I Turned 40, Became a Shoe, and Made Chicken & Dumplings

On homemade birthday cake, David Sedaris, a $500 French pot, and why sometimes doing things the hard way is the whole point.

August has been a lot.

I turned 40, which my friends very generously decided was an occasion worth celebrating. They threw me an amazing birthday party, and somewhere in the planning process my friend Ashley made the perfectly reasonable suggestion that perhaps I did not need to make my own birthday cake.

We could order one from Frank's, she said.

Or Hannaford.

Excuse me?

I don't think so.

Everyone eventually accepted that I was going to be ridiculous about this, although I'm not sure any of us understood exactly how ridiculous.

What followed was approximately four days of fitting cake construction between work and the rest of my life. I made a two-tier, eight-layer vanilla-almond cake filled with homemade raspberry preserves and covered in ermine buttercream.

And we need to talk about ermine buttercream for a moment.

At some point, America abandoned a perfectly good piece of culinary genius. Ermine frosting is made by cooking flour and milk into a thick base, cooling it, and whipping it into butter and sugar. The result is silky, buttery, light and just sweet enough.

Instead, we collectively decided it was more convenient to dump an avalanche of powdered sugar into butter and call it buttercream.

I'm sorry, but we've lost our way.

Most people don't even know what they're missing. They've spent their entire lives eating frosting that makes their teeth hurt and assuming that's just what frosting is supposed to do.

Anyway, this is apparently a hill I'm prepared to die on now that I'm 40.

The cake itself eventually became so tall that I realized I had nowhere to put it.

Fortunately, we own a camper.

So naturally, we plugged in the camper solely to refrigerate my birthday cake.

Unfortunately, the cake didn't fit in that refrigerator either.

At this point I was four days into this project and emotionally incapable of dealing with a refrigerator shelf that required a screwdriver, so Sean was summoned to dismantle part of the camper refrigerator while I continued working on the cake.

Then there were the flowers.

I had a very particular look in mind, which meant buying fake flowers from three different stores before I had the right combination.

And then I painted the outside gold.

Completely reasonable behavior.

Turning 40 with David Sedaris

A few days later, Sean, Ashley, Bobby and I headed down to Bar Harbor on a weeknight to see David Sedaris at the Criterion Theatre.

Ashley and I are big fans. Sean and Bobby were Sedaris virgins, and we were very happy to introduce them.

There was one slight problem.

A few days earlier, I'd managed to slam my ankle into a rock while kayaking. It had developed an impressive goose egg, but apparently this wasn't going to stop me from walking miles around Bar Harbor.

So I limped.

We started with dinner and drinks at Geddy's, where I had a delicious lobster bisque and discovered that their cocktails apparently come with miniature animals.

Mine came with the cutest little monkey.

This is the kind of unnecessary flourish I strongly support.

Before the show, I got to meet David and brought along one of my favorite books, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, for him to sign.

He looked at my last name and asked me if I knew what “trainers” were.

This should have been an easy question.

Instead, my brain immediately started searching every possible definition of trainer.

A sports trainer?

A corporate trainer?

Personal trainer?

Why is David Sedaris asking me this?

And then I realized I had been standing there silently having this entire internal conversation while David Sedaris waited for an answer.

So I said no.

I then spent the next several minutes thinking, What kind of idiot doesn't know what a trainer is?

He explained that he lives in London, where sneakers are called trainers, and apparently “Esham” reminded him of a trainer.

So David Sedaris drew me as a sneaker.

Specifically, an Esham Trainer made from expensive owl leather.

You know what?

I'll take it.

The show was hilarious. I'm also about 99 percent sure Bobby Bones was there. At one point we yelled “Bobby!” across the street to see whether he'd turn around.

He did not.

This evidence is admittedly not strong enough for a conviction.

Afterward, we proceeded to a bar, temporarily forgetting that we were 40 years old, and had some drinks.

It was a wonderful night.

Eventually, You Have to Stay Home and Make Dinner

So that's been August.

A two-tier birthday cake requiring four days, three stores worth of fake flowers, gold paint and emergency camper refrigeration.

Kayaking injuries.

