Promises, promises

I've had so many things to write about lately; the only thing I'm short on is time. (Thanks to Justin for putting a little fire under my ass.) So let this post be a massive, behemoth, wrap-it-all-up, end-of-year blowout bonanza. What is New Year's Eve for if not excess excess excess?

First, some recent memorable dining experiences:

AVANTI: Had a lovely lunch with Tom the other day. One of the great things about working in restaurants is having free time during the day to go out and have fancy lunches (the downside being very little free time to go out and have fancy dinners. But lunch is cheaper, so let restaurant biz win this round). Avanti is one of the two or three great restaurants in Santa Cruz, with an emphasis on fresh, local, and in-season produce. Soif, the restaurant where I used to cook, and Avanti often feature the same ingredients from the same local farms; eating at the two restaurants is like seeing two paintings by different artists who were using the same palette.

We sat at the bar, in keeping with my sister's and my philosophy that the bar is the best place to sit for parties of two (and when you're flying solo). We were ravenous and fell upon the hunks of bread and olive oil with abandon. The olive oil surprised us with its explosive flavor of freshly crushed olives. The bartender confirmed that they let crushed olives and herbs macerate in the oil before pouring it off and serving it. I thought it a great touch and something I'd like to try at home. Next came bruschetta: thick slabs of grilled bread, lightly charred and smoky. One piece was topped with marinated orange-scented beets, the other with a chiffonade of barely-blanched, bright green kale and a mysterious crumbly white cheese (queso fresco?) tossed with hazelnuts and more of that delicious olive oil.

The main courses shone. I had a crispy striped bass served on a steaming, brothy tower of cannelini beans, tomatoes, artichoke hearts, and carrots. The effect was something like a soup, but fresher. Tom had the clear winner: the Poulet Rouge, a half roast chicken brushed with a subtly sweet, rich, red (naturally) wine-based sauce. I had to keep begging for bites to try to suss out the ingredients; I failed. No matter - the slight sweetness brought out the nutty Parmesan of the risotto and was cut nicely by the watercress salad served alongside. I am never one to order chicken (usually Boresville, the mark of a ho-hum eater), but this was a Great Dish. I have a running list in my head of dishes I know I'll crave when I'm pregnant: this is definitely at the top.

The best thing about it all was the price tag. Even with a great glass of wine a piece, the total bill for the whole experience was somewhere around $50, a smoking deal. The same thing at dinner would have been considerably more spendy. I can't wait to go back, for lunch of course, to try the cheese plate: the five cheeses they had available were carefully selected to create a balanced plate that progressed from a mild, smooth triple-creme to a sharp blue. MMM.


GABRIELLA: My brave dining companion boldly ordered the crispy pig's tail. I egged him on, thinking of Laura Ingalls Wilder fighting her sister for it in "Little House in the Big Woods." I imagined a sweet curly little crisp of a tail, ready to pop in your mouth. Instead, a long, crusty carrot-shaped monster lay across the plate, doused in what tasted like little more than Dijon mustard. It lay there with as much menace as I've seen a foodstuff muster. When we ventured a taste, we discovered that most of the interior was what looked like spinal cord, little pig vertebrae coated in a thick layer of mean, dirty-tasting fat. It coated your mouth and lingered, whispering of barnyard and pig sweat and garbage. Needless to say, this was not a hit, but Archie put on his game face and made a valiant effort. I have rarely seen menu bravery so poorly rewarded.

The rest of the meal was good, but not great. My appetizer was a highlight, little rounds of raw hamachi with cool, creamy avocado and a little zest of citrus. Not reinventing the wheel, but simply delicious. Our fruit tart came with housemade limoncello, which I have loved ever since my summer in Venice, and the tart sang with Meyer lemon, another old favorite.


Speaking of Meyer lemons, I pilfered a skillion of them from our tree in Sacramento. They arenow in a big bowl on the kitchen counter, staring up at me and daring me to make my mom's famous lemon cake. I'm not a cake lover (ice cream is my dessert of choice; see blog title) but there are a few I can't turn down. This is one. The cake's dense, butter-rich crumb is tempered by the tang of lemon, which stars in both the batter and the glaze. When the cake is still warm, we prick the surface with a fork and pour on the glaze so it seeps into every slice. You have to eat it when it's still slightly warm! The combination of warm buttery cake and tart lemon-sugar glaze is simply irresistible, and another food for the Pregnancy Craving List.

