I’m currently at Starbucks working on a restaurant review, and the baristas are in an extra-jolly mood because they’re getting off early today. (Presumably they are less jolly over at the larger Starbucks down the street, which is open all day today and tomorrow.) I ordered a peppermint mocha (why not?) and was told that whipped cream is required on all drinks today.

“Does Santa want you to leave him low-carb cookies? I think not,” said the barista. I took not only the whipped cream, but the peppermint sprinkles.

In Bangkok there’s a coffee chain called Coffeebucks, or at least there was a few years ago; they may have been quashed by The Man since then. I liked the name enough that I’ve been calling Starbucks “Coffeebucks” ever since. I’m sure corporate is thrilled. Iris recognizes the logo and says, “Iris going to Coffeebucks, drinking some almond.”

“Almond” is steamed milk with almond, Iris’s daily beverage. Usually we make it home, but it’s available at every espresso bar, so we often get it out, too. Once Iris was going for a walk with my dad, and I told him to stop at Starbucks for some almond. Later I asked Iris, “Did you and Pops get some almond at Coffeebucks?” and she replied, “No, just Starbucks.”

Starbucks is a good place for almond because they only charge $1 for it, although sometimes they charge extra for the almond syrup (this is completely random). Recently, Iris and I were down at Pike Place Market doing some Christmas shopping and we stopped at the Seattle’s Best on Pine, across from Sur La Table. We saw someone getting peppermint sprinkles on their mocha, and of course Iris requested sprinkles on her almond. I poured the drink into her sippy cup, making sure that she saw the sprinkles before I closed it up, and she took a big slurp and said, “Iris tasting the sprinklies.”

In case I sound like a corporate tool, I did write an article recently about why Starbucks is good for local coffeeshops. It’s because they don’t serve beer.

Americans have a strange relationship with pressure cookers.

For one thing, there’s the fear factor. Just last night I was at the supermarket, and the cashier asked what I was planning to make with some beef, beer, leeks, and egg noodles. “Probably some stew in the pressure cooker,” I told her. A look of horror flashed over her face. “Those things scare me,” she said.

The pressure cooker scares me a little, too, but not because I think it’s going to explode. My pressure cooker is a modern spring-valve model made by WMF. I say “modern,” because the spring-valve type is relatively new to the US market, having been introduced in 1990. In Europe, spring-valve was the new thing in the 40s. The spring-valve is replacing the old style of cooker, which is called a jiggle-top. If you can hear the word “jiggle-top” without laughing, you are more mature than I.

No, my problem with the pressure cooker is that I don’t really understand how to use it. Oh, I know how to put ingredients in, bring it up to pressure, and release the pressure, and everything comes out cooked in record time. What’s perplexing about the PC (I have to start abbreviating, even though I know it’s impossible not to read “PC” as “personal computer”), however, is that it monkeys with basic physical constants. I’ve spent years coming to an intuitive understanding of what will happen when I put soup or stew ingredients in a pot and cook them, and the PC mocks that.

It’s like if we moved to a planet with slightly different gravity. Everything would seem reasonably normal at first, but then you’d start to get weird aches and your clocks wouldn’t work right, plus it would turn out your wife was actually an alien and you’d keep hearing this voice in your head saying “get your ass to Mars.” In the case of the PC, the high pressure and 250-degree water destroy some flavors and boost others.

My biggest PC success has been with cabbage, which seems to come out perfect every time and only needs to cook for four minutes. The biggest failure was pork carnitas; the texture was fine, but they tasted like pork with gallons of lime juice and none of the other good stuff (poblano chiles, mexican oregano, garlic) that went in.

Yesterday I took Iris out for sushi for lunch and didn’t really start thinking about dinner until after four. A perfect PC night. I cut the beef chuck into cubes and put it into the PC with sauteed leeks and onion and some chunks of carrot. I poured in some dark beer and chicken broth, about a cup total. One thing I’ve learned about the PC is that you need to keep added liquid to a bare minimum.

I cooked at high pressure for twenty minutes and let the pressure subside. While the stew cooked, I quartered the mushrooms and sauteed them in a pan in some bacon fat.

