Three Perfect Things

Preface
This is not really a food post.

Introduction
Today I went walking on the beach past Davenport and I found three perfect things:


Chapter 1
The first was a flat round stone. It looked black when it was wet but then it dried in my hands to a dusty gray. It is extremely circular, which made it stand out. It feels nice to hold and pat back and forth between your palms. It has such a nice feel that your fingers itch to skip it across water, but if you did that you couldn't hold it any more, and plus you're not that good at skipping rocks anyway.

Chapter 2
The second was a crab claw. It is complete (as much as any part divorced from its body can be) and undamaged and the joints are still working. You can pinch things with it, if you felt like it, and bend it around and make it gesticulate. There is no meat inside but it smells peculiar and pungent. The pincers are black, like they've been dipped in ink, and the rest is a lovely beige that merges with salmon-pink. There are charming brown speckles all over.

Chapter 3
The third was a small shiny white fleck of shell, I think from abalone but I can't be sure. It has the iridescent shimmer of mother of pearl. Something about the size and shape of this water-smoothed bit of shell makes you want to put it in your mouth and suck it like a lozenge. One side is completely smooth; the other has indentations that look like the paths worms make through apples and other fruits. Ocean worms? This merits further research.

Conclusion
I'm not sure why I find these things so pleasurable, but I do know that they are more pleasurable together, removed from the too-full beach and the other, less perfect, shells and stones and claws.

Raw Food = Raw Deal

I admit it - I'm a sucker for health fads. I've read every diet book that has every been published, including (but not limited to) The Zone, Dr. Atkin's New Diet Revolution, French Women Don't Get Fat, The Okinawa Diet, Sugar Busters, The Best Life Diet, The Paleolithic Diet, Suzanne Somers' Get Skinny on Fabulous Food, Protein Power, and who knows how many more. Not that I actually practice what these books preach; to do so would be physically impossible, since they all preach something slightly different. But I like to stay informed, and it's good to throw a little healthy reading in with the Barefoot Contessa library and the Dean and Deluca cookbook, both of which tend to pad the waistline even as they please the palate.

One fad I haven't tried has been the raw food diet. I'm a cook, for crying out loud. I like to cook things. Futzing around with sprouts and blenders holds no appeal and even less glamor. I've always thought vegans looked a little gray around the gills; now imagine no eggs, no dairy, no HEAT.

But I live in Santa Cruz, where everyone does yoga, everyone drinks Kombucha, and raw food is on display at every supermarket. So I tried some spring rolls and a slice of blueberry "cheesecake" from La Vie, downtown Santa Cruz's go-to spot if you're into that sort of thing. I can't say that I am. At roughly 8 bucks, the spring rolls are the opposite of a steal, especially when you consider that they're made of zucchini, beets, carrots, and cucumber. That's it. Seriously. But the point isn't to be full, is it - if that were the case, I'd stroll on down to the El Palomar Taco Bar and swoop two snapper tacos for 6 bucks, which would give me the opportunity to get my salsa fix, becuase I swear their salsa is laced with crack. You can't stop eating it.

But I digress. The point is not to be satiated, but rather to be healthy, right? I suppose. I can't even begin to delve into the kinds of class issues this kind of eating entails; I would probably still be hungry if I didn't happen to have a terrible stomachache.

I think I'm allergic to raw food. I'm also $16 poorer than I was twenty minutes ago. Hurrah.

I want a hamburger.

This may sound strange. As a general rule, I don't eat hamburgers. I could count on one hand, for instance, the hamburgers I've eaten in the past ten years. There was the time I was driving down from Tahoe after a girls' weekend with a carful of my then-boyfriend's female relatives. We stopped at In-N-Out, a place I've eaten only once or twice (and I'm from California. I know, I know.) I ordered a hamburger. Pretty simple, right? Little did I know that you're supposed to order a cheeseburger, and a hamburger sans cheese is actually a disgusting foodstuff not worth consuming. At least, that's what the revolted looks on the faces of the Clan told me: "No cheese? REALLY? EW! WHY NOT???" (Seriously? Is cheese that important? I don't think you can even taste the cheese on a hamburger - there are so many other flavors going on - but clearly I'm not an expert. Clearly.)

