I half-heartedly collect old government recipe books — the kind that would have been distributed by social workers and home ec teachers — and they have never had a great sense of what people want to eat or read. There’s this awkward tone to the writing, where the anonymous author clearly wants to be fun and interesting, but is hamstrung by the need to Not Offend Anybody, so the result is the odd joke or weird illustrations of anthropomorphic Melba toasts.

So, when, suffering from recipe fatigue, I ended up on the First Lady’s Letsmove.gov site, I was actually a little disappointed: it was sincere, but not laughably so. The Let’s Cook section of the site will be featuring inexpensive menu plans and recipes from chefs, hoping to inspire Americans to cook more and drive-thru less. This week’s menu was from chef Marvin Woods, an Atlanta-based chef. Far from being silly-didactic, the page actually could have used more text, in my opinion.

For the first time since I was a bemused 21-year-old housewife reading Woman’s Day, I printed out someone else’s shopping list and went to the store. Last night, I made Woods’ Thursday night meal, Mediterranean Chicken, Pearl Barley, and Feta Eggplant.

The chicken, among my audience, was more or less a wash. We were out of pearl barley (we have always been out of pearl barley) so I used some Israeli couscous I found malingering on a high shelf, which is cooked like risotto.

We did not have parsley, so I used basil, and we did not have olives, so I had a mild sad.

It was fine to eat. Things I would do differently next time include having olives, using parsley, and using chicken thighs. The couscous was great as always.

In the Real Shocker Department, the eggplant was a Big Hit.

Points in its favor include that Trader Joe’s garlic marinara sauce is absolutely stuffed with chunks of garlic and contains no sugar; that Trader Joe’s has a new brine-packed feta that is fantastic; and that it was clearly the best thing on the table as evidenced by the fact that I could not photograph it before it was attacked by ravenous children.

I was shocked, honestly, both that they liked it and I liked it. I don’t care for marinara sauce or eggplant (except as baba ganoush) but that was highly edible.

For dessert, we had CSA strawberries. They were also a hit.

According to the menu plan, last night’s dinner should have set us back $15.00. Despite paying more for kosher chicken breasts and the premium feta, I think we were probably in the ballpark. Did I just unironically learn something from the government?

I made this butternut squash lasagna with CSA squash last year.

Generally speaking, when one is searching for some sort of sustainability-related activity or service in the Bay Area, the problem is never finding said activity or service, but choosing which of fifty, say, purveyors of hand-raised organic cricket-fed cruelty-free cockscombs is the one for you.

So it is with choosing a Bay Area CSA, that being Community Supported Agriculture, that meaning a variety of things depending on who is talking. Generally speaking, CSAs are an opportunity for non-farmers — ie almost everyone — to subsidize local farmers and their products, by buying a “share” in their enterprises. This usually amounts to agreeing to pay in a set amount per week or year in exchange for produce or meat or whatever the CSA is producing.

A lot of CSAs offer a box of produce every week or every other week. That’s the kind I was looking for; you get a box of extraordinarily fresh, completely seasonal, downright sexy fruits and vegetables and it’s up to you to cook it all by the end of the week. Depending on how busy you are and how random the ingredients are on a particular week, the night before the new box comes, when you are intent on using up the dregs of last week’s produce, may resemble a laid-back episode of Top Chef, only you are forced to actually taste the red kale and charentais melon coulis instead of gleefully watching Tom Colicchio glower at it onscreen.

(You still don’t get to taste Hubert Keller. CSAs can’t do everything. Sad face.)

In my quest to develop my own eco-kashrut philosophy, I’d like to start supporting local farmers who try to leave the earth a little healthier than they found it. So I spent the last week or so winnowing the massive list of Bay Area CSAs, based on the following criteria:

1) Conveniently located drop location.

Many CSAs offer your box at a local customer’s house, hopefully in your neighborhood. I have belonged to several CSAs in the past, and having to drive across the world to pick up the raw ingredients for dinner is both lame and probably-not-very-eco-kosher. The same goes, imho, for having the food driven in a delivery van across the world to my house.

2) A reasonable variety of food in the box.

I loved my last CSA, until we hit winter and it was bok choy every. single. week. I know it was in season. I was trying, gamely, to roll with the seasonal punches. But, honestly, I could not think of anything to do with bok choy. I don’t like cooking it. It’s full of water and gets limp easily and ugh you see my point.

3) Affordable.

I don’t want to pony up 6 months’ worth of dues upfront. And I don’t want to borrow against my firstborn child to pay for mesclun.

4) Offers something besides vegetables.

Some CSAs offer flowers, farm-fresh eggs, or even meat.

With these criteria in mind, I finally settled on Two Small Farms CSA. The drop location is a block from my house, they offer the famous Mariquita strawberries, and they don’t operate during the winter, which keeps me from being smothered in bok choy and winter greens. They offer a nine-week payment schedule, and the box itself comes out to about $22/week for organic produce. They also offer fresh organic flowers for another $8/week, about what I’m already paying at Trader Joe’s for not-organic flowers. And did I mention I can pick up the box a block from my house?

So I have a CSA! At least I will, when it starts up next week. Now, onto my next task: lining up reliable sources for humanely raised meat.

