Pasta alla Mafia

As I said in my last post, I've been cooking from Anna Del Conte's Portrait of Pasta, a nice book. I borrowed it years ago from the library, made the Horace pasta and another one, both were excellent, then returned the book and didn't make the Horace pasta for a while. I didn't know I copied the recipe into a file on my computer. So recently I checked and found the file. I like chickpeas, and leeks are nice because they keep for a while in the fridge. Then just a few days ago I saw a copy online for $1.25 shipped so I bought it.

The recipe I made last night is in del Conte's ``modern'' recipes section. She calls it Pasta alla Mafia because of its Sicilian origin but doesn't explain the title beyond that. I've always had a fascination with the Mafia, with all gangsters. Three of my favorite movies are John Woo's ``A Better Tomorrow'' trilogy.



(3:03 is a classic shot. But looks like you can watch the whole thing on Youtube now. Which I might do. A Better Tomorrow has scenes in Hong Kong restaurants, it makes me want to make Chinese food again. But I'm prevented. Maybe I should go through that list of recipes that don't use many Chinese ingredients from Dunlop a little more tonight.)

So back to Pasta alla Mafia. I visited Sicily once, I kept thinking whether to go to Corleone or not, in the end we didn't. Not that anyone would mistake us for Mafiosi. But many parts of Sicily were beautiful. I remember walking around in Palermo behind our hotel, which near the Quattro Canti, trying to reach the harbor to get on a hydrofoil to some island, the buildings were old, run-down, but full of character. A little like Napoli --- the pizza in Napoli was monumental.

For this Sicilian recipe you need anchovies. Anchovies have been defamed in the United States. This is probably due to incompetence. Anchovies are probably awful if you don't know what to do with them; I know what to do with them, and because I learned from Hazan, I've never tasted a bad dish with anchovies in it --- in fact I've tasted few bad dishes at all. But I remember when I was a kid and would've parroted the idea that anchovies are awful to anyone who asked me. Only the UK eats worse than us here in the US --- the Italians and French know what to do with anchovies. But ignorance is hard to overcome. If you don't want to use anchovies in this recipe, leave them out. Put in canned tuna instead if that makes you feel better. If you want to learn to use this fine ingredient, then my advice is to get a glass jar of imported Italian anchovy fillets in olive oil. I keep mine in the fridge but I doubt it's necessary.

Pasta alla Mafia

You need anchovies, pitted olives, chilies, citrus rind/zest, spaghetti, garlic, olio. You take the citrus rind and zest and put them in a saucepan with the olio and let it mingle. Bring the pasta water to a boil. Chop the chilies, garlic and olives. Add the chilies and garlic to the oil. Throw the pasta into the water, take out the citrus rind and heat the pan. When the oil is hot, add the anchovies, and mash them up with a wooden spoon until they're just a paste. Add the olives. When the pasta done, toss everything together.

Mangiare.

Indian Chappali Kebabs

I grew up on my Mom's Indian vegetarian food. Indian food is not the easiest to get off the ground, because most dishes require a mixture of spices from tray of about 8 spices: turmeric/haldi, coriander/dhania, cumin/jeera, pepper/mirch, garam masala, poppy seeds, mustard seeds/rai, cardamom/elaichi. (Recipedelights has a nice translation of more ingredients than I have heard of.)

But once you have these spices, then you can make Indian food. The easiest starch that goes with Indian is basmati rice, but I've been trying to use up my Jasmine rice and that's good also.

I don't make Indian food much --- though I grew up on it, because my Mom lives nearby so whenever I want something I phone her --- and because once I learned a little bit about how to make it, I settled for making passable dishes without much work. But the thing is, I've never learned the art of flavoring Indian food by fine tuning each spice to each dish, nor have I learned any non-beginner dishes.

I tried learning some South Indian food but I didn't progress. I never got good and fast at dosas... which is one of my favorite foods. I need to get back on that. Lately I've been working on Madhur Jaffrey's book, and it has some meat recipes.