I had been living my life under the woeful misapprehension that ordering a hamburger was a simple proposition; I didn't understand that hamburger eaters are a part of a particular, if not particularly exclusive, subculture. The way you eat your hamburger (or don't) can align you with (or exclude you from) a group of people, potential in-laws included.

So I don't eat hamburgers. I know some may find this a sacrilege. For some, hamburgers are a food group entirely their own, a basic form of sustenance meant to be consumed, along with other meat-and-bread combinations, as often as possible. Not me. Too many apples and ice cream to be had, I suppose. I guess I think it's strange that hamburgers, along with so many other American staples, have never really entered my personal food lexicon. Part of it, I think, has to do with being a girl, and a health-conscious one to boot. The other part has to do with spending formative years in boarding school and in France, where hamburgers were few and far between (Quick and MacDo notwithstanding). And then I became a foodie. Why order a hamburger when there are boquerones and ceviche and tartare and duck to be sampled?

The bigger question, at least right now, is this: so why do I want a hamburger now? We're talking about an honest-to-goodness, full-bore, legitimate craving. It's not for a fast food hamburger, either, which are the only hamburgers I've eaten in recent memory. I want to sink my teeth into an inch-thick patty, rare and juicy, on a thick, squishy bun. I want sauteed onions and blue cheese on top, and I want a pile of shoestring fries on the side. And ketchup.

This is so weird. I don't even know where to get such a thing. I may have to make it myself.

To be continued...

Home again home again

My but it's been a while.

I've just returned from a month in India, where the air is full of spices, although as I sit here typing in the early Santa Cruz morning (hello jet lag), it seems almost like a dream. There's too much to say about India, a place where splendor and squalor bump elbows, and abject poverty and mind-boggling luxury bump up against each other everywhere you look. So I'll start with food, since this is, after all, a food blog. And because I'm sick and sniffling, I'll start with masala chai, the delectable, spice-heavy cure-all available on every street corner in India.

Chai in India bears little resemblance to the signature drink of the Om generation (Venti soy chai? Come on.) for sale at places like Starbucks. Around three or four in the afternoon, everyone from shopkeepers to cab drivers to barbers takes a break to sip a thimble-sized cup of chai. Workers cluster around chai wallahs, who set up simple stations with a gas burner, milk, tea, and spices, and a handful of glasses. These glasses belong to the chai wallah, so after shelling out your 4 rupees (less than 25 cents), you stand and sip your piping hot chai on the sidewalk, then return it to the stand. Businesses send employees with big thermoses, which they fill to the brim with the tea.

The drink itself is hot enough to blister your tongue, fragrant with cardamom, spicy as hell, and as sweet as you can imagine. Its restorative effects are not to be dismissed; this morning I made some for myself and am already feeling better. We took a cooking class in Udaipur where we learned to make chai and even bought some of our instructor's homemade chai masala, a nose-tingling and sinus-clearing blend of green cardamom, black pepper, cinnamon, and dried ginger. (To make this at home, combine equal parts of each spice and grind to a fine powder in a spice grinder or the like. Our instructor used 25 grams of each spice and kept the powder in a glass jar in her pantry, where it will keep for several months.)

Here is her recipe. The quantities for both the chai masala and tea are flexible and can be adjusted according to taste.

Masala Chai
Serves 2

In a small saucepan, combine:
1 cup water
1 tsp. chai masala

Bring to a boil. Add:
1 tbsp. Assam tea (Darjeeling or any black tea will work as well)
1 cup milk (she used buffalo milk, but any milk will do, preferably whole)
Sugar to taste (a couple of teaspoons per cup works well)
(optional) 1 tsp. grated fresh ginger, washed and unpeeled

Boil for 2 minutes, then remove from heat, cover, and let steep for an additional 2 minutes. Strain through a fine mesh sieve and drink. It will be extremely hot. To cool, you can attempt the super-high pour of the chai wallah pictured above, or if you're like me, you can drink it immediately and burn your tongue each and every time.

Family dinner.

