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.

Trimming the Fat

It's 6 in the morning and I'm making bacon. More bacon than I have ever dared rest my eyes on at one time. I'm teaching myself to render bacon fat for the food blog I write for (not this one), which touts the philosophy that we should keep eating the way our primordial ancestors ate, which includes using all the parts of an animal, as well as finding ways to use (rather than discard) its fat.


I can't help but think, as I photograph the bacon fat in the light of a new sun that has just barely come up, how I am not a caveman, and I do not want to eat bacon, nor find uses for its fat. As I walk back to my bedroom, my clothes, my hair, and the entire bottom floor of this building stinking of fried lard, I think: Oh, Nana. And all the Nanas of the world. How did you ever handle it back then, in the 40s, 50s and 60s when bacon was such a regular and desired-after breakfast module? Daily bacon. Really?

The Opera is on Friday.

The dishes were accumulating so I couraged up and tackled them, and now I'm biceptually intimidating. That is, my muscles are strong.


Les Huguenots will premiere this weekend, so there are a lot of people in my building right now singing opera. That's how I got sidetracked and muscular -- I was on my way to the kitchen with a heavy box of plates when a voice came out of nowhere. Holding my heavy box I creepily lingered in the hallway in front of the door where that voice was coming, perking my ears and trying to take part in the music. My arms, oh they were aching with the weight of those dishes, oh and people were passing now too, giving me odd stares. But I didn't budge. I was standing there, with my heavy plates, enjoying the singing, and my arms were shaking, but it was beautiful, it really was.

Eventually, of course, the music stopped, and I went away. My dishes now are done, and I am sipping tea in my room, reflecting on the chicken and fingerling potatoes I ate at lunch, drizzled with lemon-caper dressing. I will sleep well tonight. The opera is on Friday.

The Upper West, Yes.

Searching for an apartment in New York City has been a nightmare, but the worst may be over now.

Brian came up from PA yesterday to help me look at a place, and we put our deposit down on an apartment located around the Petit Senegal neighborhood of 8th avenue. We found it on Craigslist after weeks of complicated searching, which entailed my driving back and forth to the city on the weekends and meeting with various people to see a very limited array of options based on what our budget allows (apparently that includes anything from a basement apartment with no windows to a fifth-floor walkup with no stove).

There was an air of inevitability about it, that something else would come along. And sure enough...this video might be our new backyard. I should hear from the building owner this week.

Other forms of it.

I have been standing or sitting on the Oriental rug, looking out the window, listening to the Opera singer who lives next door sing through the wall. I have been writing research papers, not journal entries. I am not cooking, but I am very, very glad.

Sharing is caring

Sharing is caring, my colleague assures me. And my best rejoinder yet for stealing all his printer ink? Homemade brownies.

I find that making desserts is, in general, a pretty fool proof idea. Especially in grad school. Especially when you're looking for an excuse not to analyze the Deweyesque notions of democratic education one more time, because if you do your brain will Deweyesquely explode.

The glory of dessert is something I first learned back in high school, when I never had a pen or was always forgetting my text book. I'd get someone to share with me by offering them the freshly baked whateveritwas in my lunch. There was great success in this method then. Some things never change.

Blangavo

The source of all misery is rejection. It's true even for old fruit. So better to be kind-- when an avocado is nearing the end of its edible life, do whatever you can not to throw it out. Instead, accelerate a rebirth.

Rebirth and acceleration are big reasons why I own a blender. Blenders do a darn-tootin' good job of both accelerating the rebirth of foods that are nearing their throw-away stages, and accelerating my access to newly born foods that are otherwise tedious or just plain boring to eat. Maybe you don't experience this, but when I look at an avocado, I want badly to do something creative with it. Still, I end up just eating it by itself, plain, scooping it out of its thin dark skin with a spoon. Afterwards I look at some eggs longingly. I pick up and put down a pineapple. I close my eyes and contemplate the taste of a blueberry-avocado-cilantro mix. Had I employed a blender, I could have made a morphing. I could have pulverized several foods into one, and made something new of avocado which was also only accessible by straw. Turning food into a one-way road kind of deal (one serving device vs. plate, fork, napkin etc.) is a great aid to those of us already plagued by so much indecision in so many aspects of our non-kitchen lives.


