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.

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.