A Homemade Life Read online

  In a large bowl, toss the berries with the remaining 2 tablespoons flour. Pour the batter over the berries, and, using a rubber spatula, gently fold to combine, taking care that all the flour is absorbed. Pour the batter into the prepared pan, spreading it evenly across the top. Bake until a toothpick inserted in the cake’s center comes out clean, 1 hour to 1 ¼ hours.

  Transfer the cake to a rack, and cool in the pan for 5 minutes. Carefully invert the cake out of the pan onto the rack, and cool for at least 20 minutes before slicing. Serve slightly warm or at room temperature.

  NOTE: Sealed in plastic wrap and stored at room temperature, this cake will keep nicely for 2 or 3 days. And it also freezes well. Once, when my parents went to visit a friend in Aspen, my mother baked one of these cakes the week before, froze it, and then packed it in her suitcase. It defrosted en route, and they ate half for dessert that night. Then, the next morning, their friend warmed leftover slices on the grill for breakfast. My mother highly recommends that.

  Yield: 10 to 1 2 servings

  IN NEED OF CALMING

  I was not an easy child. I guess you could say that I was fearful, but that alone doesn’t adequately capture it. I was born with my hands over my ears, and I don’t mean that metaphorically. Any sort of loud noise—thunder, vacuum cleaners, backfire from cars—made me cry as though on cue. But it wasn’t only noise. I was also morbidly afraid of blood, needles, and people with any type of visible injury. Also, my head was enormous. I wound up in tears every time my mother tried to wedge it through a turtleneck. I was not a fun, happy-go-lucky kid, the kind who sticks her hand in the birthday cake and smears frosting all over her smocked dress. My parents, as you can imagine, were quite disappointed by this. On my first birthday, my mother carefully set the whole scene: me in my high chair, enormous cake on the tray in front of me, camera poised and ready. But I wouldn’t touch the frosting, not even with a fingertip. And, on top of all that, I also hated bananas. Kids are supposed to love bananas. When all else fails, that, at least, is supposed to be easy.

  My parents did their best. To ease her mind, my mother once consulted a psychic. The psychic said that I was a “new soul,” that this was my first time on earth, so quite naturally I was fearful. This didn’t explain the turtleneck problem, but still, it was something.

  But new soul, old soul, if the me of twenty-five years ago could see what’s in my freezer right now, she would scream. Lurking within its icy depths are no fewer than six ripe bananas, hard and frosty-skinned, lying in wait like small, shriveled snakes. It’s like a stockpile of tropical fruit terror. And what’s more, I love it. Growing up really is great.

  I’m not exactly sure of the chain of events that led to my conversion, but I do know that it started with a banana nut bread made by Linda Paschal, the mother of my childhood friend Jennifer. The Paschals lived in the house diagonally behind ours, and our families became friendly when Jennifer and I, then five and three, heard each other playing in our respective backyards. Not long after, our fathers built a gate through the fence, and we spent the next several years running back and forth from one house to the other, playing with my plastic toy ponies, staging elaborate lip-synch performances to Juice Newton’s “Angel of the Morning,” and eating, as it would happen, her mother’s banana bread. Such is Linda’s talent with quick breads that not even I could resist. Her banana bread was a model of the species: moist, tender, and spotted with walnuts. It was soulful and persuasive, familiar and softly scented, like the nape of a baby’s neck. I have thought of it often in the years since, wondering if it shouldn’t be produced en masse, sold in drugstores, and fed to anyone in need of calming.

  Of course, it would take many doses of Linda’s bread before I was solidly on board with bananas, and even today, I am no great fan of eating them plain. But I find it very easy to tuck away baked goods made from them. Sometimes I buy bunches of bananas just to bring them home and let them go brown. There’s something profoundly reassuring about having a bunch at the ready, ripe and speckled and on the verge of stink. It’s like hoarding gold bullion, only this type of gold needs to be kept in the freezer or else it will start to rot. I love to bake with bananas. They make baked goods miraculously moist, with a sort of sweet, wholesome perfume that, I sometimes imagine, Betty Crocker herself might have worn.

