Lobster is great celebration food. Doesn’t anything sound better with lobster in it? Apparently Ramen Halu agrees, since its highly touted, limited-edition 7th anniversary special was … lobster ramen.

I’ve been a little disillusioned about ramen lately. I first discovered rich, porky tonkotsu ramen in L.A. about a decade ago (!!) at Daikokuya, but recently I’ve heard it’s gone downhill and that the milkiness of the broth comes not from long-boiled pork bones but from actual milk. Then, just as I discovered the flavorful but not too rich shio ramen at Santouka and the complex shoyu ramen at Gardena Ramen, we moved to the Bay Area. There are actually two decent ramen places within walking distance from my house, which is probably more than most people outside of Japan can say, but they’re nothing to get really excited about.

The best ramen joint in the area, people say, is Ramen Halu. I had only been there once, when I was pregnant and feeling pickier about food than I have since I was a kid and went through a phase where I ate nothing but beef stew. I told my husband I wanted udon; he took me for ramen. For the record, udon’s fat, chewy noodles come in a clean, almost austere broth; Ramen Halu’s signature broth is more like gravy. My memory of that meal is shrouded in a haze of nausea.

But now I’m un-pregnant, and lobster ramen sounded pretty good. So my friend Daveena and I went to check it out.

We sat down, our bowls came, I took a taste and I was in love again. This was amazing stuff. Pork, chicken and lobster shells and heads had gone into the broth, but if I hadn’t read that on the menu I could only have said that it was dark, complex and flavorful. The thin, whole wheat noodles were toothsome, with just a little more heft and flavor than the regular kind. I was so absorbed in eating those noodles, I forgot about the lobster.

I had worried that the lobster itself might be a letdown, poor in quality or overcooked or scant. But about half a tail’s worth of lobster meat floated in my bowl, and it was sweet and barely firm. Perfection was complete.

The next week, I came back with Wes and the baby for another round. It was just as good as I had remembered. I only felt a little bad when the baby, who had been sleeping in his stroller for most of the meal, awoke near the end and I looked up from my bowl to see him watching me with his dark eyes, dreamily gnawing his fist. Someday, kiddo. Someday.

Ramen Halu
375-M Saratoga Avenue
San Jose, CA 95129
(408) 246-3933

Today is my first Mother’s Day, but since my two-month-old didn’t make me breakfast in bed, I baked myself some scones and thought back on the showers that my friends threw me when he was just a baby bump. A shower, I found, is kind of like a wedding: You’re the star. Or rather, your unborn child is; the spotlight of attention focused on Baby TBD made me feel giddy with its reflected glow.

In San Francisco, my friends Daveena and Jen threw me a shower at Jen’s gorgeous place.

I was charmed by the place settings; Daveena says she surfed Ebay for weeks to put together perfectly mismatched (yet somehow coordinating) sets of Limoges china.

And the sandwiches, oh, the sandwiches! Also the result of Daveena’s obsessive creative thinking, the flavor combinations blew my mind. She bought tea-cooked eggs from 99 Ranch, a Chinese supermarket, and used the smoky, aromatic whites to make egg salad with mayo and watercress. The yolks were deviled with wasabi to make canapes topped with tobiko. Red-cooked pork belly, another Chinese classic, got layered into sandwiches with sriracha-spiked mayonnaise and pickled green onions. Goat cheese laced with shreds of green-black nori was set against thin slices of red-rimmed radish in another delicate combo, and Vietnamese banh mi inspired a sandwich of tea-smoked chicken with diced pickled cucumbers and jalapenos and soy-fish sauce mayo.

I couldn’t make up my mind which I liked most and had to have seconds… and some thirds.

Down in Los Angeles, my friend Jess’ also fabulous place was the site of a second baby shower. Here, the spread was from my favorite bakery-caterer, Clementine, complete with their delicious, flaky scones (apparently you can buy them by the bag, frozen, and bake yourself) and unbelievably creamy deviled eggs. She also had Fortnum & Mason teas in a cool assortment of teapots.

Although there was a ton of food, Jess said she panicked that there wouldn’t be enough. (Ha!)

