Bread, Butter, and Cheese

Los Angeles, California

Now that I've had my rant about non-adventurous eaters, and I've gotten it out of my system, I'm ready to settle down and write about the food that really means something in my life. And that's not lobster, nor caviar, nor even the much-heralded Kaya Toast. Truth be known, the food that, all things (including fat, calories, and other health considerations) aside, I tend to crave the most is (surprise!) bread, butter, and cheese.

A few years back I surprised Billy with reservations to celebrate his birthday at The French Laundry. We had an amazing evening there, just the two of us. And I remember several of the iconic dishes we ate there, but what I remember the most was how good the butter tasted! I know, I know. Go figure. Cleverly, no bread was brought to the table when we were first seated. But somewhere in the middle of the early courses, a server brought a tray around, and offered us a choice of several varieties of bread. He or she (can't recall, there were so many of them gliding about) placed two dishes of butter on the table. One was from Vermont, and the other was local from Sonoma County. The bread was good, but what we spread on it was unrecognizable. Why is this so good? I asked Billy. It wasn't that we hadn't had butter in so long that we didn't recognize it. We don't eat much butter at home, but we eat a little, as we never use a butter substitute. But, we get around butter by using olive oil for cooking most of the time, and not spreading butter on much of anything. After that evening, I experimented with some of the imported butters like Plugra European and Kerrygold Irish, but even those tasted nothing like what we had marveled over at The French Laundry. Was it because it was so fresh? Did they milk the cow at midnight and make the butter at dawn that day? That might have worked for Sonoma, but what about the Vermont butter?

Anyway (before the entire post becomes about butter), I think I have written before that my friend, Lisa, says that she would rather have bread and butter than dessert these days. I whole-heartedly agree with this. Give me a hot, crisp loaf of sourdough bread. Or, toasted brioche. Or, really good chewy rye bread. Pass me some good enough sweet butter (as I've given up the quest of finding butter as good as I had on that fateful night), and I am one happy camper.

What completes the triumvirate here is (surprise!) cheese. Yep. Good, old-fashioned cheese. And I mean that with no trace of irony. I LOVE sharp Cheddar cheese. I love Manchego, and also Leyden (which has cumin seeds, and is, I believe, a dutch Edam-style cheese). And, I also love Camembert, which is really getting into Haagen Dazs territory when you start calculating butter fat. And I mean that in a good way.

Remember the we're good 95% of the time so that we can be really bad 5% of the time? Well, this is one of those times. Sometimes you just want, you just need, you just must have bread, butter, and cheese. That is why I revisited Cheese Fondue recently. I had to dig out, and dust off, the fondue pot in order to do this. And my recipe made an inordinate amount of fondue, way more than Billy and I could consume even in our 5% mode. But what we had was delicious, though I probably won't prepare it again for many, many moons, and then some.

What I am inclined to prepare more often when I am in this mood, is my recipe for macaroni and cheese. I've been preparing this dish since I was a child. The recipe originally came from my Betty Crocker Boys and Girls Cookbook, which I got when I was in elementary school, skipping right over the Easy Bake Oven phase, where you bake utilizing a lightbulb because ostensibly you shouldn't be trusted yet with a real oven, give me a break. The recipe was added to and subtracted from, and over time, leaned down a bit, though, let's face it, macaroni and cheese is never going to be a svelte dish, at least not palatably. Somewhere along the line I recognized the same basic recipe in The Los Angeles Times. It was attributed to Ronald Reagan (as in macaroni & cheese from the great communicator). Trust me, this can be made in a blue state home, just as easily.

Macaroni & Cheese

10 ounces              medium shell, or gnocchi-shaped pasta

2                              eggs, beaten with
1/2 teaspoon         salt or Lawry's seasoned salt (sorry!) and
couple of grinds  mixed peppercorns

1/2 cup                    sour cream or light (not non-fat) sour cream,
                                 blended with:
1 1/4 cup                 whole or low-fat (not non-fat) milk; and
10 or so shakes     hot sauce (I like Crystal brand Louisiana hot
                                  sauce, but any medium-heat brand will do.
                                  I wouldn't use that much Tabasco!)

2 cups                      cheese*, cut into 3/4 inch cubes
1/2 cup                    cheese*, shredded on large-holed side of grater
2 tablespoons        butter, cut into dice-sized cubes (optional)

1/2 cup                    breadcrumbs, matzo meal, panko or
                                  combination of any, browned up in a small
                                  skillet with tablespoon or two of melted butter
                                  and/or olive oil.


Cook pasta, drain and return to hot kettle. Immediately toss with the beaten egg mixture. Then stir in the cubed cheese, and butter, if you are using butter. Place in buttered casserole. Pour sour cream/milk mixture over. Top with shredded cheese and crumbs.

