In praise of ginger

Winter has officially arrived in San Fran. I was tricked into thinking it would never come, because last week it was consistently 68 degrees. I felt extremely smug about my decision to move to California and traipse around in a t-shirt in December when the rest of the country is huddled indoors.

Then it started to rain, and it pretty much hasn't stopped yet. So now I've reverted to my cozy winter recipe rotation, which includes boeuf bourguignon, various soups, roast chickens, and Gramercy Tavern Gingerbread Cake.

I'm a giant fan of anything starring ginger. In Paris I ordered ginger chicken at a Chinese restaurant (Passy Mandarin, I believe), and the plate arrived with a few chunks of chicken completely obscured by approximately half a pound of sliced ginger. What happens when humans consume that much ginger? I didn't know, but I plowed ahead and finished the whole thing. I felt freaking great afterwards, that's what happened. I fervently believe in such a thing as the ginger buzz. Seattleites can get a similar fix at Malay Satay Hut; the ginger chicken there is slightly less terrifyingly intense than Passy Mandarin's.

Ginger is a crucial member of a holy quinity of spices--cardamon, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg are the others--that make gingerbread cake so delicious. (Yes, I made up the word "quinity". It's good though, right? Better than quintet.) Gingerbread cake is never exactly wimpy, but this one is extraordinarily muscular, amped up and darkened by the addition of Guinness. I like to throw in some candied ginger as well. It's very easy to make, although this time around I had a bit of trouble encouraging it to leave the pan as it was cooling and was left with fist-sized hunks of cake that weren't particularly attractive. That's when a light dusting of powdered sugar comes in handy.

Wikipedia tells me, "Ground and fresh ginger taste quite different and ground ginger is a particularly poor substitute for fresh ginger." Ouch. Ground ginger does have a duskier, less tingly flavor than fresh, but let's not write it off just yet. I wonder what this cake would be like if I tried adding in some fresh ginger, very finely grated? It just might blow my mind.

Kicking the habit

Since finishing cooking school and eliminating the daily helpings of foie gras and brioche from my diet, I have gained six pounds. It’s not a huge amount, but my weight has been extraordinarily consistent since seventh grade, and it disturbs me when my clothes are not quite as comfortable as they used to be. An office job has something to do with it, not to mention a joyful reunion with my car and the return to supersized portions in the U.S.

Luckily, my coworker SueAnn is a triathlete and a very energetic, cool person. About four months ago, she suggested that we check out a cardio kickboxing class at the employee gym, and refused to let me weasel out of going. As someone who had barely broken a sweat since I quit the freshman soccer team, I was a little reticent. (Incidentally, in the time that has elapsed since that first gratifying soccer team quit, I have also started and quit club soccer, indoor soccer, adult soccer, tennis lessons, pilates, golf, swing dancing, women’s snowboard camp, belly dancing, Japanese, Italian, French, Javascript and Flash classes, two health clubs, four cities, seven apartments, and too many jobs to count. Quitting is also the title of my favorite This American Life episode.) But somehow SueAnn has kept me going to cardio kickboxing with moderate regularity, and I've even started to enjoy myself. Sort of.

I didn’t even know what cardio kickboxing was. I had a vague notion that punching bags might be involved. In retrospect, I’m glad I was such a fitness innocent, because the reality is honestly far worse than the nightmare scenarios even my own fertile imagination could have produced. I get upset when my life starts to resemble Dilbert or Cathy cartoons, and attending aerobics classes at a corporate gym definitely engages me in both of those realms.

The instructor is deeply tan, deeply muscular, pierced, and as far as I can tell enjoys limitless energy stores. She also has a great butt; probably a crucial asset in her line of work. Every day, she rushes in one minute before the class is set to begin, pops a CD into a sadistic music machine that allows her to crank up the tempo to “muscle-shred” setting, adjusts her headset, and gets us jogging before she’s even stripped off her street clothes.

The routines are complicated, and the first couple of classes I thought I might die of either exhaustion or embarrassment, whichever came first. Now I’ve gotten used to the whole process:

1) Change into clothes that make me look mentally compromised (lime green elastic waist shorts, 1992 INXS shirt, rainbow socks, sparkly white sneakers, purple headband).

