can't look away

Wow. No wonder this is a New York Times article. Fat panic? Check. The trivial concerns of the super rich? Check. Major league cat fights? Check.

What sets her off is the junk food served on special occasions: the cupcakes that come out for every birthday, the doughnuts her children were once given in gym, the sugary “Fun-Dip” packets that some parent provided the whole class on Valentine’s Day.
...
“Is there or is there not an obesity and diabetes epidemic in this country?”

When offered any food at school other than the school lunch, Ms. Roth’s children — who shall go nameless since it seems they have enough on, or off, their plates — are instructed to deposit the item into a piece of Tupperware their mother calls a “junk food collector.”

The reaction from other parents? "Please, consider moving." Her poor kids.

annals of cookery

"Spear the garlic with a fork, and use it to beat the eggs, egg yolks, cream, and goat cheese together."

OK, Deborah Madison. If you say so.

identity politics

Ezra Klein just wrote a piece arguing that we should ensure that food prices reflect the various externalities (health, environmental, etc) so that consumers can make good choices. It's a policy concept I definitely favor, but I still hated the piece. Why? Because the thrust of his argument is that "[a]t the end of the day, the best information a consumer has is always the price of a good." That, in fact, we are consumers first, and that it makes little sense to ask people to think about food in any way other than as a commodity. This is a philosophy of human identity that I hate, that feeds into the sense that our lives are and should be primarily oriented around a marketplace rather than around relationships or ideas or values. It's capitalism as identity. One lovely aspect of the food movement - and especially about local food from farmers we can meet - is that it gets people to think about the whole web of interactions that happen when you buy a half-gallon of milk or a chicken sausage or a basket of potatoes, and to see those as not simply a matter of exchanging cash for commodities. I find it pretty condescending for Ezra to claim that people (presumably people other than him and other foodies) just can't understand those connections and thus have to be told what to buy via price, and that there's no hope for moving in a different direction. And yes. Yes I realize that the anti-commodity food movement is often very elitist, but it doesn't have to be; and I think living in Philadelphia, where local food is much more practical and accessible has helped me realize that.

Changing price signals is great policy, but it's crap philosophy.

symbolic regulation

Let's talk about raw milk and regulation. I drink raw milk. I buy it at one of two retail outlets; there are three brands available in Philadelphia, one from each of three very small farms that raise three different heritage breeds of dairy cattle. It's totally delicious. I stopped having cereal with milk years ago because I felt like the milk had a weird aftertaste; raw milk doesn't have it. The Gardener also finds it much easier to digest than pasteurized milk. I also feel pretty good about the food safety of raw milk. In Pennsylvania, raw milk is licensed, inspected, and regularly tested for contamination; more importantly, the farmers treat their reputation like gold. One of them recently recalled its weeks' production because they found bacteria (listeria or campylobacter, I don't remember which) somewhere in the bottling facility. Not in the milk, and no one got sick, but they recalled it immediately. Their relationship with their retail outlets and customers is direct and traceable, and unlike the Peanut Corporation of America, if there is so much as a breath that one of those farms isn't careful, they'll lose customers. The retail outlets will stop ordering, and the customers will stop buying. They are certainly far more careful than basically any large-scale dairy, and the testing they do is more comprehensive.

All of which makes me really annoyed with most parties in the article linked above, which talks about an E. coli outbreak in Connecticut linked to raw milk, and the new regulations the state is planning: namely, raw milk will be restricted to on farm and farmers' market sales. Now. That's the law in most states, actually. And it's certainly sad that several children got quite sick, and may have long-term kidney damage. (Although, ok, one of those kids got E. coli from another kid, which means she was interacting with that other kid's poop, so it's hard for me to see raw milk as the primary health issue; and the other parent was all, "I didn't know raw milk could have any health problems ever," which made me a little irritated with how she totally missed the part in middle school science where everyone talks about Louis Pasteur and the germ theory of disease.) But requiring that sales be made directly by the farmer will do nothing whatsoever for public health, unless you believe that raw milk is intrinsically a health threat and reducing its consumption is in and of itself good for public health. It's symbolic: hey, it's sad that kids got sick! Let's do something! When a better option would be to think about whether Connecticut does have adequate testing and inspection. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that since PA makes you test twice a month, and CT doesn't seem to make you test even once a month, there's some room for actually useful changes in there.