  If I didn’t watch myself, I would probably dump mashed bananas into anything that held still long enough to let me. I cannot have too much banana cake with chocolate ganache spread over the top, or too many banana-scented bran muffins. But my standby banana vehicle is the one that started me down the road in the first place: the tried-and-true, the humble loaf called banana bread.

  I love the classic banana-nut combination, just like Linda Paschal used to make. But I also like my banana bread with more exotic additions, like shredded coconut or dark rum, and my all-time favorite is a plucky variation involving chocolate and crystallized ginger. It’s a formula I stumbled upon a few years ago, with the help of my friend Kate.

  One Saturday morning, when Kate met up with her usual running buddy Glenn, he handed her a present. It was heavy and rectangular and wrapped in foil, and when she tore into it, she found a loaf of homemade banana bread flecked with chocolate chips and chewy ginger. Had I been Kate, I probably would have hidden it away and hoarded it, but lucky for us all, she is a better person. That night, she invited me to dinner, and after big bowls of mussels and a baguette, she whipped a carton of cream and served me a thick slice of the cakelike bread with a dollop on top. And then, bless her heart, she didn’t even bat an eyelash when I ate three slices. In fact, she nearly matched me at two and a half and may have outdone me in cream consumption.

  These days, I bake banana bread all the time, and I usually do it as Glenn did, with chocolate and ginger. It’s homey but a little sophisticated, and it’s almost impossible to stop eating. The flavors of banana and chocolate get along so well, and ginger makes them even better, cutting through their richness with its spicy heat. It’s the kind of thing that begs to be cut into big, melty slices while the loaf is still hot.

  I am still not sure how I feel about turtlenecks and thunder, but I’m willing to bet that, with enough banana bread, I could find a way to warm to them, too.

  BANANA BREAD WITH CHOCOLATE AND CRYSTALLIZED GINGER

  this recipe is my take on Glenn’s. If you don’t have any chocolate chips lying around, try chopping up a bar of chocolate instead. I like the look of the irregular chunks and shards that result.

  6 tablespoons (3 ounces) unsalted butter

  2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

  ¾ cup sugar

  ¾ teaspoon baking soda

  ½ teaspoon salt

  ¾ cup semisweet chocolate chips

  1/3 cup finely chopped crystallized ginger

  2 large eggs

  1½ cups mashed banana (from about 3 large ripe bananas)

  ¼ cup well-stirred whole-milk plain yogurt (not low fat or nonfat)

  1 teaspoon vanilla extract

  Set a rack in the center of the oven, and preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease a standard-sized (about 9 by 5 inches) loaf pan with cooking spray or butter.

  In a small bowl, microwave the butter until just melted. (Take care to do this on medium power and in short bursts; if the heat is too high, butter will sometimes splatter or explode. Or, alternatively, put the butter in a heatproof bowl and melt in the preheated oven.) Set aside to cool slightly.

  In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt. Add the chocolate chips and crystallized ginger and whisk well to combine. Set aside.

  In a medium bowl, lightly beat the eggs with a fork. Add the mashed banana, yogurt, melted butter, and vanilla and stir to mix well. (The same fork works fine for this.) Pour the banana mixture into the dry ingredients, and stir gently with a rubber spatula, scraping down the sides as needed, until just combined. Do not overmix. The batter will be thick and somewhat lumpy, but there should be no unincorporated
flour. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan, and smooth the top.

  Bake until the loaf is a deep shade of golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, 50 minutes to 1 hour. If the loaf seems to be browning too quickly, tent with aluminum foil.

  Cool the loaf in the pan on a wire rack for 5 minutes. Then tip it out onto the rack, and let it cool completely before slicing—unless you absolutely can’t help yourself, in which case, dig in.

  NOTE: Fully cooled, this bread freezes beautifully. And it tastes delicious cold, straight from the freezer. To protect it from frost, wrap it in plastic wrap and then again in aluminum foil.