2) Hide in back row of class.

3) Rush around punching the air in hot, mirrored room to songs like “Don’t Cha Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me?” and “Don’t Phunk with My Heart” with fellow technology drones.

4) Try not to throw up.

5) Clap occasionally in between punches; kick the air; ponder whether I look more like circus seal or uncoordinated donkey (or both?).

6) Attempt to shut down brain.

7) Respond too late when teacher bellows, “GIMME JACKS! JACKS! TWO MORE TWO MORE!!” Suddenly I am the only one jacking.

8) Slink out of class fifteen minutes early to avoid crunches and lunges.

We stomp and fake and hook in unison, like a dance squad or the North Korean army. Occasionally when we’ve completed a particularly challenging set of exercises together, people will actually whoop and cheer. Sometimes the sweat and the cheering reminds me of clubbing in London a long time ago, but then I remember that I am at work in a tech corridor south of San Francisco. I did not just eat a giant vindaloo and drink martinis in preparation for dancing all night long, there are no cute boys named Duncan to flirt with, nobody in the room is on drugs (as far as I know), and we are not dancing to hip European DJs but instead to a cover of “Sweet Child O’ Mine” sung by a plaintive woman and sped up to the point of absurdity by that sadistic machine that crouches near the stack of Bosu balls.

Sometimes when I punch the air, I pretend I am punching Herman Miller in the chops. I know I should thank him for inventing the cubicle because without it we might still have long vast open rows of desks, but I prefer to blame him for this entire mess instead.

The road to Tastyville

Recently, Randy handed me a strange, brown, plank-like cookie.
”What is this?”
“Homemade graham cracker.”
“Huh.”
“Why is he making homemade graham crackers?” I wondered as I took a bite. It was pretty good – like a store-bought graham cracker, but slightly thicker and chewy instead of crispy.

I’m not a big fan of graham crackers. To me they are bested by their Anglo cousins, digestive biscuits, who suffer from a somewhat nastier name but boast a more thought-provoking texture. However, the history of this rather boring graham cookie is kind of cool. They’re part of that weird legacy of early American health foods invented back when people believed that cereal, hot cocoa and enemas could cure their ills (check out The Road to Wellville for similarly quirky convictions). Of course, the way we’ve been clinging to wine, chocolate, and blueberries lately indicates that we are still hinging similar dreams of vitality and immortality on the stuff we choose to put in our bodies.

Graham crackers were the bright idea of party boy Sylvester Graham, who recommended “…hard mattresses, open bedroom windows, chastity, cold showers, loose clothing, pure water and vigorous exercise.” This is my favorite part: “Graham believed sexual desires irritated the body and caused disease, and that the remedy was to marry, get the urge out of one's system, and let it fade.”

Although I’m with him on the pure water and loose clothing, I don’t think Sylvester and I would have had much to talk about.

Randy’s project meant that our kitchen countertop was suddenly monopolized by vast expanses of dull brown cookie/crackers. Clearly something had to be done. (Perhaps something akin to Newman disposing of the muffin stumps? “All right, I'm going to need a clean eight-ounce glass,” he says, pulling out four quarts of milk. “As I understand it, we have a situation here and time is of the essence.”)

I didn’t pull out four quarts of milk; instead I lugged my giant KitchenAid mixer up onto the crowded counter and whipped up (literally!) a batch of homemade marshmallows using this recipe from Cooking for Engineers. I was shocked to find that they came out really well. I’m not sure why, but I was just convinced that it wouldn’t work, and that I would wind up weepily bemoaning my culinary failures to Randy. Again. (This had already happened last week after a sodden, mushy tarte tatin emerged from the oven. I stomped my feet and wailed in frustration. “I’m not sure I have the energy for this,” he said wearily. Nor did I. I think we just went out for pho instead and everything was happy again.)

So, in a move that would probably make old Sly Graham roll over in his (hard, well-ventilated) coffin, I slathered some of the marshmallow fluff onto the graham crackers, dipped the suckers in a bowl of melted Valrhona, and suddenly we had a cripplingly rich snack that has now surely contributed to our premature demise. Since it’s obviously too late to get back on the road to Wellville, I guess it's time to take a hot shower and climb into my soft, luxurious bed.