Because 78 glorious years ago today, the great and good people of this great nation ratified the lovely, lovely 21st Amendment which repealed the terrible, awful, no-good, very bad 18th Amendment, thus putting an end to Prohibition.

There’s a funny familial story about Prohibition that’s been floating around the Plumcake Family Mythology for nearly 80 years.

Once upon a time, in the faraway land of Yonkers, New York a young Salvation Army officer by the name of Miss Plumcake’s Nana discovered her fun-loving and all-around less stick-in-the-mud younger sister had snuck off to some speakeasy in the city and was dancing the night away. My Nana, who could out-damp even the soggiest of bed coverings, was outraged and her anger was not lessened when she discovered her one good dress –her Confirmation gown– was missing.

Grim but not stupid, Nana did the math, deduced her wicked sister and her heavenly dress were sharing the same airspace.

Nana marched right down to the speakeasy and proceeded to RIP the dress right off of her shameless sister, thus fulfilling her lifelong legacy of ruining everyone’s good time –well, except for the men at the speakeasy I suppose– and adding another chapter to the legend of Miss Plumcake’s family.

The moral of the story is this: Don’t anger a Plumcake woman. Also, if the last words you say to your devoted teenage great-granddaughter are “Have you always been that fat?”, you thereby give up your rights NOT to be talked about publicly and at great length.

Remember, an elephant never forgets.

In honor of the end of Prohibition, and the fact I’m going to have to whittle down my Scotch collection to 3 liters so I can take it across the Mexican border, I thought I’d ask a little booze-themed Big Question.

Today Miss Plumcake wants to know:

What one alcoholic beverage would you be unwilling to go the rest of your life without?

After much thoughtful deliberation, I’ve decided upon the humble yet sublime Talisker 18 year-old single malt Scotch. Talisker is the only Scotch made on the Isle of Skye and has in its golden soul the best of both the smokey peat of the Islay malts and the honeyed heather of a Speyside.

It’s not the most expensive or rarest Scotch I own, a bottle of Talisker 18 will set you back less than a hundred dollars, and there are other Scotches I prefer as specimens of one breed or another, but for pure overarching perfection, the Talisker is hard to beat, and, incidentally, is ridiculous (in the good way) on a hot buttered waffle.

I am in LOVE with that porto set.

(now with sales code AND a recipe!)

Reading – Romancero Gitano by Frederico Garcia Lorca. A beautiful collection of poems from Spain’s most famous modern poet. He described his 1928 work as “a carved altar piece of Andalusia with gypsies, horses, archangels, planets, its Jewish and Roman breezes, rivers, crimes, the everyday touch of the smuggler and the celestial note of the naked children of Córdoba. A book that hardly expresses visible Andalusia at all, but where the hidden Andalusia trembles.” Read it in Spanish if you can, but a reputedly excellent bilingual collection of Lorca’s work is available here. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, this is an interesting blog outlining the relationship between Salvador Dali –who is responsible for the portrait of Garcia Lorca above– and the poet.

Watching - Evil Under the Sun. How had I never seen this before? It is early 80′s (possibly unintentional) high camp in all its glory! Diana Rigg and Maggie Smith as bitchy aging chorus girls done good! Roddy McDowell at his screamingest queenie best! Jane Birkin! Hats! Turbans! Turbans UNDER hats with coordinating clip on earrings! Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot! Cole Porter soundtrack! I just about died.

Hearing – The Sweetest Thing by U2. My favorite love song and is even nearer and dearer to my heart since going to Ireland. Say what you will about Bono, the boy knows how to apologize. Watch the video here. From now on, I refuse to accept any apologies not accompanied by the cast of Riverdance, an elephant and mostly naked men stripping on a firetruck.

Smelling - Organix Tea Tree Mint Shampoo. Do you want to smell like a Thin Mint? Of course you do. I’m no ‘poo except for the summer, but this sulfate-free stuff smells great and leaves my hair nice and healthy.

