Sua SponteMy law school odyssey: the ongoing narrative.
Don't get the impression from my rapturous restaurant reviews that I'm a food snob. Uberfancy dinners are nice on occasion, but I love me a grimy little restaurant with undiscovered incredible flavors as much as anyone. (And this is a good thing, too, given the budget to which we'll be limited next year.) Extra points if said dive is located in a fascinating semi-dodgy ethnic neighborhood. If I'm comfortable parking my car there, it's probably not interesting.
At this year's public interest auction back in January, I bid on a Soup Tour of our wonderful city, to be guided by a fellow 3L (coincidentally, a sometime undergraduate college classmate). Our first stop was a terrific hot pot at Lao Sze Chuan in Chinatown -- figure shabu shabu, except with a highly seasoned Chinese broth and fish alongside the meat. Our guide shot the breeze in perfectly-pitched Mandarin with the waitstaff. "They love him here," his girlfriend told us. "How many white guys can come in and do that?" It was an excellent evening, but Lao Sze Chuan is not a dive.
The restaurant we tried last night, however, was.
You'd think that for someone who lived in California as long as I did, I'd be fairly fluent in Mexican food. Maybe our town was just too upmarket, saturated as it was with incredible seafood stews and mole and what Tom once called "Burritos from God." At any rate, it took a relocation of several thousand miles further away from the Mexican border, but I've finally discovered birria.
Don't blink or you'll miss the Birrieria Jalisco, a block or so past Western on 47th Street. It is your picture-perfect dive restaurant: chrome paper-napkin dispensers on rickety tables with dinged veneer tops, chrome-framed chairs with vinyl upholstery, a handpainted and untranslated Spanish menu hanging over the bar/cashier counter where orders were placed, and even mismatched linoleum tiles and a wooden screen door that banged shut. (Their waitstaff is also on their way to sainthood after flagging us down on the street, fifteen minutes after we'd left the restaurant and they'd closed up, just to alert me that I'd forgotten my backpack at the table. With my laptop in it. Which was returned to me unmolested. *shudder*)
The birria itself is goat meat stewed in rich, well-spiced goat broth. It's served with corn tortillas, lime, raw onion, cilantro, and toasted whole red chiles. You pick up a hunk of goat, wrap it in a tortilla with a little bit of all of the above, and damn, that's what I'm talking about. A small plastic vat of sour-pickled carrots and cauliflower also made it to our table, but once you get into the goat-bliss zone there's no turning back. The only thing that could disrupt my sudden addiction to goat was the quart-sized styrofoam cup of fresh horchata that had somehow appeared alongside. The whole meal came to well under $10 per person, some of the best delight for your dining buck to be had on the South Side, if not throughout town.
The place closes at eight, though, which meant that we found ourselves back on the sidewalk well before we'd finished enjoying each other's company. I suggested looking for a Starbucks, but (perhaps unsurprisingly; perhaps thankfully) there were none to be found nearby. Instead, we found ourselves wandering into another experience that I should have had in California but didn't: the El Central Bakery.
Much cleaner than the Birrieria Jalisco, and sans goat, the bakery consisted of a small front room packed full of overflowing pastry cases and an enormous back room walled off from the front by several large glass windows. Behind these, four or five pastry chefs dashed up and down several long tables, spreading filling and folding dough over it and neatly slicing the long rolls into triangles, lightning-fast, all by hand. All three of us were still goat-saturated, but I couldn't resist picking up at least one pastry (fifty-five cents!!) for sometime when I'd have the gastric bandwidth to appreciate it.
"You only getting one?" asked the fellow in line in front of me, pondering the item on my tray (which consisted of some sort of soft yellow cake in a bed of crunchier, cinnamony puff pastry).
"I could get them all," I told him with a grin, "but I have to stop somewhere."
"You need to try one of these," he told me, showing me an item on his own tray that looked like -- and turned out to be -- a custard tart in a shortbread crust. "With a glass of cold milk. So good."
I took his advice, grabbed one, and paid a grand total of $1.16 for the pair. (My husband and I devoured them both this morning; they were so good, so much better than we even expected, that now I'm thinking of heading back down to 47th Street this afternoon to stock up. No joke.)
The final stop on our tour of the block was a supermercado/taqueria. "We had a place like this by us in California," my husband remarked, "called La Costeña." But La Costeña did not have the large butcher's section, complete with fresh goat (perhaps awaiting pickup by the Birrieria Jalisco guys?) and a rope of red sausage looped around a drying rack that had to be at least ten yards long uncoiled. Loud ranchero music piped through the ceiling speakers. My husband's eyes lit up; his fears that he had abandoned authenticity by moving to the midwest had been dispelled. As it turns out, they're keeping it real here too.
The final stop on the Soup Tour will be a Vietnamese place on the North Side, which hopefully will be as good as the pho I used to get as a 1L in the Tenderloin. Even if it isn't, this still remains the best public-interest auction item I've ever won.
Back during the crazy days of my write-on campaign, my wonderful mentor Adam was always willing to take an hour or two out of his hectic tenure-track schedule to help me hash through the latest round of revisions to my Comment. "I owe you a nice dinner for all your help," I told him once after a particularly involved discussion of uniform statutes. "Hell, if I make it on, I owe you dinner at Charlie Trotter's."
He may have thought I was kidding. But that's the kind of debt I'm happiest to pay, for every reason you might imagine. And last night, finally, after Adam had finished with the presentation that had been his excuse for coming to town, I made good on the promise.
