sigh.

super bowl sunday food is gross.

build-your-own-nachos/tacos/burritos - gross.

seven layer bean dip - gross.

deep fried potatoes covered in sour cream skins wrapped in bacon and slathered with guacamole - gross.

even slashfood’s attempt to adapt super bowl sunday’s more traditional fare to a vegetarian/vegan palette - gross. nobody wants to eat museli while they’re watching football. i don’t want to watch football, period, but if i had to - say, somebody was holding a gun to my temple - i would, at the very least, want to be eating something delicious.

and deliciously not deep-fried, soaked in creme, butter, or milk, dripping with melted cheese, and buried under a veritable mountain of refried beans.

refried, folks. that means fried once… then fried AGAIN.

grumble. pat’s out of town and i’m feeling grumpy.

 

a long winter

I… have been misleading you all.

I started blogging with every intention of sticking to it. I mean, I love to write! It’s validating, soothing, exciting, and above all, a profound act of faith. But… then, life happened. And school happened. And there was this boy…

In any case. I feel like I’m slinking back, guiltily, to a project that I neglected for the life that had seemed more imperative.

slink. slink.

Maybe because that’s exactly what’s happening right now.

But now, I’m camped out at the Downbeat (a link to come! Once I figure out how to write links…) Cafe, nestled between two cute, vintage-y shops - you know, the type of place that sells clothes for $200 that you would wear only to cultivate the appearance that you might have made them yourself  - right off of Sunset Blvd and Alvarado St in Echo Park.

I love this neighborhood.

I come here to work, usually. With free WIFI, a fairly diverse (although pricey) menu, and a frequent stream of writers, screenwriters, and artists in their client base, it’s a good place to write. Especially if being in the apartment only makes me want to bake everything in Kirstine’s new bread book or watch the entire second season of Grey’s Anatomy on DVD.

Today I got a small cup of Earl Grey tea and a salmon salad. While I think, for the most part, that $2 for a cup of tea is scandalizing, I have to admit that it was remarkably good. To make the tea, the barista scooped a tablespoon or so of loose tea leaves into an open tea bag that she then expertly tied and placed in the cup. (Maybe “expertly” was too generous an adverb, but I was impressed.) And the cup actually looked like a tea cup. Open faced, short, stout, and white porcelain sitting on a matching saucer, using it felt… proper.

The salmon salad. I’ve been really into smoked salmon, lately, ever since I had the salmon salad at Full of Life - a salad & sandwich shop in Claremont - a few days ago. I love the marriage of taste - salty, smokey - and texture - soft, yielding - in smoked salmon. It feels decadent. The meal includes two slices of smoked salmon on a bed of field greens, garnished with sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, red onions, and capers. Balsamic vinaigrette on the side. With half of a warm Italian baguette and a few pats of cold butter. All in all, fairly standard. What it really needed was a piece of fresh whole-milk mozzarella and a sprinkle of freshly ground black pepper. But now I’m just nit-picking.

Mmm. Not spectacular, but it scratched my smoked salmon itch.

 

A hunt for raspberries, and a good recipe.

The apartment’s been feeling kind of lonely these last few days. Kirstine got waylaid in Seattle on her way back from her trip and Pat left for the Bay two days ago so all of the sudden, I found myself alone in a place that was meant for two people.

I’ve got to say, I don’t like being by myself. Especially not here. It gets all quiet at night, for one. I’ve started reading my sentences out loud as I write so that there would be a little more human presence in this place. I felt stuck.

That’s where I was this morning right before I decided to clean house. Several hours later, I discovered that along with a sparkling kitchen floor and noticeably less ants (yes, I have a major ant problem), I also found myself with nothing left to eat. As it turns out, I had thrown away everything in the fridge.

And when I say everything, I mean. Everything. As of this morning, all I had left was a couple of bottles of condiments (ketchup, anybody? and two different bottles of maple syrup…), some ice cream, and a couple of unripe avocados. Oh, and half of a frozen bagel from a week and a half ago, bought with the admonition that it must be eaten fresh, or not at all. Which - sigh - I ate dry, straight from the freezer to the toaster with half a glass of orange juice for breakfast.