  Yield: about 8 servings

  THE WHOLE MESSY DECADE

  I was born in 1978. That means that I lived a good portion of my formative years in the presence of mullets, crimped hair, and shoulder pads, hallmarks of that rollicking decade now known plainly as the eighties. I’m not sure it’s good to admit that I was in any way present for such an era, but I’m willing to go out on a limb.

  Anyway, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic about the eighties. If you think about it, mullets really were a smart, well-meaning invention. Anyone with long hair can tell you that it gets in your face sometimes. Mullets handily took care of this by cropping the front short while leaving the back alone. With a mullet, you got the best of both worlds: long hair without having to choke on it. I don’t expect to convince anyone of the truth of this anytime soon, but I am content to try.

  My mother did the eighties very well. She could work a pair of shoulder pads like no one else. You should have seen her in the periwinkle dress she wore to my sister Lisa’s wedding, the one with the shoulder pads, the open back, and the enormous bow. She looked stunning—a little like royalty, really, like Princess Diana with braided brown hair and a better-looking husband. She was the fashion beacon of Oklahoma City. Our town may not have been Milan or Paris, but if you doubt me, you probably never met my mother.

  Like many other beacons of generations past, my mother dove head first into the trends of her time. Luckily, I do not mean cocaine, or hair crimping, or MTV. In my mother’s case, I mean aerobics, with its perky wardrobe of pastel tights and leotards with matching belts, leg warmers, and terrycloth sweatbands. For a large part of my early childhood, my second home was a place called The Workout, an aerobics studio in a strip shopping center about ten blocks from our house. My mother would suit up, pack me a bag of books and other diversions, and off we’d go for entire afternoons. Today, people often ask about the origins of my ability to remember 1980s dance songs, and I tell them that I owe it all to The Workout, to the thud of Reeboks reverberating off the studio mirrors.

  My mother was a natural at aerobics. She quickly came to be friendly with the instructors and even considered teaching her own classes. For my part, though I was only four or five, I used my time at The Workout to do some serious thinking about my life. I decided that I wanted to be someone else. Namely, I wanted to be Sherry. She was one of the aerobics instructors. She had a soft voice and leotards in all sorts of bright colors, and her shiny brown hair was something out of a VO5 Hot Oil ad. First, I reasoned, I would have to change my name. Then we would have to spend lots of time together, so that I could learn to be just like her. This could be difficult, I knew, but I had a plan. It happened that around the same time, I had been informed—probably on the playground at preschool, although I can’t really remember—that in order to get a driver’s license, I would someday have to pass a test requiring me to take a car apart and put it back together. It sounded like an insurmountable task. Clearly, I would never get a driver’s license. Instead, I privately decided, I would get Sherry to drive me everywhere. Then we would be together always, forever.

  But I did not change my name, and Sherry never drove me anywhere. My mother, however, was invited by the instructors to appear on local television, which struck me as a nice consolation prize. She, along with a team of other Spandex-clad women, did an aerobics demonstration on the morning television show hosted by brothers Butch and Ben McCain. We were both very excited. She later went on to become a personal fitness trainer and is now a Pilates instructor.

  But my mother’s glory in the 1980s wasn’t limited to fashion or exercise fads. She was also very skilled in the realm of white chocolate.

  I’m sure you remember white chocolate, that sweet, melty substance made from cocoa butter, milk solids, and sugar. It was first popularized in the mid-eighties, when Nestlé released its Alpine White bar, and it went on to take the country by storm. For a while, it was everywhere, stuffed into brownies and cheesecakes and squiggled on top of biscotti. It even showed up in chip form, invading cookies across the land with its comrade-in-arms, the macadamia nut. White chocolate was the eighties, right up there with blackened redfish.

  Of course, in the intervening years, white chocolate has fallen out of favor. In some circles, I understand, it ranks up there with mullets among the most vilified relics of the era. But I would like to argue in its favor. I would like to argue that white chocolate made the whole messy decade worthwhile, if only because of one dessert. It is called a white chocolate cœur à la crème, a creamy mousse of sorts spooned into a heart-shaped mold and served with a berry sauce, and it appeared on my personal horizon in February of 1987, when Bon Appétit ran a recipe for it. My mother, a regular subscriber, had the good sense to clip the recipe, and I had the good fortune of eating it on many occasions.