Since growing up I've been corrupted into eating meat, and so I tried some of these recipes. I've modified her Chappali Kebab a little, because I don't eat 1.5 pounds of ground beef in a sitting, only a half pound between me and my wife. But rather than reducing everything by 2/3, which would then call for 1/6 of an egg, (which I may try at some point,) I instead boosted the amount of chickpea flour. It's not bad, but I think that much chickpea actually changes the taste, and not all for the better. The bitterness of raw chickpea makes an appearance. But they're not bad, and they're fun to make. I think in India these are made with ground lamb or goat, since I never heard of Indians eating beef. But this is what I do:

Indian Chappali Kebabs

Get the rice going (I use a rice cooker.) Thaw .5 pound of beef (I put it in a mylar sandwich bag in warm water.) Brown about 4 tablespoons of chickpea flour (besan) in your iron pan on medium, stir from time to time. Brown a little more than 1 teaspoon each of whole coriander and cumin along with the chickpea flour. Chop a small hot green pepper, put in the mixing bowl (or use powdered red chili,) and break the egg in. Leave the pan off the heat once the chickpea flour is browned. Wait until the rice is done and the beef is thawed. When that's done, then dump the beef into the mixing bowl, and then add the chickpea flour and spices (you don't want to add warm chickpea flour to the egg without the cool beef or it might cook the egg!) Heat a few tablespoons of olive oil in the iron pan, form 4 balls from the beef, flatten them into disks, and put them in the iron pan. Flip every 20 seconds, until they're done, about 2-3 minutes.

To get Jaffrey's original, which she claims to have reverse-engineered from a Manhattan take-out, use 1.5 pounds of beef, only 2 tablespoons of chickpea flour, only half an egg, and a little more coriander and cumin.

Horace's Chickpeas, Leeks and Pasta Soup

So tonight I'm setting up a beautiful chickpea and leek pasta soup based on a recipe I found in Anna Del Conte's excellent book Portrait of pasta. This is a great cookbook because it has a section of historical recipes and they've all been great, and it's fun to read about dishes that some historical figures might've eaten.

So the chickpea and leek pasta comes from Horace's Book I, Satire VI, Non Quia, Maecenas. It's a charming poem, Horace's Satires are available for free download from Project Gutenberg, which is one of the best sites on the Internet. So in this Satire, Horace is talking to the rich Maecenas, whoever that was, and says that although Maecenas is rich, he is content with his life. Horace talks about his father:

If I have lived unstained and unreproved
(Forgive self-praise), if loving and beloved,
I owe it to my father, who, though poor,
Passed by the village school at his own door,
The school where great tall urchins in a row,
Sons of great tall centurions, used to go,
With slate and satchel on their backs, to pay
Their monthly quota punctual to the day,
And took his boy to Rome, to learn the arts
Which knight or senator to HIS imparts.
Whoe'er had seen me, neat and more than neat,
With slaves behind me, in the crowded street,
Had surely thought a fortune fair and large,
Two generations old, sustained the charge.
Himself the true tried guardian of his son,
Whene'er I went to class, he still made one.
Why lengthen out the tale? he kept me chaste,
Which is the crown of virtue, undisgraced
In deed and name: he feared not lest one day
The world should talk of money thrown away

and then goes on to talk about how he whiles his days away in the Forum and the Circus, and sometimes winds down back at his house to a dish of chickpeas (vetch,) leeks and pasta. (Though I don't get how if his father was poor, he could afford to have sent him with a group of slaves behind him. But anyway.)

