The Recipe, straight from Dad

Best Bloody Mary:

In a tall mixed drink glass, fill half to two-thirds with ice cubes. Add good vodka to about one-third level in the glass. Add V-8 with full sodium content (not the Low Sodium variety) to within about a half inch of the top of the glass. Add about a tablespoon of lemon (not lime) juice from either a real lemon or from a Realemon. Shake about twenty drops of McIlhenny's tabasco sauce, several shakes of salt, and about twenty twists on the pepper mill, with it set to medium fine grind.

Now shake shake shake your Mary. Add celery sprig, and don't drink more than two of these in one night.

not getting work done, part I

My father insists his Bloody Mary recipe is a secret ("never order a Bloody Mary out, it will be less than half as good as this"), but I will tell you: Stoli, Tabasco, fresh ground pepper, and whatever you do, do not add Worcestershire sauce.

makin pretty food, or makin food pretty?

Want the recipe? LMK.

best breakfast cabbage

Breakfast, to me, is anything that makes you stop feeling hungry enough to get on with your day. Still it is usually a trial. I am picky. Cereal, for instance, has maintained a highly unattractive status for many years. Oatmeal and its implied fix-ins are often too much trouble. Fruit is ok, but not by itself. Yogurt is good with fruit, but there isn't any in the house.

Skipping coffee altogether, which usually entertains me during my indecisive breakfast session in front of the open fridge, I decided on a half head of red cabbage and some light cream. Quartered the cabbage, then quartered it again, then sauteed in butter over medium heat with one side of each quarter down. After about 5 minutes flipped them so the other side hit the pan. Poured in the cream, covered it, lowered the heat very low, so that it maintained a gentle simmer, and cooked for 15 minutes. Sprinkled with salt and fork-served the wilty leaves into the mouth. Braised breakfast, this was called. Braised best breakfast.

and things on which to spread it

Breads n' Spreads looks on the outside like one of those clinics you can find in a strip mall somewhere, flanked by a Subway and a Baskin Robbins, shoved in beside a Christian bookstore; a clinic lacking insignia save for the hyphenated name of the doctor printed on the door. For those who know the truth about it, though, it actually serves excellent lunch.

After today I write in praise of Brian's turkey and provolone on toasted bread with red pepper spread, and the cold potato leek soup I ordered, which tasted like a hybrid of what I imagine ranch dressing and pure vegetable broth would be if: 1) they were mixed well, 2) if the vegetable broth was made from the juice of the crispest, cleanest, freshest cucumbers and zucchini in the countryside, and 3) if the whole thing at the end was sprinkled delicately with chives.

Brian's sandwich also came with an herbed penne salad, featuring black olives, sundried tomatoes and prettily chopped red onions. My soup came with a warm roll, which I had to eat simply because I haven't received a warm roll with anything I've ordered out, I don't think, since I was eight. We drank rounds of tall glasses of cold Snickerdoodle coffee, trying to bite the ice cubes that floated at the top. The ice really did look delicious; the cubes were made of coffee instead of water, and looked like big bobbing blocks of chocolate. All food was served on the kind of ware you only see in Anthropologie catalogues.

a cement hole with indoor yelling

Moving day is bad for everyone. Moving day with full-stop traffic in 90 degree car with no air conditioning is worse. After enough moving days, you become prepared for it all. The tribulations come less as a shock.

What I was not ready for were Pennsylvanians on the interstate. In New York, if you are standing at the Metrocard machine and your debit card just won't swipe, and you turn around and look whoever it is behind you -- the first person in the traffic jam you've caused-- in the face and give an earnest "I'm sorry," they will give you a nod back and say "it's ok." If you put your flashers on in Pennsylvania, however, or linger in the left lane, they'll flip you the bird, man. They will. It's rather shocking.

It is my fault, of course, that I packed so haphazardly as to allow for a jar of minced garlic to spill all over some box in the backseat. It is my fault that, while driving, I decided to stick my hand back there and try to figure out where it was, which of course led me to find it and then freak. out. when I pulled my hand back and it was covered in garlicy goo, and which of course was the reason that I slowed down in the left lane to a creepy 40, and swerved a bit, too. I know, I am ashamed.

The lessons to be taken away from this are many, including the food-related thing that it's important to take your time -- with cooking, with reading recipes, with sharing meals, with eating them. And when packing to leave a place, keep the minced garlic behind.

Aromatic vegetables etc.

This week's recipe photos turned out great.

tender corners, shaped like washington state

A lot of people have moved to Washington in the past eight years. The 2000 and 2008 census reflect a near 600,000 individual accession, versus Pennsylvania's 167,227 and New York's measly 513, 981.

Sartre's food blog

Our most basic pleasure drives: food and sexual gratification. Thomas Aquinas understood that these drives are in themselves wholesome because they're aimed at what is basically necessary for human life. But Kafka and Nietzsche spoke outwardly of their aversions to sex. And yet, were they not "generative?"

