Glancing catch. Plus, apple cider doughnut cakes.
I’m fine. But, I did something dumb. I tried to stop a falling knife.
It’s possibly the first lesson when working in a kitchen, step back and let it go. Still, the other morning, I wasn’t thinking. The knife tumbled with other things on my board. I reached instinctively. I wasn’t aiming for the blade but it found me in a glancing catch. Two nicks on my smallest finger, by the middle knuckle. Hairline and unnoticed until I do something like juice a lemon.
There is a weirdness of starting a chatty newsletter in a pandemic. At the tipping point of climate change. As race and reckoning is on our tongues. How many people are out there with true, actual cuts and wounds right now?
It feels oblivious to talk about anything else. This morning the words I’d written for today felt wrong, awkward as I said them aloud one last time. I didn’t publish. I saved them instead.
Since last we talked, I made garlic confit, one jar to live in the back of the fridge, up on the top shelf on the right, beside the big batch of chile oil, and smaller containers for the freezer. I fiddled with the house sandwich bread recipe. I made the same cake* four times in 10 days, dialling in the details. Variations lived under glass on the counter and others went off to friends.
Summer collapsed into autumn, and somehow that felt the most surreal—more so than the slow, unfolding glow of summer from spring. This was the season that was and wasn’t, a dream and waking.
YOU MIGHT WANT TO MAKE THIS
*These cakes sit on the counter like paired slabs of autumnal familiarity. They keep well for a week, improving after a day. Out of the oven the texture is almost spongy; jaunty and open. As the cake sits, it settles, relaxing into a sturdiness that is exactly right and as it should be. The crust establishes itself with a gentle crunch as it meets the teeth, while the centre fluff gives way with a velvet weight. In other words, it turns from cake to cake doughnut, so that’s pretty great.
APPLE CIDER DOUGHNUT CAKE (Makes 2 loaves, which pack especially nicely for a porch-drop off.)
Grease two 8-by-4-inch loaf pans and line with parchment paper on long sides. Preheat an oven to 350°F | 176°C.
In a medium bowl, whisk together 225 g all-purpose flour, 130 g whole wheat flour, 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg, and 1 teaspoon medium-grained kosher salt.
Brown 225 g unsalted butter in a medium saucepan to a proper hazelnut shade. Save 3 tablespoons, then pour the remaining in a large bowl.
In the same saucepan simmer 2 cups apple cider until reduced by half. Pull off heat and stir in 1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce and leave to cool.
Whisk 200 g granulated sugar and 100 g light brown (golden yellow) sugar into the large bowl of brown butter. Add 3 eggs, one at a time, beating well after each. Stir in the scraped seeds of 1 vanilla bean or 2 teaspoons vanilla extract. Stir in half the dry ingredients, followed by the apple cider mixture, then finally the rest of the dry. Scape into the prepared pans and bake until golden, puffed, and set (which is to say, bouncy when prodded at the middle and a toothpick stabbed in the same spot comes out clean), around 55 minutes. Cool in pans on a rack for 15 minutes.
Meanwhile stir together another 1/3 cup granulated sugar with 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon and 1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg in a quarter-sheet pan or similar rimmed plate. Rewarm the reserved brown butter if needed.
Pull a loaf from the confines of its pan. Dab brown butter on one side with a pastry brush and lay that side into the spiced sugar. Repeat, anointing sides and then carefully rolling in sugar until completely coated. Do the same for the second loaf, then let both cool completely on the rack, now set over the pan to catch any wayward sugar.
A note. I made this in a bundt as well, but preferred the texture yielded by the loaf pans.
Another recipe: Continuing with sugar-dusted, cinnamon-scented delights, Benjamina Ebueshi’s Cinnamon and Cranberry Doughnuts.
THINGS I WOULD TEXT IF I HAD YOUR NUMBER
Yesterday was Orange Shirt Day, to recognize the systemic cultural genocide of Canada’s indigenous populations by the Residential School system. The last school closed in 1996, but we are not even that far removed from those atrocities. In the final hours preceding her death this week, Joyce Echaquan bravely broadcast the racism of those meant to care for her.
Downstairs you’ll find my great-grandparents’ brass tiffin carrier; it has five levels of round containers and the knob from the top is long gone. In other words, it is perfect. Considering the 100-ish-years of its life, the meals it has held, bring a serene comfort. As a move to create more heirlooms, I took pleasure in putting my name down for this masala dabba.
This piece brings up important criticisms of how, in an attempt at “mainstream” success, non-white restaurants and food writing still regularly position our traditions and cuisine in relation to that mainstream, rather than valid in their own right.
Tracee Ellis Ross spoke of her active effort to “remain teachable.” Been sitting with that.
The conversation at NPR’s Code Switch regarding the term POC.
Michelle Buteau’s Welcome to Buteaupia, her comedy special. She is joy, she is more luminous than a gold-sequin suit, she is our accessible Beyoncé (her words).