A cake, a wall, and some dark magic.

Necromancy.  Dead magic.  The prophecy of the exhumed body.  Every time I bake, it feels like I'm communing with my past, a wayward child that's running too fast for his own feet.  Simple simmering, trying to remember the last time I just sat or ate something healthy.  Gentle boiling, trying to remember if my grandmother's name was Norma or Lily.  Patiently waiting, trying to remember when the last time I hugged someone.

This week it felt like a dark moon hung over San Antonio.  I felt a sort of reverse-gravity in the pit of my stomach.  The air was thinner, the sunlight hit asphalt in garish hues of motor oil that looked like blood.  Tasted it in my mouth.  I bit my lip too hard.  I bit my tongue more than once.  It made me feel shaky and I couldn't fall asleep, I kept hearing car alarms and wailing trains in the distance.  It used to be coyotes.

Necromancy.  When an ex-boyfriend comes back into your life and he isn't so much a ghost as he is a warm body.  A warm body that feels rotten and you can't quite place his presence anywhere.  Uncomfortable, the same sense of nausea you felt when you overheard at your grandmother's funeral, "The mortician did a good job with the make-up."  (Her name was Ruth).  He shouldn't be here in the new life.  

Necromancy.  The tangy smell of jam on burnt toast.  How easily we remember things through smell.  How some flowers smell like carrion and it attracts insects with hummingbird wings.  It all looks so perfect until you start to breathe.  I remember three smells from my childhood:  my mother's Dr. Pepper chapstick, the foam on the top of the Diet Cokes I'd pour for my dad, and hot cast iron with its burn crisps of old corn bread stuck on the edges.

This week I kicked the wall in my bathroom because I ran out of things to say.  I wasn't sorry for it.  I went to Home Depot and spend $17.  It's a large splotch of grey where my foot caved in.  I couldn't find the words to describe all the anger I had, built up over five years.  I broke a wall with my foot and there's still bits of plaster stuck to the sole of my shoe.  Every step is a little dustier, small motes of my anger trail after me onto the tile at work.  They settle into the hardwood floor of my apartment, into scratches where we pushed the couch on its side and it left long marks a half inch deep.  A nail that stuck out of the leg, bent at an angle. "It could have poked your eye out."

This week I brought memories back to life, a form of magic through baking.  The shamanism of sense memory and mixing bowls.  The smell of old fruit, blackberries I picked from bramble on my uncle's farm.  Burnt cornbread on the stovetop to cool.  A large glass of Diet Coke that hisses as the carbonation dies.  I used to shuck the corn for dinner, put the silk in a Wal-mart plastic bag for the chickens.  I made a cake with these kind of memories, this brand of necromancy.

Cornmeal Cake with Sweet Corn Topping and Quick Berry Jam

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Ingredients for the Cake:

• 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour 
• 1/2 cup yellow cornmeal 
• 2 teaspoons baking powder 
• 1 teaspoon salt 
• 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar, and 1/4 cup for sprinkling 
• 1/2 cup buttermilk 
• 2 large eggs 
• 7 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted, plus some to grease skillet

Ingredients for the Sweet Corn Topping:

• 2 cups heavy cream
• 2 ears of corn, kernels cut and cobs whole
• 1/4 cup confectioner's sugar
• 2 teaspoon vanilla

Ingredients for the Quick Berry Jam

• 1 pint blackberries
• 1 pint raspberries
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 tablespoons clover honey
• 1 lemon, zested and juiced
• 1/4 teaspoon dried lavender
• Sachet of gelatin 
• pinch of salt

Directions:

1. The night before, heat cream and corn kernels and cob in a saucepan.  Allow to simmer for four minutes.  Let steep overnight.
2. Further, make the jam by macerating berries in sugar and honey and allowing to stand in a saucepan for ten minutes.  
3. Bring mixture to a simmer, berries will break and slowly release their juices.  Allow to simmer for 12 minutes.
4. Add lemon juice and zest and lavender.  Stir gentle and continue to simmer. 
5. In a small bowl, pour in gelatin.  Add 2 tablespoons of water to gelatin and allow to bloom for six minutes.  Once stiffened, spoon into jam and stir gently to break down the bloom.  
6. Take off heat and allow to rest for several minutes (it will start to thicken).  When a little cooled, place in a heatproof container and refrigerate overnight.   
7. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 375 degrees.  Butter a 10-inch cast iron skillet and set aside. 
8. In a large bowl, whisk together flour, cornmeal, baking powder, salt, and 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar.
9. In another bowl, whisk together buttermilk, eggs, and melted butter. 
10. Pour over flour mixture, whisking to combine.