Loving – Horchata. Horchata is a creamy refreshing summer drink served throughout the Spanish-speaking world. The Spanish version is made with tiger nuts, but since I wouldn’t know a tiger nut if I stepped on one (and trust me, I’m not about to do that), I make a version of the variety they serve most commonly in Mexico and South America, flavored with rice, almonds and cinnamon. I don’t have a precise recipe, but here’s the gist:

Miss Plumcake’s Horchata:

Bring 2 quarts of water to a boil in a large pot, with a few cinnamon sticks. Remove from heat and add a cup and a half or so of uncooked white rice (do not rinse), give it a good stir, cover it and let it sit at least 5 hours, ideally overnight. In the morning, give it a final stir and strain the rice water into a large pitcher, reserving one cup of liquid and dispose of rice (you could probably do something with the rice, but I don’t eat rice so I don’t know).

In a large microwavable measuring cup or small pot, combine one 14 oz can of sweetened condensed milk and reserved rice water, heating until it has the consistency of fresh milk, then add it to the pitcher of rice water. Add a few drops of natural almond extract if you’d like, then chill. Serve over lots of ice with a few toasted almond slivers if you have it. Sabroso!

Hating - Flaccid Unnecessary Ruffles. Seriously. What is with these things? It’s like every top I see is just dripping with random bits of fabric flotsam. It just looks sloppy and cheap and if I wanted to look sloppy and cheap believe me, I’d be doing it in a much more entertaining way than just wearing stupid ruffles.

Wanting - All Espadrilles All The Time. My affection for the espadrille is well-documented, and especially now that I’m Fake Spanish, they’re pretty much all I want to wear this summer. The Emmah from Calvin Klein scratches my neutral-color, leg-lengthening high wedge itch (to be worn with shorts) and I’ve been wearing my wild Lacroix ones all spring, but really any ‘drilles will do.

Buying – Belted Linen Dress by La Redoute. As I mentioned yesterday, I’m heading down Mexico way for a month for some hot Night of The Iguana action and I’m going to wear mostly white linen. Because when your house comes with a maid, you can wear white linen every day. This dress is easy and versatile, use the belt that comes with it, your favorite scarf, wear it as a dress or a tunic. Whatever. Available in white and navy, you can get it for cheap if you use code OSPCOUPON16 to take 40% off your most expensive item.

Be sure to check back at the main ‘Tis the Season page to look back on profiles you’ve missed and look forward to ones that are soon to come!

About a week after she taught me to make risotto, my mother had a meeting that was going to go straight through dinner. She asked me to cook. No problem. I’d cooked dinner for the family plenty of times. She left instructions. Great. Roast, check. Veggies, check. Risotto, no problemo.

Well, almost no problemo.

When I went to start the risotto, I couldn’t find the rice. I searched high and low, but the  only rice I could find was a box of Minute Rice. Even if I wasn’t a complete food snob even then, the fact remains that Minute Rice does not a good risotto make. I had to get dinner on the table, so I had to think fast. Then I spotted a jar with what I thought was brown rice in it.

Brown rice is rice, so I assumed it would work. It’s not a quick cooking rice, so I assumed it would result in something that had the right texture. I love the flavor of brown rice, so I thought this might even be good. What I didn’t realize until I had been cooking for a while was that I’d actually reached for the pearl barley.

I know, I know, pearl barley doesn’t really look like brown rice to the trained eye. The thing was, I wasn’t trained in that particular aspect of food. Whatever the silliness of my mistake, however, it remains one of the best mistakes I’ve ever made.

The entire family loved barley risotto.

All the same, I never made it again. You see, it was a mistake, and at that point in my life, mistakes were to be swept under the rug as quickly and efficiently as possible and never, ever made again, even if the result of the mistake was something good.

I’m older and wiser now. I know that there are mistakes to be shoved to the back of the mental closet, ones to mull over and learn from, and ones to be embraced as serendipity. It was time to rediscover barley risotto.

My resolve coincided with two things that made it even more serendipitous. The first was plans for a visit from some good friends and fellow foodies who have recently gone vegetarian. I needed a hearty main dish that would involve no meat, but would satisfy Mr. Twistie who sometimes irrationally fears vegetarian meals as failing to fill him up properly. The second was the fact that I joined a CSA, getting my first shipment of farm-fresh organic fruits and veggies just two days before our friends arrived.

