No, not this lovely salad. That’s the flank steak dish I told you about yes­ter­day, with shred­ded car­rots added to the sec­ond try. Avery says this: “The bean sprouts are already kind of sweet, and the beef is so savory, that I worry it over­pow­ers the beef to add car­rots, but it’s good.” I like them for the color, but you try it both ways and see. We’ve finally come to the end of the left­over flank steak. I love what Gladys Taber says about left­overs, “it’s a ter­ri­ble word. ‘Remain­ders’ is even worse.” But if you can use things in a nice way, it’s so sat­is­fy­ing and budget-conscious.

No, what I’m talk­ing about as far as diet-busting, uber-rich, super special-treat, is… Home­made Fried Chicken! Have you ever fried chicken? Nei­ther had I, until last night. For some rea­son it sounded so good, and so ambi­tious to do, that I thought about it all after­noon and read Lau­rie Colwin’s recipe in Home Cook­ing (here adapted by Sara Moul­ton for the Food Net­work, and Bobby Flay’s online ver­sion, and then adapted both sets of instruc­tions to my own approach. Mostly I needed help in depth of oil, tim­ing and what to do with it when it’s cooked. Turns out, the short answers are: 2 inches, 12 min­utes, lay it on paper tow­els. But here’s the real deal. The secret to my fla­vor­ing is a table­spoon of a new spice blend I found in the fab­u­lous Pen­zeys Spice Shop in Min­neapo­lis, led there by my tal­ented and ener­getic niece Sarah.

Home­made Fried Chicken
(serves 6)

1 chicken cut up (breast halves cut in half again)
1 cup milk
1 1/2 cups flour
1 tbsp each: Fox Point sea­son­ing, paprika, gar­lic salt, lemon pep­per
Wes­son Oil to fill 2 inches deep in large, deep-sided skil­let (with a lid)

Mix the spices in the flour by means of a leak-proof plas­tic bag (pos­si­bly the one you car­ried the chicken home in?).

Have a bowl ready for your milk, a big bowl for your sea­soned flour, a plat­ter for the floured pieces, and the skil­let ready full of oil. Since I am noto­ri­ously bad at keep­ing track of heat­ing skil­lets, I waited until I had fin­ished dip­ping the chicken pieces to heat the oil. Prob­a­bly you can pay atten­tion to each, and if so, more power to you.

Dip each chicken piece in milk and wet every bit. Then place in sea­soned flour and pack as much flour as you can on each piece, lay­ing each one on the plat­ter when you’ve fin­ished. When you’re fin­ished, dust a lit­tle more sea­soned flour on the wait­ing layer of chicken pieces.

DON AN APRON. I’m not kid­ding. And place either a dish­towel or some paper towel on the floor under the front of the stove. But don’t slide on it!

Heat the oil until a piece of bread on the end of a fork fries imme­di­ately when placed in the oil. Then places as many pieces as you can of the chicken in the bub­bling oil. You can crowd a bit, because the chicken pieces shrink as they cook. Cover imme­di­ately and cook for about 5 min­utes, then turn each piece care­fully. Con­tinue to cover and cook, turn and cover and cook, sev­eral times, but let­ting at least 10 min­utes elapse for the breast quar­ters and wings, and at least 14 min­utes for the thighs and drum­sticks. When they look brown and appeal­ing, they are ready. Remove to a clean plat­ter lined with paper tow­els and let rest for about 5 min­utes before eating.

*************

Ambrosia! But RICH. If you’re like our fam­ily, you don’t eat much fried food. You’ll be sur­prised at how lit­tle it takes to sat­isfy you. Then quickly wrap up any left­overs, drive to your neigh­bor Farmer Rol­lie and his wife Judy, and donate them. They will be thrilled, and it’s a good excuse to sit and gos­sip for a bit.

We’re off to the pool. More later…

That’s one of Avery’s and my favorite lines from the Lau­rie Col­win book “Fam­ily Hap­pi­ness.” Two Euro­pean immi­grants are shar­ing child­hood songs, in Ger­man, and trans­lat­ing them for their fam­i­lies. After one par­tic­u­larly silly song, though, Klaro says, “There is no trans­la­tion for this song. It is merely some inco­her­ent rav­ings about food.”