11. Pour batter into skillet and bake 45 minutes on middle rack

12. While cake bakes, strain cream mixture into the bowl of a stand mixer.  Discard corn remnants.  Whip cream on medium-high until peaks form.  Add remaining topping ingredients.  Set aside.

13. Allow cake to cool and then invert. 

14. Assemble cake by adding a layer of jam, and top with the whipped cream mixture.

15. Think about home while eating it and enjoy.

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I want to finally give a shout-out to Kristyn over at Laite Atelier for no other reason than she has been a wonderful, interesting, and talented person I met this week.  

A New Project and A New Website

Two different people.  I used to be this kid who wore black, that wore my grades as a mark of honor, who would smoke a cigarette and hold in my cough until no one was looking.  I used to live in a world of dichotomies, I took one direction, judging those who took the other.  Bitter and self-centered, I hated everything that wasn't within arm's reach, anything I had to work for.  I was this lazy with all the best relationships I've ever held onto--from Nolan to my mother.   I was like this in law school, in California.  I left this person there, too.

In the last two months of living in Texas, living alone for the first time, I've grown into a new person.  Soft and muted blues, greens, greys--I don't hide behind a layer of black, a 4.0, or in a puff of smoke, indiscernible from the fog that hung over Pittsburgh most mornings.  I appreciate beauty and tones, floral and minimalism.  I respect the curated life, the plant you buy for decoration and how it differs from the one you buy for herbs.  I work with my hands now.  I feel a vernal change in my bones to produce, to craft, to create.  I have callouses that have softened over from when I would hold a pencil too long, back in the day when I held a pencil to write at all. My working hands are toiling again.  I'm creating candy bars, confectionaries, memories.  Someone's breakfast, someone's "cheat day".  

I appreciate a good cup of coffee above most things, and that's something that hasn't changed between the old and the new life I have.  That is why I went to Press Coffee with a simple idea:  I want to sell candy.  A simple stand, a couple dollars a bar, for an hour or two to get my name out there and have some fun doing it.  Press was, to me, the perfect venue.  From its wonderfully curated decor to its light-dappled cafe tables, Press understands appreciating the small, everyday victories of the perfect cup of coffee, the first bite of a crisp pastry, finding the just-right leather chair to sit in and enjoy the morning for what it is:  an opportunity to create, relax, not take life too hard or seriously.   I would have never thought of the generosity that would come of Natalie offering to give me liberty on stocking them as often as I could produce them.  

I am dropping off my second order this morning.  Twenty-seven bars of Matcha, Cookies and Cream, and Peanut Butter.  They're delicate and snap when you break them.  They're wrapped in the same designs I used for Nolan's Valentine's Day present, florals for spring*.  They're one of the simple pleasures we allow ourselves to spend money on, and maybe one of my customers will share his with someone he loves today.  I hope, whoever buys one, they'll recognize the attention each bar got from me.  From cutting the wrappers to measuring the foil, to getting the perfect process of tempering and cooling, each bar was made from my hands, hands that once held pencils too tightly, cigarettes too loosely, and another boy's hand too recklessly. 

If you're located in the San Antonio-area, stop by Press Coffee at 606 W French Place 78212, and maybe I'll see you there, too! (Usually for only, like, five minutes in the morning before work, though).

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What my work desk usually looks like

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Matcha is probably my personal favorite.  Beau and I are hockin' these like it's 2012

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(they're not $2, btw)

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*groundbreaking

And finally, a special thanks to Samuel Nuñez  for creating such an amazing logo, that inspired so much of my work this last month--from the candy bars to actually making this website a thing.  Go check him out, too!