(Apparently the state did consider such a bill, but since it required farmers to pay more, it got nowhere. Which makes me wonder: isn't there a compromise? Don't Connecticut's raw dairy farmers want to have evidence that their dairies are safe? Testing and permitting, done right, are really good for the credibility and safety of raw milk. They're apparently trying to raise funding for monthly testing via a non-profit, but having it be state-mandated really does improve credibility, because it helps prevent situations like this one in which a single farm's problem becomes an issue for every raw dairy in the state.)

still cooking

Still not writing. Instead, experimenting with desserts. It's "would you still love me?" week at my house for baking. What if I add too much of something? Or don't have a particular ingredient at all? Will I still be a worthwhile person and will the recipe work out and how is this related to me getting into grad school? So far all the desserts have turned out fine, and no one has disowned me for fucking them up. Maybe I'll get into grad school after all.

Two weeks ago I made the Cook's Illustrated coconut cream pie with bananas and caramel on the bottom. The recipe has a lot of moving parts, which kept hitting me over the head like the workshop tools in the Pirates of the Caribbean fight scene. I bought the crust, because last time I made a graham cracker crust it was more like graham cracker crumbs weakly coating the outside of some custard. The store-bought one held together much better. But no sooner had I heated the milk, the coconut milk, and the unsweetened coconut than I realized I didn't have enough eggs. To the co-op! Which was out of eggs! Fortunately a friend was working there: he offered me as many eggs as I needed from his own refrigerator if I'd go to his house and bring his dog back over. Great. I got to pretend I have a dog for 15 minutes while I picked up my two eggs. When I got home, I realized that I actually needed three eggs. I had to wait til the next day to make the custard, but ultimately triumphed.

The pie was awesome. The custard is good enough to be a stand-alone recipe. To convert it to banana-caramel, per the suggestion of the original recipe, I just made caramel sauce (half of the recipe lower down in this post), poured the caramel into the crust, sprinkled in some toasted coconut, sliced up a banana and arranged it on the caramel, and then added the custard. I did not top the custard with a full layer of whipped cream, because I've done that before and it dilutes the coconut flavor. Instead, just a dab of whipped cream on top. If I'd had it, I would have added black rum to the whipped cream, though vanilla is also very good with coconut.

Last night: Gramercy Tavern Gingerbread, from Smitten Kitchen, which I discovered earlier this week and love. Also delicious. I added an extra half tablespoon of ginger, a little more of the other spices, and an extra teaspoon of baking powder. That last entirely by accident. The cake completely collapsed in the middle, but its deliciousness remained, especially eaten with caramel sauce and maple-bourbon whipped cream. Use plenty of bourbon.

Speaking of caramel sauce, I don't understand why people don't make it more often. It's easy, and forgiving. This time I accidentally put the cream in before the butter, and for a while I thought I was going to end up with a floating layer of butter on top of my caramel. Fortunately, it mixed in eventually.

Caramel Sauce
1 c. sugar
5 Tbsp water
1/4 c. butter
1 c. whipping cream
salt to taste
Combine the sugar and water in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Stir. Heat gently until bubbling slightly, then turn the heat up to medium high. Let boil without stirring (original recipe says to use a wet pastry brush to get crystals off the sides - do this if you want, but all that happens if you don't is that it burns a little on the side and you need to give it more soaking and scrubbing.)

Eventually the sugar starts to caramelize. Swirl and stir it - the edges will be darker, and you want to see the combined color. When it's the color you want (I like burny dark caramel, but you can experiment) turn the heat off. Whisk in the butter, then the cream. The caramel will bubble up furiously and maybe crack a little, and the sugar will tend to form a sticky tangle. Stir over low heat until everything is smooth. Add salt and taste. You can also add vanilla or other flavorings here, though I've been wondering what would happen if I mixed the sugar with Earl Grey instead of water.

Just made chocolate-chip coconut meringues, because we had left-over egg whites, and tried science to discover the relative merits of greased-and-floured versus plain baking surfaces when you don't have parchment paper. Or cookie sheets, but all our alternatives are Pyrex. No science there. Surprise! If you grease and flour the pan, the meringues stick less.

The recipe is for Almond Rochers. We didn't have almonds, but there was a penciled note suggesting coconut and chocolate chips instead. We didn't have enough chocolate chips, so I just added some extra coconut (left over from the cream pie). They turned out beautifully: the recipe (which I'm not posting right now; maybe tomorrow) has you warm the egg whites and sugar before you beat them, and the residual heat melts the chocolate just a little, so that it's streaky instead of chunky. They make interesting stripey organic forms, kind of like less regular, flat-bottomed pollen particles. Yummy yummy allergens.

promises, promises

I'm supposed to be writing about why David Brooks is wrong about education, and how Value at Risk relates to No Child Left Behind.