Continue reading "past consideration"
Almost guiltless, and you'll feel good and calm and productive making them:
Oven Fried Sweet Potatoes
1 c chardonnay
1 tbsp olive oil
Healthy shake of allspice
Healthy shake of paprika
Salt to taste
One large sweet potato
Preheat oven to 425. Pour chardonnay into a wine glass. Combine olive oil and spices in a mixing bowl. Peel sweet potato and slice into matchsticks. Drink chardonnay. Toss matchsticks in olive oil mixture and spread out in a single layer on a nonstick cookie sheet. Bake for 15 minutes, then turn them all over, then bake for another 10 minutes or until crunchy. Ignore any alarming "Help, I'm warping!" noises the cookie sheet may make while complaining of the hot oven.
This recipe scales easily; just repeat everything.
All the Stuff Needing Done [1][2] this spring break means that I haven't been able to visit my mother in Florida, as I usually do. So to bring a little bit of semi-tropical flavor into our still-snowy lives, I made this for dinner last night:
Spring Break Curried Chicken, Caribbean Style
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, put through a press
2 tbsp curry powder (a bit more is OK if you're using up the last of the can)
1 tbsp cumin seeds, ground
2 tbsp olive oil
3 boneless chicken breasts, cubed (I don't like dark meat, but if you do, you can use that instead)
2 potatoes, peeled and cubed
2 1/2 cups water
1 tomato, chopped
Throw onion, garlic, curry powder and cumin into your food processor. Whirl to make a paste. Add 1/4 cup water to make the paste pourable. Heat oil in saucepan and decant paste into hot oil. Fry for 5 minutes. Add cubed chicken and fry for 5 more minutes. Add water, tomato, and potatoes. Simmer briskly for twenty minutes or so, until the potatoes are fully cooked through with curry goodness. Most of the water, and almost all of the tomato, will be soaked up. (Caveat: the bottom of the saucepan will burn if you leave it to simmer for too long. Oops.)
Serve over rice only if there's enough sauce left for the rice to soak up, otherwise the potatoes are probably all the starch you need.
[1] Currently estimated at: clinic filing due Friday, response paper on unfinished book due the following Monday, and Same Old Same Old(tm) spring seminar paper due May 16 but which should really get written now while I theoretically have the time.
[2] Note the Pittsburghism. I blame my father; he's the one who grew up there.
Skordalia is delicious while you're eating it. It's even delicious on your palate for a good half hour afterward. But by the time an hour has passed, you feel like a walking clove of garlic.
Conclusion: like bagna cauda, skordalia only works if everyone in the house shares it.
In celebration of today's successful negotiation, and in anticipation of a week of fun-free exam preparation, I suggested to my husband that we try dinner at a new restaurant which has recently hovered at the top of my on-a-lark list.
I forget how I first heard about Moto. Maybe the introduction came in one of the articles my mother-in-law routinely clips from Bon Appetit magazine and mails to us. Or maybe I followed a link from Metromix, or read one of the glowing reviews about the edgy new wave of technological cuisine. Anyway, somehow I learned that there was this place called Moto where they printed flavors on edible paper using edible ink in a BubbleJet printer. And I love a good gimmick, so I was excited to try it. "Let's go to Moto!" I grinned to my husband, who had been indulging in a nice lazy afternoon and wasn't terribly excited about going out.
He was eventually convinced, though, which was key: with my husband on board, any fancy restaurant experience will be twice as much fun. I'm a cheapskate and always order the smallest, humblest things on any menu. He, on the other hand, will go straight for the chef's special tasting menu that costs upward per person of our biweekly grocery budget, because well, isn't that the point of going to a restaurant like this one? (He is, of course, always right about this.)
So we were off on the three-hour Dining Experience, hoping at the most to be amused. And we were. But the food itself, despite the novelty factor, surpassed our wildest expectations. Not by accident did chef Homaro Cantu spend six years on staff at Charlie Trotter's before striking out on his own. Our tasting menu, aside from prompting a fresh round of giggles with each course, was as astoundingly good as you'd hope.
Continue reading "i heart homaro"
Law School Musical Almond Cream Pie
8 oz (1 package) cream cheese, softened
2 cups powdered sugar
8 oz (1 tub) Cool Whip, thawed
8 oz (1/2 jar) almond butter, chunky preferred
2 tbsp vanilla extract
2 pie crusts, graham or chocolate
More Cool Whip and almond slices for garnish
Whip cream cheese in electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment. Add sugar and Cool Whip; whip together until fully blended. Add almond butter and vanilla and whip together until fully blended. Decant mixture into two storebought pie crusts. Freeze overnight in your freezer, or in the car if it's sufficiently cold out. Garnish with Cool Whip dollops and sliced almonds if presentation matters. It usually won't.
Reduced fat Cool Whip may be substituted with minimal impact. Not so sure about reduced-fat cream cheese. Almond butter must be the real thing. (We like the kind from Trader Joe's.) This recipe could probably be halved, if you're not making pie for a crowd.
Serve to hungry law school musical cast members along with their daily takeout. Guaranteed to charm the director into exempting you from rehearsal on Valentine's Day.
By special request:
JCA's Two-Day Atomic Gingersnaps
Worth the effort...worth the wait.