In 2002, having married a Jewish man and had a baby, I finally “got around to it” after a few years of study. At this point, I was no longer surviving on Skor bars, but bacon cheeseburgers. As I tried to formulate a Jewish practice, I added Shabbat to the rotation, and, along with it, a weekly kosher dinner. We toyed with the idea of keeping kosher all the time, but never took it seriously, for several reasons:

1) The health reasons given for keeping kosher were made obsolete by such modern innovations as refrigeration and the FDA.

2) The ethical justifications for kashrut — that kosher animals are killed more humanely — were offset by the fact that most kosher meat still comes from factory farms.

3) It seemed like a gigantic hassle.

4) Our rabbi said we didn’t have to.

5) Bacon cheeseburgers.

No, we didn’t think about it very hard. But very few people we knew kept kosher. It seemed archaic. And we didn’t have to. So we didn’t.

Over time, however, the idea of keeping kosher began to represent the gold standard of Jewish observance for me. I think it has something to do with my perfectionist streak. Despite the fact that raising two children in a Jewish household and sending them to Hebrew school while studying for my own bat mitzvah was far above average Jewish observance, I wanted more. I secretly read the blogs of kosher housewives. I still didn’t want to keep kosher. But now I felt bad about it. (Insert Jewish guilt joke here. I would suggest: “I am my own Jewish mother.”)

Also, I attended a family bat mitzvah several years ago, where the new Jewish adult explained, earnestly, her personal reasons for keeping kosher, paraphrased as “Every time I think about what I eat, it reminds me that I’m Jewish.”

Enter Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, one of the founders of Jewish Renewal, and his book, Jewish With Feeling.

Rabbi Zalman suggests moving away from traditional kashrut and toward  “eco-kashrut,” a term he coined. In my understanding, eco-kashrut makes explicit the justifications for “regular kashrut,” incorporating our modern attitudes towards the food chain and our environment. In other words, instead of keeping kosher because it’s safer (it’s often not), we would make food choices that are safer for our families — buying locally and patronizing restaurants that buy locally. Instead of keeping kosher because it’s more humane for animals (again, not necessarily), we would buy markedly less meat because the production of meat is so hard on the environment, and then, when we do buy meat, make sure we are comfortable with how the animals were raised and killed.

Even if one chooses not to follow the injunctions to separate milk and meat and the various food prohibitions, eco-kashrut requires eating very thoughtfully. Would we merely buy hormone-free milk, or organic hormone-free milk? Which is better for the earth; which is better for the cow?  Every eating choice becomes a tiny step towards tikkun olam, the Jewish goal of repairing a broken world.

I am going to try this and see where it leads. I even have an action plan!

* Join a CSA to get fresh, local produce every week

* Prepare a vegetarian Shabbat

*Look into joining a meat CSA

* Develop a policy for eating out/take-out

And, finally,

* Start fleshing out (pun!) what is and is not eco-kosher, and whether it includes a Niman Ranch bacon -  Cowgirl Creamery cheese – Prather Ranch beef burger.

The (food) revolution will be blogged. Watch this eco-kosher space.

But they were so greedy that they ate EVERYTHING they came across, and, gradually, their greediness gained focus. They started grubbing on hand-made breads and pizzas at Arizmendi Bakery. They discovered home cooking and learned to make their own salad dressing. They tiptoed into Say Cheese and never looked back.

And they found Chowhound, by accident, featured in a Calvin Trillin article.

(And then they stopped speaking about themselves in the third person.)

We fell passionately in love with Chowhound. We took the tips very seriously. Top commenters were household names, at least in our house. (”If Melanie Wong says the ramen’s good, the ramen’s good.”) Back then, Chowhound was just a series of giant HTML pages with a gray background. There were entire boards dedicated to complaining about the site. It was massively slow, almost completely unsearchable. But the San Francisco Chowhound board taught us everything about eating locally — and eating very well.

Chowhound changed everything we ate. We visited every Farmer’s Market in the city. We ate the best ice cream, the best sushi, the best hamburger, the best donut. We didn’t eat “Mexican food” anymore, we ate  Salvadorean pupusas and Mexico City-style tortas. A hankering for “Chinese food” brought Shanghainese dragon’s head meatballs or Hakka steamed bacon with dried mustard greens or Spices! Restaurant, where, we discovered, a multicourse meal of improbable spiciness could leave us with two wine glasses’ worth of buzz.

We visited Gary Danko for an incredible, intimate birthday dinner that stretched long after closing, and we ate sausages standing up at Rosamunde Grill. Chowhound didn’t discriminate. Members of that community saw good food not as a hierarchy, with The French Laundry at the apex and a million hole-in-the-wall joints at the bottom, but a continuum of delicious tastes and communal experiences.

Out of all these restaurants, all these dining experiences both exalted and not-so, we hesitated to visit one restaurant: Jai Yun.

Reviews were never mixed, always full of superlatives (”the best Chinese food I have ever had”). The restaurant is small, and boasts a single chef. There is no menu. The chef sends out whatever he feels like cooking, and you can choose a variety of price points, based on what you feel like paying. The ideal number of people in a party is supposedly six, and we could never seem to think up a group that didn’t contain at least one vegetarian.