Bake at 350 degrees for 40 minutes.

*about that cheese . . . I almost always use a sharp cheddar for at least some portion of this, and usually for the shredded cheese topping. The cheddar mixes well with the aforementioned Leyden, if you can find it (our local Whole Foods carries it). I've also used a small amount of stilton with the cheddar. If you'd like to use Monterey Jack or swiss for a portion of the cheese, you might stir in some green chilies. Recently, I made this with baby swiss and gruyere, and stirred in a couple of spoonfuls of Carmelized Onions, the recipe for which you can find in a previous post entitled Come Sunday (available here, for free!). That was quite tasty.

Note that this does not make a cheese-sauce style dish. It is custard-based, more like what you find as the filling in quiche. The cheese melts but doesn't meld into the custard. So you get melty nuggets of cheese along with the custard and the pasta. What is lovely about these suggested choices in pasta is that the nuggets of cheese can get wedged inside the cavities of the pasta. Isn't that fun -- kinda like putting ripe olives on your fingers?! But you could use any macaroni-style pasta. There's a lot of freedom here.  The only thing I would advise against is using a reduced-fat cheese. They just don't have the right consistency in their melted stage, and frankly aren't that good in any stage. If you feel you need to reduce the fat by, say 25%, I'd suggest eating this 25% less often. But that's just the way my mind works.


So feel free to use your favorite pasta; your favorite cheese. Skip the butter if you're feeling pious (I usually do). Make your own breadcrumbs, or not. The obvious point being that you can fool around with this recipe in any way that you might like. Betty Crocker won't mind. I won't mind. And, I think I can assure you that neither will Ronald Reagan. Thanks for reading my blog. Sorry if it was a bit cheesy . . .

The Acid Test

Los Angeles, California

Writing a blog is fraught with peril. While you think you're writing for yourself, or, as in my case, using the blog as an exercise for writing, you still are mindful of the fact of readers. People out there are reading what you write. So there is a temptation, small though it might be, to try to please your readers. And, frankly, you can't do that. I mean, for me, the real lesson in blog writing is that some people are going to like some of what I write sometimes. And conversely . . . you get the idea.

It's a lot like food. Some time back, in some former blog post (available here, for free!), I wrote that if you have a narrow bandwidth when it comes to food, you should exit the building NOW, or words to that effect. Again, except for my hate on goat cheese, Billy and I eat pretty much everything, and I'm glad for that. And we are able to do this while still maintaining a fairly healthy diet. I often say that we're good ninety-five percent of the time, so that we can be really bad for the other five percent (case on point: the Dodger dog I consumed the other night while the Dodgers were beating the Mariners in the last game of pre-season play). Life would be unbearable if we were to endeavor to eat healthily all of the time. On this front at least, we're simply not fanatics about anything except enjoying food that tastes really, really good. A lot of the time that food is also good for us. And, sometimes, it's not.

While Billy and I are both pretty much omnivores, we come to it from very different experiences. My father was strict about what my sister and I ate as children. We had to try everything on our plates, and could only leave one thing (which was cleverly called a "leave"). This meant that I struggled through peas, lima beans, spinach, oatmeal, and lots of other things that a lot of kids refuse to eat. I came out the other side actually liking these foods --even the green ones. My parents also allowed us to serve ourselves so that we had an idea about portions. Nothing made my mother crazier than a young (or old!) dinner guest who piled food on their plate and then ate little or none of it.

And, while we also went out to eat quite often, I don't ever recall eating hot dogs or hamburgers in restaurants, when I was young. I also never realized, until I was an adult with roommates, that macaroni and cheese could be purchased in a box. It just wasn't the way we ate. When, at around age ten, I ordered a whole cracked crab at a restaurant in Santa Barbara, the waitress turned to my mother and advised her that it was a whole crab. "She knows that," my mother said, adding "She can handle it." And I could.

Billy, on the other hand, grew up with solid midwestern-style food. The obvious difference between home meals in Billy's family and mine was this: In my family, we came to the table when the food was ready; in Billy's, when everyone was finally rounded up to the table, the food was taken off the fire. Medium-rare and al dente not being words bandied around there at any time. What he got was lots of meat, and lots of corn, potatoes, and root vegetables. Ice cream? Always. And not much admonishing to eat the green things, or anything for that matter. And yet, he's also an adventurous eater. Go figure.