So she made some dark-chocolate-dipped macaroons, just in case. They were perfectly moist and not too sweet, set off by the slight bitterness of the chocolate. I could hardly manage to eat one, but took a few to go, and later that day they made the perfect plane snack.

Clementine’s deviled eggs

6 hard-boiled extra-large eggs
1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon mayonnaise
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 1/2 teaspoons, tightly packed, of horseradish (adjust to taste)
salt and pepper
Radishes and chives for garnish

Cut eggs lengthwise and remove yolks into small bowl, keeping the egg white halves intact. You won’t use four of the egg white halves; save for another use. Mash the yolks with a fork or whisk until very fine, then add mayonnaise, mustard and horseradish, and salt and pepper to taste. Blend with a rubber spatula until creamy.

Using two spoons, as if dropping cookie dough, divide filling among the eight remaining egg white halves. Make radish sticks by cutting each radish into thin slices, then cutting the slices into sticks with some red skin at either end. Top the deviled eggs with the radish sticks and a sprinkling of chopped chives. Refrigerate until ready to serve.

Clementine
1751 Ensley Avenue
Century City, Los Angeles
(310) 552-1080

When you’re in no condition to cook and a food-centric holiday comes around, it’s great to have friends who do. (Big ups to Dan, designer of this blog, who picked us up when we locked ourselves out of our apartment without even our car keys.) We went to Matias and Jenny’s baby-friendly pad for a group Easter dinner, where a flavorful smoked crown roast of pork from the German butcher shop Dittmer’s was the main course. What really impressed me, though, was the coconut cake with a silky, fluffy marshmallow frosting. I had made such a cake once - Alton Brown may call the topping “7-Minute Frosting,” but whipping the egg whites in a bowl balanced over a pot of simmering water made for seven of the most arduous minutes of my life. Fortunately, Jenny told me that she had discovered an easier way to achieve the marshmallow effect: Just pour boiling hot sugar syrup right into the egg whites.

Her recipe tweaks one from Allysa Torey of New York’s Magnolia Bakery, one of my favorite places. It’s now mostly known (and sometimes vilified) for launching the recent cupcake craze, but I fell in love with the simple deliciousness of their homestyle American baking when I was a grad student. Plus, their cupcakes at that time cost half as much as those at the new gourmet cupcakeries.

And speaking of marshmallow fluff, I don’t really enjoy eating Peeps, but I love seeing what people do with them in the Washington Post’s annual diorama contest, Peeps Show.

Coconut Layer Cake
Adapted from a recipe from Allysa Torey of Magnolia Bakery
Makes 1 cake

For the cake:
2 sticks (1 cup) softened unsalted butter
2 cups sugar
4 large eggs at room temperature - separate 2 of the eggs
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup coconut milk
2 3/4 cups cake flour
1 TB baking powder
dash of salt
1 tsp vanilla extract

For the filling:
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup coconut milk
1/2 cup sugar
2 TB all-purpose flour
One 7-ounce package sweetened, shredded coconut
1 tsp vanilla extract

For the frosting:
3 large egg whites
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
>1/2 cup cold water
1 1/2 cups sugar
3/8 teaspoon cream of tartar
One 7-ounce package sweetened, shredded coconut

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease three 9-by-2-inch cake pans, line pans with waxed paper, and grease the paper. Dust pans with flour, shaking out excess. Set aside.

2. Make the cake: In a large bowl, with an electric mixer, cream the butter, add the sugar, a little at a time, and beat the mixture until light and fluffy. Add the 2 eggs yolks and 2 whole eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Combine milk and coconut milk in a measuring cup.  Combine dry ingredients in a separate bowl and add to the butter mixture in four parts, alternating with the milk mixture  and the vanilla extract, beating well after each addition. Beat the 2 egg whites until you have soft peaks.  Fold into cake batter.  Divide the batter among the cake pans. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until a cake tester inserted into the centers of cakes comes out clean. Let cakes cool in pans for 10 minutes. Invert onto racks and let cool completely.

3. Make the filling: In a saucepan combine the milk and coconut milk, sugar, and flour, and whisk mixture until smooth. Cook over moderately high heat, whisking constantly, for 5 minutes, or until thickened and bubbly. Remove from heat and add the coconut.  Stir in the vanilla extract. Cover and cool to room temperature.