  Cœur à la crème is a delicious, delicious thing. For a good part of my childhood, it was my favorite dessert. It was made mainly from cream cheese and heavy cream, with a smooth texture that sat somewhere between cheesecake and mousse. It was also very pretty: a velvety, ivory-colored heart whose surface was quilted daintily from the cheesecloth that lined its mold, with a deep red puddle of puréed raspberries on the side. It was beautiful in a precious, bed-and-breakfast kind of way, but it went down like a New York cheesecake, in lusty, sauce-slinging gulps.

  My mother made it mainly for dinner parties, but once, when I was in the fourth grade, I begged her to let me bring it to a special lunch with my French class. My teacher, a frail, black-haired Frenchwoman named Madame Boutin, had been teaching us basic food vocabulary—baguette and fromage, pomme and poire, poulet and viande—and now we were to celebrate with a small, brown-bag feast. When I came to class with my mother’s cœur à la crème, she oooooooohed approvingly.

  “Magnifique,” she breathed. It most certainly was.

  It’s sad, really, that with the end of the 1980s, white chocolate went the way of crimping irons and Boy George. Because cœur à la crème is really something. That’s why, on the eve of a barbecue last summer, I decided to trot it out for an encore. It’s cool and unfussy—a little like ice cream, but better—and perfect for a warm, sticky night. We stood at the kitchen counter and ate it straight from the serving platter, eight of us with eager spoons, talking with our mouths full. I highly recommend it, even the straight-from-the-platter part.

  CŒUR À LA CRÈME WITH RASPBERRY PURÉE

  though this dessert is traditionally served in the shape of a heart, I can’t, in good conscience, ask you to run out and buy a special mold for this one recipe. I can’t even make myself go out and buy one. I don’t believe in kitchen equipment that serves only one purpose, even if that purpose is creamy and delicious.

  Instead, I use a small colander, the kind you might keep around for rinsing cherry tomatoes or a handful of herbs. Mine has a capacity of 1½ quarts, and it makes for a small, handsome dome. If your colander is larger, that’s fine, too; your dome will just be wider and flatter. This dome-shaped version—dôme à la crème, as I call it—isn’t quite as glamorous as the traditional cœur, but it tastes just as good.

  Last, use the best white chocolate you can find. I like Valrhona.

  FOR THE CŒUR/DÔME

  3 ounces white chocolate, finely chopped

  One 8-ounce package cream cheese (not low fat), at room temperature
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  1¼ cups heavy cream

  ¾ cup powdered sugar, sifted

  FOR THE PURÉE

  One 10-ounce bag frozen unsweetened raspberries, thawed

  3 tablespoons sugar

  First, prepare the mold or colander (see headnote). Cut two sheets of cheesecloth large enough to line its interior and extend beyond its edges enough to enclose the filling completely. Wet the sheets of cheesecloth under the tap, wring them out well, and line them up together, so that they form a double layer. Lay the cheesecloth atop the mold or colander, pressing it smooth along the base and walls and letting the overhang fall over the sides. Set aside.

  In a microwavable bowl, microwave the white chocolate on high for 20 seconds at a time, stirring well after each go, until just smooth. Set aside to cool slightly.

  Combine the cream cheese, ¼ cup of the cream, and the powdered sugar in a medium bowl. Using an electric mixer set to medium speed, beat until light and fluffy, scraping down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula as needed. Add the white chocolate, and beat until very smooth, about 2 minutes. Set aside.

  In another medium bowl, beat the remaining 1 cup cream to stiff peaks. Gently fold the cream into the cream cheese mixture. Spoon the finished batter into the prepared mold, smoothing the top with a spatula. Fold the cheesecloth over to enclose it completely. Place the mold on a rimmed sheet pan or another rimmed dish. Refrigerate for at least 8 hours or overnight.

  Meanwhile, prepare the raspberry purée. In a blender or food processor, combine the thawed raspberries with their juice and the sugar. Blend until smooth. Press the purée through a sieve into a small bowl to remove the seeds. Cover and chill for up to 4 hours.