The leek and chickpea is what I will have tomorrow. It's a tasty dish. Here's an adaptation of Del Conte's .. adaptation of Horace? I use a slow cooker for all my beans --- I can't have beans without the slow cooker now

Horace Chickpea and Leek Pasta

You will need 1/2 box or more pasta, 1-2 leeks, 2-3 tomatoes, 6 ounces chickpeas, 1-2 bay leaves, parsley, salt, pepper, and 1 stick of celery. Soak chickpeas overnight, change the water once, drain and rinse (I do this in my slow cooker bowl.) Cut the white part of the leek into small rings. Add the leek, tomatoes, chopped celery, bay leaf, salt, and lots of ground pepper to the soaked chickpeas. Cover, boil, lower and simmer --- I slow cook on low all day, Del Conte says simmer 3 hours. Do not uncover.

When the chickpeas are tender and you're ready to eat, boil the pasta, drain, and fry it in olive oil. Add the fried pasta and oil to the soup and cook until the pasta is tender. Add the chopped parsley and serve with grated parmegiano on the side.

Sichuanese Dishes without Chinese Ingredients

I've been a fan of Fuschia Dunlop's since I met a couple who lived for a year or so in China. We went over their house and they made a Sichuanese hotpot for us (I think they used Dunlop p347 as a guide, but since they lived there I suppose they might've been doing their own thing,) in a beautifully crafted Chinese copper brazier. The meal was remarkable (this couple also made Ethiopian food for us, and homemade Gouda cheese... both of these were also exquisite.)



Anyway so during the Sichuanese hotpot evening, I asked the wife which Chinese cookbook she recommended, and she recommended Fuschia Dunlop, so I bought it. And I was converted to Sichuanese food, or maybe just Dunlop's food.

Many things aren't exactly fast or easy in Dunlop, but some things are. But I worked on Dunlop and I gained some skills in Chinese food. And one thing is that Chinese food is the most fun food to make of any cuisine, in my opinion.

Now I started learning to cook when I was finishing my Ph.D. at UCLA.. Actually perhaps I had tried a few dishes before that, out of the Moosewood cookbook, which I haven't used for years, if you know what I mean.... So when I decided I wanted to stop eating out all the time and start cooking, I wanted to learn from some time-tested books. And so I bought 2 books, one was Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques, and the other was Marcella Hazan's The Essentials of Classic Italian Cuisine

(I'd been to Italy a number of times and remain a devotee of the country, the cuisine, the people, the architecture, the art, the history, the churches, the ruins, the gelato, the culture, the lifestyle.) Pepin was good, I used him to buy a few tools in the beginning (see my 1st post), and to learn a few basic things.

Marcella Hazan taught me to cook.

Since then I've collected a lot of cookbooks, read what's good and what's bad in cookbooks. Dunlop is a good cookbook, one of the best. Sichuanese cooking isn't hard, but you do need one skill that I didn't have as a beginner --- reading the entire recipe, preparing all the steps in advance, and being ready. You need this skill particularly when you're cooking Sichuanese, because once you're done with the prep, and your stove is on, and the oil is starting to smoke in your wok, everything happens very, very, very quickly. And that's what's fun about it.

So I made a bunch of dishes. Here's a simple, fast easy one, which isn't from Dunlop but was taught to me by the husband from the couple mentioned above.

Chinese Fried Rice

Prepare 1C rice. (I make Thai jasmine rice when I cook Chinese, it's what I find at my Chinese grocery so I suppose it's what they eat there.)

Meanwhile, chop 2 green onions, 1/2" ginger, and 2 cloves garlic. Beat 2 eggs with some salt. Now heat your wok with some peanut oil, superhot, just until it starts smoking. (If you don't have a wok, use a large pan that as much of rice can fit in as possible.) Throw the eggs in, they will fry and cook very quickly, slide them out. Heat some more oil, add ginger, then the rice. Mix and coat the rice with the oil, then cut in the egg, then toss in the green onions, and salt.

Anyway, now, my wife has barred me from making Chinese food because of the melamine thing. Now it's understandable --- but Chinese food is so much fun to make. So I'm going to go through the recipes in Dunlop and list which ones can be made with non-Chinese ingredients. Here's my list so far.