Also we were a little intimidated — it sounded almost like omakase, in which you approach a sushi chef and respectfully put your palate in his capable hands. There are rules governing omakase, many ways to look like a jackass, and we figured the same might be true of Jai Yun.

Every year or so, we remembered Jai Yun, that Holy Grail of San Francisco Chinese dining (”best Chinese food outside Hong Kong!”) and somehow forgot.

Until January, when we were offered the birthday opportunity of a lifetime: a half-off dinner at Jai Yun coupled with very sweet last-minute babysitting. Done and done.

Jai Yun’s interior is, to put it bluntly, unprepossessing. I expected a tiny, shadowy room lit by candlelight, where diners spoke in whispers, but I was wrong. It’s the number of tables that’s small, not the restaurant. That accounted for the feeling of smallness as well as the feeling of silence: there were only two other parties there, and though we were all chatting animatedly amongst ourselves, there was by no means a lot of noise.

We ordered the $50/person meal and waited to be amazed. We were.

This is the list of dishes we received, in order. There are some photos but we were too greedy to document everything.

Marinated celery

Beef with Szechuan peppercorn sauce (numbing spicy)

Shaved lotus (very gingery)

Wakame salad (a take on the one often served in Japanese restaurants)

Cabbage with pickled ginger

Vegetarian goose (one of my favorite Shanghai specialties)

Chopped tofu with cilantro

Marinated cucumber

Julienned jellyfish

Enoki mushrooms with cellophane noodles and tripe

Marinated radish

Abalone egg white omelet

Seitan with bamboo shoots, asparagus and ginger

Taro balls with pork

Mustard greens with edamame and tofu

Shrimp with chickpeas and bell peppers

Mung beans with Chinese bacon, cellophane chow fun noodles, and leek greens

Hands down, my very favorite. I have never seen clear chow fun noodles; they were shimmery, they reflected the light, they melted in the mouth, they were dream noodles.

Orange beef with pork cracklings on top (!)

Gingko nuts with squash

Kung pao chicken with Szechuan peppercorns

Chinese celery with fish cake

Slow-braised pork shoulder (another Shanghainese dish)

Corn with fish

Seared eggplant

Jai Yun will be one of our favorite restaurant memories. We were enchanted by each small dish, brought out individually. Every single dish (and there were many dishes!) was perfectly balanced and flavored. All four of us liked EVERYTHING.

I wish we had done this years ago, but it’s probably for the best that we did it now. We have many fewer fancy-dining experiences now than we used to, making Jai Yun a dining high point for 2010 (though the year is, admittedly, not yet half over). Also, it’s nice to know that our expectations were not, in any way, too high.

Apparently, some things do stay the same. Again, nice to know.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kesta/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

For the first time since 2001 or thereabouts, I did not host a Passover Seder. (I attended two seders, both of which were lovely.) I did not cook an unforgivably unpalatable kosher-for-passover dessert, nor did I set a glass of water beside Elijah’s cup for Miriam, nor did I explain the significance of an orange on the Seder plate. Thanks to the kindness of others, I have eaten brisket and matzo ball soup and charosets both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.

(I did make chopped liver and matzo balls with gribenes. I’m not dead yet.)

It is six days into Passover. This is always the point at which I begin to complain in an unseemly manner about the absence of bread in my life. I miss bread. I miss pizza. I miss sushi.

And, yet. There have been beautiful things this Passover. I watched my daughter chant the Four Questions in perfect Hebrew (with perfect pitch) for three generations of her family. I learned the Modeh Ani morning prayer by heart. I ran five miles and stood among the ruins of a millionaire’s estate looking over the Pacific Ocean. I ate at Contigo, and, though I could not spread the briny-sweet cured anchovies on bread, I consumed every morsel of fresh Dirty Girl strawberries with sweetened crème fraîche and rhubarb gelée.

In short, I have had the best Passover of my life.

I thought, when I began my Jewish journey a decade ago, that Passover was Jewish Lent, a mortifying of the flesh, a kind of fast to achieve holiness. Passover, this year, has been, instead, a crystallization of Jewish time. Things moved more slowly. I ate less. I ate more carefully. I ran along the ocean in San Pedro to an old lighthouse and just missed seeing dolphins. I lit Shabbat candles. I sat in warm sand with new friends. I said a prayer of thanks for my first morning breath.

Tomorrow night, when I taste my first bread in seven days, I will not be sorry. But I will, I think, be grateful.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sweetbeetandgreenbean/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

This is how to make collard greens. First, my grandfather drives his truck to the Alemany Farmer’s Market. My grandfather chooses a bunch of taut, bitter leaves, and he puts money in the dirt-caked, stubby-fingered hand of the farmer who planted the seeds, and he brings home the collards to my grandmother to cook.

But where does my grandfather get the money to buy the collards? Well, first, my grandfather buys a ticket on a slow bus from outside Pine Bluff, Arkansas. He sits in the back because it’s 1943, and he’s leaving Arkansas because he has to sit in the back of the bus there. The bus takes him to San Francisco, and he gets a job mixing concrete, and then another, better job, and a foreman’s job, and one day it is 1985 and he is a senior supervisor for the Department of Public Works who makes more money than he has ever made, and he has a wife who has never had to work, who makes the very best collard greens.