There was I with a fridge full of fabulous leafy greens and piles of great, fresh citrus. I decided to do a big salad followed by a risotto using some of the bitter greens. I went looking for a recipe. Here’s where I found it.

Take a look at that. Barley, greens, meyer lemon juice and zest, cheese, toasted pine nuts… how good is that? It’s beyond awesome. For the greens, I used a combination of kale and chard. I also went a tidge heavy on the cheese, because when it doubt, I always add more cheese.

How did it turn out? Rich, creamy, but refreshing at the same time. So delicious. The only complaint about it was the same one I heard when I was twelve: there just wasn’t enough. Everyone wanted more.

By the way, here’s the CSA I joined. I recommend it highly to anyone in its delivery range. It’s convenient, easily customizable, and surprisingly inexpensive. If you’re outside the delivery area and looking for a CSA to fit your needs, check out this site and see what’s available to you.

One day recently I was thinking just that as I thumbed my way through one of Mr. Twistie’s flea market finds, 300 Ways to Serve Eggs From Appetizers to Zabaglione. published in 1940 for the Culinary Arts Institute. That’s right, the CIA. As in the food one, not the spy one.

Anyway.

I thought it would be fun to play with eggs, so I determined to find a recipe. Several were rejected out of hand because they sounded way too scary to eat. You know, things like Noodle Oyster Loaf with Creamed Eggs and Stuffed Eggs in Cucumber Jelly.

On the other hand, I like poached eggs and had never tried making one myself. And so I lighted on Poached Eggs on Potato Cakes. I like poached eggs. I like potatoes. It seemed well worth a try.

Ingredients:

4 large potatoes

2 Tblsp butter

2 Tblsp grated cheese (Are these people on crack???? That wouldn’t be enough cheese for me for one egg, let alone half a dozen. I halved the recipe and got a lot more generous with the cheese. I didn’t really measure, but I think it was about half a cup when I felt I had enough. Oh, and the cheese wasn’t specified, but I used extra-sharp cheddar, because I find it tasty and had some on hand I needed to start using up soon.)

Salt and pepper

Fat for frying (I used a combination of unsalted butter and olive oil, because I think it adds a nice flavor.)

2 onions, sliced

3 tomatoes, sliced (i used Roma because there were some actual decent ones at my local grocery store this week)

6 poached eggs

Pare and boil potatoes until tender. Mash, add butter, cheese, salt and, pepper. Shape into flat cakes and fry in hot fat. Prepare a sauce by browning the onions in fat and adding the tomatoes. Simmer slowly about twenty minutes. Cover fried potato cakes with sauce and top each with a poached egg.

The hardest part was the fact that I’d never poached an egg before. If you need instructions, take a look here and have fun. Mine got a little messy, with strings of white floating off. Still, with a bit of practice they should be just fine. The most important thing is that they tasted good. Seriously, give it a go and don’t skimp on the cheese. This one is tasty and satisfying.

There is, however, one place where I do order dessert on a fairly regular basis. It’s a little bistro in my neighborhood known as Mona’s Table. Why there? Because Mona is one of the best in the business. Pretty much everything that comes out of her kitchen is culinary gold.

A couple weeks ago, Mr. Twistie and I went there for lunch one afternoon and I had to try out the blood orange polenta upside down cake she had in the dessert case. I flipped. It was a delicate but textured cake with whole slices of blood orange – peel, pith, and all – festooning the top. Leaving the pith in might sound odd to some of you, but trust me, it gave a slight bitter edge that was just enough to prevent any hint of cloying sweetness. The whipped creme fraiche on top was a surprisingly lovely touch. It added a slight tang that would have been missing with whipped cream but perfectly lifted the entire dessert.

Of course I raved. I asked Mona if she would be willing to give up her secrets. Little did I know that the recipe had been published in the March issue of Bon Appetit! That’s good news, because it means it’s readily available online at Epicurious. In fact, that’s where Mona said she found it. I went right home and looked it up.