No Chinese Ingredients

• Sea Flavor Noodles p93
  
• Spicy Cold Noodles with Chicken Slivers p96
  
• Mr. Lai's Sticky Rice Balls with Sesame Stuffing p97
• ZHONG dumplings! p102 (these are a culinary masterpiece)
  
• "long" wonton dumplings p104
  
• steamed pork and pumpkin dumplings
  
• steamed pork and cabbage dumplings
  

Yacai Only (Yacai is a Chinese ingredient, but it's only 1)

• Dan Dan Noodles p88,
  
• Mr. Xie Beef Dan Dan Noodles p89,
  
• Yibin Kindling Noodles p91,
  
• Spicy Noodles with Soft Tofu p92
  
• Leaf-wrapped Sticky Rice Dumplings

(I changed Dunlop's titles from using the word glutinous to using the word sticky. The etymology of the word glutinous is that it comes from the word gluten which is related to the word glue. Hence glutinous rice can be thought of as related to gluey rice --- but that's problematic for a different reason, so I went with sticky rice, which is another common translation. But sticky has a different etymology --- people used sticks to 'stick' things to other things...)

The Siren Song of Ova

Eggs are one of the best items to have if you like fast, cheap cooking, and want excellent food. Eggs are the simplest excellent dish. You can make eggs just as well as some fancy Lyonnais chef can, here's the recipe:

Heat your iron pan. Put in 1-2 tablespoons of butter. Crack 2-3 eggs in a small bowl and mix, but not thoroughly. Wait until the butter just smokes and then dump the eggs in. It will sizzle, the clear albumen will turn white. Shake the pan back and forth over the heat as the eggs cook, this gives the eggs a little bit of fluff. Then slide out your omelette onto a plate, salt and pepper. Done. You could pay $300 for the same omelette.

There's all kinds of yakking in cookbooks about the perfect omelette and whatnot. There's nothing to it. The perfection of the omelette is that it's simple. Anyone can do it, easily. That's the perfection. It's not that someone who went to Le Cordon Bleu and then staged with some supercool celebrity chef like Susur Lee can make it any better. It's already perfect.

You crack the eggs into a small bowl, mix them up, dump them into the just smoking butter, shake the pan as it cooks. That's all.

There's also boiling the eggs. Put the eggs into room temperature water in a pot. Turn on the heat. Wait for it to boil. Keep the boiling very gentle, so the eggs don't break. Wait about 10 minutes (you'll have to do this by trial-and-error to find what consistency you like.) Dump out the water and fill the pot with cold water. Take out the eggs after a minute or so and peel the eggshells and the skin. Eat with salt and pepper. Perfection.

One silly thing I remember about boiled eggs --- I once went to Turkey for sightseeing. I wanted to see the remains of the Eastern Roman Empire --- being a classical history buff. So we were in Istanbul and we were served breakfast every morning at the small hotel we stayed at. And every morning it was hard to peel the skin off the eggs. We marveled that the Turks didn't know that you should chill the eggs right after boiling them to make it easier to take the skin off. The older lady who prepared the breakfast didn't speak English, and we didn't raise the point with anyone. So then we came back and we met a lady who raised chickens, and also my cello teacher raised chickens, and they'd give us their fresh eggs from time to time. When we boiled them and chilled them, the skins were hard to peel.... Turns out that the freshest, best, eggs, are hard to peel even if you chill them right after boiling. And so the Turkish breakfast lady wasn't the ignoramus, we were.

But anyway what's the siren song about? Eggs are attractive, a perfect dish, so simple, so easy, so fast, so flawless.... But there is a flaw! Eggs are pure protein, and they don't reach their highest until they are paired with a starch! How many times there were eggs in the fridge, and butter, and perfection awaited, but no, there was no bread! (Rubbing some garlic on toasted, sliced, French or Italian bread that has been drizzled in olive oil is the way to go. Bruschetta.) So now I keep potatoes on hand, but potatoes take a while to cook. And so the siren song of the eggs, ever beckoning, luring, leering.