But, then, where does his wife come from? It starts with a man named Newman Ingram, whose face I have never seen, who is born in South Carolina of two slaves born in Africa. Newman begets a son whose name I do not know with another slave named Chaney, and that son begets another son named Terrell, whose face I have never seen, with a woman named Charlotte, and they have a son, Neely, the first one of these born a free man. (I have seen Neely’s weary, broad face in his sole surviving photograph.) And Neely and his wife, the haughty creole Amanda Duncan, have a son, Augusta, who will break his mother’s heart and his wife’s heart and his daughter’s heart.

Augusta Ingram

Augusta and his several brothers are high-yellow men, some of whom can get by riding the front of the bus in cities where no one knows about their dark-skinned father, some of whom disappear forever and are presumed to be passing. That magic high-yellow skin supposedly makes Augusta better than his dark-skinned wife Mary and his pretty little brown daughters, but when his liver fails and he turns a deep golden yellow from the bile it just makes him dead. And that is how you get my grandmother, who takes the train to San Francisco with her aunts after every last one of those people dies before she is sixteen.

Maybe Martha’s aunt Irene, who will one day own a restaurant, will teach her to make good collards. That will be later, after Irene and her sisters abandon their teenaged niece in San Francisco, after sixteen-year-old Martha changes her name to Barbara and marries her hard-working boyfriend, who had been a concrete mixer operator and will one day buy her a big house at the base of Twin Peaks with a kitchen just right for making collards.

The kitchen has a big window over the double sink, framed with frilly curtains. My grandmother will soak the collards well in the left-hand sink. My grandfather is peeling and cutting up potatoes with a huge sharp butcher knife, so he’ll just go over and drain the collards and cut the rubbery leaves from their thick stems while my grandmother blanches the ham hocks for the greens.

My grandmother will put the collards in one of the bigger pots, and they will cook down slow with the ham hocks. When the collards are tender and limp, my grandmother will make cornbread and an iceberg salad with apples and carrots, and my grandfather will have turned the potatoes into thick, soft home fries in the same skillet where he has just fried some pieces of chicken. And I will sit down at the kitchen table, my melamine plate piled high with food, and tear at a chicken drumstick and home fries and cornbread with margarine and grape jelly, and pause at the collards only to carefully pick out and devour all the little shreds of ham hock and completely ignore the bitter, wilted, silky greens, luminous with pork fat.

And when I am done there will be a sad lonely pile of collard greens on the plate, but my grandparents won’t make me eat them.

I tried to explain how to make collard greens but it may be impossible. My grandmother is gone forever and my grandfather doesn’t eat pork anymore. And, worst of all, I rarely ate collards when given the opportunity, being in it for the ham hocks. Still, I am going to blanch some ham hocks and pile some wilted greens in a pot and try my best. I will serve them on a melamine plate to my son and daughter, who have never seen my grandmother in the flesh, who have never been to Pine Bluff but are of Pine Bluff, not Ingrams but of Ingrams, have washed their hands in my grandparents’ double sink, and meet their hard-working great-grandfather in his truck all over San Francisco. They will probably not like collards yet but that is probably beside the point.

I could watch this forever. DTMFA, Joan.

Last Week:

Last week, Betty found The Secret (Don’s) and read The Group (which I’ll blog about later). Don tried to make up for the past with his mistress’ brother and was feted for his general excellence. Peggy owned Kinsey and Kinsey accepted his ownedness. Everybody drank as if it was the Dark Ages and safe, reliable water sources were scarce. And nobody ate a damn thing except, and I quote: “soup.”

So we went with an alcohol theme (hat tip to Olivia) and, I think, we acquitted ourselves quite well.

My Brother-In-Law The Hero The Chef lit alcohol on fire and it BURNED.

This is what it looks like when a chef lights Irish Coffee on fire.

This is what it looks like when a chef, making a riff on Steak Diane, flambees Niman Ranch rib-eye pieces.

This is what the steak looks like plated:

We also had sauteed mixed peppers, red rice, and my version of Bloody Mary Shrimp, ie with crab and blue cheese crackers. Instead of Absolut Peppar, I marinated a sliced serrano pepper and some cracked black peppercorns in Skyy Vodka (If you want to see a grown man cry, badger him into drinking a single sip. It is fun.).

Finally, I invented Lambrusco Sorbet.

Lambrusco Thyme Sorbet

(based on the generic Wine Sorbet recipe at FoodNetwork.com)

6 ounces water
4 ounces (dry weight) turbinado sugar
10 ounces Lambrusco
juice of 1/2 lime
a few branches of fresh thyme

Heat the water and sugar on low heat just until the sugar dissolves. Add the Lambrusco and remove from heat. Add lime juice and thyme fronds. Cool. Fish out thyme. Freeze in ice cream maker. Eat. Eat! You want I should die from worry?

We finished it up this morning and, yes, my offspring refused to stop eating the sorbet so I could take a picture. Which, frankly, was a compliment.