But I just started a new (yet remarkably non-stressful) job, and I've been traveling, and it's winter, and the Gardener is sick, so what I actually want to write about is food.

I found out last week that the awesome, famous, surprisingly unpretentious¹ beer bar in my city - which I knew to buy local when possible and to buy wind power offsets - also serves at least some meat that I'm happy to eat. I found this out by calling and asking in the middle of the afternoon, and the reaction of the person I talked to was, "Are you writing an article or something?" No, no, I just want to know for myself. What about the steak frites? The burgers? What about chicken dishes? "Is this for an article or what?" Oy. No, I am just that interested.

Also, are you sick? Is someone in your household sick? Do you need something tasty and nourishing to eat that doesn't take long to make? Consider miso-tofu-rice-greens Feel Better Soup.

Feel Better Soup for 2

• 1 cup rice (white, brown, short-grain, long-grain, whatever)
• a little tamari
• a chunk of wakame/nori/other dried seaweed (optional)
• hot pepper flakes
• 2 cups leafy greens (chard, kale, spinach, etc), washed and cut into wide ribbons with most of the stalks removed
• half a block of tofu, cut into small cubes
• miso paste - I get fancy South River three-year aged barley miso, which it will not surprise you to learn I like better than Miso Master; but Miso Master (or whatever) would be fine
• 2-3 scallions, washed and thinly sliced
• toasted sesame oil

Cook the rice like you normally cook rice.

Bring 2.5 - 3 cups of water to a boil. Drop it to a simmer and add a slug of tamari and some hot pepper flakes for flavor. Add the greens and the tofu, and simmer until the greens are cooked but not soggy, 3-5 minutes. Turn the heat off and stir in miso to taste - miso doesn't do well being boiled. Serve it up.

To serve: put a big scoop of rice in the bottom of your bowl. Ladle the soup on top. Garnish with scallions, and add a generous slug of toasted sesame oil in the middle, where it will look cool. Eat.

Note that you still have half a block of tofu left, and probably some scallions as well, so you can make this the next night too.

---

1. It's pre-foodie-revolution in a way that makes it feel like the staff are stoked that you're interested, rather than judging you for not knowing enough already.

yes!

Just go read the Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson op-ed in the NY Times. It's Wendell Berry! Also they talk about pasturing, which is really awesome, and about perennialization of grain crops - definitely awesome.

Soil that is used and abused in this way is as nonrenewable as (and far more valuable than) oil. Unlike oil, it has no technological substitute — and no powerful friends in the halls of government.

Agriculture has too often involved an insupportable abuse and waste of soil, ever since the first farmers took away the soil-saving cover and roots of perennial plants. Civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland. This irremediable loss, never enough noticed, has been made worse by the huge monocultures and continuous soil-exposure of the agriculture we now practice.

Correct!

nerd!

You know you're a sustainable farming nerd when you get all engrossed reading the Organic Valley farmer profiles. This one made me happy: the farmers switched to grazing from row crops, and from Holsteins to Jerseys, and went to seasonal dairying, and they're happier and have a better family life and the cows are happier too. If you, too, are a sucker for little stories about the world getting better, you can get a few minutes of enjoyment here.

tangible reasons the credit crisis matters

Farmers generally harvest on credit - no credit means they can't pay their employees or run their machines and, the year after record food prices, the harvest is at some non-negligible risk from the financial markets.

Which, by the way, is a time-sensitive issue. Warren Buffet also sounds worried, which always makes me nervous. I've also been thinking about what Obama should have said about how a potential bail-out package would affect spending priorities (**cough**Keynes**cough**) - Lawrence Summers mentions the case for Keynesian stimulus about two-thirds of the way through this article.

real != fake

After all those articles about how eating unprocessed, nutritious foods and being active are more important for your health than losing weight, the New York Times prints an article about how more people are eating unprocessed, nutritious foods that includes the following sentence:

"The real question, is whether better eating can translate into weight loss."

ISN'T THAT THE FAKE QUESTION?

The article also positions what it calls 'positive eating,' in which you choose to eat things that are good for you and taste good (usually organic, unprocessed, natural - real - food) as a diet fad, which, if you were really reductionist, it might be. But it's not. Why? Because unlike other diet fads, real food is sustainable: it feels good, it's reasonably affordable if you cook for yourself, it provides both pleasure and health, it does not rest on some bizarrely contorted idea of how to eat.