Limping through Bar Harbor.

Lobster bisque.

Tiny cocktail monkeys.

David Sedaris turning me into footwear.

Drinks on a weeknight.

Eventually, there comes a point when you need to stay home and make dinner.

Something simple.

Something comforting.

Something sensible.

So naturally I put an entire chicken into a $500 French pot and spent the evening making chicken and dumplings from scratch.

I apparently don't know when to leave well enough alone.

But here's the thing: sometimes making the thing is part of enjoying the thing.

I could have ordered my birthday cake. I could have bought raspberry preserves. I could have used American buttercream. I could have stayed home instead of hobbling around Bar Harbor.

And chicken and dumplings can certainly be made with a rotisserie chicken, boxed stock, canned cream-of-chicken soup and a tube of something.

There's nothing morally superior about doing it the long way.

Sometimes I just like doing it the long way.

And if you're going to spend a quiet evening at home making chicken and dumplings, starting with a whole chicken turns out to be a particularly satisfying way to do it.

Why Start with a Whole Chicken?

Because the chicken does two jobs.

First, obviously, it gives you the chicken.

But while it gently simmers with onion, carrot, celery, garlic, thyme, bay leaves and peppercorns, it also makes the broth that becomes the foundation of the entire dish.

There's no separate carton of stock to buy and no mystery can of condensed soup required to make everything taste vaguely chicken-ish.

You put a chicken in water with vegetables and herbs and, about an hour later, you have tender chicken and chicken broth.

Our ancestors were onto something.

The important thing is not to boil the hell out of it. Bring the pot just to a simmer, turn the heat down, partially cover it and let the chicken cook gently.

When it's tender, pull it out, strain the broth and pick every useful piece of meat from the bird.

And I mean every useful piece.

Don't just take the breasts and obvious thigh meat and declare the job finished. Get into the wings. Pick around the back. Find all those little tender pieces hiding around the bones.

That's some of the best chicken on the bird.

Then We Make It Chicken & Dumplings

Once you have your homemade broth and pulled chicken, the rest starts moving pretty quickly.

Butter goes into the Dutch oven with fresh onion, carrots and celery. Garlic joins them, followed by flour, which coats everything and eventually thickens the broth into that particular chicken-and-dumplings consistency I was after.

I don't want soup.

But I also don't want chicken pot pie filling capable of supporting a spoon vertically.

I want something gloriously in between: silky and creamy, substantial enough to cling to the chicken and vegetables but still loose enough to pool around a dumpling when you spoon everything into a bowl.

A little heavy cream helps us get there.

Because we have standards.

About Those Dumplings

These are fluffy drop dumplings.

Not noodles. Not rolled dumplings. Not little dense dough balls.

Big, craggy, fluffy dumplings that expand dramatically as they cook and eventually occupy most of the visible real estate on top of the pot.

The dough couldn't be much easier: flour, baking powder, salt, pepper, thyme, parsley, melted butter and milk.

Mix it only until everything comes together.

This is not a situation where we're trying to develop gluten.

Nobody needs an athletic dumpling.

It should be soft, shaggy and scoopable, somewhere between biscuit dough and very thick cake batter.

Then drop approximately 12 dumplings over the gently simmering chicken mixture.

And now comes perhaps the most difficult instruction in this entire recipe:

Put the lid on and leave it alone.

No peeking.

For 15 minutes.

The bottoms of the dumplings gently simmer in the chicken gravy while the covered Dutch oven traps enough steam to cook the tops. When you finally lift the lid, those modest little scoops of dough will have transformed into enormous fluffy dumplings.

Stick a toothpick into one of the biggest. If it comes out without wet dough attached, dinner is ready.

What you should have underneath is tender chicken, carrots, celery and peas suspended in a silky chicken gravy, with those enormous herb-flecked dumplings floating over the top.

It's deeply comforting without tasting like it came out of a casserole recipe printed on the back of a soup can in 1987.

And look, I am not above a can of cream-of-chicken soup when a recipe actually calls for one.

But you've gone to the trouble of simmering a whole chicken in a $500 French pot.

We're making the real thing.