4. Assemble the cake: When the cake has cooled, spread half the filling between the first two layers of cake, then the other half between the second and third layers. The cake should be assembled so it can be iced as soon as the frosting is completed.

5. Make the frosting: In a large bowl, with an electric mixer, combine the egg whites and vanilla extract. In a saucepan over moderately high heat, combine the water with the sugar and cream of tartar. As mixture begins to bubble at edges, stir once to make sure the sugar is dissolved completely, then let come to a rolling boil (about 2-3 minutes). Remove immediately from heat.

6. With the electric mixer on medium-high, beat the whites and the vanilla extract until foamy, about 1 minute. Without turning off mixer, pour the sugar syrup into the beaten egg whites in a thin, steady stream. Continue beating constantly, on medium-high speed, for about 5 minutes, or until stiff peaks form but frosting is still creamy. Frost top and sides of cake immediately and sprinkle top with coconut.

Yeah, I’ve been away, and I have a damned good excuse. That’s me, after squeezing out more than 7 pounds of screaming baby. Oh, and that’s baby. He calmed down a bit.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the traumatizing effects of childbirth as much as this: I ate hospital food for six meals, and loved it. After I arrived in the postpartum ward in the early evening, more exhausted than I’d ever been in my life, a nurse handed me a cheese sandwich and it seemed like the most glorious thing I had ever tasted. And this was no gourmet sandwich de fromage. It was good old processed Kraft American slices on the kind of soft, flexible bread that pretends to be whole wheat but is really a mixture of refined and whole grain flour. I was even more excited when a whole tray arrived with my real dinner.

What was there to love about chicken breast lubricated with some kind of clear fat, plain white rice and steamed vegetables on the side? And at lunch the next day, a soft taco of ground beef flavored with laughably mild spices on a flour, not corn, tortilla?

Well, there was the primal appeal of simple food, not simple in the I-worked-on-a-farm-in-France-for-a-year-and-communed-with-the-earth way but completely utilitarian and unpretentious. I grew up with my mother’s unimaginative, assimilationist American cooking, so perhaps this is just my comfort food.

There was the luxury of being waited upon and eating in bed, something I can never quite pull off at home because I don’t have an eating-in-bed tray with legs and if I wanted to actually enjoy my meal, I’d have to cook it myself, then climb back into bed and serve myself, which undermines the lovely indulgence of the concept.

There was the childish delight in being able to order off a menu while lying in said bed, like on an international flight. There was even acidophilus milk for the lactose-intolerant, like me, although I later learned from a lactation consultant, “You don’t need to drink milk to make milk.”

And there was the minor miracle of a meal delayed 20 minutes by a screaming baby that is still warm because the plate comes encased in this nifty insulated shell.

We’ve all heard that hunger is the best sauce of all, but those six meals reminded me that many other factors contribute to deliciousness.

On our way back from Aspen, I plotted another chowhound stop (ok, this one was thanks to Roadfood). Mom’s Cafe, write Gourmet’s Jane and Michael Stern, is famous for its “scones,” discs of fried yeasted dough that are kissing cousins of the sopaipillas you’d find just one state south, in Arizona.

Although the Sterns advise getting to Mom’s at breakfast for fresh, hot scones, the truth is that scones are always made to order. Who wants fried dough that’s been sitting around? I had mine with a “side” of chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes and green beans. The steak wasn’t as crisp or spicy of crust as I’d like, but it was all good, homey stuff. The scone was appealing in the way that fried dough always is, and there was a haunting sweetness to the dough. But while Mom’s touts its honey butter as a topping, the bottle of honey butter on our table had a list of ingredients that was mostly artificial. Not so the original recipe for honey butter, which was displayed on the wall in an article about the restaurant from the Salt Lake City Tribune.

There was also pie — this is pie country, seemingly — and it was good.

Renee Baker’s Scones
From the Salt Lake City Tribune

7 cups flour, plus extra for kneading
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 TB salt
1 1/2 packages (1 1/2 TB) yeast
1/2 cup (1 stick) melted margarine or vegetable oil

Combine flour in a large bowl with salt and sugar, reserving a tablespoon of the sugar to proof yeast. Make a well in center of the dry ingredients.