Since all the cleaning gave me an excuse to pick up some groceries - an activity that for most people constitutes a chore, but for me is a downright delight; a past time; a good date, even - I took the opportunity to see if I couldn’t hunt down the ingredients for a recipe I’ve been trying to get right ever since Kirstine made it several weeks ago and knocked me off my feet with it. Seriously, I kid you not. It was amazing. That girl is incredible (and for more than her skills in the kitchen). She is how I can know beyond any measure of doubt that cooking well is not the difference between having a good recipe, and not. That particular truth is made evident to me by the fact that while we share the same cookbooks and use the same recipes, she bakes like a Danish Martha Stewart, and I… well, lets just say that I’m trying this recipe for the second time, now.

peach and raspberry crisp

originally found in The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook by Ina Garten, with a few modifications by yours truly.

I’m usually not one to follow recipes with any kind of rigor (or as some would argue, respect) so getting involved in the kitchen is always a kind of adventure. This recipe is fantastic in part because you can mess around with it by making substitutions and imparting your own preferences (for white peaches over yellow? for more raspberries rather than peaches?) without ending up a mess. For a baked dessert, it grants you a surprisingly large amount of space for lateral movement.

For this dish, only use the best quality fruit. The success of fruit desserts tend to depend a great deal on the kind of ingredients that you choose to invest in them.

makes 4-5 servings.

2 cups raspberries, slightly tart
4 large peaches, firm and ripe
3⁄4 cup granulated sugar
1⁄4 cup plus 1 tablespoon of light brown sugar
3⁄4 cup plus 1 or 2 tablespoons of all-purpose flour
a pinch of salt
zest of one orange
1⁄2 cup quick-cooking oatmeal
1 stick cold, unsalted butter, diced.

Special equipment: any shape of dish (glass or porcelain) that will hold the fruit will do. I used a 8 x 8 square glass baking dish. Kirstine has used a 10 x 15 x 2 1/2 inch oval baking dish with fantastic results, as well.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter the inside of the dish.

First, blanch the peaches by immersing them in boiling water for 30 seconds, then placing them in a cold water bath. Peel the peaches and slice them into thick wedges and place them into a large bowl. Add the orange zest, four tablespoons of granulated sugar, 1/4 cup of brown sugar, and 1-2 tablespoons of flour. Toss well.

Gently mix in the raspberries and watch out for bruising. Allow the mixture to sit for five minutes. If there is a lot of liquid, add 1 more tablespoon of flour. Pour the fruit mixture into the baking dish and gently smooth the top.

For the topping: Combine the rest of the flour, granulated sugar, brown sugar, salt, oatmeal, and the cold, diced butter in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Mix on low speed until the butter is pea-sized and the mixture is crumbly. Sprinkle evenly on top of the peaches and raspberries. Bake for 1 hour, until the top is browned and crisp and the juices are bubbly.

Serve immediately, or store in the refrigerator and reheat in a 350 degree oven for 20-30 minutes, until warm.

Personally, I think this tastes great cold and straight out of the pan, right from the fridge.

If you don’t have an electric mixer, you can use two knives to cut the butter into the flour-oatmeal mixture by making a criss-cross motion with the knives moving in opposite directions. I used 2 tablespoons of flour to bind the fruit together (rather than one) because the last time I tried this recipe, the peaches were a little too ripe and the extra liquid caused the topping to sink into the fruit mixture while it was baking, leaving just a tiny island of topping in its wake that barely peaked over the bubbling fruit. The original recipe calls for more peaches in proportion to the raspberries, but I like the tart flavor. It pairs well with the sweet, crunchy topping and a generous scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Also, I use half the sugar from the original recipe for the fruit mixture simple because I don’t think that sweet, ripe fruit needs the complement. Sugar should never overpower the flavor of the fruit itself in something like a crisp made in the dead heat of summer, in those precious few weeks when everything is in season.