This Week

Quote of the week, as expressed by Mr. Greg Harris, right before getting beat down by the former Miss Holloway: “You don’t know what it’s like to want something your whole life, and to plan for it, and to count on it, and not get it.”

In this week’s episode, three women who were taught that that “something” should be marriage — and then married the wrong man — take center stage in three separate romantic relationships, and we learn what happens when you are finally confronted with the thing you wanted your whole life, and don’t get it.

Roger’s one-that-got-away, Annabelle Mathis,  returns to try to rekindle their failed romance, under the pretext of offering Sterling Cooper a dog food account. Apparently, long ago in Paris, Annabelle threw over Roger, who was a gadabout, for a man who was more settled. Apparently, she’s been pining for Roger ever since.

There are shadows of the Sal-Lee Garner interaction here — widowed Annabelle tries to seduce Roger — but Roger doesn’t see the need to take one for the team. “It’s different with this girl,” he explains — meaning Jane — but it’s really not, is it? Annabelle is nothing if not a grown-up Jane. Roger has finally gotten over their affair by simply marrying a stand-in for Annabelle. And, suddenly, Roger’s completely baffling obsession with Jane makes perfect sense.

In a way, neither Roger nor Annabelle get what they want. Annabelle married someone else, and will never be able to rectify the mistake; Roger thinks he’s happy with Jane (though Jane hasn’t looked happy for a single second this season), but he can never really have young Annabelle again. One day, it’s clear, Jane will realize Roger’s reasons for marrying her have absolutely nothing to do with her — if she hasn’t already.

Meanwhile, Joan is stuck in a bad marriage, herself. Greg, the rapist/failed surgeon, tanks an interview and has the nerve to imply Joan has no idea how he feels, causing him to get a vase cracked over his head. Though the beatdown is richly deserved, the exchange simply underscores how ill-suited Joan and Greg are to one another. Even after leaving Sterling Cooper, Joan has immediately found a job; Greg can’t — or won’t — find a position outside the operating room. Joan has gone from a working girl waiting for Mr. Right to a working woman supporting Mr. Right.

And then Greg goes and joins the Army, because it’s more important, to him, to be a surgeon than it is to make Joan happy. It’s a decision that would have had a devastating effect on Joan’s life — if she had been the stay-at-home wife she wanted to be. Luckily, Joan is in a surprisingly independent position.

Joan doesn't really see herself in fatigues.

Joan wanted, more than anything, to be “saved” from a fate as a working spinster secretary. She effectively transferred her ambition to her husband. But, in reality, she’s far from getting the life she wanted as a well-to-do housewife in the suburbs. Worse, it’s not even clear she would have liked that life in the first place.

Betty has that life, or, at least, she thought she did, until she uncovered Don’s Dick Whitman box. For the first time, Betty confronts what Don really is: not a strong-jawed Cary Grant type, not a dashing lover with a mysterious past, but Dick Whitman, son of Archie Whitman, sitting on the edge of their double bed, crying like a lost child. Underneath the Don Draper facade, Dick Whitman is emotional, wracked with survivor’s guilt, and scared to death the life he built is going to explode.

The truth about Don seems to deflate Betty. I don’t think she expected Don to be stammering “I can explain” or shaking so hard that he can’t light a cigarette. This is honest emotion, and the man she thought she was marrying doesn’t do emotion. When Betty reaches out her hand, so tentatively, to pat Don’s shoulder when he’s crying, it’s as if she’s trying to console a stranger in distress.

All three women — four, if you count absent Jane — married men who appeared to be good providers. They assumed that was all they needed to be happy. No one taught them to look for anything else in a man. But this way of choosing ensured that they had no real role outside their husbands’ identities. This especially holds true for Joan and Betty. If Joan is a doctor’s wife, what does that mean if her husband isn’t a doctor? How can Betty be Mrs. Draper if her husband wasn’t Don Draper in the first place? And Roger has projected an identity onto Jane that is no less dependent on how her husband defines himself.

The episode’s Halloween ending underscores this idea. Though society defines gypsies and hoboes as worthless outcasts, they embrace their exclusion, creating their own societies with their own norms and rules. Will Joan or Betty finally break from their rigid roles?

For this episode, at least, Joan shows real anger, and Betty demands — and receives — real, truthful answers. By the end, each woman appears to submit, for the moment, to the fate she’s married, but clearly the masks are starting to slip.

“Who are you supposed to be?” a neighbor asks Mr. and Mrs. Draper. For the moment, no one has any idea.

Next week:

Lordy, did somebody eat something that wasn’t horsemeat or candy, or drink something that wasn’t alcoholic? Why don’t these people eat anymore? I’m going to get cirrhosis and the sugar diabeetus.

A woman wears this expression when she is not trying to decide WHETHER to destroy her husband, but WHEN.

Last Week:

Henry made Betty sad. Conrad Hilton made Don sad. Lee Garner, Jr. made Sal sad. Don made Sal really sad. That episode was very sad.

Luckily, during his evisceration of Don’s perfectly fine ad campaign, Conrad Hilton expressed a desire for fried chicken (oh, and also the moon), or else this week’s foodcap would have just consisted of my crying-in-the-shower Flickr photostream.