Dissolve the yeast in 1/4 cup warm water with 1 tablespoon sugar. When dissolved, stir in 2 1/4 cups warm water and melted margarine or oil. Slowly pour yeast mixture into flour mixture, mixing well.

Knead dough until smooth and satiny on a floured surface, using extra flour (up to 1 cup) as needed.

Place dough in a greased bowl and brush top with melted butter. Cover and let rise until doubled in bulk. Punch down.

Pinch off pieces of dough and roll in hands to make little biscuits. Place on lightly greased pan and let rise until doubled.

Pick up each “biscuit” and stretch to flatten. Heat oil or fat to 375 degrees and fry the scones until golden on both sides. Serve with honey butter.

Honey Butter

2 sticks (1 cup) butter or margarine
1 1/4 cups honey
1 egg yolk

Combine and beat with electric mixer 10 minutes.

Mom’s Cafe
10 E. Main Street
Salina, UT 84654
(435) 529-3921

Although in Aspen, the bill of fare rarely lives up to the bill, halfway down the valley in Carbondale is a restaurant I’ve thoroughly enjoyed twice now. Its website reads like a manifesto of seasonal, local food and gourmet ingredients — you get the impression of a Chez Panisse in the mountains. While not quite as precious, Six89 manages to keep excellent food within reach of the common man.

Although the economic troubles had kept many away from Aspen, the restaurant seemed fairly busy on a Thursday night. Maybe the “appetite stimulus plan” was responsible: any appetizer, soup or salad, plus a main dish, for $26.89. It’s billed as being for locals, but it’s for anyone, really.

My family was seated in the main room, where some very pretty holiday decorations were out, and the atmosphere was warm even though we couldn’t see the fireplace from our table. It was a bit loud, but a feeling of celebration was in the air.

I don’t think I’ve ever asked so many questions of a server, as we all ate and marveled and wondered: Where is the blue cheese in this salad from? (Point Reyes.) Are the crisp fried chickpeas cooked first, or do they fry the dried peas? (Cooked first.) What’s in the gnocchi? (An Italian truffled cheese.)

I made a meal out of two appetizers, the sweetbreads with apple and glazed Berkshire pork belly, and had so many tastes of others’ food that I was barely able to finish the second dish.

It’s taken me a while to finish writing this up, so my memory of the details of the meal have faded, but what remains is a warm memory of a golden evening.
Six89
689 Main Street
Carbondale, CO
(970) 963-6890

In a town where restaurants come and go from year to year, Wienerstube has long been a standby restaurant for my family. Almost every ski vacation featured one morning when we’d walk over and enjoy a hearty, leisurely breakfast. My dad recalls a table that would inevitably be occupied by U. Mich. faculty in-season; my mom found the waitress’ dirndls charming.

But things change; my parents report that on their last visit, the food and the coffee were terrible. And no more dirndls — although I have to say, I felt relieved on the waitresses’ account.

I wasn’t sure whether we’d be visiting the Weinerstube this year, till I read that a new Austrian chef had taken over. Passing the restaurant, I looked at the menu for New Year’s Eve dinner (which I surmise never came off), and my appetite was piqued. So the next day, skirting some crime tape from the previous day’s bomb scare, my dad and I stopped in for lunch.

Turns out lunch is a good time to check out what the new chef is up to, as the lunch menu is more authentically Austrian than the wider-ranging dinner menu.

Dad had wurst “salad,” strips of fine-grained sausage, Emmenthaler and onion in vinaigrette. I was really interested by this, as it was one of those dishes that redefined my idea of a salad, like baba ghanoush, or the first time I had a single-vegetable salad, in France. You can have a salad of sausage and cheese! Madness, but in a good way. It also came with some truly excellent baguette.

My schnitzel was crisp and tasty (which is all you can really say about schnitzel at its best), served with a lemon half properly sheathed in a muslin shower cap. It came with German potato salad, typically tangy and mayo-free; and orange-flavored carrot salad, a nice twist on a basic.

Service, alas, was atrociously clueless.