Avoiding the Red Cliche

Most things come easily to me, things you wouldn't expect from a boy with no discernible talent.  Things like baseball, calculus, forgiveness never came easy to me, but love did.  Love in the carnal sense, love in the fictional sense.  Love in the sense of letting go, love in the sense of finding yourself.  Love in the sense of that ever-present gnaw at the pit of your stomach that registers in the mind as I am responsible for someone else's happiness. Love has come easily to me since birth.  I love my mother in an almost manic sense, an almost Oedipal obsession with my desire to make her smile.  In kindergarten, I kissed a girl named Alex's hand when she reached out to grab a colored pencil, I thought I was gentlemanly and adult of me.  Years of expansive love bloomed in me as I began to daydream of boyfriends and how exotic the word fiancé sounded, with it's accented e and promise of a future with someone else.  With each boyfriend, there was a breakup, and with each breakup, there was some promise of next time, next time, next time.  I found Nolan during one of those next times.  During my return to Italy, when we were both a little bruised, both a little cut up and the vinegar kisses of a stranger felt like when soap gets in a hangnail.  But, underneath all of that, once we stripped down and opened up, there was love.

It was raw and passionate, it left me heady in the perfumed 10x8 dorm room where the heat was on and a blizzard blew through Pittsburgh one night in January.

It was lazy, falling asleep with a bucket of chicken during XLV.

It was chaotic in the sense of never having an ending, never knowing the dates of anything important, throwing shoes and his grandmother's dishes when I got too angry and forgot to say, "I'm sorry."

But I was never sorry, never sorry for loving someone so ferociously and tender.  I'd lick the wounds I had created and then blame the rust-taste in my wolf mouth on his laziness, his determination to let our love fade away.  It was raw and passionate, it was lazy and chaotic.  And somehow love became this little succulent, never needing watered, collecting dust on the windowsill, timid in its approach to life.  Our love had a geophyte approach to sustainability, fatty and tuberous, holding onto any love that existed when life got barren and dry. When it got hard to come by, when it couldn't be found in the moonlight nor with a dowsing rod, broken off from a backyard apple tree when the Santa Anas made us unbearable to one another.

Since I left for Texas, we fell in love again--hard and fast, when the bones were most brittle.  An apologetic love where conversations often ended in "How did it get like this?"  We are finding our way back to the frenzied love of when I was 19, and slowly those sour wounds heal when they're exposed to air.  I wanted to celebrate this love for Valentine's Day and forget all the other four years and the bullshit we put one another through. I wanted to celebrate this love in boxes, small tins of love that overpowered Nolan for Valentine's Day.  I wanted to remind him what home could feel like.  I wanted to remind him what love could feel like, because our house in San Diego was big by San Diego standards, and it could creak too loud when you're lonely.  I made him dinner, cakes and bread, and shipped it to him to have for Valentine's Day with a movie, so it felt like a date tonight.

I love you.

“He shall never know I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made out of, his and mine are the same.”

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Roasted Beet Pasta

Ingredients:

• 2 large-sized beets
• 3 whole eggs + 1 egg yolk
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1 teaspoon lemon zest (optional)
• 6+ cups flour

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 450
2. While oven is preheating, peel beets and wrap in foil, place on baking tray.  When oven is ready, roast for 40 minutes.
3. Remove from oven and allow to cool for a few minutes, unwrapping so steam can release
4. Cut into large chunks.
5. In a large food processor (6 cups or more), throw in beets, eggs and yolk, olive oil, and salt (and optional zest).  Puree until smooth
6. In a stand mixer, combine puree and three cups of flour using the paddle attachment.  When dough begins to form, switch to dough hook and continue to mix, adding in last three cups of flour, one at a time, until a proper dough forms
7. Remove from bowl onto a floured work surface (i prefer marble for pasta-making) and knead for 7 minutes or until is elastic
8. Keeping dough floured, cut into eighths and lay plastic wrap on sections you are not going to use.
9. Use your pasta machine's directions for thick noodles, and dry.
10. Enjoy with a vinaigrette and parmesan!

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Bacon Salt

Ingredients:

• 5-6 strips of bacon
• 1/2 cup sea salt (preferably a larger crystal)
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper

Directions:

1. Fry bacon on a skillet until extra-crispy
2. Put on a plate lined with paper towels and allow to cool, blotting excess grease
3. In a food processor, combine all ingredients and pulse until combined.  Do not over-pulse, as it can result in fats in bacon to liquify.
4. Enjoy over popcorn, with potatoes, or be creative!

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Handcrafted Candy Bars

There is no real recipe for a basic candy bar.  I used some of my mother's recipes, which use more specialized chocolate and techniques, but the instructions I have below can be practiced even with chocolate chips. From here, you can personalize them and make them your own, even including honeys, spices, herbs, salts, and even homemade nut butters!  But, I would start here for an intro into confectionery.