1/2 lb unsalted butter
2 cups sugar
5 tbsp finely minced fresh ginger (yes, five)
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup Chinese bead molasses (it's a little more bitter than American molasses, but that works just fine too)
1 generous tbsp white pepper
2 tsp distilled white vinegar
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves
4 cups all-purpose flour
On Day 1: Use the pinwheel-shaped chopping blade in your food processor to cream the butter and sugar until evenly combined. Add the minced ginger, beaten eggs, sugar, molasses, white pepper and vinegar. Whirl until evenly combined, then add the baking soda, cinnamon and cloves. Whirl again until evenly combined.
Scrape batter out of your food processor into a mixing bowl and add the flour, 1 cup at a time, giving it lots of elbow grease. Batter should be doughy and sticky by the time all the flour's been worked in. Divide dough into 3 balls, wrap each in plastic wrap, and stick 'em in the fridge. Leave the dough to chill for 3 hours minimum. I like to let it sit overnight so the flavors soak into each other.
On Day 2: Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Pull out the dough balls one at a time. Flour your hands and any flat surfaces generously; this dough is sticky! (I wind up washing my hands after each tray of cookies.) Pinch off 1-2" chunks of dough one at a time, roll into a ball with your hands, then place each ball on your nonstick baking sheet and flatten into a disc with your fingers. Cookies should be about an inch apart. Bake for 15 minutes or until firm but not dry. Makes about 6 dozen cookies, but these will disappear way faster than you thought possible.
I suppose there's reading to be done for First Amendment, or possibly Legal Profession. Or if I wanted to be really on the ball, I could be studying up for Saturday's Negotiation session, Sunday's inevitable Advanced Trademarks paper, or the spring seminar paper that seemed to get off to such a good start last week.
Instead, flush with inspiration and the contents of my spice cabinet, I've gone on a cooking spree the likes of which my kitchen has not seen since we left California. I made a big pot of Potus Ypocras, which smells delicious and should be ready to drink in a month. I made the dough for a batch of my specialty gingersnaps, which is currently chilling in the fridge for the requisite three hours minimum. I've got all the ingredients lined up to make the long-overdue lasagna I owe my recently-no-longer-pregnant friend. And I'm not ready to stop. There's a can of pears in my pantry. Maybe I can make a variant on BT's Friday Night Cobbler (with some extra spices thrown in for good measure). And does yeast really expire when the package says it does? If not, my husband will be eating fresh foccaccia for dinner tonight.
The law review people vote tomorrow, I guess, or early Thursday. Perhaps that's why I've been afflicted with such an uncharacteristic burst of domesticity. There's a certain comfort zone in the kitchen, one that I've neglected for awhile now. There is safety in food. It sends you to a zone where burdensome things like school can't reach you. Consumption can theoretically take you there just as brilliantly as preparation: last Friday LawFairy and I made an entire exhausting week disappear over a pot of fondue, a half-dozen glasses of wine, and assorted other butterfat-rich goodies that transported us elsewhere entirely.
But there's just something magical about preparation. My fingers smell like fresh ginger. My kitchen smells like heaven. I don't actually have much of an appetite; being surrounded by food in progress is satisfying enough. (Although I did lick the gingersnap bowl.) And I haven't even warmed up the oven yet.
Come what may, for the next few days we'll eat well. (And I think that regardless of the outcome of the Fateful Vote, fondue will be in order thereafter.)
Ambient music: Rachmaninoff, Isle of the Dead. Damned if it isn't a musical metaphor for my 1L year.
[pause to appreciate my return among the living]
[/pause]
[resume complaining]
Admin Law exam in 33 hours. My energy supply is on the wane, as is my liquor cabinet. (Mood of JCA when she's run out of vodka <<<< mood of JCA when there's a nice full bottle of vodka in the freezer.)
Here's the best I can do, in celebration of finishing all two of my outlines, as it were, just in time:
Midnight Chocolate Milk--and yet it is neither chocolate, nor milk...
1 part Godiva Chocolate Liqueur
3 parts Vanilla Silk soy milk (yes, I do tend to keep several cartons on hand at all times)
Combine in your largest coffee mug. (Mine is enormous and features a picture of Minnie Mouse sunning herself at the beach.) Works best if you layer in the chocolate first, then add the milk. No stirring should be necessary. Raise the mug on high and toast your completed outlines, the distance you've come since 1L, and the satisfaction of music that matches your mood.
I can't even read an article about the Monster Thickburger without getting nauseous.
The best comment I've heard so far on the thing was from an industry expert last week, who joked that if the regular Thickburger was "food porn," then this one was a "snuff film."
Eek.
Sauce for the Goose:
1 shot Stoli Vanil
6 oz Vanilla Silk Soy Milk
Combine in a coffee mug. Enjoy before bedtime.
Sauce for the Gander:
1 generous jigger Bacardi white rum
4 oz reduced-fat egg nog
Healthy shake of nutmeg
Combine in a short juice glass. Stir to mix in the nutmeg. Have wife taste to ensure the proper rum-nog balance. Don't let her finish it before you get a taste too.
In the past week, lights have been painstakingly strung over every last skeletal tree on our block. Building after building is adorned with garlands and ribbons and enormous wreaths (there appears to be a fairly uniform correlation between height of a high rise and diameter of the wreaths on its street face). And on Sunday's grocery shopping adventure, my husband lit upon a quart of egg nog.