A lot of our friends don't eat certain things. In some cases, this stems from conviction, religious or otherwise. In others, it has something to do with health issues, or current diet trends like avoidance of gluten. And I'm ok with all of that. But I do have a problem with adults who haven't grown out of the yuck stage. In a John Larroquette Show episode, the "yuck" was how the part of the egg which connects the white to the yolk was described. It's that opaque white part, visible when the egg is raw. I'm sure it has a real name, but do we really care what that is? For all practical purposes, let's just call it "the yuck." A word familiar to us all, because we used it in childhood to describe food that we found, well, yucky. But we're adults now, and most of us have gotten over it. We've learned that lobsters start out as ugly, mottled, gray-colored bugs, only turning brilliantly red after we've thrown them into a pot of boiling water. We know that caviar are fish eggs, and that sashimi and carpaccio are fish and beef (usually) served raw. And if we've allowed our palates to evolve, we know that these things taste really, really yummy.

A friend of mine once forwarded me an article written by someone who had decided to prepare an elaborately complicated meal for friends. In it, the author stated that he didn't want to be invited to someone's home for a roast chicken and store-bought ice cream. That wasn't his idea of entertaining, nor of being entertained. I don't agree with this. I think a wonderfully roasted chicken is one of the most delectable treats which can be offered to dinner guests, provided that they're not vegetarians. And, as long as the ice cream isn't Kroger's or Safeway brand, I can go with it, as there are some wonderful artisinal ice creams to be had at retail today (and let's face it, who among us is above eating plain old Ben & Jerry's, either?). My point being that I'm fine and dandy with good quality but simple food (especially since, ostensibly, the object of the exercise it is spending time, while breaking bread, with family and friends). But if you want to serve me something exotic, I will not only eat it, I will probably really enjoy it (unless it contains goat cheese, and I'm really sorry about that). And, not to put too fine a point on it, if you do serve me goat cheese, I won't exclaim "eeuuww or yuck" at your table. I'll probably try to eat a little of it, even though, for me, continuing to try to cultivate a taste for goat cheese is akin to trying to board a vessel that sailed a long, long time ago. It's all the way around the Cape by now. But, trust me, I really did try.

A few years ago we were traveling in northern California and were invited to someone's home for dinner. They were friends of the friends we were staying with in Tahoe. For dessert, a homemade cheesecake was presented. Now, cheesecake is probably my least favorite dessert. But I did eat it, while trying not to obsess about the calories and fat I was consuming while not really enjoying it (our friend, Susan's, Boston Cream Pie would have been well worth it's caloric content, two slices worth). But, it was a pretty good cheesecake, as cheesecakes go. The next day we drove to Sonoma county to visit with other friends. Guess what they had purchased for dessert to celebrate Billy's birthday? Chocolate cheesecake. Again, I ate a slice of it. I have not had cheesecake since then, and it's been a couple of years. Hopefully it won't cross my path again for while. But I was raised to stifle the 'yuck' and eat most of what is put in front of me (after asking for a very small slice). There are certainly worse fates.

When the fates are with me, and I run across something that tastes amazing, I am eternally grateful and want everyone I know to try it. But, like writing, not all food is appealing to everyone. As an example of this, here is my current test on the yuck vs yummy factor. It's called Kaya Toast, and it is on the menu at Susan Feniger's Street, here in Los Angeles. It's probably one of the most delicious things I have ever tasted. The first time I tried it, after my very first bite, I moaned. The second time, I couldn't stop omigod escaping from my lips several times. It is sensuously sweet, and salaciously savory and salty and richly exotic, all wrapped up into one insanely, deliciously yummy treat. And this is how it is described on the menu:

Kaya Toast a uniquely Street experience. Toasted bread spread thick with coconut jam; served with a soft fried egg drizzled in dark soy and white pepper.

We were introduced to this by our friends, Todd and Christopher. We were a party of four that night, and, even though they had had it before, all of our eyes lit up when we first dipped the coconut-jam sandwich quarters into the egg yolk which had broken open and pooled into the seasoned soy surrounding it. Praises were sung. And another plate of it was ordered. The next time we were there, again with T & C, we both started and ended with this dish (the restaurant's menu features small plates of "street food" from all over the world). Many of the dishes we tried were really good. But Kaya Toast was stellar.

After that first time when we went to Street and had Kaya Toast, I told a lot of people about it. Their responses to the description of the dish ran the gamut from that sounds really disgusting, to can we go have this, like, today? The people in the "can we have this" group obviously being the ones nearest and dearest to my gastronomic heart. The ones with whom I might want to enjoy all kinds of food, including, specifically, Kaya Toast. I think it's the acid test. So, if you think you're in this group who would pass this test with colors flying, feel free to let me know. Billy and I would even be perfectly willing to go along to support, witness, and, well, share it with you. Oh, and, as an added incentive, I promise that this time I will try to control that moaning thing. Omigod, thanks for reading my blog!