It seems to me there are two ways of being in the world -- I have seen it enough -- those who are born to romp and to eat, and those who find alternative nourishment; those who "regenerate" by contemplation, by asserting a voice into a crowd. It used to seem impossible to exist in both groups when I first came to New York. I became thin and severe, a pilchard sort of fish. But then I found Sartre's cookbook.

a word to the wise.

Omelets should assist rather than hinder the salience of egg. Do not even think of adding meat; it is out of the question. Vegetables, on the other hand, belong to another family entirely, with a different leader. Their leader is neither better nor brighter than the leader of eggs and meat; the two are just on opposite ends of the spectrum. When we have tried in the past to have two leaders within the same family within the same omelet, it ended in bad flavor. Again, so did today's chicken-and-egg experiment, save for the serendipitous pun.

some ideas you have when you're delirious are actual good ideas.

As I write this I'm half delirious, like Kathy Fagan writing "Little Bad Dream Charm." I haven't ingested anything all day except a few teaspoons full of bittersweet powdered cocoa, and two Dixie cups of white wine. So now I'm sitting here, heart pounding, with a multigrain boule, made into a delicious sandwich with 2% Fage, sliced tomatoes, oregano and olive oil. This sandwich is seriously in the top 5 best ideas I've ever had while out of my mind. Do not gchat or call for the next 30 minutes.

taking food pictures less seriously

Exhibit A: last night's dinner.

There is only so much to a picture of bouchons au thon, you know what I mean, or like, chocolate cupcakes. A premium photograph of a chocolate cupcake makes the cupcake look appealing, resulting in a desire or a small unfettered anxiety about finding said dessert and inhaling it. But what does this cupcake taste like? Yes, I mean the one in your photograph, oh pristine food-photographing blogger. I have seen beautiful chocolate cupcakes before, and I've made them from your recipe, and they tasted like foam, or one time oatmeal. This should never happen and it proves the flaw.

I would rather interpret the quality and taste of food by how it's been written about, versus the aesthetic appeal of the photograph per se. There is something to be said for people who can do this, who can write engagingly about making/eating food, hence making that food seem irresistible. I believe this recipe really worked for them because they are able to recount the feelings they had as they were eating it and making it. Julia Child has done this. Molly Wizenberg has done this. I have respect.

My calculated declination in food photography over the next few weeks will be in effort to improve my own food writing, starting......now, featuring (above) shoddy photograph of what I ate for dinner last night (post haste), including blurry background glimpses of the disheveled laptop-centered life I lead, not failing to include the occasional cameo of a used Q-tip.

The 9G Burrito Cart

It's inexplicable to live at Bard College for a summer and never eat at the Route 9G/199 Burrito camper, which I just learned is officially called Bubby's. I have never tasted a burrito so soft and fat and perfectly crisped and variegated by a charcoal grill as the ones I've tasted here. And I've had a lot of burritos. Like, probably not more than people who have worked at burrito joints but close enough to know those burritos are sub par. They have nothing like the home-made, hand-mashed guacamole the burrito cart ladies mash up a few hours before the lunch hour begins, or the fluffy, basmati rice brought in straight from India, or the salsa verde they make at home and put out in little jars for you to spoon on your tortilla in the little nooks where it folds in above some melty local organic cheese. After being exposed to that kind of salt-of-the-earth enterprise those Other burritos you get from Some Mopey Employee at the chain joint just bring shame to the tortilla-wrapped genre of cuisine, in my opinion, and to the world as a whole.

Today I spent my penultimate $5 bill on what may be my last rice-and-beans-in-foil until I return to the Hudson Valley next summer to graduate with my first master's degree. If I had not waited until the last hours of the afternoon to eat lunch today, a digital memory of the Bubby's cart and all its representative attributes might be pictured here. As it is, you'll just have to take my blog for it.

tahini.

The coup de grâce of anything resembling regular dinner food ever again. Dayum.

Share?

Here's a shot of Obama with my cute friend Kim sharing some tortellini at the beach. More luncheons with the Prez and beach eating on the way.

Cleaning/Shipping out

This is a very exciting week. I'm moving! On Friday! Which means I'll need to clean out my fridge.

This idea excited me very much until I actually opened my fridge to see what was in there. I have no idea how I have this much food.

• half a purple bell pepper (slowly rotting)
• 11 eggs
• 2 sticks of butter
• 3/4 jar Peanut Butter & Co. Dark Chocolate Dreams
• 1 canister Sesame Tahini
• 1/4 cucumber
• half a lime
• 10 oz. fresh spinach
• 6 carrots
• 4 chicken filets
• 1 jar minced garlic
• 1 onion
• 2 bananas
• 1 tomato
• 1 apple
• 1 tablespoon bacon fat which has now probably permanently aroma-stained the mason jar it's in and which I'll now probably have to throw away too, sad face.
  