I am very, very glad Connie likes fried chicken. Because, you see, I like fried chicken, too.

I don’t care how much of a stereotype it is, I could eat fried chicken every day. Usually, I don’t, because it is a) a hassle and b) deadly. But what Connie wants, Connie gets.

I brined the chicken drumsticks first, in buttermilk, kosher salt, a load of pepper, cayenne, and several crushed (not minced) garlic cloves. I left them in a ziplock bag with the brine for around four hours. Then I mixed flour, polenta, salt, pepper, ground sage, ground oregano, and baking powder, dredged the chicken pieces in that, and fried them in LARD. (My justification is that if I am going to fry chicken once a year, it had better be the best fried chicken on earth.)

To my surprise, the same thing happened to me that happened to Cook’s Illustrated when they made fried chicken: the pieces that sat around coated with flour — the second fried batch — were way better than the first (they are the pretty golden pieces in the photograph). So next time I’ll dredge the pieces and let them hang out for a while. Sidebar: I still have a bag full of brining chicken pieces in the fridge, so I think I will make Cook’s Illustrated’s oven fried chicken recipe for dinner.

A professional chef who is a member of my family by marriage came over and made fried green tomatoes.

While he was here he also made shoestring potatoes dusted in cumin, mostly because he’s cool that way.

I had the idea to make guanciale cornbread with chive butter. I am glad I had this idea.

It tasted exactly like cracklin’ bread, which is by no means a complaint.

And, finally, because I felt so bad for putting fat food on my family, I marinated feta with olives, red onions, olive oil, and mint, then tossed it with arugula and watermelon.

Everything was great. Nothing failed. No one made aspic. The appelkaka is forgotten.

This week:

The title of the episode, “The Color Blue,” stems from a conversation Don and his new mistress Miss Farrell have in bed. Essentially, Miss Farrell believes that no one can truly understand anyone else’s perspective. Don, meanwhile, ever the (m)adman, isn’t concerned with people’s individual perspectives so much as how people can be convinced to see the same things. He delivers the episode’s thesis statement: “people may see things differently, but they don’t really want to.”

This episode’s subplot, where Kinsey tries to best Peggy by finding a great Western Union slogan, actually offers perspective on the main plot: Kinsey, getting drunk in his office, staggers out to chat with a janitor named Achilles. In the middle of their conversation, Kinsey suddenly gets a flash of inspiration, staggers back into his office, and, promptly, passes out. In the morning, Kinsey cannot, for the life of him, remember what the excellent idea might have been.

Kinsey tries to recreate the conditions that led up to the idea — even having a second conversation with Achilles — without success. In other words, he tries to return to whatever perspective allowed him to have the brilliant idea, but it’s gone. Not only are we unable to fully understand other people’s perspectives and thoughts, sometimes we are even unable to understand our own.

Amazingly, Peggy and Don take this situation — in which Kinsey can’t communicate with his own unconscious — and create an excellent ad about communication, selling Western Union with the line “you can’t frame a phone call.” A written communication, in their opinion, is a permanent statement of perspective, just as a work of art or a novel might be. In doing so, they convince Kinsey that their way of advertising — their perspective — is better than his. We actually see the moment where Kinsey “sees things differently.”

Peggy is a better ad writer. Kinsey finally gets it.

Betty gets it, too, where “it” is “Don Draper’s biggest secret.”

The same “perspective” conversation is carried out, one-sided, by Betty herself. Don, a bit overstretched with all the lying, accidentally leaves the keys to his Drawer of Secrets in his pocket. Betty immediately knows what the key is for, and promptly discovers that everything she thought she knew about Don — everything she saw when she looked at him — is completely wrong. It’s important to remember that, while Don is crafting an ad campaign about communication, one that will culminate in the statement that the telephone is ephemeral while paper communications are forever, Betty is finding an entire box full of paper communications — photos, deeds, letters — that tell Don’s real story.

Ironically, prior to this, Miss Farrell has made a hang-up call at the Drapers’ house. I think that, for much of the episode, Betty thinks this is the real secret Don is carrying around — that he’s cheating. But the phone is useless (just ask Conrad Hilton, who doesn’t appear onscreen but calls Don’s answering service; Don is not dancing attendance on him anymore). The papers tell the real story. As long as those papers exist, Don can never be the real Don Draper.

Meanwhile, Don carries on as if everything’s fine, probably assuming Betty’s coldness is about his affair. We’ve always known that Don doesn’t understand Betty, but, clearly, he seems to think he understands her perspective. In an effort to draw her out, he flatters her repeatedly, but he has absolutely no idea what she is really thinking, what she really knows.

Don said, at the beginning of the episode, that “people may see things differently, but they don’t want to.” He’s proven both right and wrong over the course of the story. Kinsey was able to get a new perspective on Peggy, and Betty certainly has a new perspective on Don. But, unlike Kinsey, Betty wanted to find out what was in the drawer. As the decade progresses, Don’s aphorisms about “what people want” are becoming untrue. People are beginning to want truth and answers. As Don becomes farther and farther removed from the new zeitgeist, his advertising is sure to suffer.