The Zen of Dishes

Cooking is well and good, but when I started out, I hated doing dishes. That was one of the big draws to eating out, in a way, was that you just go, pick something, someone brings it out prepared, you eat and pay and that's it. No dishes. When you eat at home, though, there's a big pile of dishes. The pile is so big, sometimes it's hard to know how it got that big. What to do?

Well there's a few things. Mostly one has to look at dishes from a philosophical perspective. When they're there and you have to do them, and you'd rather do something else, they don't just go away. In fact, for me, when they're sitting there, they cause more trouble than washing them. I hate having dirty dishes sitting in the sink.

I read Kitchen Confidential by Bourdain a few years back



it's a blast --- anyone who likes cooking should read it. He talks about a restaurant where the head chef came by where a junior chef was cooking and the station was not immaculate. The head chef pressed his palm into the crumbs or whatever was on the station, then held his palm up to the junior chef and said ``this is your mind.'' Which sums it up exactly. Another quote that comes to me is Glenn Gould, who said that you don't play the piano with your fingers, you play it with your mind..

So anyway, how clean my kitchen is reflects how my mind is working. If there's something messy there, then as I cook, I don't have time to think about what's different about this mess in a split second when I need to move something, and what ends up happening is that the small mess causes a bigger mess and more work. Whereas if I clean up whatever it is right away, the kitchen is ready for whatever might come up, everything is where it needs to be if I need something immediately. It's a tool thats ready to go. Rather than mess-ups cascading on each other, I can save something in an instant.

But enough about saving things. It always has to happen, but we strive to read the recipe beforehand and know what's coming and what to expect. So dishes.

Now there's a professor down the hall from me who studies Eastern Philosophy --- I teach math. I asked him once why it's important to teach math to students. He said the only thing that matters, for example when a student is doing a calculus problem, is the moment when the student is absorbed in the math, when they are living math for a minute or for half an hour. In that half-hour, their mind is in a single state. There's no stress, there's no worries, there's flow. It's a rare thing and a pleasurable thing.

When I do dishes, there's a flow. It doesn't have to be a new, fascinating dish, a new ingredient, an amazing novel, a great movie, a beautiful piece of music. Now when I started doing dishes, it was cumbersome, messy. It took a few weeks before I did dishes without thinking about this new cumbersome chore. Now I just do them. It's part of my life.

Overall, I think cooking and doing dishes is faster than going out. I cook better than stuff I can afford to buy (I had an awful hotdog recently.) And it's not unpleasant once I started doing it regularly.

Supersonic Thai Curry with Jasmine Rice

OK so the cookies are a bit much, I agree. And this is about fast, cheap cooking that is excellent. Well here's a fast, cheap dish that dances in the mouth (not saltimbocca, though)!

I'd always liked Thai curry and Thai food in general. I took a class once at Pasadena City College with Yupa Holzner, and actually made Pad Thai (I haven't really made it consistently since, it seems to me to involve a certain amount of preparation.) She didn't teach me how to make curry either. From Bhumichitra's book, I learned to make a vegetarian curry, and then I simplified it until I've got the cheapest, easiest, and fastest yellow Thai curry. Its a pretty good book but its a little long on ingredients.




If you're in the San Fernando Valley, then most Sundays the Thai Wat of Los Angeles has food stalls, made by members of the Wat. There's some of the best Thai food there, we used to go from West L.A.

So to eat curry, you will need to prepare Thai jasmine rice ahead of time. I have invested in a nice rice cooker, since I eat Asian food constantly. It's a great time saver, especially the programmable timer, but I used to cook rice in a pot for a long time. These recipes are for 1 person. All regular white rices cook according to the same recipe.

Rice in a Pot

Take 1 cup rice into the pot. Pour in water, stir and drain 1-2 times to wash the rice, finally drain it thoroughly. Then add 2 cups water, a pinch of salt, and if you like, some oil. Cover and boil. When it just starts to boil, lower the heat to a very slow simmer. Done in about 20-40 minutes. Check the pot as little as possible --- open it quickly, tilt the pot, and use a spoon to peek at the bottom of the pot, if there's water, put it back, if not, the rice is done.