If my husband is Superman -- and I like to think he is -- then saturated fat is his Kryptonite. He's convinced that it's at the front of the line of toxic awful things waiting to kill him. He's gotten every bit as bad as I am about obsessing over the nutrition-information labels on food. Egg nog is one of his alltime favorite foods, but thanks to his fat fatwa, he invariably forces himself to pass on the real deal.
This, though, was reduced-fat egg nog. "It's still got saturated fat," he said with displeasure. "But the total fat content is the same as in soy milk," I countered. "And you drink soy milk every day."
He pondered the carton.
I counted to three, then snatched it from his hand and dropped it into the shopping cart with an admonition: "Just do something nice for yourself!"
He required no further convincing.
The stuff isn't bad, particularly laced with nutmeg and spiked with rum. "I think I made this too strong," he remarked a few minutes ago while preparing himself a glass.
"I'll drink it!" I piped up. I'm 472 words into my 1500-2000 word final paper for psychology, the last paper of the quarter, and a swig or two of egg nog would do me good.
I did help, but in the end the drink was his own. Maybe it was inauthentic, but however diminished was the consumption-related pleasure, the pseudo-nog more than made up for it in the relief and lack of guilt at preemptively avoiding overindulgence. If we can head the rest of this Holiday Season off at the pass in a similar fashion, we'll be fine.
Today it was eighty degrees out, humid, heavens full of big fluffy sky-colored clouds. People without family in Florida complained of the humidity. But when the weather is this cozy and congenial in a famously freezing city this late in the season, I can't find a reason to complain.
Instead, we're having Florida Salad for dinner -- baby greens topped with slivers of leftover rosemary-balsamic chicken, dressed with my stepfather's trademark addictive salad dressing:
Don's Florida Salad Dressing
3/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1 generous tsp white pepper
1 generous tsp sea salt (coarse grained is good)
Combine, shake, let sit for an hour or so until the salt dissolves. Mmmmm. This isn't the season for them, but try this dressing over good fresh tomatoes.
My drink of choice, as I plow through a stack of reading whose height and heft alone would have had me fleeing the room in an earlier life, is a wine I found awhile ago at Trader Joe's. Egri Bikaver, its label boasts, then translates into English for those of us insufficiently fluent in Hungarian: Bull's blood of Eger.
It's not so great, as far as wines go. Headachy. But it's bull's blood, for pete's sakes. Who could say no to that?
(N.B. No bulls were harmed in the manufacture of Egri Bikaver, which is made entirely from grapes.)
There is a perverse pleasure in cleaning out one's food stash, all the more so when it means you're about to leave town. I've been known to serve my husband entire meals consisting of tinned herring, crackers, and olives before Thanksgiving vacation. And now, with hubby already installed on the left coast, my eating habits are even less constrained. By the end of exams next week, dinner might well be marshmallows and Scotch.
Despite my best efforts to keep the turnover rate at somewhere around a month, my freezer has accumulated some truly wretched squatters. I'm doing my best with these. On Monday I made a marinara sauce in which to dip the frostbitten fried mozzarella sticks left over from an injudicious Bennigan's run during my cheese embargo. Last night I thawed some repulsive papery-spongy potatoes, and managed to turn them into a convincing attempt at oven fries. (It's amazing what you can do with enough olive oil.) Tonight I'm looking for some way to use up a half quart of Soy Dream vanilla non-icecream. Eating it is one option. Any better ideas?
First: this morning, while purchasing large quantities of bottled water for my husband, I indulged in a small hunk of Taleggio. Enjoyed in moderation (as I plan to), it should last me at least a week. It is good stuff: not so pungent as it threatens to be, but still with enough bite-back to fill the palate. Recommended.
No dietary regime can ever be made fully livable without cheese.
Second: in response to my previous post on California and weight loss (partially obviated by the fact that I am, in fact, eating cheese now), commenter Margaret posts:
It makes me sad that rather than see a positive correlation between your weight gain and happiness, you believe it to be a problem. It may be that you body needs to be a size 10 or 20 or whatever. People who are thin as a result of stress are not to be envied. Regardless if you believe the claims of death from obesity (See Bigfatblog.com for a divergent point of view on the matter) persistant stress is almost never a healthy condition.
Margaret continues:
What I find most interesting is that although your post reveals the knowledge that size is relative (See your own words on the insanity that is Southern Cal) you also seem interested in conforming to that point of view rather than being secure in your own. I challenge you to reexamine the need to be thin (and since it is now trendy to say "I just want to be healthy" I challenge you to question what "healthy" means).
But hubby freaked out. We were fat and had high blood pressure and didn't work out and weren't watching what we ate. We were, obviously, going to die.
I stood by my story that the drugstore blood pressure meter was a piece of crap, but figured it was as good an idea as any to get in shape. I was in the process of applying to law school, and therefore well into self-flagellation mode anyway. More pain? Ah heck, bring it on. So we joined a gym. We attempted to be vegetarians (and succeeded for nearly three months). We lost a few pounds, felt lousy, snapped at each other a lot, and finally went back to eating meat. Fish, anyway.
And eventually, we got healthy. Ever seen that episode of Absolutely Fabulous where Edina starts working out, almost loses hope, then notices a strange lump on her arm? "It's a muscle, Mum," says Saffy. "A what??" Eddy shrieks. "A muscle? I have a muscle? Ring Mother, tell her I have a muscle!!" Like Eddy, I discovered my first-ever bicep while drinking a cup of tea. I did not holler or phone my mother. But I did walk around for the rest of the day with a huge gooey grin on my face.