I tried it out at home, and lo and behold, it was just as good when I made it. Trust me, this is surprisingly easy and fabulously elegant. If you have access to blood oranges, this is a winner beyond expression, especially if you prefer your desserts on the slightly less sweet side.

May I suggest zucchini bread?

‘But Twistie!’, you exclaim, ‘I have made many loaves of zucchini bread and am so burned out I have not the will to try another!’

‘Fear not,’ say I. ‘This is like no zucchini bread you have ever eaten before. I know this because I have baked and eaten umpteen gazillion zucchini breads over the decades and I have never tasted one quite like this.’

You see, most zucchini breads fail for me in one or both of two ways. All too often they are so moist as to become gummy, more like pudding with a crust than actual bread. The other common failing of zucchini bread in my experience is that they are often far more sweet than I prefer. Not that I have anything against sweet, per se, but there are things that I feel ought to be sweeter and ones that ought to be a little less so. Zucchini bread is one of those things where I sometimes feel like a salmon swimming upstream. I want it to be bread, not a sticky cake. I want it to be sweet, but not tooth-rottingly so.

Then one day last week, I walked into my Friendly Local Bookstore, started browsing the cooking section, and discovered something that had been missing from my life and my bookshelves. It’s a delightful tome entitled Good to the Grain: Baking With Whole Grain Flours by Kim Boyce.

Boyce, a former pastry chef at such restaurants as Spago and Campanile has approached her subject from precisely the angle I have been waiting to see for yonks without realizing it. You see, while most books about working with whole grains come from the angle that whole grains are Good For You, and therefore the flavors are of secondary importance, Boyce is all about how good whole grains can taste.

For those of us who honestly love the flavors of such things as barley, rye, whole wheat, etc., this is a real boon. The recipes range from bread to brownies to scones to tarts and all stops in between. They’re broken down not by what you want to bake, but by what flour you want to bake with. This means that if you can get whole wheat flour but not spelt, you can ignore the spelt chapter until you find a source.

Speaking of those sources, she’s got a page of them in the back just in case you don’t have a handy local organic or health food grocery that carries things like aramanth and teff.

Seriously, if you enjoy baking, this book opens up some great new frontiers quickly and painlessly.

And that brings me back to Boyce’s zucchini bread. It’s moist without being gooey. It’s sweet in a subtle way. It’s malty and slightly herbal with a satisfyingly crunchy crust and a delicate crumb. Boyce recommends eating it with melted butter and mint tea, but so far I haven’t been able to bring myself to adulterate it in any way.

It makes me want to plant zucchini just so I’ll have more of an excuse to bake this bread over and over and over again.

Intrigued? Good! Follow the bouncing cut and see how it’s made!

Zucchini Bread

Ingredients

Butter for the pan

2 Tblsp basil, about 12 medium leaves

1 Tblsp mint, about 8 medium leaves

Wet Mix:

4 oz (1 stick) unsalted butter

1/2 lb. zucchini (about 2 medium)

1/2 Cup plain yogurt

2 eggs

Dry Mix:

1 Cup rye flour

1 Cup all-purpose flour

1/4 Cup wheat germ

1/2 Cup sugar

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp kosher salt

Position a rack in the middle of the oven and preheat to 350F. Lightly butter a standard loaf pan.

Pick the basil and mint leaves from their stems. Roughly chop the leaves and reserve. Melt butter. Add the herbs to the butter to infuse their flavor while the other ingredients are being prepared.

Slice the ends off the zucchini. Grate the whole zucchini on the largest holes of a box grater into a large mixing bowl. Ad the yogurt and eggs to the bowl and whisk thoroughly.

Sift the dry ingredients into another large mixing bowl, pouring back any bits of grain or other ingredients that may remain in the sifter. Scrape the butter with herbs into the zucchini mixture and stir together. Pour the zucchini mixture into the dry ingredients, gently folding until just combined (This was the one point where it got scary for me. There really didn’t seem at first to be enough liquid, and it took forever to fold enough to get all the dry ingredients moistened. Resist all urges to add more liquid, though. There really is just the right amount. Trust the recipe here.). Scrape the batter into a prepared pan and smooth the top.