Supersonic Yellow Thai Curry

You need: a pack of yellow Thai curry, 1-2 cloves garlic, 1-2 potatoes, 2-3 green onions, a can of Thai coconut milk, soy sauce, salt, oil (peanut, canola or olive are best,) sugar

Chop the garlic and fry in oil (about 1 tablespoon) on medium heat. Chop the potatoes into 1/2 inch cubes or smaller. When the garlic is a little transparent and golden, add a tablespoon or so of the curry and stir-fry for 30 seconds --- it may spatter so be careful! Now pour in 1/3 can of coconut milk and let it cook for about 1 minute, then sweep the potatoes in and cook for 5-7 minutes. Meanwhile chop the green onions --- chop the white finely and the green into slanted slices about 1" long or so. Add the green onions to the curry in 5-7 minutes, then sugar, salt and soy sauce to taste. Eat with the rice.

Chocolate Cookies

I like chocolate. A lot. I got into cookies once when I watched the Matrix again (for the nth time)... The scene where Neo first goes to see the Oracle, and she's baking cookies.



So while I lived in Salt Lake City I went to Avenues Bakery --- they have amazing cookies. I got a bit addicted. Its a nice little cafe, but after paying $ for cookies a number of times, a person like me starts searching for a way to make them at home. As I made different cookies over the years, I kept some notes.

So then I moved away, and I didn't make cookies for a while. We had a child, there hasn't been a lot of time... So a few days ago I was looking through my copy of



which is an inspiration... I lived in Los Angeles for 14 years and the La Brea Bakery was one of my favorite spots there. Some of the recipes are a little over my head, but I've made several and everything I've tried came out very well. Silverton's chocolate chip scone is wondrous, as is the Crottin de Chocolate, and it was in the scone that I began dumping more and more chocolate.

I write pastry recipes that I work on or develop on the inside cover of my copy, and so when I wanted cookies a few days ago, I started following along the recipe I wrote there years ago. Its Tollhouse by way of Avenues by way of Silverton by way of... my chocolate obsession. I did a double-take when I saw how much chocolate I was adding, but I plowed on --- how bad could it be? So here goes... hang on to your hat. Frankly I don't even really claim the cookies taste like cookies should, nor that they're good in the way we generally want of cookies. They've got so much chocolate that I think they're kind of half-truffles, and extremely dark ones at that. So these are a bit about appreciating 99% chocolate itself, not sugar, not flour... baking chocolate and butter... everything else is secondary in this recipe.. And make sure you have a glass or 2 of milk... I can't eat more than 2 cookies in a sitting because of how much chocolate there is...

Chocolate Cookies

You will need 1C nuts, 2 sticks butter, 1.5C brown sugar/white sugar/honey/molasses, 2 eggs, 2C unbleached all-purpose... baking soda, salt, 1 pound of good quality 100% chocolate, 1/2 vanilla bean (optional), 1C rolled oats

Preheat to 375. Chop 1 cup of nuts (I like walnuts) and slightly roast them in the oven as it preheats --- from time to time check and take them out if they're fragrant. Chop and ``cream'' 2 sticks of butter (if they're from the fridge they will loosen up as you work.) Add 1.5 cups of brown sugar (white sugar works also), beat in the 2 eggs. Now take a tablespoon, fill it about halfway with baking soda and then carefully add water until its almost full, mix and put into the dough (normal people probably use a small bowl and don't try to save on dishes this much.) Mix in the 2 cups of all-purpose.

Get a cutting board, serrated knife (bread knife works well) and the 1 pound of chocolate (if its in a block... if yours is already chopped or chips then skip this step.) Gradually press the bread knife into the chocolate block, it should give and break. Keep chopping the chocolate until you've got chocolate pieces that are bite-size or smaller.