I stuck with the Healthy Lifestyle because I liked it. I felt fine and, I realized, looked better than I had a few dozen pounds ago. I still work out regularly, but not because I imagine it will affect my appearance; heck, it's one of the few times of day when I get any serious reading done. I'd like for my clothes to flatter me a little more before I head back to California this summer, but beyond that, I honestly can't confess to any serious body issues. (I joke about getting my nose fixed, but if I really cared, I'd have had it done by now. My mother has been trying to convince me to get the thing remodeled since I was fifteen years old.)
The bigger danger, I think, comes in judging people with a clothing size or BMI that differs significantly from yours. If you're happy with your body image, or are within reachable range of happy, then more power to you whatever the magic number may be. But skinny people aren't all anorexic or bitchy, fat people aren't all self-indulgent or undisciplined, and people in between aren't necessarily headed in either direction. They might be happy. And this, I think we can agree, is the point.
Venturpreneur, who needs no greater praise of his personal neatitude, still gets some from me: you've got to love a guy with a cheese category on his blog.
Incidentally, I highly recommend Cardinal Sin. I bet it's this good even if you aren't just coming off of 40 days' privation.
I've found the perfect cheese to break my fast, one of which Waddling Thunder would doubtless approve: Cardinal Sin (res ipsa loquitur). It's in the fridge right now, singing to me like a siren.
So when exactly does Lent end? Sunrise on Easter? Sunset? Midnight tonight? Midnight Saturday, which would be about a half hour ago?
If I were a more religious person, I'd know these things already...
Happy Easter, anyway! (A few hours early, even. Maybe I'll spot the bunny, if he keeps a schedule similar to that of Santa Claus.)
I've been good. I really have. I gave up cheese and Snood for Lent, and have not cheated once. (I accidentally ate a cheese shred on a salad once, but that doesn't count since I thought it was a piece of carrot.) Even at my cousin's wedding in Costa Rica, an occasion on which I normally would have sampled every last food offering, I stuck to my guns: "¿Hay queso? Ah. No puedo, gracias."
Almost exactly ten years ago, when I was visiting my alma mater as an admitted high school senior, I picked up a random campus publication from the admissions office. It turned out to be the school's Jewish student community quarterly. The lead article told the story of a fellow who had abandoned kashrut for the first time on a trip to Mexico. He had dreams where God challenged him to keep kosher, and he responded by defending cross-cultural awareness, which God surely must favor. I was reminded of him at that wedding, as I frog-marched myself away from the glorious exotic cheese tray.
I've never kept kosher (most Catholics probably haven't), although I have been vegetarian for entire months at a time. And I've also done Slim-Fast, perhaps the most draconian regime of dietary restrictions imaginable (this was in the old days when it was all chocolate milkshakes). I'm impressed by people who base entire dietary lifestyles on exclusionary principles, all the more since I never succeeded in doing so myself for longer than an academic quarter. It's hard enough for me to give up one thing. The cravings are getting worse and worse as time passes. And I haven't even lost any weight.
Of course, when your choice of food is founded in your religious beliefs, it's both easier to stick to your guns (because there's a built-in rationale for you avoiding certain foods, a rationale you presumably value highly) and to cheat (like the kosher guy who debated multiculturalism with God). I'd like to say that this year's Lent experiment was grounded in my deep and solid Catholicism, except that my Catholicism is neither deep nor solid. This is more of a Contracts exam issue-spotter: I prayed for something in a moment of great need, wound up getting what I prayed for, and consequently decided to participate in Lent this year since I felt as though I owed something back. I can't cheat -- I'm bound by estoppel.
The gaming-in-class thing is working out better; I don't miss Snood in any real sense, perhaps since none of my classes this term are either particularly dull or particularly contrarian to my politics. I haven't even done the quasi-cheat of switching to a different game. People around me play Spider Solitaire, or Minesweeper, or even Snood themselves, but I'm OK with just taking notes. No cravings there. I might just see how long I can keep this up, even after Easter.
Cheese, though -- that's a toughy. I'm itching for some now. On Sunday I'll be bingeing for sure. But I can't blow it now; this is the home stretch. I'll wait. I'll uphold my end of the bargain. For the agreed-upon term, at least, I'll keep the faith.
Nothing like a nice steaming bowl of spaghetti squash and tomato sauce to suggest that spring is, in fact, right around the corner. What else can combine the concepts of "comfort food" and "light and fresh" so seamlessly? This, my friends, is what Pasta Salad *should* be. (Inspiration, if not actual recipe, thanks to Knife-Wielding Feminists.)
In weather this cold, even the healthiest diet winds up devolving into lots of dark, heavy food. There's plenty of it to be found in this city; even Pan-Asian restaurants feature a sixteen-ounce steak as the daily special. (They probably rub it with something Asiatic, but when it's this cold, who can tell?)
I concluded, in this time of minus-signs on the weather report, that I was bored with thick clothes and thicker food. I needed some brighter flavor in my life.