Bake for 60 – 70 minutes, rotating the pan halfway through (I didn’t bother changing the position of the pan because my oven heats pretty evenly, unlike the stove burners on top of it). The cake should be dark golden brown and spring back when lightly touched; a skewer inserted into the center should come out clean. Remove the cake from the oven and cool in the pan for 10 minutes. Then, invert the cake out of the pan and cool on a baking rack. The cake should be eaten at room temperature.

Wrapped tightly in plastic, it can be kept up to three days, even getting better the next day after the flavors have some time to meld together (This last bit I can guarantee to be true… except the part about lasting three days. Two was all it lasted around here, because of the deliciousness and the arrival of starving musicians.).

Seriously, if you enjoy baking, this is a fantastic book. If you are as unsatisfied with zucchini bread recipes as I was, this is a great change of pace. Give it a go! You’ll be glad you did.

Is she gone?

Good.

I’m going to share a recipe. Yeah I know recipes are Twistie’s gig, but she’s not here now, is she? Crap, she’s turned back around, HEY LOOK TWISTS, IS THAT STEVIE NICKS? Phew, okay let’s make this quick.

You know how sometimes you want a pie, but you don’t really have TIME to make a pie (even though there is ALWAYS time for pie, it’s just a matter of priorities) and you were Raised Right so you wouldn’t dream of just glopping something out of a can into a pie shell, since that leads to Bad Pie and because you were Raised Right you know there are very few things worse than Bad Pie.

It’s time for Shameful Pie:

Shameful Pie
1 extra-large lemon (or 1 medium lemon and 1 medium lime) peel on, and quartered
2 c. sugar
4 eggs
1 stick butter, melted
pinch salt
Optional:
small sprig or rosemary if you’re feeling fancy
1 tbs cornmeal if you want to make it a Shameful Chess Pie

Dump everything into a blender and blend the crap out of it for 2 or 3 minutes until everything is bright yellow and smooth and gorgeous. Pour into an 9 inch uncooked pie shell Bake at 350°   until center is set, about 30 minutes protecting the crust if it browns too quickly.

That’s it! Could you die? It’s so good too. Now, I’m not particularly fond of my own mother so the slap-yer-mamma bar is pretty low for me, but this will make you want to do a violence unto even the most beloved of mothers.

It’d probably make pretty good lemon bars too.

Still, who am I to talk? I’m the one who suddenly needed cocoanut in my life desperately after more or less four decades of being contented when it was offered me, and utterly unconcerned when it wasn’t. Sometimes, as I said, you just get a hankering. I further believe that the best way to handle that hankering (unless it’s obviously and dramatically A Very Bad Idea, such as a sudden desire to eat lug nuts and wash them down with a Big Gulp of battery acid) is to just eat what you want and have done with it. My cocoanut Jones was easily taken care of with a slice of the Pina Colada cake I made last week for a friends’ birthday.

If Mr. Twistie wanted grilled cheese, who was I to say no?

As it happens, I was meandering along in my cookbooks looking for something fun to make as my recipe of the week when I found that Nigella Lawson had provided me with the answer in her fabulous and handy book Nigella Bites.

Flipping through the TV Dinners section of the book, I found a grilled cheese sandwich entitled Mozzarella in Carrozza that seemed just what I was looking for. Lawson describes it as ‘… somewhere between French toast and grilled cheese.’ Just what I needed! Read on after the cut to learn more.

Mozzarella in Carrozza

Ingredients

6 slices white bread, crusts removed (I never keep soft white bread in the house and decided I’d rather try this with the loaf of oat bread with nuts and seeds in it that I already had hanging around. Not only did I already have it, I thought the flavor would add a punch to the mozzarella, which it did.)

1 fist-sized ball mozzarella, cut into approx. 1/4″ slices, then strips

1/2 Cup whole milk

3 heaping Tblsp all-purpose flour

1 egg

salt and pepper

olive oil (not extra virgin) for frying

Make sandwiches out of the bread and mozzarella, leaving a little margin around the edges unfilled with cheese, and press the edges together with your fingers to help seal (this is where my choice of bread was not as happy as it was the flavor department, because it just didn’t seal well, and Nigella even points out that smushability of the edges is one of the reasons she suggests soft white bread in the first place). Pour the milk into one soup bowl, the flour into another, and beat the egg with salt and pepper in another. Warm the oil in a frying pan over medium heat. Dunk the sandwiches briefly, one by one, into the milk, then dredge in the flour, then dip in the egg. Fry in hot oil on each side until crisp and golden and remove to paper towel. Cut in half and apply to face.