Betty just looks at Don, barely speaking. It’s as if she’s trying to see if he looks any different now that she knows a lot of the truth, or that she’s trying to imagine what the world looks like to a man who is now a complete stranger to her, or, maybe, that she is trying to figure out how to look at him. Who is Don? Who is Dick Whitman? What is she going to do now?

Based on next week’s previews, I think Betty’s new perspective is going to lead her right off the reservation.

Next week:

We were so busy stuffing our faces and gasping at this week’s reveals that we didn’t notice that no one ate anything. Miss Farrell offered to feed her brother “some soup.” Betty sits at the dinner table at least twice, but no one talks about what they are eating. Don carries around a slice of maybe cake while drinking coffee. Kinsey steals an apple out of someone’s lunch and gets black-out drunk.

C’mon, Mr. Weiner, give me something to work with. Drunken chicken, maybe? With…soup?

Baby's first LOLdon.

It was fun watching people take out their frustrations on each other this week. Just kidding, it was harrowing and depressing.

Last Week:

Don and Betty were a hot, sexytime couple for basically the first time ever, jet-setting in a vision of Rome that was very like the backdrop of a James Bond flick. Pete was the worst ever, and Trudy offered him concilatory cold salads.

There was mutiny in my household and among my guests. No one wants to play my Crazy Foods From The Sixties game anymore. The appelkaka was the last straw. These people feel that we have proved a point, which is that food from the sixties was largely terrible, and they do not feel obligated to join me in watching Mad Men if I continue to serve terrible things to eat.

I considered being a visionary, one who pushes her art on the masses, but, frankly, even I was getting tired of putting huge amounts of effort into things that were inedible. So! It was fun, but I think the food is going to look a lot more like contemporary spins on what the people of Mad Men were eating.

This week was the Delicious Food kick-off, and, I have to say, we went all out.

In honor of the demise of Gourmet, we prepared one of my very favorite Gourmet recipes ever: Tagliatelle with Chestnuts, Pancetta, and Sage. I had the brain flash to replace the pancetta with Boccalone guanciale I had lying around (by “lying around” I meant “was feverishly thinking up ways to use”). Sidebar: guanciale is better than bacon. Don’t worry, I’m not saying bacon is not the best ever. It is. Just if there were something better than the best ever it would be guanciale.

So, if you are planning to replicate my efforts, replace the pancetta with guanciale, and also ask your brother-in-law, who is a CCA-trained professional chef, to make fresh tagliatelle.

Oh, your brother-in-law is not a professional chef? No fresh tagliatelle for you. A pity, since the leftover fresh pasta was delectable tossed in browned butter and sage.

You should be shopping for a higher-quality brother-in-law.

In other news, I also sent a shout-out to Trudy (someone ought to!) with two cold salads.

Hearts of palm marinated in white wine, red spring onion, and parsley. Trudy would have used mayonnaise.

I updated a recipe from the Hostess Cookbook that called for frozen limeade concentrate and, among other things, frozen blueberries:

Composed fruit salad with a dressing of orange and lime juices, honey, ginger, black pepper, and orange flower water.

They will pry the Hostess Cookbook from my cold, dead, aspic-coated hands.

This Week:

Recurring themes: Demanding phone calls. Revealing secrets. Mean role models. Profound disappointments. Everyone was either :( or >:( .

It’s hard for me to even make jokes about this week’s episode. It was one of the most harrowing yet. Even Betty’s flirtation with Henry was poignant. Don’s interplay with Conrad Hilton was surprisingly heartbreaking. And Sal…oh, Sal.

All three storylines began on such buoyant notes. Watching the episode again (and again,) this really isn’t true. Now that I know what’s coming, all three storylines really began with sexual overtures in three illicit relationships in which one person is married. Lee Garner, Jr., the Lucky Strike heir, is, from the beginning, inventing excuses to interact with Sal — and they’re flustering Sal, and not in a good way. Don turns an early-morning trip to the office into a quasi-first date with Sally’s teacher, Miss Farrell. And Betty starts out writing mash notes to Henry.

if u like me check "yes" if you dont like me check "no"

All three relationships involve power imbalances. In both the Don/Miss Farrell and Betty/Henry relationships, the women temporarily hold the power. (Remember that the episode title derives from the song, “In the Wee Small Hours Of The Morning,” when a man waits for his female lover — who is holding all the strings — to call.) Miss Farrell has been seeking out Don’s attention, then deflecting it, for months, and he’s finally interested. In the same vein, Betty has been actively pursuing Henry by encouraging Henry to pursue her. Over the course of the episode, both men move in for the pounce — with different results. Don comes to Miss Farrell, and he is rewarded. Henry forces Betty to come to him, and Betty turns him down.

Clearly, in the world of Mad Men, the world is designed to facilitate married men’s affairs, while making it incredibly difficult for a married woman to have a discreet liaison. Don and Miss Farrell are rehearsing ancient roles, that of married man and mistress. Betty, having few examples before her, can’t come to a comfortable detente with Henry. And, meanwhile, for Sal, there is no example at all.

