Jennifer Jeffrey, Writer & Editor

Got Crab? (the cookbook is out!)

Guess what just hit the shelves? The CRAB cookbook!

CRAB: Buying, Cooking, Cracking was just released by Ten Speed Press. I'm delighted with the production quality - the photos are beautiful, and it contains just 35 recipes - enough to give you lots of options, not too many to make you feel overwhelmed.

I'm a huge crab fan, especially since Dungeness crab is sustainably harvested, and therefore doesn't provoke spasms of guilt upon consumption. Over the next few weeks, I'll post a few crab tips & recipes & a photo or two. In November, I'm going to sail out on the Bay on a crab boat to see how these rosy pink critters are hauled in and brought to shore.

In the meanwhile, I've got three CRAB cookbooks (signed by Andrea Froncillo and myself) to give away to the first three people who e-mail me with the name of your favorite crab dish. Go for it!

The Smallest Art Gallery In The World (August '07)

If you've read this blog for a while, you know that I have a room in my house that I affectionately call The Smallest Art Gallery in the World. It's not fancy, and the art isn't groundbreaking or revolutionary, but it makes me happy, and that's good enough for me.

For the past four months, I've had the "Morocco" exhibit up, composed of photos from my January trip, along with a few Moroccan-themed paintings, a pair of hand-embroidered slippers, Moroccan candlesticks, and a few other odds and ends. The only blogger who took me up on my offer to stop by for a look was the lovely Tea, who arrived with a packet of delectable peach tea as her "entrance fee." I was charmed, and the tea was wonderful; I'm still enjoying it.

For the past few weeks, I've been meaning to pull everything off of the walls and hang a fresh "exhibit" but things have been rather hectic. Last week, I finally got around to it.

This time, the theme is Type. Words. Letters. Numbers.

Walk a Mile in These Shoes

I was talking with a friend of mine a couple of days ago about my recent blog posts exploring the complex intersection between the slow-local-organic movement and the pressures and expectations inherent in most women’s lives.

“I’m curious as to why you chose that topic,” he said. “I mean, it isn’t hard for you to make it to the farmer’s market. And you don’t have kids. What gives?”

“Oh, I’m just a selfless advocate for women everywhere,” I replied breezily.

We both laughed, and then I gave him the truthful answer. The truth is that for many years I lived on the extreme end of the slow-local-organic spectrum. I’ve briefly alluded on this blog to the fact that I grew up on 13 acres in rural Oregon. For reasons both financial (we were, to put it bluntly, poor) and philosophical (my mother was firmly against any and all processed foods, pesticides, herbicides and sugar), my family grew, prepared and preserved most of our food.

When I write about the slow-local-organic movement, I’m really talking about a significant portion of my life.

Random Musings on Recipe Writing

This month finds me hunkered behind my computer screen as the leaves drift past my window, finishing up a manuscript for my second cookbook with Andrea Froncillo. Last time, we were mostly working from a set script; our goal was simply to translate the dishes from The Stinking Rose menu into recipes that people could easily make at home.

The current cookbook-in-progress has a few similar elements; the theme is crab, and some of the recipes are being taken from Andrea’s two crab restaurants on Fisherman’s Wharf, the Crab House on Pier 39 and the Franciscan Crab Restaurant at Pier 43 1/2.

But this isn’t a restaurant cookbook, and so we’re also inventing as we go. It’s a good thing that I love seafood as much as I do, as I’ve been tasting quite a bit of crab, and I can honestly say that I’m not tired of it yet. It helps that the crab I’m using in my test recipes is premium grade jumbo crabmeat (and big, meaty crab legs) that I get from the restaurants; in the spirit of research, I’ve been buying crab from random places (Trader Joe’s, the Safeway seafood counter, Whole Foods) to see what kind of product is out there, and I am amazed at the difference. No wonder many people only eat crab in restaurants – it’s often far better quality.

But beyond these crabby musings, I’ve been giving more thought to the art of recipe writing lately. As I’ve pondered the question of why modern recipes are written the way they are, I’ve gotten a bit of insight from The Recipe Writer’s Handbook, which reports that “… consumers lack confidence in their ability to cook.” Hence, most of our “modern” recipes contain lists of precise measurements, and terse, exacting instructions that turn recipes into somewhat scientific formulas.

Not that there is anything wrong with this; clear, precise instructions ensure that a recipe is reproducible and comes out the same way virtually every time. And that’s a very good thing.