Serves 2.

How was it? I loved the melty mozzarella, but frankly it was a bit messy doing the three-bowl-dredge  bit. the edges of my sandwiches didn’t smush properly, making things a bit sloppy in that department as well. That’s the downside. On the upside, the subtle flavor of mozzarella combined with its inherent meltiness makes for a darn satisfying grilled cheese sandwich. Mr. Twistie seemed more than contented, and that was, after all, the point of the experiment. My final conclusion: this is not a dish for company, but it can make a delicious option for when you just need some comfort food taken to eleven.

Of course, being me, I took it to twelve. I added a fun condiment. See, in the very same book there was a Masala Omelette with Green Cilantro Chutney. I don’t happen to be much of an omelette fan. Scrambles yes, omelettes no. Why? I’m not really sure. Just the vagaries of human taste, I guess. Still, I kept looking at that chutney.

You see, one of our favorite restaurants is the local Indian one. The food is fabulous, and one of our favorite treats is the delicious cilantro chutney they serve with the papadums. It’s a touch spicy, but at the same time it’s cool and… and… look, it’s fantastic stuff and I had no clue how it’s made. The more I looked at Lawson’s recipe, the more I thought it might be fairly close to what we have at India Palace. Now that I’ve made it, I think it’s quite close and could easily be tinkered with until it’s nearly identical. I also thought it might be kind of fun and tasty as an accompaniment to those mozzarella sandwiches. Here’s how it works:

Green Cilantro Chutney

Ingredients

1 – 5 jalapeno peppers, according to taste, seeded and roughly chopped

1″ piece of ginger, peeled and roughly chopped (I used a little more because we’re both freaky on ginger and didn’t bother peeling because the skin is perfectly edible and doesn’t bother us at all)

4 garlic cloves (again, I went a little on the heavy side here because vampires are not welcome at Casa Twistie)

1/3 Cup creamed cocoanut or cocoanut milk to taste (I used the milk, which I happened to have on hand after making the Pina Colada cake, and found myself adding a tidge more when the chutney wasn’t quite as smooth as I personally prefer)

1 large bunch of cilantro

4 sprigs of mint

1/2 tsp salt

pinch of sugar (I often leave it out if a recipe calls for just a pinch of sugar, and I started to do that here, but found that this particular pinch really does make a difference. Remember kids, taste often and critically in the kitchen.)

the juice of 3 limes (This was my biggest substitution. When I got back from the grocery store, I found that I had forgotten to buy the limes, leaving me with one grapefruit in the house as my entire store of citrus juice. Then I re-read Lawson’s introduction and found that she had used the limes as  a substitute for the original vinegar in the recipe. Having a bottle of really good cider vinegar on hand, I went with it, and was perfectly pleased with the results, though I’ll try to remember my limes next time)

Put the jalapenos, ginger, garlic, and cocoanut into a food processor and blitz to a paste. Add the cilantro and mint and pulse again until the herbs blend. Add the salt and pinch of sugar, then, with the motor running, pour the juice of two and a half limes down the funnel, processing again to mix thoroughly. Taste to see if you want the juice of the remaining half lime.

After your meal, put whatever remains into a jar and refrigerate it for up to a month. It will solidify, but this is easily corrected by leaving it at room temperature.

How was it with the sandwiches? Phenomenal! There was something about this combination that I found both exotic and deeply comfortable. Would it get me thrown off of Top Chef? Who cares! Mr. Twistie and I shared our sandwiches and a big green salad happily. We both enjoyed the meal. It was tasty, and that’s the final point of good food.

The next time you want something  special, consider combining two comfortable things you think might bring out something good in one another. You might be just as pleasantly surprised as Mr. Twistie was.