The verdict: Still not as good as Kirstine’s, but it’ll do the trick. I baked it a couple of hours ago, and I’ve been finding excuses to open the fridge all night, sneaking bites of crisp with tiny spoonfuls of french vanilla ice cream that was also secured away in secrecy.

Maybe having a crisp all to myself is not such a good thing. We’ll see how long it takes me to make my way through it.

It felt nice to start over, new groceries and all. Either way, it’s been a good day.

 

The kitchen perfect.

Cooking is a lot like writing, I’ve decided.

For people who do and do seriously - by that I mean, people for whom these acts fulfill a larger desire than just a way to get from point A to point B - the stakes are extraordinarily high. Often higher than we might even admit to ourselves.

I got interested in making good meals a couple of months ago, a fairly recent development by any measure. With the purchase of a several cookbooks that Amazon.com told me were must haves (How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman, The Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer, The Way To Cook by Julia Child) and a good non-stick pan, I took a deep breath and made my peace with the fact that my self-esteem was probably going to take a beating.

The first time I really tried to make something that didn’t end up turning out (cocoa brownies), I told myself that cooking has a steep learning curve. Like making good pancakes, you have to first make it over the initial hurdle. Because - and lets just be honest, here - no matter how talented of a pancake chef you are, that first pancake or two will look lopsided. The consistency will not be even and chances are, the inside will still be raw when you bite into it several minutes later. That’s practically a law of nature.

Personally, I was not blessed with the aptitude for pancaking (something about a wrist motion?) but Pat - Pat makes these incredible pancakes. I love watching that man cook. The way the steady curve of his shoulders fall and dip into the tuck of his waist, how his posture shifts just slightly when he’s ready to turn on the stove; his eagerness. As it is, his pancakes are perfect - golden, soft, and the skin yields just enough when you take the first bite with the slightest hint of crisp at the edges.

And as for me, I have yet to make a successful dish more than once. My results in the kitchen are such that I can’t in good faith attribute the outcomes to anything more than luck. I’m okay with that though. Good things happen slowly.

At least for now.

 

Why food?

I never took meals very seriously.

unwind

A person’s relationship with food - and food being a broad category that includes what we eat to sate our appetites, what we eat because we have to, what we eat to be full, what we eat even when we don’t really want to, and what we eat to feel certain things; memories and emotions mixed up with particular smells, textures, the way that something turns in your mouth, slides down your throat, and settles in the pit of your stomach changing suddenly into an experience, the way a spatula feels in the palm of your hand, how the skin of an onion yields just like that when you settle your wrist into the handle of a good, solid knife; how drops of soy sauce fall into a hot pan, sizzling and turning into the air, folding into the flat of the walls; that meal your father made for you every time you came home from college, a place in time -

and the way that a person chooses to make sense of those experiences contextualized tells us a tremendous amount about her.

That is because a person’s relationship to food must also be her relationship to nourishment, the earth, and - I dare say this with a straight face - other creatures that live and breathe and feel. It is her relationship to pleasure; it is the most primitive form of intimacy.

I say this because eating is an activity that for most of my life was fraught with risk, inextricably bound with guilt, disgust, and no small amount of desire. It was not until very recently that I started to rethink how I organize my own relationship to these experiences and the terms by which I make decisions about what I put into my body - what decisions about what to have for dinner really mean, socially, politically or otherwise.

What does this all have to do with you, you ask? What are you getting out of this situation?

I’m going to lay all my cards out on the table, here. I can’t guarantee that I’ll have the best or most innovative recipes because I’m not a expert chef and I won’t mislead you into thinking that I am.

In fact, I won’t mislead you at all if I can help it. I will try to be as honest as I can. Mostly, I just want to create a space in my life where I can take food seriously, to think about meals as more than what you do while you wait for other things to happen. To think about meals as the event, themselves.

Well, here goes nothing.

bon appetite.