Bad Ideas I used to Have:

• eating nothing but oatmeal for an entire week
• eating nothing for an entire week
• mixing chocolate peanut butter cookies with my hands
• eating Boca burgers without cooking them
• opening canned stewed tomatoes with a knife
• Honey Bunches of Oats, Life cereal, Nutter Butter cookies broken up and dumped into a bowl beneath tons of milk
• spaghetti sandwich

the best lunch meat between toast ever, except for that time I added jelly.

For dinner a turkey/artichoke panini from Panera on toasted Foccacia bread, and a giant chocolate chip cookie which did not (and I checked) contain trans-fat. Eaten whilst driving through the traffic light on route 9W on the way back over the bridge, both windows down, with the still, steady August air coming in from both sides, a little of the artichoke/cheese juices going down my wrist. I have never had better lunch meat between two slices of toast in my life. There were no parking spots when I got back, so I sidled up on the grass, not-caring. The post-Barnes and Noble Friday night $9 dinner to go was the best post-Barnes and Noble Friday night $9 I ever spent. (as opposed to the mid-Barnes and Noble $9, which is usually accompanied by a few other digits, and then a guilty walk out the big, smooth, wooden B&N doors, resulting in a typical $9 dinner, according to my track record, which is usually the post-B&N thing that tends to round it all out)

Yerba. No, Yerba.

Coffee is borderline healthy, with positive effects to the psyche and immune system, so it has been hard to shake.

I bought the stuff they sell at Whole Foods in a little container that looks like hot chocolate, something called Teccino, made with figs and nuts and, as far as I could see, twigs and branches and other home-building materials suitable for a vole. But that ended up garnishing my ice cream. What worked for me once, my sophomore year, was green tea, which, after six months (and even before that) really just tasted like a sock. I switched back to coffee after a fateful run to Starbucks that morning, and have since been caffeinating regularly while turning my attention to the drugs, sex, and other related vices of my friends and family members.

A week ago, during my sometimes- routine of drinking cup after cup of coffee and getting really involved in some article or paper such that I forget to eat, I felt heart flutters. It didn't feel great, like the other times when I've had heart flutters. And they didn't go away this time, even after I ate an apple and some toast. Instead, they came back a few times, and I had the distinct feeling like this was bad, like my mind was telling me to stop it. I couldn't sleep at all that night, and the next day, I made one measly cup in the morning out of habit, and just the smell felt like I was forcing myself to do this thing I didn't want or need. I abandoned it after one sip.

I decided yesterday I might have hit a plateau, like I did with alcohol after 9 years of experimenting with my repetitive inability to drink more than one beer. I decided it might be time for a moratorium; time to admit I no longer need the abundance of youth to keep me going.

I think I am OK with it. This tea I'm drinking helps. It doesn't have caffeine, which is amazing, because it tastes like it definitely should, and though it's got a very earthy, dirt-like flavor, it's nothing like the green tea sock.

Yerba Mate, it's called. I like it.

an impromptu road trip.

I drove to Pennsylvania over the weekend -- a good four hour haul down I-78.


I had a lot of work to do, but I felt the need to "escape," i.e. to use a real washing machine, to take a bath in my own bathtub, to drink a disproportionately measured gin and tonic you'd never get in any bar. To spend some quality time with the boys: Joe and Bri, and Dad, to whom the disproportionately measured gin and tonic duties have always been carefully entrusted.

Bri and I are starting to get ready for our big move to New York City at the end of the month, so I also took the opportunity to schlep a few boxes of books and odds n' ends back to my adolescent bedroom; a room which has, for the past few months, served as nothing but a big storage unit. Funny how that happens. Funny how I feel like it means I am at last an adult.

I meant to spend a lot of time in the kitchen while I was home, and so I did. On Sunday, Bri read aloud to me from the New York Times Magazine while I broiled a pork loin, baked a loaf of banana-chocolate bread (from Molly Wizenberg's book A Homemade Life), and prepared a delicious batch of eggplant ratatouille with organic flank steak.





After a long day, we scooted over to a gathering just in time to meet the lovely host of get fork'd, who had just welcomed into her life a delightful little Pomeranian puppy, who may or may not be named Mercutio.

Perplexities of gorgeous company.

I can just hear the assembly of nectarines, peaches and apricots guffawing over by the windowsill.



I know. Fruit doesn't guffaw. But it ought to. It waits while I walk slowly around the farm stands, meticulously choosing it -- the juiciest, most fragrant of the bunch -- only to bring it home in a bulbous paper sack and then not eat it.

What can I do? It's hot, and the heat ruins my appetite. But I am alone! and 3 peaches, 1 tomato, 1 jicama, 20 raspberries, 6 carrots, 2 bell peppers and 4 apricots do not make happy company when the appetite is perplexed. They must be mixed, blended, chunked, baked and somehow transformed in the next 4 days before it all goes bad. I know not how. Only that raspberries and jicama go first, for they are the most beautiful.