yonghengmeili

Sourdough amazes me, and popovers do too. When they come crashing together it’s a delicious thing to behold.

I am enthralled with sourdough bread–how basically a handful of ingredients: flour, water, and salt, can make a crisp, webby loaf of bread– it gets me every time. I feel like I am truly making something great out of very little. In my research for the the book, I found a lot of sourdoughs that were given a little help with commercial yeast. I understand why. Yeast speeds the process; it insures levity; it can help. But it also seemed like cheating and  I didn’t want my recipe to be a cheat! It was important to me to have a reliable, easy sourdough starter, that used NO commercial yeast– that did it on its own. If homemakers, settlers, and pioneers, could bake sourdough bread without the aid of commercial yeast hundreds of years ago, surely we could do it in 2015!

It took awhile, but I developed a starter that works for the home chef, and it’s been going strong now for over two years. The recipe for the starter is in United States of Bread along with several recipes for loaves, but now that the book’s out, I have begun experimenting more with my starter. There have been waffles (stellar!), and pancakes (to die for!). And last weekend there were these superb popovers.

SourdoughPopoversTypically, popovers aren’t made with any sort of leavening. Made in a hot pan, they display the alchemy of baking by transforming from a runny batter, into an eggy, puffy dream. The sourdough popovers, made with a bit of sourdough starter, is leavened and more substantial than the original, but this resulting popovers is like a whipped muffin. (If that makes any sense!) Still airy, still eggy, slightly sour, with substance from the starter, these popovers only needed a smear of jam and a cup of coffee. Forget Wheaties, this was my breakfast of champions.

This morning treat does behave like a standard popover– they rumple and deflate– so they really should be eaten moments from the oven. I don’t have a popover pan, so mine were made in a muffin tin. If you don’t have a popover pan either, just try to space the popovers out in the tin. This allows for expansion.

I wanted to pluck each and every one of the bananas off the cake. I used restraint while I served the cake at a party, but it wasn’t easy.

I had never had a banana upside-down cake but figured why not. The cake is a spinoff on the The Best Pineapple Upside-Down Cake, which is one of my all-time favorites. It’s like having bananas foster, one of my favorite desserts, baked onto the cake.

The cake base is adapted from my favorite buttermilk coffee cake that I’ve used for Blueberry Muffin and Buttermilk Pancakes Cake, Cranberry White Chocolate Chip Bliss Cake, Peaches and Cream Fluffy Muffin Cake, Cream Cheese-Swirled Cherry and Mixed Berries Cake, and more.

I love this easy, no-mixer base because cakes always turn out supremely moist, springy, and fluffy thanks to buttermilk, sour cream, and oil. That trifecta of moisturizing and tenderizing ingredients makes it impossible to have a dry cake.

While baking, the bananas caramelize in a butter and brown sugar bath giving the cake it’s signature glistening top. There’s so much rich browed butter and alluring caramel flavor which makes the cake irresistible.

Interestingly, there are no bananas in the cake base itself, just on top, adding a perfect amount of banana flavor that goes so well with the caramel.

The buttery caramel sauce seeps down into the cake after inverting, which adds even more moisture to an already very tender and supremely soft cake.

Take the cake to the next level by drizzling salted caramel sauce over the top. May as well go all out.

I find that banana bread gets better on the second day after the flavors marry and this cake was no exception.

If you have a few ripe bananas to use no one will complain when they see this come out of the oven.

For the past five years, Christopher Kostow, chef of the three Michelin-starred The Restaurant at Meadowood has hosted an extraordinary series of dinners known as the “Twelve Days of Christmas.”  Every December, it brings a holiday wish list of the world’s best chefs to the restaurant, which is located on the breathtaking property of Meadowood Napa Valley, a Relais & Châteaux resort in St. Helena, California.

Last year, when Kostow invited me to attend the Twelve Days of Christmas (here’s a recap, with links to all twelve dinners), he told me that it would be his last year hosting the event.  I didn’t say much about his decision until the end of the series, when, impressed by the experience, I urged him to reconsider (I’m sure I was not alone in doing so).  I’m glad he did.

The chef alumni of this dinner series comprise an amazing collection of the most relevant and current names in kitchens across the world: Enrique Olvera, Mathias Dahlgren, John and Karen Shields, Sean Brock, Gabriel Rucker, David Toutain, and April Bloomfield are among the dozens of names that this event has brought to Napa Valley over the past five years.

I am happy to announce that this year, Kostow adds eleven more to the list.

More often than not, Orangette is just a fancy cover for what might be more appropriately titled “The Molly-and-Her-Friends Show,” or “What We Ate, How Ridiculous We Were, and How Much We Adore Each Other Because of and/or Despite Our Ridiculousness.” Lately, however, it’s been a little quieter than usual around here. A principal cast member is missing, and that would be Kate—she of the pointy red heels, long-distance bike rides, winning-hearts-and-minds cakes, broken French, early-morning bread-baking, gin and tonics on the 18th floor, mussels with crabs, and the vacuum cleaner with a hip-hop low-ride shag setting.