Other Food Stories of note: on Christmas my mom made Yorkshire pudding, and I was struck as I always am by how good something so simple can be. What is better than a fluff of dough baked in roast drippings? I sound like Ina Garten, I know, but simple, rich pleasures are where it's at. For dessert I made the Blumderful cake, a recipe that has quickly assumed Classic status with our family. It makes the biggest statement of any cake I've ever baked, but is also a huge pain in the ass. The cake part is relatively simple - an angel food cake made rich with egg yolks. You slice it into three layers and spread freshly whipped and only slightly sweetened cream between each layer and all around the outside. The comes the crunch: a crispy yet melt-in-your-mouth coffee flavored candy that you have to make yourself. This is tricky. You must carefully caramelize sugar with corn syrup, coffee, and vanilla, making sure to heat the mixture to EXACTLY 300-310 degrees. When the caramel is the right temperature, you stir in baking powder (I know, weird, right?), which causes the whole mess to puff up in a golden brown explosion. You stir madly to incorporate the powder, trying to keep your cool as the mixture takes on a life of its own. Quickly, you pull the pan off the stove and pour out the froth of candy onto an ungreased baking sheet. There it spreads out and cools; once it's hard, you have at it with a rolling pin or meat pounder and shatter it into a million crunchy little pieces. This you pour over the top of the cake and smoosh into the sides, where the whipped cream holds it in place. You must serve the cake within an hour, max, of adding the candy: upon contact with the cream, it begins to melt into a gooey caramel. This is delicious, but left too long and the cake collapses in a sodden mass. Temperamental!!!

It's a delicious cake, but that goddamned candy. I had to make it THREE times, which my mom thought was HILARIOUS. If you heat it too much, it burns and fills the kitchen with an acrid, relentless smoke. Too little, and your candy is flaccid and pale like taffy. The third time around, my mom supervised, which was both humbling (I'm a cook!!!) and comforting (I love my mom). The third time was a charm, and the cake looked like a lovely tower of caramel and cream, just as it should. Thanks mom.

PHEW! Have you made it this far, dear readers, if in fact you do exist? Let me know.

Here's to 2007, a year of endings, beginnings, and many great meals. And here's to 2008, which I hope holds more of the same. Love to you all.

A word about the title

Apples and ice cream happen to be two of my favorite foods. I have to be true to my roots here; there can be no rewriting of history. Sure, I love mussels and leeks and ceviche and steak tartare and all manner of adult and challenging flavors. But I have always loved apples. When I was little I'd sometimes eat three or four a day (clearly, I have never fallen for the empty promises of moderation). Nerd that I was, I spent a lot of my childhood reading, and apples are a great reading snack - you can eat them with one hand, they don't require utensils, and they make relatively little mess. My parents might beg to differ on that last, though. There has always been the problem of what to do with the core, and sometimes I would forget to dispose of it altogether. This habit has been hard to break, even as I have gotten older. My father has often stumbled on a dessicated core in one of my many reading nooks and taken this as prime evidence that I was home from school.

Ice cream has also been an old standby. My father and I were filling out a questionnaire at the gym over Thanksgiving, and one of the questions was "What is your favorite food?" I drew a blank and asked my dad. He didn't even pause before he said "ice cream." I admit, I judge people who don't care for it, and judge them harshly. People who say vanilla is their favorite flavor lose much in my estimation as well. Vanilla? Seriously? That's the best you can do? I imagine vanilla-lovers as quiet, meek types with no real opinions and a lot of empty space where their personality is supposed to be. What about fresh mint chip? Coffee? Hazelnut? Dulce de leche? Blackberry sorbet? Peanut butter cup? Come on! Live a little!

Lately I have taken to making my own ice cream, and I admit, vanilla has earned more of my respect. At Soif I would scrape the seeds of three whole vanilla beans and scald them with milk and cream before tempering in the yolks of twelve, yes 12, eggs. This I would heat carefully into a thick, golden, vanilla-flecked custard. Once cooled, I'd churn it into a mellow, silken ice cream that, I confess, even I liked. It was especially good on top of our apple crisp or served alongside our roasted figs in vanilla syrup.

But I digress! The point of this whole post was to say that while, yes, I do love apples and ice cream, there is a third food that I think might be my favorite. I'm not sure it counts as a food, actually, but without it I think I might put fork and knife down forever and lead a life of monastic asceticism. SALT. Definitely my favorite element of eating. Without salt, food would be bland bland bland, flavors would disappear into each other and never resonate on the palate. Salt changes everything! And there are almost as many flavors of salt as there are flavors of ice cream. Kosher salt is my cooking staple, sea salt lives on my table, and I simply love sprinkling bug crunchy crystals of Maldon sea salt on top of everything (thanks to Old Beks for that one). Vinegar is a close second to salt: together and in the right proportion, salt and acid take food from everyday to exceptional.