Here's my best effort at same, inspired by Dave DeWitt's Habanero Cookbook:
Midsummer Salmon Pâté
2 small cans salmon, or one large, drained (and deboned/de-skinned as needed)
2 tbsp Grey Poupon mustard
3 tbsp Malibu Rum
2 eggs, hardboiled, chopped
1/2 Maui onion, minced
Juice of 1/2 lime
1/4 cup plain yogurt (fat free works fine)
2 dried habanero peppers, reconstituted in simmering water and minced (you can use fewer, or different peppers, or none altogether depending on your tastes)
Throw everything in the Cuisinart and puree. Chill for a few hours to set flavors. Eat on Carr's Table Water Crackers by the light of an artificial sunlight lamp. If you can stand it, have some chilled sauvignon blanc alongside.
Power of suggestion, baby. Vacation is all in your head.
3 cans anchovies, coarsely chopped
10 cloves garlic, minced
1 stick butter
1 cup extra-virgin olive oil (then add the oil from the anchovy can)
Melt butter in oil over low low low heat. Add garlic. Cook over low low low heat until garlic is golden. Add anchovies. Cook over low low low heat until anchovies have dissolved into a layer of anchovy paste on the bottom of your skillet with chunks of garlic in it. There will still be a layer of oil above the 'chovies, with some butter lather floating on top.
Have your family cluster around the hot skillet (remember, keep it on low low low heat) and dip vegetables and crusty bread into the bagna. Everyone has to eat some, if only to share in the post-bagna garlic perfume.
Do this on New Year's Eve for good luck in the New Year. It has even been known to work.
"Wow," said my husband, admiring the price tag on my current drink of choice. "Six-dollar wine."
"Cheapest they had," I replied, which was true. And it's not bad, either.
I have no excuse. Not only am I certain that there is a Trader Joe's here, I know exactly where it's located. I just need to shlep out there and pick up a case of Two Buck Chuck.
When I graduated from my First Real Job After College to my second, which paid me roughly 40% more per year, I made myself a promise: from now on I drink good wine, and my car gets good gasoline. I've been good about the car thing, especially since I got the A4 (which accepts nothing less than 91 octane--the inside of the gas cap says so). But while I've steadfastly refused to go back to the "Chillable Red" wine-in-a-box crap I drank when I was broke, I fear I'm still a vino cheapskate.
Getting a reservation at the French Laundry is an endeavor. It's an unthreatening, reasonably-sized restaurant, conveniently located a short way up into the Napa Valley, with charm oozing visibly from its stone walls. It's also $135 a person for the dégustation menu, so I for one wouldn't have figured that everyday people would be lining up to eat there.
And yet everyone is. The place takes reservations two months to the day in advance, starting at 10 am, on a single phone line manned by one harried operator. My husband and I managed to score our reservation only by booking time starting at 9:55 am on June 15, queuing up three different telephones (two cell, one landline), and repeatedly hitting redial...for an hour and twenty minutes.
Continue reading "la linge"
I'm an avowed spicy food enthusiast, so this was a no-brainer. But even if I didn't already collect hot sauces, I still couldn't have resisted Lawyer's Breath:
Detail of label:
Apparently there's a whole product line of "judicial flavors," which I'll now have to sample!
No copyright class for me. I let time make the decision for me and cooked dinner for my groggy husband instead. Now that school's out I should make things that are fancier or more involved, but this recipe is one of his favorites and also happens to be a completely cheap and easy throw-together for all ye law students in search of dietary variety on a budget:
Don's Original Salmon Cakes[1]
1 can salmon, the cheap kind (about the size of a can of soup), bones removed
17 (yes, 17) saltines, put through the food processor to yield about 2/3 cup cracker crumbs
2 eggs beaten
Dried onion shaken over the beaten eggs -- use your judgment, we like a lot
Paprika to taste -- we like a lot
Combine everything in a mixing bowl, making sure you mash up the salmon. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 2 hours so that the egg softens everything -- letting it sit the whole day is OK for the commuter students out there. Heat a little olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Make little patties out of the mixture and fry them 4 minutes to a side in the oil. (Make sure you have enough oil going, since otherwise the patties will blacken before they're done cooking.) Pat the oil off the finished cakes with a paper towel and serve with spinach sauteed in the same skillet after you're done with the fish. Makes 8-10 cakes. Mmmmmm.
[1] Don is my stepfather. He did not actually invent this recipe, but did introduce it to us, so they'll always be Don's salmon cakes to us. Plus, whatever the original recipe called for, the paprika is definitely his innovation.
The New York Times has discovered Charles Shaw. (Article courtesy of Benn, who needs a blog.)
The lasagna I donated to my school's public interest auction finally came due. Turns out the lucky purchaser is N., a guy from my Edie class. "I bought all the food I could at the auction," he said, "so that I wouldn't have to cook in the weeks before finals." He specifically requested turkey sausage and extra cheese.
I needed a break from outlining anyway. (I always need a break from outlining. For some reason, the effort seemed so much more efficient last semester when we'd gather around K.'s kitchen table to do it. Now K. has decided that she prefers to outline solo, so C. and I are stuck doing likewise. Hopefully it's taking her less time than it's taking me...)
So last night, I set aside a good two hours and cooked. There's something incredibly homey and comforting about making lasagna; you're always doing three or four things at once, but it's less like a panicky law-school-style juggling act than a long-familiar dance step. You thicken the sauce with tomato paste, thin it with a bit of red wine, beat the eggs, stir the boiling noodles, sprinkle the freshly-chopped herbs over the saucepan and the ricotta bowl, and there's a calm to the movement that draws you in among all the women, your relatives and ancestors, who have done this before. Before you know it, as you slather on the last layer of ricotta and sprinkle extra mozzarella on top, time has passed. Time has passed and the kitchen's a mess and there are sticky utensils and cutting boards and discarded saucepans all over the place, and gosh, how did they get there? I was too in the zone to notice them.