Wienerstube Restaurant
633 E. Hyman Avenue
Aspen, CO 81611
(970) 925-3357

The dining scene in Aspen is a collage of dissatisfaction. The average meal is pricey, a nice night out insanely expensive — and even then there’s no guarantee that you’ll be wowed by what you get. You can go “budget” with ethnic meals, but a mediocre fajita lunch will still run you about $25. And on the mountain, lunch for two — a bowl of chili, a quesadilla, and drinks — can ring up as $42 at the cashier’s stand.

So a $6 sandwich is a particularly good find. I was at first disappointed to see that the longstanding popcorn wagon across the street from the rather longer-standing Wheeler Opera House (since 1889) is now more like a lunch wagon, its formerly old-fashioned red exterior now a bland stamped aluminum. Worse, while the wagon and its adjacent fire pit used to be a late night hangout (open till 2 am), it now closes at 7!

After the initial bitterness died down, I noticed the sign advertising “Italian piadinas.” I thought this was a colossal typo of “panino,” till I was catching up on Food & Wine magazine back at the condo and found that it’s a legitimate kind of sandwich. So I thought I might as well give it a try - popcorn and hot dogs are apparently off the menu.

I really wanted to try the un-Italian “Jimmy the Greek” sandwich, but they were out of pork. So I got the Italiano instead: prosciutto, mozzarella and a salad’s worth of arugula in balsamic vinaigrette, wrapped in a flatbread freshly toasted on the griddle. Yum! It was one tasty sandwich — so much so that the next day, when I came back and they were still out of pork, I had it again.

I also stopped by Main Street Bakery for a snack one afternoon. It’s a rare outpost of unpretentiousness, where locals and out-of-towners hang out or grab baked goods to go. There’s a communal table or two, and one night I happened upon a Celtic jam session. The meals (breakfast and lunch) don’t seem that appealing, so I rarely eat there, but the small baked goods (scones, muffins, cookies, etc.) are pretty reliable.

This time, they had a couple plates of petits fours on the counter. These bite-sized cakes had an American twist: flavors like red velvet and carrot cake. Curious, I took a couple ($1 each). They were encased in white chocolate, and though I would have preferred a thinner shell, it preserved the moistness of the cake and icing. Could this be the follow-up to the cupcake craze?

The Popcorn Wagon
Mill Street at Cooper Avenue
Aspen

Main Street Bakery
201 E. Main Street, Aspen
(970) 925-6446

Our holiday getaway this year involved a roadtrip from California to Colorado by way of Utah. After spending a night in Zion Lodge (decent motel accommodations, mediocre food, stunning location in Zion National Park), we stopped for breakfast a couple hours later at Arshel’s Cafe in Beaver, UT, said to be well-known for its pies.

We were a little doubtful when we pulled up to the empty cafe with its pink diner decor  (ok, it was 11 a.m., a bit late for breakfast and early for lunch, but El Bambi truck stop down the street was hopping), but the place was spotless, our waitress was friendly, and breakfast turned out to be excellent: fluffy pancakes, biscuits smothered in sausagey cream gravy, housemade sausage patties. And yes, I had pie: apple cranberry, same as I had made for Thanksgiving. Arshel’s crust was way better than mine, tender and flaky, not too thick. On the other hand, I preferred my tarter filling; this one was good, but not special.

Unfortunately, after consuming a huge country breakfast Wes refused to expand the experiment by ordering more pie, so I can’t comment on the choco-PB or coconut cream. They looked lovely, though.

Arshel’s Cafe
711 N. Main Street
Beaver, UT 84713
(435) 438-2977

Several years ago, I dimly recall, I decided to make gift boxes of cookies for all my friends for Christmas. I pulled out an assortment of recipes, including rugelach and chocolate truffles, and proceeded to raise hell in my kitchen for two or three days. At the end, I was exhausted. I threw a party, packed the cookies in Chinese takeout boxes jazzed up with random slashes of gold paint, and begged my friends to take them out of my sight. Never again, I vowed.

How quickly we forget. With our nation officially in a recession, it seems everyone is trumpeting the virtues of homemade Christmas gifts. And not much is cheaper than eggs, flour and sugar. Once again, I hit the kitchen for a cookie extravaganza. I woke up early to knock off batches for a couple of friends who were leaving town this morning, and am now sitting surrounded by plates of cookies and the warm scents of cooked sugar and spices.