Before you begin, use a ratio of 3 oz per candy bar, so you have some room for leeway with sticking to the bowl, the mold, and your spatula.  From here, you can cut and halve, mix chocolates together and multiply easily.  I particularly like mixing white chocolate and a milkier, lighter chocolate.  When you have decided how you would like to flavor your chocolate, measure out how much you will need.  Then, take away about 30% of that amount and set aside (this will be your "seed chocolate", a step for this pseudo-tempering.  It is necessary so your chocolate doesn't turn grey when cooled).

Prepare any mold you may be using.  I always use a light olive oil cooking spray and then wipe off the excess with a paper towel.

In a microwave-safe bowl, combine your remaining chocolates and microwave on HIGH for 20 seconds.  Take out and stir.  Put back in for another 20 seconds and repeat this process until all chocolate is silky smooth and easy to stir.

Add remaining chocolate and continue to stir.  The heat from the melted chocolate should melt remaining chocolate.

Add any add-ins and pour into mold and smooth out with a rubber spatula.  Allow to cool for at least half an hour in the fridge before unmolding.  Package however you want (I went a little far with homemade packaging I designed and printed on special paper, but basic foil will do). Store in a cool place, or the fridge.

Other recipes used: For the cake (marzipan inspiration here)/  For the hot chocolate mix /  For the marshmallows / For the bread.

Ice Cream in the Wintertime

I've gotten used to microwaving water for tea and never having to tell a single person what I'm thinking.  I slept for fifteen hours yesterday, my body exhausted from the flu, and no one would ever have known if I didn't tell people.  For pity, for a connection to someone else.  I've become this different person, a liminal character between two worlds--the moorish memories of California, the Shangri-La future of central Texas.  If the sun hits me at noon, my fingertips become smoke rings, I float away into my own imagination.  I never have to tell a single person what I'm thinking. Last week, I stopped by a Salvation Army and looked for an ice cream scoop.  I wanted an old one, one that looked rustic and used.  One that survived birthday parties and anniversaries, graduation parties and the Y2K scare.  I found a chipped crock and an Ace of Base CD instead.  I forgot my wallet in the car and felt oddly embarrassed, oddly unsure of myself, self-conscious of my windowshopping.  I went back out to the car and noticed how few parking spots there were for how many customers the store had.  It confused me, how people got there.  I left without buying anything.

The reason I needed the ice cream scoop is because I was determined to make ice cream.  Chantilly Meringuèe, to be exact.  I was given twenty-two eggs from a coworker whose fridge was overflowing with them.  So many delicate egg whites, cracked open on the sides of mixing bowls and countertops.  My fascination with the egg white's transformation was last seen with the Italian Meringue Buttercream, but I wanted to take it one step further.  Because, egg whites, too, are so liminal.  So between-worlds.  Too viscous for liquid, too amorphous for a solid.  The more air you incorporate, the more velveteen and shapely it becomes.

I wanted to see this transformation, I wanted to feel as though my sublimated body could border-cross the way this dessert did.  I wanted to create magic without the unnecessary equipment of an ice cream maker.  I wanted something cold on my tongue, the sharp bite of winter melting in my mouth.  I wanted to feel alive this week, after sleeping for fifteen hours and only speaking when I needed something.  I wanted to feel like a kid again, taking change from my pocket and buying ice cream across the street from my school, at a place called Shaffer's Snack Shack.  I wanted to share this recipe with you.

Mountain Cedar and Chicken Noodle Soup

I was five when I told my first lie. We lived in Kentucky then.  In a little ranch house with not enough room.  My sister slept in the laundry room, her bed was by the washer.  The house had one big tree in the backyard, broken bricks in a corner of the lot.  The fence on the left was overrun by blackberry bramble.  My sister and I would see who could fit the most in our mouths, the juices running down our chins like well-fed wolves. In that house, I told my first lie.  I told my mother I was sick, that I couldn't get out of bed, that I couldn't move.  She said I looked pale and I held her hand while we watched a movie on the bottom bunk of a bed I shared with my brother.  My mother had long hair then, thick and that kind of black hair that turns blue in the right light.  She was 29 then and worked in a warehouse for produce and generic-brand food.  Her whole life was over by then, I think.  She was never really her own person by the time I came along.  But she sat on the bed with me and we watched movies.  I lied to her and we both took a nap together.