N. lives in Emeryville, which is nowhere near where I live. Accordingly, the lasagna got to ride for a good hour in the passenger seat of my car as I blundered my way about the East Bay in search of N.'s street address. Turns out N. lives less than a mile from the Bay Area's only IKEA store, which I was hard pressed to avoid. I miss IKEA. Growing up has meant upgrading, piece by piece, most of the cheap furniture in my apartment. I think we still have one or two bookcases from IKEA and maybe a nightstand, but that's about it. Sic transit gloria mundi. N. seemed at any rate thrilled with the lasagna, particularly when he heard that it contained nearly four pounds of cheese.
Now I'm craving lasagna.
This was dinner tonight:
1/2 onion, minced
sauteed in a bit of olive oil
add a splash of balsamic vinegar, then wince and regret it
too late
add 1 smoked Muscovy duck breast from Costco, copious fat layer carved off, cubed
sizzle a bit
add 1 bag Trader Joe's Four Mushroom Mix (no need to thaw it)
add 1 can chicken broth
add a bit of water
add a splash of red wine (Charles Shaw Cabernet Sauvignon today)
sprinkle on some of the spice packet included with the Four Mushroom Mix
bring to boil
lower to simmer
add 1/2 bag frozen peas
fend off husband who is reaching into pot with his FRICKIN BARE HANDS to fish out mushrooms and pieces of duck breast
stir
go check email, play some Cubis, queue up some Sting MP3's
remember that pot is still simmering
stir
ask husband if he'd prefer soup or stew
when he expresses no preference, decide on stew
add several heaping spoonfuls of fat-free sour cream
add another splash of red wine for good measure
stir
return to computer and accomplish nothing for the next fifteen minutes
decide I'm hungry enough
call out to husband "You ready to eat? Because I am"
dish out stew
decide to call it goulash, just because the word is fun to say
*swoon* in surprise at how lick-the-bowl yummy it is.
Normally when I invent recipes like this, they don't wind up tasting this good. I must have picked up some mojo from Lidia, who was making something with mushrooms and green peas this morning on the gym TV while I ran on the elliptical trainer. She gets the credit for inspiring me to think about mushrooms and peas. And that goofy duck breast, which I'd bought on a whim last weekend and which had been chanting "What are you going to doooo with me?" every time I opened the refrigerator door, had nominated itself for maceration just by being.
Should you ever find yourself in possession of a smoked duck breast, a bag of frozen mushrooms, and some fat-free sour cream, try this. It's really amazing. We ate the whole pot. (And I'd leave in the balsamic vinegar, even.)
We had the fortune to find ourselves in Elk, California (pop. 250) beneath an expansive full moon. The bustling metropolis of Elk features not a single street light, but we neither needed nor missed them under the incredible moon shadows. Our cottage sat astride a bluff about twenty yards above sea level, with a mildly precipitous path leading downward to a stone-encrusted beach strewn with giant logs. How did logs get on the beach, particularly logs four and five feet in diameter? Coastal redwoods leveled in mudslides? We had no idea. I dreamed of massive bonfires, and so, apparently, did the moon.
Breakfast featured, among other things, a treasure called Morning Pie whose recipe I could not leave without:
Morning Pie
2 cups cottage cheese
3 eggs
2/3 cup sugar
2 Tbs all-purpose flour
1/3 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
2 tsp grated orange rind
1 Tbs orange juice
1/4 tsp orange extract
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Beat cottage cheese with an electric mixer for 1 minute. Add remaining ingredients and blend well. Pour into a 9" pie plate sprayed with Pam. Bake for 50 minutes, or until knife inserted comes out clean. Refrigerate overnight; serve chilled next morning. Freezes great also. Serves 6. (Recipe courtesy of David the Innkeeper, Elk Cove Inn.)
To reach Elk you cross the Golden Gate Bridge and shoot northward on the 101 all the way up through Sonoma County. Past Healdsburg, right when the towns start getting truly quaint (better had pack all the Tylenol et al. that you'll require, since the last chain drugstore you'll see is in Cloverdale), you ease off of 101 onto a road called the 128, which bears absolutely no resemblance to its eponymous Boston analog. This 128 swings around for about six or seven miles in some crazy-ass hairpin turns before depositing you, vaguely queasy at this point, in front of the Entering Mendocino County road sign.
From there the road runs parallel to the Anderson River through what I'm pretty sure is California's northernmost wine-producing region. The cute, if slightly ghosty, towns of Yorkville and Boonville slip past before you look around and realize that you're breathing deeply and everything is...just...perfect. By the town of Philo, as you pass the Roederer champagne cellars, you're grinning. And when you come upon the sign reading "Navarro, pop. 67," hopping out of the car for a quick photograph is an irresistable temptation.
There's a Navarro Vineyards as well, south of Philo, where the tasting room is lazily patrolled by a dachshund named Simon. I adore dachshunds even when sober, and after tasting at Husch and Roederer already, I was ready to hug the dog straight into the A4 and cuddle him all the way back up to the inn. Alas, Miss Kitty, the official guardian of the patio outside our cottage, likely would have objected, so Simon stayed at Navarro (where you can purchase a T-shirt featuring an artist's rendition of Simon standing on his front paws, balancing a bottle of Gewürztraminer on his nose).