This is part of my view about how you change the world. It has to be sustainable, which means that whatever method of changing the world you choose, you have to be able to keep doing it. Virtue and pleasure need to be connected, which is my fundamental problem with all the non-profits that expect you to work for them all the time for practically no money because you're doing what my grandmother calls good works. That model is how people end up quitting their non-profit gigs at 28 to get a corporate job. The positive eating (positive working?) model is how people keep on doing good.

(Somebody call Aristotle! This is all shamelessly ripped from the pages of the Nichomachean Ethics.)

I do not think it means what you think it means

Stephen Dubner, on the Freakonomics blog argues in favor of specialization and against eating local. The argument makes some sense: transportation costs, according to some recent work, don't account for that much of the carbon emissions created for food. Here's where my understanding breaks down. Dubner describes making orange sherbet, which was expensive and produced crappy orange sherbet: unsurprising. He concludes from this that growing one's own food is likely to be resource-intensive in money, labor, and waste, and that therefore specialization is a better deal. Which, fine, but it's based on some fundamental misunderstandings of the local food movement.

1. Eating local doesn't necessarily mean growing your own. I certainly grow fairly little of my own food (the Gardener of course has a garden, with lettuce and greens and tomatoes and herbs), but I eat mostly local, including items like eggs and milk that are totally impractical for me to raise myself.

2. Specialization can mean different things. The farmers I buy from have a specialized job as farmers, but they maintain the ecological health of their farms by growing a variety of crops which they rotate, and by incorporating animals into their farms. So their job is specialized, but they are generalists within that specialty: being a true specialist as a farmer means planting a monocrop, which then exposes your crops to greater disease risk and reduces your ability to let the ecology do the work of keeping the land healthy. Dubner conflates specialization of labor with specialization of crop, and they're very different.

3. Bizarrely, Dubner argues that growing your own will rarely be cheaper. This is just untrue overall, although there will always be exceptions. Herbs are a great example: a window box with marjoram, sage, thyme, oregano, rosemary, etc will run you something like the cost of 2-3 bundles of each herb. There are certain things where that's not true, obviously (eggs and milk are easy examples, but corn is expensive and takes a lot of land), but Dubner doesn't really investigate the costs: he just assumes that it's similar to his orange sherbet. What's particularly funny is that the NYT food section has a current article about how people are gardening to reduce their food costs, which does include some actual information.

4. Growing your own means using excess capacity. Walk around any city: there's tons of space to grow food, including patios, vacant lots, roofs, windowboxes. Because this increases the net food growing capacity of the planet, growing your own, especially for city dwellers using it as a supplement, is a pretty clear benefit for overall efficiency. Similarly, Dubner claims that people are bad at growing their own food, but this isn't a fixed point: the best way to get better at gardening is to do it for a few years.

As an aside, if I were trying to do what Dubner did with the orange sherbet, but in an efficient way, the first thing I would do is abandon the idea that it needs to be orange sherbet, and instead make something with some excess: this week, that'd be strawberry-buttermilk ice cream with jam strawberries that you can sometimes get at the Farmstand and the buttermilk that's left in our fridge from making butter out of cream that was going to go bad. Part of the point of eating local and being ecologically efficient is turning waste into food. Compost, buttermilk, yogurt, jam, dried tomatoes: take what you have too much of and make it useful.

half right

California is denying water permits to development projects that don't have an adequate water supply, which turns out to be quite a few of them. While this NYT article, as usual, omits some important information (where are most of the permits being denied?) and is a short newspaper article so you don't get much background (have I told you to read Cadillac Desert? I'll tell you again), it's still pretty interesting. Adequate water supply in this case means meeting a 2001 rule that you need a 20-year water supply: California already relies heavily on water imported from the Colorado basin, so it's not clear where any new water is going to come from, especially since climate-change predictions have the Colorado basin and California both getting dryer.

The problem, as the article does mention, is that agriculture - mostly though not entirely heavily subsidized, environmentally devastating, corporate agriculture - uses much more water than residential and office uses. So the water boards are absolutely right to prevent developments - especially developments with golf courses! which should never exist west of the 100th meridian! - that lack an adequate water supply, but at some point agriculture will have to pay too. It's a sign of the lunacy of our agricultural system that we have dammed rivers and exterminated salmon in order to grow and heavily subsidize crops that destroy the topsoil, pump chemicals into the Pacific, and end up with land whose inadequate drainage concentrates selenium and other heavy metals and chemicals in swamps that then kill migratory birds and are essentially permanently unusable. And then we have to refrigerator-truck those crops across the country, exacerbating global climate change and further reducing the available water for California.