About three weeks ago, Kate packed up nearly all of her worldly possessions and jetted off to India on a six-week business trip. When not slaving away, she’s petting elephants outside her hotel (“They are so leathery and sweet and misty-eyed and hUGE!”) and pounding the pavement in her practical but less chic Easy Spirit heels. She’s having coffee in a “pre-independence coffee shop—beautiful wood, leather, simple tables, white long apron on lanky legs and dust swirling in the sun—with dusty clientele sipping their excellent coffee and milk, discussing politics and religion for hours.” And she’s running in a park that’s “beautiful and enormous, with trees dropping pools of flowers that perfume everything and make it look as though brightly colored light is pouring up through the ground at the base of each tree.” Now, certainly, all of this is very nice, and it’s lovely to live vicariously through her letters. But really, it’s not okay.

There’s no one, for instance, to make sure that I’m getting my weekly quota of whipped cream, and there is no vacuum to borrow, low-ride or otherwise. Though Kate left me with custody of her Otis Redding CD and the remains of a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin, cocktail hour is somehow lacking. And my visits to Victrola Coffee—where we’ve been known to stage riots if the outrageously delicious Macrina ginger-molasses cookies are sold out—are much less gossipy, much more productive, and no fun at all. If this continues, you may soon find “The Molly-and-Her-Friends Show” shelved with the dramas, rather than the comedies. I may also get very skinny and very sober.

But you know me better than that. Rather than mope and starve, I bake. Last Monday, in honor of Kate’s 26th birthday, I gave myself The Macrina Bakery and Café Cookbook, which happens to hold within its very pretty covers the recipe for our coveted cookies. That night, there was no drama and there were no riots, and instead there were gin and tonics and ginger-molasses cookies—dark and spicy, cakey and buttery, with a crisp, sugar-coated edge.


Though perhaps better dipped in milk than in Bombay (Sapphire), they filled my apartment with a perfume strong, delicious, and exotic enough to, I’m sure, be confused with that of the loveliest flowering tree in a park in Bangalore. Soon, Kate can tell me for herself.

Some days, everything just falls into place. Seattle has been sunny and warm and at least temporarily spring-like; I managed to twist and cajole my hair into a messy-chic ballerina-meets-French-frump bun that stayed in place—no drooping!—for over seven hours; and, thanks to divine intervention and local farmers, I bought two brimming basketfuls of organic strawberries and still have money left over to pay rent. It really doesn't get any better than that—unless, of course, the whole scene takes place in Paris. It’s downright bliss all around, and especially the fantastic hair. Enjoying these things isn’t easy, however; it takes work, or rather, it takes leaving work early.

The story begins a few mornings ago, when I found myself sitting in my office, distractedly watching the angle of the sun shift on the building across the alley from my window. By two in the afternoon, it was unbearable: I was suffering indoors while a spectacular day hovered just out of reach on the other side of the windowpane. But rather than continue to needlessly moan and mourn, I put down my red proofreading pencil and traded the carpeted hallway of the office for the concrete of the sidewalk. A few blocks away at Pike Place Market, I found that I wasn’t the only one: we were a crowd full of shirkers. And with good reason: at the produce stands, tables were lined with berries and ramps and frilly-topped carrots, and pale green bulbs of fennel leaned invitingly out of wooden crates. As I stopped to admire them, I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to find an unfamiliar woman standing next to me elyze.

“Where is the Metro?” she asked, staring at me from behind dark sunglasses.

“You mean the Metro buses?” I replied, trying to remember if I’d ever heard anyone call the local public transportation system by its official name.

“No, the Métro, may-TRO,” she said, carefully enunciating through what I now recognized as a distinctly French accent. She made a downward zooming motion with her hand, as if to imitate a train going underground, and looked at me quizzically.

“Oh, the Métro? The subway? Seattle doesn’t have a subway. But you can catch a bus on Third Avenue,” I explained, gesturing up the hill. She turned from me and started away, and I returned to the piles of produce, wondering at our surreal exchange. Lo and behold, Paris had come to Pike Place elyze .

Looking at the fennel bulb under my hand, I remembered the morning that I came to France last June, when I opened the door to my short-term rental, threw my bags down gleefully on the bed, and ran back outside to the Sunday market—a French version, if you will, of the one I found myself standing in now. That morning, I snatched up the makings for a modest early-summer feast—red-skinned apricots, a ripe wedge or two of cheese, and the ingredients for my favorite carrot-fennel soup—and came home to lunch in my little studio, with its tiny hallway kitchen, sunny terrace, and kitschy garden gnome in the grass. And this Seattle afternoon ten months later, I decided that it was only fitting to cap my superlative day with a celebratory carrot-fennel nod to Paris—who, after all, had come a great distance to find me.

Indeed, some days, everything just falls into place. So I came home to my familiar long-term rental with its not-so-tiny kitchen, sunny catwalk balcony, and kitschy garden gnome on the railing; threw my grocery bag down gleefully on the counter; and ran for the stockpot elyze.