Between Navarro and the ocean lies the Navarro Redwoods State Park, inside which it is wholly impossible to harbor any discontent with anything, period. "Camp only in designated areas," mildly threatens a brown sign at the entrance to the park. The trees are slightly scary, much bigger than ordinary trees, silvery-reddish-green with bark and moss and needles and more moss. Perhaps they suspected that I had entertained dreams of bonfires featuring their shipwrecked cousins. Even so, they still welcomed us completely.
And then the ocean. This is my ocean, this is the Pacific I'm supposed to live near. It is not steel-gray and furious like the ocean in Half Moon Bay or Santa Cruz; this ocean is at once joyous and pensive, a toss of jade and eucalyptus and evening sky colors dotted with whipped-cream foam. "Look at the ocean!" was all I could say to my husband. "It's got color!" It had color under the sun, under the fog, and oh, my God, under the moon. The sky and the fog and the ocean swirled together past the cottage picture-window until I could no longer tell which was which.
Amidst the whispering roar of the ocean and the quiet of everything else, my husband and I remembered that we were married and proceeded to act like it.
I turned twenty-eight yesterday at 12:42 pm, right on schedule. Try to keep distractions and other unwanted intrusions out of the way as much as possible, said my horoscope. Now's a good time to pay attention to the inner workings for a while. If you're feeling guilty about something, do whatever is necessary to cleanse yourself of that negative energy. I ate a lot, drank a good deal of wine, and read the inn's copy of Winnie-the-Pooh.
And it was good.
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful: it's pomegranate season, and Costco stocks the biggest, ripest, sweetest poms you'll find in all of California. Or at least, they stocked them yesterday; by today they've probably run out, so good are these babies. Few things are as purely satisfying as having a whole six of these brilliant, wine-red, softball-sized delights beckoning from the kitchen counter. Well, five anyways. Make that four.
Pomegranates are my favorite fruit, and perhaps my favorite food, in the universe. You can't be unhappy when you're eating a pomegranate, greedily gulping mouthfuls of the seeds, joyously squirting juice all over yourself. It's an immersive experience, the perfect distraction from sixty-two pages of Crim notes that are vehemently opposed to being turned into a short outline.
Incidentally, is anybody going to bite on the contest? C'mon, property mavens, let's hear it!
...must...brief...
This whole work-Saturday, play-Sunday thing has worked out reasonably well to date, so of course we had to go mess with the formula today by deciding to squeeze some play time into Saturday. (Tomorrow we're helping some friends move from San Mateo to South San Francisco, which, while a good deed in my book, hardly counts as "play time.")
We couldn't avoid the Saturday indulgence, see; today at 4:30 was a long-awaited event at Fuki Sushi. I'm a huge fan of wine-tasting, beer-tasting, scotch-tasting and pretty-much-any-good-quality-alcohol-tasting, so I couldn't have been more thrilled when I picked up the little promotional card advertising Sake 101: a sampling of eight premium sakes from Japan, complete with hors d'oeuvres.
I wasn't disappointed. Three of the sakes were of the junmai type, the Sake of the Common Man. Junmai sake smelled and tasted, for the most part, the way you'd expect sake to smell and taste. (With one exception: an item called shusen, which was pale yellow and smelled horrible. Tasted OK, though.) Further up the food chain were a pair of ginjo sakes, one of which was apparently designed to please women drinkers. Ironically, I preferred the other one, as did both of the other women at our table.
At the top of the sake totem pole were the dai ginjo sakes -- neat, pure bliss in a glass. A dai ginjo, according to our tasting guide, is supposed to slip straight through your mouth and down your throat. This sounds absurd until you taste one and realize that that's exactly what it does...a wash of flavor rolls back over your palate and disappears as you swallow, leaving no aftertaste. The best one ($100/bottle!) bore the poetic name of suirakuten, which the tasting guide, after a moment's thought, translated as "heaven of tipsy delight."
That's where I am right now. And I have to brief.
Background noise of the moment: ear candy, the Pergolesi Stabat Mater. It goes well with suirakuten. I should make that my new motto, or username, or something.
My husband isn't home yet, and the simmering pot of white bean soup on the stove will need to continue simmering for another 45 minutes before it becomes officially edible. (Mad props to Professor Civ Pro for canceling class today, enabling me to actually *gasp* cook dinner.) I, meanwhile, have the munchies.
Last week, on our excursion to EPCOT in Cupertino, we found ourselves simply unable to resist the snacks aisle in the Ranch 99 market. My husband chose one of his perennial favorites, a peanut-brittle-esque confection made with black sesame seeds; I decided to experiment, and grabbed a bag of something I'd never tried before.
I don't read Chinese, and the people who translated the packaging apparently are scarcely better at English. Still, I was able to deduce that these things were called Broad Beans, and that they were probably awfully fattening.
They're delicious, in case you're wondering. A quick googling informs me that Broad Beans are in fact fave, the beans first made famous as Hannibal the Cannibal's preferred contorno alongside human liver. These particular beans are deep-fried in palm oil until crunchy, then seasoned with something vaguely garlicky and a whole helluva lot of salt. They are virtually impossible to stop eating once you've picked them up, and horrendously guilt-inducing if you haven't been to the gym since Monday morning.
I should put them away now. Really.