There were some heartbreaks along the way:

but all’s well that ends well.

Here’s the final score:

Whole wheat sables w/ chocolate bits: I’ve made these shortbread-like refrigerator cookies a couple times before and I love them, especially with cocoa nibs, which have the flavor of chocolate but not its sweetness or fattiness. Of course, the sense of virtuous restraint vanishes when you remember that the cookies are practically all butter and sugar. Whatever. Recipe from the L.A. Times, but their archive sucks and I enjoyed the beautifully written recipe review in the Wednesday Chef.

Maida Heatter’s gin-soaked raisin chocolate cookies: This is from Gourmet’s best cookies roundup, and for once I actually remember this recipe from having made it before. These are amazing, not just in flavor but also in concept. There’s hardly any flour — just two tablespoons. The bulk of the dough is confectioners’ sugar. They bake to a dry, crackly crust, but remain moist and gooey inside, thanks to the gin-soaked raisins. I can’t say that I taste the gin (I used Hendricks), but they seem decadent anyway. I imagine you can sub the alcohol of your choice, as long as it goes well with chocolate and raisins.

Gingerbread cookies: My complaint with most gingerbread cookies is that they just don’t taste like ginger, or anything but a generic blend of holiday spices. Not these. With ground and fresh ginger, and cardamom as well as allspice, cinnamon and cloves, they have a truly spicy kick. And you know how to take them over the top? By sandwiching them with rum buttercream.

Mocha toffee bars: These are very good, with strong coffee flavor. Unfortunately they were competing with my vivid taste memory of the chocolate-nut-covered shortbread bars one of the editors used to bring into my office around the holidays every year. Happily, I just heard back from one of my ex-coworkers, who said she’s going to ask for the recipe for me. Hooray!

Chocolate caramels with fleur de sel: They looked so pretty in the photograph, but … either my candy thermometer is broken or I don’t know how to use it. While I was stirring desperately and trying to get the temperature up to 255 degrees, an armorlike layer of burnt candy was forming on the bottom of the pan. It’s still there, after a couple rounds of boiling water. The candies are actually not bad — on par with See’s, one of my friends assured me — so I’m going to try to pass off the smoky note as deliberate. Burnt-sugar chocolate caramels, anyone?

Rosemary pine nut cookies: I really love the simple yet creative desserts I’ve had at Pizzeria Mozza in L.A.; well, basically, this one and the salted caramel butterscotch budino. I had these cookies on my first visit to the pizzeria, shortly after it opened. I don’t think I even ordered them; they wouldn’t have sounded like my kind of thing. One or two just came with my check, and the piney aroma of rosemary infusing these cookies was a revelation for me. They’re not too difficult to make at home, although I may have overcooked my nougat — thermometer problems again! — which definitely was not pliable at room temperature. Enter my good friend the microwave. But all’s well that ends well, and this recipe certainly did.

Raisin-filled sugar and spice cookies: These are my new favorite cookie: tender, buttery, and scented with my favorite spice, cardamom. I had to restrain myself from doubling the amount, and I’m glad I did — the butter carries the spice flavor very well, and I was using a fresh, pungent jar of spice from Penzeys. I only wish I’d paid more attention to the Wednesday Chef review in which Luisa pointed out that it is impossible to roll out the ultra-soft dough as specified in the recipe, or rather to transfer one sheet on top of the other with the fillings, as in making ravioli. Luisa opts to shape and fill them by hand; I think I like cutting out circles, then folding them in half like dumplings.

The smell of those raisin spice cookies reminds me of the one kind of Christmas cookie that I really did make with my mom when I was little: a simple butter cookie, the rounds stamped out from thinly rolled dough. We’d paint them, using tiny art-supply brushes, with a blend of egg yolk and food coloring. I’ve never bothered to make them on my own, scorning them as too simple, but that buttery scent brings back powerful memories of our old house, decorating the tree with my parents (when I was young enough to get into a fever of excitement over the pile of presents beneath it), and pretty much all the feelings that the holiday is supposed to be about.

Christmas is still a couple days away; I guess I have time to make another batch.