Smart.

problems with industrial farming, in brief

The New York Times has an op-ed out about industrial animal farming. It's actually very good - it hits, briefly, all the major problems with the meat system, from rural impoverishment to labor exploitation to antitrust issues to environmental damage to antibiotic resistance. You might not actually know what all of the problems were from reading it, but any given sentence could act as a starting point to learn more about why, exactly, our food system is so totally fucked.

home dairy production

In the last couple of months, the Gardener's been bringing home unpasteurized, unhomogenized milk from grass-fed cows (and once from goats!) that was about to expire, and turning it into food.

So far she's made cultured butter, regular butter, halloumi, sour cream, yogurt, paneer, buttermilk quark, whey ricotta, cottage cheese, rice pudding, and chevre. All of it free.

Sometimes my life is awesome.

in honor of spring

If you are considering sending livestock, we would like one of these



and one of these



both of which were recently born to farmers in this area. The Atlas of American Artisan Cheese is full, as my girlfriend points out, of people who got one goat and ended up with a dairy. You can kind of see why. Also, she wants to get a goat. Just one. And she's been making cheese. Please make space in your fridge for our future dairy.

(They're both interesting breeds, too. The goats in the picture/link are Nubians, who have really excellent, high fat content milk. The calf is a Devon-Highland mix, and, as you can tell from its fuzziness, is going to be perfectly happy living outside, mostly on pasture, year round.)

---

dinner at the Experimental Cafe

You know those elementary school cookbook fundraisers where everyone puts in a favorite recipe, and inevitably one of the recipes is for 'puppy chow' and another is for 'mud' made from chocolate pudding, oreos, and gummy worms? or, and this I find truly disgusting, kitty litter cake. Well, there's a new recipe in town. It's delicious, disturbingly realistic, and what the Gardener made for our dinner last night.

Poop in the Grass
(for 4, or 2 plus lunches)

1 pound Jamison Farm merguez lamb sausage, defrosted
1-2 pounds baby sweet potatoes, scrubbed well and trimmed
spring mix and maybe some microgreens

dressing
goat yogurt (and maybe some sour cream for body)
herbs (rosemary and thyme)
salt to taste

Put the sweet potatoes in a lightly oiled pan, and roast at 425 until soft.

While they're roasting, make the dressing: whirl the goat yogurt in a food processor with the herbs, or just chop the herbs and mix with the yogurt. Put in sour cream if you think it would improve the texture. You could also use buttermilk or regular yogurt thinned with buttermilk if goat yogurt doesn't happen to end up in your fridge.

Cook the sausage in a pan over medium-high heat with a tiny bit of oil until it's browned on the outside and no longer raw in the middle.

Arrange the spring mix in a circle on each plate. In the middle of the circle, put sausages and sweet potatoes. Garnish with microgreens, and serve the dressing at the table.

(local: everything but the salt, which is from Maine, and the olive oil, which is from Trader Joe's.)

buy organic

I keep meaning to write about how I look at food in the grocery store and decide what to eat (which may or may not have any relevance to your life - mostly, Em asked me to, and I said I would), but this story is the kind of thing that makes me so uncomfortable buying conventional produce, especially out of season. It's an article about songbirds dying or having severe neurological problems from high concentrations of pesticides used on produce in Latin America. Setting aside my strong suspicion that anything that kills birds is probably bad for my long-term health, it's a serious downer to sit down to dinner and start thinking about poisoned songbirds.

Similarly, I can't buy conventional strawberries anymore because I just think about sea otters having immune problems and being poisoned by toxic algal blooms from all the pesticides and fertilizers dumped on the strawberry fields outside Watonville. So, no strawberries since last spring, except maybe at a catered event or something where I didn't buy them. I can't wait for May, when I get to have them again.