What I envisioned was a rich and dark stew. What came out was beef vegetable soup. The beer was no longer noticeable at all, and the chicken broth was the dominant flavor. Not a failure by any means–we all enjoyed the soup. Iris kept picking up pieces of meat and saying, “That’s some beef!” But to me, the PC is still a roulette wheel in disguise.

Probably there are few things kids like to hear less than that their parent is going to a meeting. Maybe we should say “playdate” instead of meeting.

It seems I may have used the M-word too often. This morning, Iris was eating toast with jam. Even though she’s capable of eating bites off a big piece of toast, she prefers toast bits, so I cut her some. After eating a few, she arranged the remaining ones into a huddle and said:

“Those ones having a meeting, just like Dada’s meeting.”

Laurie has been kindly taking requests from the Martha Stewart Holiday Cookies special issue, the one that kept Hsiao-Ching Chou of the P-I up all night and forced Megan Seling of the Stranger to embark on a cookie marathon. As of today, Seling has made 54 cookies.

Nevertheless, assuming Seling still has the capacity to enjoy any cookie, she has a real treat ahead, because she hasn’t yet made the best cookie in the whole magazine. I say this having tasted only four recipes, but I’m positive one of them is the best cookie in the magazine, because it’s one of the best cookies I’ve had in my whole life: chocolate malt sandwiches.

You make a ganache with bittersweet chocolate, half-and-half, cream cheese, and a lot of malt powder. Then sandwich that between two thin, chewy chocolate cookies. I want to pull out my crusty palette of food-writer adjectives to describe them, but you’re already sold, aren’t you?

I can’t find anyone selling the magazine online, but it’s supposed to be on newsstands until January 2. It’s Martha Stewart; how hard could it be to find?

After dinner, Iris ate some bites of cookie and enjoyed them as much as I did. Then she started rooting through her toybox and found a sushi rolling mat. I’ve never used it to make sushi, but Iris announced, “Roll up Littlecat!” Littlecat, a Beanie Baby, was promptly rolled up in the mat. “Littlecat sandwich,” she said, chewing on his whiskers.

Really, I don’t want to be one of those people who thinks certain foods make their child loopy, but I think chocolate may make Iris just a wee bit loopy.

For a few years I published an annual cookbook roundup. You can find the 2000 through 2002 editions at my old web site. Then I got lazy, and we had a baby and stuff.

But now I am, as they say in France, *rentré en noir.* I was all set to pretend the last couple of years never happened, but I was looking over the 2005s and found little I could heartily recommend. Maybe it was a bad year, but more likely I had other things on my plate. If I did a 2005 review, it would end up looking something like this:

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Mexican Everyday, Rick Bayless. I flipped through this book and it seems solid. Bayless is a great cook. Probably a good gift.

I was on the verge of despair. I promised you cookbook reviews. For weeks you have been compulsively refreshing your RSS feeds, waiting for mamster’s cookbook reviews. Then Laurie suggested the obvious: review the 2003 and 2004 cookbooks. They’re road-tested, still make great gifts, and I can even tell you which of them have survived being gnawed by Iris.

Rather than go radio silent for days and resurface with enough cookbooks to flatten you (that was my favorite *Alias* episode), I’m going to post one review a day until I’m out of books.

Jamie’s Dinners (2004)
Jamie Oliver
321 pages, $35

On page xiii of this book, there’s a photo of Jamie with his posse of young chefs, looking ready to fricassee whatever crosses their path. For months, Iris would ask us to pull the book down from the shelf and open it to that page so she could gawk at them and say, “Guyguy!” She also liked the page with the ham and the one with the kids eating noodles.

I like the page with the corn, which basically describes how I’ve made sauteed corn all summer; the page with the Concertina Squid, which look like a good way to scare people; and the page with the Chicken and Sweet Leek Pie with Flaky Pastry, which looked like mush but was delicious.

It’s a beginner cookbook, but one with some pretty out-there recipes (like the squid), and it never talks down to the reader. This from a guy not exactly known for subtlety. It seeks to guide the new cook toward the kind of hedonism-with-ethics that I aspire to. Try to get some organic produce and humanely-raised meat, Jamie tells us, and then enjoy the hell out of it.