In that same house, that small little house in Kentucky, with the vinyl siding and it's creaky front door, a tornado hit and my 29-year-old mom drove home to protect us. She drove a green pickup truck.  She tied a sun-bleached red bandana on the mirror the day she got it.  It was a summer then, hot on the skin and the heat broke the sky. She put that same mattress we fell asleep on over our heads and we watched as a tree branch smacked the window pane, leaving a scratch that was still there when we left two months later.

I haven't stopped lying since I was five.  I do it every day.  I do it over small things, like if I put cream in my coffee.  I do it about big things, like when I tell people I love them.  I do it as a way to get attention, as a way to hold someone's hand.  I do it for pity and for protection.  I do it for fun.  I lie to my mother more than anyone else.  I tell her I forgive her for everything, for the missed birthdays and the time she hung up the phone on me when I called her from Italy, drunk and alone and only had ten minutes left on the pay phone, only a few cents left in my pocket.  I lie to her to make it easy, because I remember how she sat on the bed and held my hand and loved me even when I was lying to her.

Every time I was sick after that day, she'd stay home with me and watch a movie.  She'd take my temperature with her hand flat on my forehead and at night she'd have my dad carry me to my room.  We had tradition, we had rituals.  We had moments that I haven't been able to share with anyone else.  I lied to her over and over again for seventeen years now, but every time I call her and tell her I'm sick, she always remembers this day, too.

Last week, I called her and told her the mountain cedar was blowing.  I told her that my eyes itched and how I didn't want to go to work.  She told me about her chicken soup with big noodles and roasted chicken.  Carrots and celery and oil.  She told me who I used to eat it and ask for seconds and thirds.  She told me how she wished she could be here now, in my kitchen in Texas, making it for me.  I lied to her again and said, "Yeah, me too."

Instead, I did it myself, like so many things these days.  This soup is an apology, a memory, a souvenir from when we all played sick and tried to get out of school with the flu.  It's a revisionist tale of how life should have gone.  It's to my mother who was 25 and young when she had me.  It's to a little boy who still has family in Kentucky he's never met.  It's to the 1,500 miles in any direction to the closest people I love.  It's a warm soup, a comforting soup.  It's a soup you eat when the tornado heat breaks and you have three small children to stop crying.  It's the soup you reheat when the dollar has to stretch because you're saving up to move out of a house where your daughter sleeps in the laundry room.  It's a soup for a home, not for a house.

Chicken Noodle Soup

Ingredients:

• 2 large chicken breasts, defrosted
• 3 sprigs rosemary, divided
• 2 lemons, cut into wedges
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 3 carrots, diced
• 3 stalks celery, diced
• 1 large yellow onion, diced
• 1 head of garlic, minced
• 96 oz chicken stock (as always, preferably homemade, but there is a lot of flavor in the soup for store-bought)
• 1 1/2 tablespoon chicken base (found in supermarkets)
• 1/2 tablespoon lemon pepper
• 1 tablespoon pepper
• 16 oz egg noodles, cooked separately in another pot

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 450
2. Rip two aluminum sheets off big enough to wrap your chicken in.  Place chicken breasts on respective foils and rub salt, pepper, and olive oil all over.  Add four lemon wedges per chicken breast and rosemary.  Wrap tightly.  Bake on sheet for 25 minutes or until cooked through.
3. Set chicken aside to cool.
4. Begin on the mirepoix.  In a large dutch oven, heat butter and oil over medium-high heat.  Before butter burns and when oil is almost smoking, add carrots, celery, and onion.  Cook down 10-15 minutes and stir occasionally, until vegetables are tender and onions are translucent
5. Add garlic and remaining sprig of rosemary (diced finely).  Cook only for a minute to release some flavors and not burn, stirring constantly.
6. Pour in chicken stock.  Allow to heat through and bring to a low boil for five minutes.  While waiting on that, tear the cooled chicken breasts into bite-sized chunks with your hands or a fork.
7. Add the chicken base, pepper, and lemon pepper.  Stir thoroughly to ensure that the seasonings have incorporated into the soup
8. Add the shredded chicken
9. Cover and let simmer on low while you prepare the egg noodles in a separate pot (follow package instructions here, but add a little bit of chicken stock to the liquid for some added flavor)
10. Drain noodles and add to soup.  Simmer to warm noodles up.
11. Serve with Laura Calder's Miracle Boule and have for the rest of the week