If you're adding it, slice open the vanilla bean and scrape the seeds into the dough. Take the chopped roasted nuts out add to the dough. Dump in the 1C rolled oats.

Now mix until the dough starts coming together. Try to make sure the butter pieces get somewhat mixed --- they don't have to be completely mixed, but they shouldn't be big chunks separate in the dough either.

From this dough, I pull off 4 cookies and bake for 15min in a small brownie pan (dishes again.) I divide the rest of the dough into 8 batches, roll each batch into a small log, saran wrap and freeze. These can be baked later, about 15-18 minutes at 375.

Bread and Muffins and Valrhona

Making bread is one the simple, cheap, and fast pleasures of cooking. I made my first breads --- focacce --- out of Dunaway's great book No Need to Knead.



I chose that book because I wanted to learn to make Italian bread --- the title make it look easy and fast. And its true, you don't need to knead in those recipes. But you do have to stir more vigorously than usual --- and I've since found that kneading isn't hard if you're just making a loaf for yourself. But anyway I've been delighted with every bread in that book that I've made.

But lately I've been making bread out of The Tassajara Bread Book by Brown.



This is a great book --- its all whole wheat. There's a decadence to white bread that whole wheat changes to worthiness. Whole wheat has a familiarity, an easiness. When I eat whole wheat that I baked, I feel good --- when I eat white bread that I baked, I feel a little celebratory.

Brown also also great muffin recipes. I was never a big fan of whole-wheat muffins, but I am a chocolate aficionado, and I've been dragging around several plastic containers of Valrhona cocoa that I bought from Surfas years ago and have always been saving ... So I put 2+2 together, and now I douse Brown's muffin recipe with Valrhona cocoa and some roasted nuts. In this recipe, by the way, Brown mentions mixing the dry and the wet ingredients separately and combining and mixing as little as possible. I used to skip that since it seemed like one of those fussy instructions that someone writes because thats how they always do it... But that one makes a difference in terms of the lightness of the muffins. I don't know why. Well this is the recipe I make which I've adapted from Brown's. Now I am also a fierce devotee of Elizabeth David's, and so I won't write out recipe in the ingredient/step1/step2 fashion, but more in her conversational fashion.

Preheat to 375.

So first the wet bowl, put in 1/4c olive oil (butter tastes better if you like). Use the same measuring cup to put in 1/2c molasses or honey (I found that when I reuse the oil-coated cup the honey or molasses doesn't stick to the cup.) Beat an egg in and then pour in 1 1/2 cups milk.

In the dry bowl, measure out 2C whole wheat. Mix in 2 tsp baking powder, a large pinch of salt.. And then the cocoa. I pretty much go all-out, I'd say about 1C or more, and I'm burning Valrhona.

Anyway, then grease the muffin tin. Now muffin tins are something else. I used to use the nonstick ones you get at the supermarket --- but as I said in the stocking-up post, I now avoid all nonstick. Nonstick wears off, and then you have to buy another pan while digesting some odd substance. So I got a heavy aluminumized steel muffin pan from Williams-Sonoma (before Lehman Brothers crashed.) It makes a big difference, and it was worth the money --- and its not nonstick and still it sticks much less than the cheap nonstick pan did. I think nonstick coating is just a way to sell cheap muffin pans that don't stick for a month or 2. I say avoid the nonstick, either use a disposable aluminum one from the store or get a good quality non-nonstick one.

So... grease up the muffin pan.

Now for the key, subtle step. Combine the wet and dry bowls into the larger bowl, and mix as little as possible to get a lumpy batter.

Hold the bowl over the muffin pan ``slots'' and very gently tip the bowl and pour the batter into the slots. First time or 2 will be a mess.

Finally, I chop some dried fruit over the muffins and pop the pan in the oven. I do the chopstick test: take a chopstick and see if it comes out clean, for me its 18min, but Brown says 15.