So I have had a very foody few days, and have been work­ing hard on both my own cook­book and the edit­ing job I’m meant to be doing for Gladys Taber’s work, for her grand­daugh­ter Anne Colby in Con­necti­cut. I thought that in addi­tion to keep­ing you up to date on how rid­ing is going in Wim­ble­don, and how we spent our week­end, it might be nice to give you a cou­ple of excel­lent recipes that my friend Susan and I have been shar­ing and com­ment­ing on. That’s the beauty of food. Some­one invites you for lunch and you love what she serves, so you ask for the recipe. Then you get to nat­ter on in your email exchange about not just the recipe, but what’s hap­pen­ing in Form Four at King’s Col­lege, and what I might say at the Royal Acad­emy where Susan works, when I lec­ture on my sculp­tor. We also get to trade hus­band sto­ries and go off on tan­gents about odd peo­ple we know in com­mon. Then you invite her to din­ner and she likes what you made, and it all gets started again. It’s so much more than just eat­ing. And every time I make this curry dish, or she makes my fried rice, we will tell the peo­ple we’re feed­ing all about each other, and for the moment I’ll be in Susan’s kitchen with her, and she’ll be in mine. I love that about food.

I’m not going to lie to you: both of these recipes require that you like mess­ing about with food. They’re not short­cuts and they’re not labor-free. They also have two other things in com­mon: once you’ve made them, you’ll never want to have the takeaway/order-out ver­sions of either of them again. And they’re great for left­overs, which helps with the effort you’re putting in. These are recipes for a day when you have some time early on, per­haps, and then a chunk of time when you can’t be in the kitchen, and then some time right before you want to eat.

Susan’s Moroc­can Chicken Curry

2 tbsps olive oil
2 tbsps but­ter
2 onions, chopped
4 car­rots, chopped or grated
3 bone­less whole chicken breasts, well trimmed and cut into bite-size chunks
2 apples, coarsely chopped
4 oranges, squeezed and pulp included, but no seeds
1 large chunk of fresh gin­ger, peeled & grated
1 tsp gin­ger pow­der
4 tbsps sweet curry pow­der, not hot
2 cups chicken stock
1 cup white wine
2 cups sin­gle cream

In a large, deep saucepan, melt the but­ter with the olive oil. Add the onions, then the car­rots and let them cook/soften a bit (as for a risotto). Then add the chicken chunks, stir and brown a bit. Then add the apple, the orange juice, the gin­ger, the curry, the stock and the wine. Sim­mer for about 10 min­utes, then add the cream. In total, for this to be prop­erly cooked, it should gen­tly sim­mer for about 45 min­utes. You can then re-heat it before eat­ing, or once cooled, put it away in the fridge until the next day.

This is a very flex­i­ble recipe – you can vary how fine or coarse every­thing gets chopped, and you can vary the fla­vors accord­ing to taste (more orange, spicier curry, etc.) Some­times I have also used some plain yogurt in addi­tion to cream. Serve with Bas­mati Rice (always steamed in one and a half times the amount of water as rice).

Kristen’s Fes­tive Fried Rice

An Unde­ter­mined Amount of Peanut Oil
1 red onion, diced
three cloves gar­lic, diced
1 big chunk gin­ger, peeled and chopped
2 cups of left­over pork, chicken, beef or prawns, cut in bite-size pieces (more than one of these if you like)

1 cup each: chopped broc­coli, car­rots, red pep­pers, sugar snap peas, green beans (diced small)
1 bunch green or “salad” onions, sliced thin
1 hand­ful bean sprouts

three eggs, beaten thor­oughly
dash sesame oil
soy sauce to taste

2 cups bas­mati rice

First, put the rice to cook with three cups water and salt. Then, in a hot wok, cover the bot­tom with peanut oil and saute the gar­lic, gin­ger, onion and meat until hot through, and the gar­lic, etc. are nicely soft­ened, then remove with a slot­ted spoon to a really big bowl. Then saute the broc­coli, car­rots, pep­per, sugar snap peas and green beans until just cooked, and remove also with slot­ted spoon to join the meat. Add more peanut oil to the wok if needed, and a dash of sesame oil. Then saute the salad onions till soft, and just briefly toss in the bean sprouts, then remove all to the big bowl. Take this chance to check the rice, which will cook in about 20 min­utes. Fluff it up and keep the lid off to encour­age extra steam to escape and dry the rice up a bit.

Heat the oil again and throw in the eggs, scram­bling very quickly and keep­ing them mov­ing con­stantly until they are bro­ken up. Now, toss in every­thing from the big bowl, and the rice, and fluff all until hot through.

Serve with plenty of soy sauce.

So there you have it! Two really good things to eat. If you leave out the meat from the rice dish, it’s an absolutely guilt-free, nearly fat-free veg­e­tar­ian option, good for when you’re feel­ing guilty from… all that creamy chicken curry!