Addendum: The article also specifically mentions organic coffee and bananas as priorities. Having seen coffee and banana plantations firsthand, I agree. A conventional banana plantation is a horrible place - dead land made of eroding grey clay with plants so weak they have to be tied to guy lines to stay up. The organic plantation I visited was like a very managed forest, with leaf litter and little plants and other live things. Shade-grown coffee is especially important because it's a cash crop that allows farmers to maintain forest cover, which is just unbelievably ecologically valuable, especially in the tropical regions where coffee grows.

paging califloridans

This is one of those pieces of legislative arcana that has the potential to be bizarrely meaningful in the lives of many people. It's called Farm Flex, and Jack Hedin, a Minnesota farmer, wrote about it in the NY Times about a month ago. (I'm late. Shut up.) Our current farm policy, which is massively fucked up in about 15 dimensions, directly subsidizes commodity growers for I think 5 crops: corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, and cotton. I'm going to resist the intense temptation to complain about these subsidies in ways irrelevant to the topic at hand, and note instead that various other crops are subsidized indirectly (for example, by building expensive dams that provide cheap water - now go read Cadillac Desert). The direct subsidy crops, though, carry a specific penalty if you switch off commodities to, say, grow fruits and vegetables. A farmer who makes that switch has 3 costs: loss of the subsidy for the acres in question; a fine based on the value of the crops grown; and future loss of the subsidy for the acres in question.

The first cost is reasonable, even in crazy commodity-subsidy world: if you're not growing commodities, it makes sense not to be subsidized to grow commodities. But the second cost makes it very difficult for farmers who switch to make any money, and the third cost is a huge future risk. Farmers who would switch are mostly not in viable parts of the country for large-scale production to compete with, say, California - the climate in Iowa wouldn't work - so they'd be supplying local markets. That's what makes this a nationally meaningful policy issue. There's a bill - Farm Flex - to cut out the second and third penalties, to make it more possible for farmers to try food production, and it's a good bill. It's pretty dumb that the federal government is actively protecting large-scale ultra-commercial growers just at the time when people are really interested in local food.

The opponents to Farm Flex are mostly California/Florida-based businesses, which makes it your job, my California/Florida-based friends, to call your member of Congress, or, if the bill makes it to the Senate, your Senator. Texans should also call. And everyone else.

You can know when that's happened by looking at this nifty widget, which I just discovered. (OK, never mind, the widget isn't working. You'll just have to google H.R. 1371 yourself.)

someone is wrong on the internet

I managed to get myself involved in one of those irritating blog-comment arguments over on I Blame the Patriarchy. I was defending the idea that it was possible to make an ethically informed decision to eat meat. If you want to read the stuff I said, I'm North. It's a perfect example of this phenomenon.

It's funny how, in this kind of argument, people act like family farms just don't exist. They're gone! Jude Becker, Joel Salatin, and the Fishers are a myth! Your only options are mass-produced meat or mass-produced vegetarianism!

That would be depressing. Luckily it's not true, and the more people remember it's not true, the less true it is. Like fairies.

if you eat this you will be happy

This was so good it made me want to call everyone I knew and tell them how amazing it was. So good that when my dad called as I was finishing one I waited to talk to him until I was done thinking about the last bite. My really amazing girlfriend made this really amazing dessert and came up with the really amazing topping. You will be so happy you made it.

Maple custards
2 cups cream
1/2 cup maple syrup (or maple sugar)
6 egg yolks

Preheat the oven to 325.

Warm the cream. Stir the syrup or sugar into the egg yolks. Mix in a little of the warm cream, then mix in the rest of the cream, stirring constantly. The recipe says to strain into a pitcher, but you should just pour it into a liquid measuring cup. Pour into six little ramekins and arrange them on a baking dish. Heat some water, put the baking dish in the oven, and pour the hot water in the baking dish so it comes about halfway up the sides of the ramekins. Lay a sheet of foil on top to lightly cover them. Recipe says: bake for about 40 minutes or until the custards are set in a ring about 1/2 inch wide around the outside edge. They should still be soft in the center.

Make this dessert with the best ingredients you can get. There are only 3 ingredients and the taste is really subtle and comples, so it's worth buying farm eggs and super-quality cream and dark dark maple syrup (grade C even, since maple syrup grades are based on color not quality). We get unpasteurized double cream which is kind of like a revelation in dairy fat.

The recipe is from Chez Panisse Desserts, by Lindsey Remolif Shere, which is worth owning if you like dessert. Which is to say, worth owning.

Then, since you live on the East Coast and have local cranberries available, make a compote for the top. The Gardener came up with this.

2 cups of cranberries
2 tablespoons of sugar, about - or to taste
a little port or red wine or something


Heat the cranberries in a little pan with a little water or port. Put the sugar in - you can put less and then adjust it. You want it tart so that it contrasts with the creamy nutty sweetness of the pudding. Keep simmering the cranberries - not too much water, let them dry out so it's cranberries not sauce, add port and water as needed - until they're ready. Put a spoonful on each pudding before you serve them. Grate a tiny bit of orange zest on everything.

Have I mentioned how amazingly delicious this is?