And this is the gospel according to me.

Ode to the Service Industry

There are few aspects of the restaurant business that are foreign to me. I have worked as a prep cook, pantry cook, and server in small family-owned places and for large restaurant groups. I have opened a restaurant (and will never do that again unless Thomas Keller calls me personally and offers me a skillion dollars a day), and I've worked for restaurants that have no business being open. Whether you work front of the house or in the kitchen, restaurants are sticky places. They suck you in. You think you're going to quit because your manager is a semi-psychotic beast and you are sick of coming home smelling like rotten food scraps. You can't mix another batch of peanut dressing, you'll scream if you have to wear those nasty work clogs one more time, no one will cover your shift, you have to work on New Year's Eve, you have a degree, a college degree, and you know there are tons of places just dying to pay you a salary and give you benefits and set you up in a nice little office.

But you can't quit. I know. I tried. When it comes down to it, if I'm not working for myself, I'd rather work in a restaurant. Nothing about it is easy, but once you master the menu, reacquaint yourself with the rudiments of good service, explore the wine list, and shine those godforsaken work clogs, it's fun. As a server, you work short shifts and walk with pockets of cash - plenty to live on, even in pricey cities. I couldn't stay cooped up in an office all day with the rest of the world, navigate a morning commute with the masses, live my life to the same rhythm as everyone else. Why go out on Saturday night and get in elbow fights at the bar? Mondays and Tuesdays are the nights to go out, when the bars are mellow and filled with other people who don't work 8 to 5. Plus, people who work in restaurants are often interesting and always the most fun. They take eating and drinking seriously, and share my idea that these are the finer things in life, not working your way up the corporate ladder.

You can't work in restaurants forever. By and large, they are the territory of young people. But while I'm young, why not?

Parsnips and pears

I have been obsessed with Patricia Well's "Vegetable Harvest" lately. The latest cookbook from the queen of Provencal cooking, it places vegetables at the center of the plate. With the bounty of farmer's markets and seasonal produce here in the heart of one of California's most fertile regions, it has served as inspiration for some memorable meals.

The other night I had J Zac and Archie over for dinner and decided NOT to serve a big hunk of meat (nothing against big hunks of meat) but simply what I was craving and not a thing more. I began by finishing off my bottle of Antica Formula, an Italian vermouth served over the rocks with an orange slice as an apéritif. I started drinking vermouth in France and have become a convert - what's not to like? For dinner, I chopped carrots, parsnips, and turnips (a mistake I was nudged into by the recipe and shall not repeat) into thin rounds and cooked them into a sort of pistou with some crushed tomatoes and chicken stock. Well's recipe calls for this spicy and slightly sweet soup to be served with a watercress pesto. I was out of watercress so I substituted arugula, which packed a different, but delicious, peppery punch. We also had Parmigiano-Reggiano to garnish as well as a loaf of crusty bread (de riguer) and some paté de campagne (no goose liver, no worries).

And that was dinner! I wanted everyone to have room for dessert, which was particularly delicious. I made Well's pear cake, reminiscent of the cakes my French sister would make during my year abroad in Rennes, France. Pears are thinly sliced then barely swathed in a light, pear brandy-infused batter and baked in a springform pan. For the last 10 minutes of baking, you mix eggs with more pear brandy (woohoo!) and pour the mixture over the top, then sprinkle on a mixture of toasted almonds ground with sugar into a fine powder. The result is a crunchy, light, and delicately sweet cake that tastes like pear, improved. I had also made a buttermilk-almond sorbet, which sounds odd but is both light and addictive (my roommate Trey has been "jibbing" off it surreptitiously ever since).

I think it went over well. Plus, there was plenty of pear brandy left over for some post-prandial drinking. Ahem.

Time, see what has become of me

I have always wanted to write a food blog; doing so has proved more difficult than I imagined when I started this thing. I began this blog months and months ago in Harvard's Lamont Library. It was 3 am, I was trying to write a paper on Ulysses, and expounding on food, Bloom's or mine, seemed to me an incredible luxury. Now here I am, graduated from school and with all the time in the world. I have a kitchen, the time, the inclination, and, I hope, the skill, to cook whatever I want. The world is my oyster, right?

We'll see. The spirit that prompted my first post is still alive: eat consciously and well, eat while respecting food's origins and preparation, eat, eat, and eat some more. I am inspired by Calvin Trillin's indefatigable appetite and M.F.K. Fisher's attention to relationships around food and Barbara Kingsolver's belief that eating well and eating responsibly (and writing about it!) are not mutually exclusive. I still love to read, clearly, and I have always loved to eat. Let the meals begin.