While Don and Betty are involved in affairs that at least hold the promise of romance, Sal finds himself propositioned by a man with no such illusions. Garner is looking for a quickie in an editing room. And not just looking for it — expecting it. In Don and Betty’s examples, the man is the aggressor, to be alternately enticed and repelled. Meanwhile, Sal is not interested in meekly acquiescing to Garner’s demands. He doesn’t put him off the way that Betty might (with a wall of cool reserve) — or Joan might (in a teasing way that bolsters the man’s dignity). Betty and Joan know the “rules,” but Sal is in uncharted waters.

Thus, when Don has the opportunity to stand up for Sal, Don tries to impose his own rules on Sal. Sal, as one of “those people” — it sounds so horrible when Don says it, and the look on Sal’s face is heartbreaking — should have just submitted to Garner, the way Joan did to her husband, the way Gudrun did to Pete. Don has no script for what two men should do in this situation: he simply slips Sal into what Don sees as the “female” role. Placate the client, by any means necessary. If it had been Peggy, he would have told her to do the same thing.

It’s such a betrayal, but especially in the Mad Men universe. In this episode, Sal is cast out of the boy’s club — the world he has tried, so hard, to belong to, the world where men flip through Playboy in business meetings and ogle actresses at casting calls. The world where the men hold all the power and the women jockey for glimpses of it.

When Peggy was “in trouble,” Don covered for her, mentored her, and ensured her success. When sex, or the possibility, gets Sal into trouble, Don, looking down his nose, tells Sal he has less power than Peggy, Betty, or even Miss Farrell. To be gay is, for Don, to be less than a woman.

Given how Don treats women, that means less than nothing.

In Sal’s final scene, Sal — the only person in this episode who hasn’t even considered cheating on his spouse — is, ironically, lying to his wife. Not about an affair, or his sexuality, but about having a job.

Our opinions divided on this, but my conclusion, based on the shady young men pairing off in the background, was that Sal was off to pick a guy up in the park. In Sal’s new life, there’s no “Prelude to a Kiss” — the song that plays over the closing credits — only anonymous sex.

One final note:
Betty, sighing sadly, tells Carla, who has been listening to Martin Luther King’s sermon on the terrorist Birmingham Church Bombing — when four little girls were murdered — “it’s really made me wonder about Civil Rights. Maybe it’s not supposed to happen right now.”

You can tell which two words Carla is thinking. Hint: One of them starts with the second letter of the alphabet, and the other one is please.

Sal and Carla reminded us that, while Betty and Don dither over romances and marital squabbles, the “real” sixties — where people are being murdered just because of who they are — are happening out there, somewhere. Even Betty and Don feel the societal malaise. They just can’t identify the source.

Next week, we will console ourselves with fried chicken, at Conrad Hilton’s request. And we will figure out what is in the black bottle — from the top of the kitchen cupboard — Don drinks from at least twice this episode.

Some of Connie’s moonshine, perhaps? (Perhaps I will brew moonshine? Just kidding, ATF!)

In my universe, Acme challah is impossible to acquire. Methods of obtaining it include 1) finding my husband during the day and convincing him to walk ten blocks to the Ferry Building on his lunch hour or 2) going to the Ferry Building myself. Note that I am much more likely to achieve 1) than 2) because I belong to a CSA and thus have no need to enter the Ferry Building unless I want the best chocolate in San Francisco or the best oysters + a great view or to be mauled by sticky tourists with expensive cameras.

Still! Despite these insurmountable obstacles, challah was achieved. Challah was served. Challah was greatly enjoyed.

All this time, I believed I liked Acme challah so much because it is rare in our household. Instead, I discovered that I like Acme challah because it is very, very good.

Challah Wars 3: Acme Plain

I planned ahead! I contacted my husband at 11:30 AM, which is like going back in time and changing the sad future where we say motzi over plain hamburger buns. He brought back Acme challah, and Acme rye, and Acme epi baguette. (Epi baguettes briefly convinced me that I might start baking. Then I found out how they are made and I laughed, and laughed, and went to buy another baguette prepared by someone who makes bread that tastes good, as opposed to me).

He also brought a host of Boccalone delights that should probably not be discussed in a post about the Sabbath. (Psst. Over here. Mortadella, brown sugar and fennel salame, lonza, nduja, and capocollo. It fed our family for days.)

Acme challah is enormous.

It could probably feed an entire shtetl, for serious. It’s lovely, too — like the Girl From Ipanema of challah:

Tall and tan and young and lovely
The [loaf of Acme challah] goes walking
And when she passes, each one she passes goes – ah

I don’t know where that crossed the line, but it did, and I’m sorry. I’m normally very much against the sexual objectification of kosher breads.

Crust: Almost delicate. Browned, but not sweet.

look how pretty!

Interior: The perfect balance between moist and dry. Airy, but not overly so.

Fluffiness: Yes. Enough to offset the moisture.

Flakiness: Yes! How could it be a little fluffy but also slightly flaky? I don’t know either! I don’t bake!

Sweetness: Just the slightest amount, and — here’s the best part — slightly salty, too. The most richly flavored of any of the challot so far. Edible out of hand.

Verdict: I was going to award it an A-, but, despite everything, I think I was just being loyal to Arizmendi up to the very end. Acme challah deserves its A.

How will House of Bagels, the challah gold standard, measure up? Stay tuned, loyal reader.