As you can see from the above photo, Avery did not ride the wacky Bis­cuit on Thurs­day; instead as a sort of vaca­tion she rode Cookie (yes, there’s an after-school-snack theme in the names, I agree). But that sim­ple sen­tence masks the sheer hell­ish annoy­ance that was get­ting to Wim­ble­don on a Thurs­day after­noon after school, when tem­per­a­tures in Lon­don had risen to an unholy 80 degrees with no warn­ing, and half the tube lines shut down because some­thing essen­tial was threat­en­ing to melt. I picked Avery up at school where she began what was to be a recur­ring lament about how tired she was. Not con­ducive to a pleas­ant trip to do some­thing I had absolutely no inter­est in to begin with, with sweat pour­ing down our faces as we strug­gled with half of the Lon­don com­muters in exis­tence. Why did every­one want to go to Wim­ble­don? And of course on the way back there was an equal num­ber of peo­ple strug­gling to get to Cen­tral Lon­don. I wanted to wave my magic wand and tell all the peo­ple on both ends of the mis­er­able jour­ney to stay where they were for heaven’s sake. One of those days when one’s inter­est in humanity’s con­tin­u­ing wanes.

We got there finally and she rode off across the Com­mon, alas with­out me since her usual instruc­tor who gives us a ride to the arena was not there and I didn’t have the energy to walk the three or so miles to fol­low her. Instead I wan­dered around Bay­ley and Sage spend­ing money on things like tape­nade, porcini-stuffed tortellini and other things you buy when you’re a) killing time and b) starv­ing. The out­door beer gar­den of the Dog and Fox pub adja­cent to the sta­ble filled with unap­peal­ing youngish white Eng­lish­men with pasty faces and badly-cut suits. Ick. The barn staff pre­pared for a “train­ing din­ner” that was to con­sist of any­thing and every­thing thrown on the bar­bie, so I was smoked out from the bench where I had been try­ing to read my tacky tabloid news­pa­per (learn­ing that a sin­gu­larly hideous Picasso had sold for $52 mil­lion at Sotheby’s. The sec­ond most pricey paint­ing by that Span­ish lout was “reputed” to have been bought by Las Vegas hote­lier Steve Wynn, and I was in the slightly cool posi­tion of know­ing that he had bought it, because in the hey­day of my gallery when I sold him an enor­mous Miriam Schapiro can­vas he indi­cated his ulti­mate goal of pos­sess­ing said Picasso paint­ing no mat­ter what the cost).

Finally Avery returned, and far from hav­ing had a lovely relax­ing ride on a not-insane pony, she had been forced to con­trol a rabid Cookie when she was attacked and bit­ten by an off-lead dog on the trail. Can it never be calm! We sweated our way home on one bus, one train, another bus. John came out of the house to meet us on the pave­ment and in answer to his cheery cocktail-in-hand greet­ing, “So how was it?” I merely handed Avery and all her clob­ber to him and said, “Don’t ask, here is your child.” Mean­ing the sweaty, exhausted, filthy, cranky one, as opposed to my child, who is always charming.

So much for the Thurs­day after­noon expe­ri­ence. Once a week, on the week­end, WITH her father, is quite enough barn, I opined.

I’ve gone shop­ping! I bought a tiny lit­tle pair of sort of full­ish shorts, that look like a skirt when they’re on. Dark gray blue, all the rage. And a lit­tle brown peas­anty top, and a pair of black “foot­less tights,” which sim­ply scream 1986 to me, but hey, they worked back then and they work now. They will be so cute under a longish tunic that I have been sav­ing for just such a devel­op­ment. I went to the French Con­nec­tion UK, whose acronym in adver­tise­ments always causes Avery to screw her eyes shut and say “bad word, bad word.” Avery spent Fri­day night at Anna’s house, in advance of the big birth­day party the next day, so John and I had quite the most divine Indian din­ner out EVER. A lovely, swelle­gant place around the cor­ner called Deya. A lit­tle com­pli­men­tary starter of a teacup-sized por­tion of lentil soup, with a tem­pura mush­room sus­pended over the top from a tooth­pick laid across! Very clever. Then onto a crab fried rice with sweet­corn (no! it was good!), black truf­fles and corian­der, then a chicken dish that was good but not crazy good, and creamed spinach and saf­fron pota­toes. I asked so many ques­tions of the waiter that finally he and his maitre d’ were hud­dled by the kitchen look­ing at me as if I were Gael Greene come to Lon­don, and after that we got star treat­ment! I must be a famous restau­rant critic in heavy dis­guise! What fun. And so nice to have a Date.

Sat­ur­day we bit the bul­let and assem­bled the sup­ple­men­tary book­shelves from John Lewis. My lack of both man­ual dex­ter­ity and spa­tial rela­tions stunned even my hus­band, who must be used to it by now. But tomor­row I plan to spend the day fill­ing the two in my study and thus emp­ty­ing the last of the hor­rid mov­ing boxes. Then I can hang pic­tures on my wall and be all fin­ished with the “I just arrived” look I’ve got so sick of. Every­thing has to be nice for the Fri­day Form Four cof­fee morn­ing here. I’m quite nervous!