What I Learned from Bill Buford

I’ve never met Mario Batali, like certain other lucky people, but I did make it to the end of Heat. Not a swaggering page-turner like Kitchen Confidential, this is a book that shows The New Yorker provenance of its author; it is, by turns, instructive, thoughtful and smart.

Granted, there are a few faux-shocking bits thrown in for good measure: Batali drinks an entire case of wine in one sitting? He flirts shamelessly with anything in a skirt? Yawn. I couldn’t care less about Mario’s personality tics; clearly, he’s a big, bawdy boy in orange rubber slippers, so let’s get on with it.

I was fascinated by the descriptions of the inner workings of the kitchen, the near-scientific breakdown of certain recipes (polenta, anyone?), and the bits of historical flotsam and jetsam Buford worked into the story that tethered the glittering present to the culinary past.

Several weeks after I turned the last page, here are the things that are still rattling about in my head:

1. It’s All About the Pasta Water. Although my pasta water could never be as scrumptious as the murky, starchy vat of goodness that sits on the stove at Babbo, Buford convinced me that reserving a bit of pasta water to toss in to my sauce at the end is a good idea. I’ve tried it several times since, and guess what? It’s true! My carbonara didn’t need more butter and cream to make the noodles slip and slide the way they should – it needed a splash of pasta water! The pasta water, Buford writes, “…flavors the pasta with the flavor of itself.”  I’m a believer.

2. Tom Valenti is the Reason for the Short Ribs. According to Buford, Valenti brought the short rib into vogue in 1990, when he placed it on his menu. Short ribs were forty-five cents a pound 16 years ago; the same amount now costs north of five dollars. I thought about this recently when I sat down to one of my favorite dishes at Jeanty at Jack’s, the Kobe Beef Short Ribs, which are tender, unctuous morsels of sheer delight. While Philippe Jeanty may not agree that his short ribs have anything to do with a restaurateur in New York, I sent a silent thank-you out to whomever made this dish popular enough to make it to my mouth ~ not once, but numerous times ~ over the last few years.

3. There are No Shortcuts to Mastery. I knew this already, and so did you, but I forget sometimes. I make a dish twice, or three times, and get discouraged when it falls short of outstanding. I forget that if made the same dish fifty times, or a hundred, it would be better by far. In this day of 30-minute meals and crazy hectic schedules, the idea of repeating something over and over to achieve perfection is a laughably impractical notion. I daydream of being able to escape to a remote mountain village in Italy – or, better yet, a tiny village in France – to stand beside a real master for a few months and truly master one beautiful dish. Mario learned how to make pasta; Alex learned how to cut vegetables; Bill discovered the art of cutting up an animal. Mastery is neither easy nor cheap, and for now I’ll live vicariously through them.

Sadness + Laughter + Orange Scarves

Literary readings are not always compelling. Some authors stumble over their words and rush through their material with nary a pause; some lack the stage presence to elevate a reading to a moving performance.

But there are others.

Authors who make eye contact with the audience, whose delivery makes the material crackle and leap. Authors whose voices resonate inside the heads of the listeners afterwards, so that whenever the listener picks up the book, they hear an echo composed of the voice and the printed word.

I attended just such a reading last week. It was held at Intersection for the Arts on 15th & Valencia, to celebrate the publication of an anthology entitled Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora.

The anthology features the works of fifty-two different women. The works range from poems to essays to short stories sprinkled with exclamations written in Farsi.

Eight of the contributors read that night, including the editor, Persis Karim. Every single one of them  was beautiful and smart and riveting. The material was at once moving and timely, offering glimpses into experiences both familiar and not. They spoke about love and loss and longing. Two women wryly recalled being asked if they drove camels "back at home."

Magic Between the Covers

A few weeks ago,  someone handed me a copy of “If You Want to Write” by Brenda Ueland. My copy has a turquoise paper cover, upon which two orange starfish drift, as if they are falling out of the sky. The copyright is dated 1938. Ms. Ueland, the introduction tells me, died in 1985 at the age of 93.

Given that it has been in print for so long, and that I frequently troll about the “Books on Writing” section,  I am astounded that I have never come across it before.

It is a rare book that makes me feverish to write. There are many books on the subject that have shamed me into picking up my pen,  or prodded me to push out one more page,  or impressed me with my grave and important duty to share my stories with the world. This book is a different creature entirely: two pages into the first chapter,  I tossed it aside and ran to my keyboard, because I simply had to get something out.