Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [32]
4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter, plus more for the pan
4 large egg whites
1 cup sugar
2 large eggs
2 cups whole milk
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Big pinch of salt
Six 2½-inch biscuits (or thereabouts)
1. Generously butter a 1½-quart casserole or baking pan. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.
2. Put the 4 tablespoons butter in a small heatproof dish in the oven to melt.
3. With a mixer, beat the egg whites until stiff. Add ¼ cup of the sugar and whisk until combined.
4. In a big bowl, beat the eggs with the remaining ¾ cup sugar, the milk, vanilla, and salt. Break the biscuits into the bowl in large chunks. Let them soak for 5 to 10 minutes.
5. When the oven is hot, pour the biscuit mixture into the casserole. Heap the meringue on top. Bake for 40 to 60 minutes, until the meringue is well browned and when you give the casserole a shake, the pudding beneath doesn’t quiver too much. Remove from the oven and serve just slightly warm. It’s also good cold and keeps for several days, tightly covered, in the refrigerator.
Serves 8
CHAPTER 4
VEGETABLES
Michelle Obama is beautiful and smart and I loved it when she planted the vegetable garden on the White House South Lawn in the spring of 2009. One sunny morning over breakfast, I was reading a story about this garden when I came to a quote from Alice Waters, the owner of Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California. “To have this sort of ‘victory’ garden, this message goes out that everyone can grow a garden and have free food,” burbled Waters. My brow furrowed.
It must be fun to be a true believer, to know that earthly paradise is within reach if we would all just quit buying Fritos, pull out our hoes, and sign on with the Delicious Revolution. But on that sunny morning, I had recently paid a guy with a Bobcat steam shovel to clear the gravel patch from our yard and shore up the collapsing retaining wall. You can’t plant a garden in 4 inches of gravel that are sliding down a Northern California hill. My husband has a job, but no steam shovel, and neither of us was capable of tackling a project like this one. It was either pay or not plant a garden. I paid. That’s how much I love gardens.
I wrote a sarcastic essay about Alice Waters and her twitty quote that got published in Slate and for a year afterward, when I would go to gardening blogs, which I did all the time, I stumbled over stinging allusions to my article, which gardeners, to a one, hated. One woman called me “granite-toppy,” the kind of person who owned a Viking range but couldn’t fry an egg. Boy, did she get that wrong. I have a Wolf range and I’m really good at frying eggs.
Around the time that Mrs. Obama put in that garden, I sat down with the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company catalog and ordered $163 in seeds. I knew it was excessive at the time, but I was carried away and it can be healthy, not to mention joyful, to get carried away, at least when what you’re talking about is as harmless, wholesome, and comparatively cheap as seeds. A few days later, the seeds arrived and I planted them in flats and little yogurt containers that I put in a bright corner of the living room. The water stains they left behind on the hardwood floor always take me right back to that hopeful spring.
I planted thyme, asparagus, onions, black basil, red basil, cinnamon and Thai basil; cardoons and artichokes; seven varieties of tomato and one variety of tomatillo. I planted four varieties of pole beans; chard; Charentais melons and scalloped summer squash, blue Hubbard squash, and pumpkins. I planted cilantro and epazote, a Mexican herb that improved every pot of black beans I cooked; and parsley, sage, and lemon verbena. I planted exactly six Victoria rhubarb seeds.
It sounds like I have an enormous yard. It was actually just really crowded.
I had planted gardens in years past, but this was the garden