Today, in need of a creative half hour, I actively took my own advice and blenderized. Blueberries, a little coconut milk, agave syrup. Ice, plenty of ice. No forks, no chop sticks. Straw only. Orange slices on top...

....and guess what?

"Blangavo" means "this recipe needs work."

In Food Blogging, a Gender Gap

photo by Ms. Alizanne

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All food bloggers document food -- its recipes, its history, its context -- for a creative outlet, a hobby, or a profit. But most of those people are not men.

In February, the TIMESONLINE put out a piece on the top 50 food bloggers, five of which were male. Matt Armendariz of Mattbites.com is listed as "one of the select numbers."

Women food bloggers are all over the internet. Some are confined to the home-zone by choice, but most are working, oscillating between what was once the call of duty for a girl and what is now considered the dream modern women should want: to be successful and confident enough to "make a home" by herself, by her own financial gains.

Molly Wizenberg of Orangette is a favorite of mine. She is neither a stay-at-home mom, nor someone who straightaway tied herself (wrists, hips and ankles) to the apron as a gimmick. She actually started her food blog in 2005 after dropping out of a PhD program in social anthropology -- so the girl's smart! -- and while she was "on the search" for her next step she began to write, and eat, and then write about eating, and now she has a book and a soon-to-be opening pizza shop in Seattle.

Molly arrived in the kitchen without coercion, and she confirms my suspicion that something about the kitchen is "right" when life isn't. Something about the kitchen is "personal" and "universal" at the same time. And being there as a woman in 2009 is an immaterial thing.

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If there had been food bloggers right after the Civil War, they'd have been the Miss Prim variety. Blogging would have been a lot of lecturing. It would've attempted to moralize, talk of "what the children and/or husband liked," but would have condemned food discussion related, for example, to anatomy (especially brindling at the terms "breast" and "leg")

Today, femme-foodies are open about limbacy, and many other topics, which make it easy for them to turn a food blog into a big discussion about life. Perhaps because of that, the idea that food is "a lot of talking," the movement, the opening of the internet kitchen doors, has perhaps been more effective for one gender over another.

Even though both men and women eat food, and agree that the kitchen is, across the world, an inclusive space, could the desire to talk about food, and connect it to a larger discussion be a gendered thing?

"We all have kitchens," the men seem to say. "We just don't think about it that much."

Ode to Ruth, and blueberries

On my way into town for some beer and groceries, I noticed the engine gauge on my dashboard going berserk. I pulled off to the side of the road and opened the hood. Coolant, all over my foot.

As I stood around waiting for the mechanic to install my new radiator (magically I had pulled off the road and right into the lot of a fix-it garage), I vaguely eavesdropped on his conversation with another customer and mostly stared into space. I was thinking about my future: a dream-life with a perfectly new and always-reliable car; a life with no car at all.

Suddenly, a little girl appeared before me.

"This is for you," she said, offering up a very long-stemmed dandelion. She stared with confidence at her hands as they convened with mine, successfully passing the gift. She stared at my stomach, where, had I been her height, there would have been eyes staring back.

"Thank you," I managed, climbing out of my thoughts, somewhat cloudily taking her in. "That's a beautiful thing."

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I know it's cliche to talk about the naivete of children, and how we, the unfeeling "adults" should strive to imitate their candor more often in our daily lives. But perhaps because of my surroundings -- a greasy, spare-parts laden garage in the middle of a dusty highway-- something about this particular child and her particular offering struck me as special.

I was thinking about money, the pain of having to fork it over in a sum that would nicely inhibit my freedom in the coming weeks. But then this girl, this flower. This way she told me it was "for me." Not just the dandelion, the car bills. But this experience, this day, this life. And despite all the noise, all the inconsistencies and inconveniences, what remained salient, really, was this little act of human tenderness. And indeed she is what I remembered returning home that afternoon. Not the car.

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Home, I ate fresh blueberries with milk. I ate them in a little white dish, slowly, by the spoonful, with lots of white sugar on top. I tilted the bowl at the end to drink up the last of the milk, which was cool and sweet and only ever so slightly blue.