oil

and blend till you have a nice saucy paste. Pour this over

1 lb. or so ground pork

and mash everything together lightly. Let sit for half an hour or so, while you work on the pickled vegetables:

1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup rice vinegar
2 tbsp fish sauce

Stir this all up in a nonreactive bowl–you will have quite a lot. Then cut your veggies into thin strips or slices:

1 seedless cucumber
1 carrot
1 small red onion
1 small daikon radish

Dump these into the vinegar-sugar mix and let sit.

Also, prep your garnishes:

Coriander sprigs (not just leaves–the stems give a nice bit of crunch)
Jalapeno slices (optional)

Now you’re ready to cook. Preheat your broiler. Drain most of the liquid off the pork mixture (surprisingly, a lot will have gotten absorbed) and place the meat in a cast-iron skillet. Spread the mixture into a large patty shape, but let the surface stay craggy and uneven. Stick the skillet under the broiler and let it go till everything is nice and crusty brown–depending on how hot your broiler gets and how long it has been preheating, this can take anywhere from 3 minutes to 8 minutes. Flip the patty over (as well as you can’t doesn’t matter that much if it breaks up) and brown the other side. The pork will have almost certainly cooked through by this time; if it hasn’t, just set the skillet lower down in the oven for a couple minutes more.

Keep the broiler on to toast your bread very lightly. If your bread is very bready, you might want to pull out some of the soft inside to make more room for filling.

Slather your toasted bread–top and bottom–with:

Mayonnaise

Drizzle on some:

Sriracha or other red chili sauce (optional)

Lay a quarter of the ground pork on the bread (if you’re being restrained), then top with pickled vegetables and the coriander and jalapenos.

Squash down the sandwich to make sure everything holds together and the flavors blend. Slice in half and serve.

I feel like I’ve cheated–but I did it with my husband, so how can that be?

A banh mi is meant to be gulped down while standing on a sidewalk, hunkered against the wind on a park bench, or crouched on a rickety seat in front of a jewelry display counter (if you’re at Banh Mi Saigon). It’s easier to be outside, because then you don’t have to worry about the crumbs flying everywhere. (If you aren’t banh-mi-savvy yet, read up at Daily Gluttony and Porkchop Express, here, here and here, oh, and also here.)

Moreover, Peter and I have a long history with these particular sandwiches, the ones at Banh Mi Saigon–they cropped up on Boston bus rides, on the day Peter put me on his health insurance, and when we got married at city hall…and on many, many days in between. They have often given structure to an otherwise tedious day of errands (as in, “When I’m done returning those ugly shoes, I’ll stop in and get a banh mi”), and I have at least once taken the subway all the way from midtown and back on my lunch hour just to get them.

But yesterday, Peter and I got in a terrible lather reading all the reviews of banh mi joints on Porkchop Express (I didn’t even give you half the links above), but it was already too late to go to Banh Mi Saigon (they usually run out of sandwiches around 6pm, but sometimes they don’t, but it’s a big chance to take if you’re taking the train all the way from Astoria just for that). And if you’re going to get on the subway just for banh mi, why would you go anywhere but the absolute best place?

We were stymied, until Peter declared:

What the hell! I’ll just make banh mi!

Whoa, dude. Was that the earth shifting on its axis I just felt? Is that the Inquisition I hear knocking on our door? Is the floor a little warmer just now because the fires of Hell are licking up to roast our heretical feet?

While I was fretting about the state of my soul, Peter nipped out and bought baguettes (from Le Petit Prince), ground pork, daikon, cilantro, cucumbers and carrots. Believe you me, we already had plenty of mayonnaise.

Sounds straightforward, but of course the real trick was the pork. Banh Mi Saigon’s is a “closely guarded secret” or something. For more than a decade, it was made in a disposable aluminum takeout tray, in a toaster oven. I used to stand in the old place, that depressing little sandwich prison, and stare at the whole process while I waited.

You couldn’t really see much detail in there, because the oven’s glass was that permanent brown-orange of burned grease, but it required a lot of fiddling, opening and closing of the squeaky little door, scraping across the aluminum with tongs, careful fluffing the pork. (Bless them, no one deserved the move up more than these people, but now in the new spot, the kitchen is so far back you can’t see anything at all!)

After years of observation, I came to the conclusion that it must be a sort of horizontal gyro, in which the crispy top layer was scraped off for use in a sandwich, revealing a fresh layer to magically caramelize. Peter thought certainly five-spice powder was involved, so he made up some of that. Then I urged him to make some standard Vietnamese caramel sauce, because all I know about Vietnamese food is that this thin, smoky caramel stuff goes in almost everything.

In retrospect, this caramel business didn’t seem so essential, because all Peter did was mix up the pork and the five-spice, pour on the caramel sauce and stick the thing in the broiler–then every few minutes, pull it out, stir out around, and let it recaramelize. He admitted to pouring on lots more sugar in the process. It took a while to get really tasty. And it really was not like Banh Mi Saigon’s. But it tasted great–more like a snack food than anything.

In assembling the sandwiches, Peter took a little tip from our Mexican friends w/r/t the construction of tortas, and pulled out a lot of the middle of the baguette, tipping the odds in favor of the filling, as well as making a nice little trough to hold the Sweet-n-Spicy Pork Crumbles (TM) he’d invented. A lot of mayo helped stick things in place as well.

The daikon and carrot and cuke had been sitting in their little pickling juices for a bit, so he laid those on, then some cilantro sprigs and slices of green chili. (“Regular or spicy?” he called out from the kitchen, in an attempt to re-create the Saigon experience.)

He sliced it in half and brought it to the table. “My work here is done,” he said. We ate them in about three minutes flat–in that same desperate way we’ve always eaten banh mi, afraid you’ll lose some bits if you move your hands and, more existentially, afraid you’ll never get anymore and this is your last bite of heaven ever.

They were so good, in fact, that, um, these photos are all from breakfast this morning.