tahini.

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

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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.

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.