My parents came into town on Sunday so that my sister and I could wrap up our visa applications for India. I had the rare opportunity to time my mother, and as it turns out it takes less than thirty seconds from the time she walks in the door to begin cleaning. Unfortunately, the type of cleaning she does at our house is of the huge-project variety rather than the superficial, make-the-house-look-tidy brand. This means that rather than wipe off counters or arrange flowers, my mother pulls all the covers off the sofa and puts them in the washing machine. She also likes to set up a sewing machine on the kitchen table and embark on large clothing-making projects. She feels good because she leaves the house cleaner, technically, than she found it, but it always looks like a huge bomb has gone off when they walk out the door. This may have something to do with their three dogs - when they visit, the people population goes up 66% but the dog population quadruples. It's all very exciting, but this kind of activity makes us very hungry. Where did we want to eat?

We left the sofa cushions to themselves and went out to eat at Soif. Yes, I work there, and have cooked there, but very rarely do I get to eat there. This is a shame, because Soif is one of best, if not THE best, place to get a bite in Santa Cruz. It was one of the best meals we've had as a foursome in recent memory, making up for the La Posta debacle over Thanksgiving (this had nothing to do with the food and everything to do with a healthy dose of sisterly drama. Like a volcano, our relationship has to erupt every so often, wiping out villagers but creating a lovely clean slate). I ordered a flight of riesling in my attempt to like varietal that all wine snobs adore. I must admit, it's growing on me. I've started to crave that mix of shimmering acidity and residual sugar - it's so good! I also had a great glass of Muller-Catoir Scheurebe, a cross between riesling and silvaner. It was a little big for my scallops, but I'm not nearly knowledgeable enough about wine to care about something like that. My scallops were cooked perfectly - seared to a caramelized crust on the outside but rare and silky in the middle - although I'm a little bored of the Brussels sprouts/Dijon mustard sauce combination (but perhaps that's just a product of bopping around Soif too long, because it was actually quite delicious).

Aside from my collection of rieslings, which I gathered around me in a wine fortress, we had a bottle of chardonnay and another of Flowers Pinot Noir, which I think is the finest California pinot I've ever had. It blew my mind, and my dad's too. My sister and my mom both had the gnocchi, and the wine was great with its butter-soaked Chanterelle mushrooms and golden potato-ness. It was also delicious with my dad's steak, although I couldn't quite wrap my mind around the sunchokes that came with it. Criticisms aside, great food and wine is just one part of a great meal. The rest - atmosphere, service, company, conversation - all combine to make something memorable.

I'd say that was one hell of a memorable meal. But we had to sober up before we could get the covers back on those damn couch cushions.

The Silence of the Yams.

Thanks to a last-minute ticket offer from Tom, I got to see Michael Pollan speak last week at the Capitola Book Cafe. I came toting my copy of The Omnivore's Dilemma (In its pristine, uncracked condition it looked shameful next to Tom's dog-eared copy complete with phone number and "Please Return This Book!!!!" inside the front cover. I hope someday someone brings a copy of one of my books to a signing and it is one half as destroyed.) and picked up a copy of his new book, In Defense of Food. Pollan is a charismatic, engaging speaker, and a funny one to boot. This post's title comes from one of the pun-nier moments of the night when he talked about the deafening assertions of labeled food ("Omega-3s!!!" "Fat free!!!!" "Lowers cholesterol!!!") drowning out the natural goodness of the produce aisle.

Pollan's career straddles the academic world and the "real" one; his books are brilliant and accessible; he teaches at Berkeley but steps outside academia to write about things like the Farm Bill. He has an intellectually challenging career that makes an impact, and I'd say that's exactly what I want. Food writing is all well and good - there's a part of me that wants to bicker over porcinis and portobellas and debate the merits of salted versus unsalted butter - but Pollan proves that food writing goes beyond truffles and saffron, that it can and should try to change the way our world looks.

Come back and marry me, Michael Pollan.

Foie Gras Limerick.

There was an old gourmand of Crediton
Who ate pâté de foie gras having spread it on
A chocolate biscuit
He boomed 'Hell, I'll risk it!'
His tomb bears the date that he said it on.

From Schott's Food & Drink Miscellany

When it's worth the wait.

The best place for coffee in Santa Cruz, if you can get beyond the reverential, museum-like atmosphere and slightly sour staff, is Lulu's at the Octagon. (Oooh, and look, Christina Waters agrees with me.) Want a cup of coffee? Select a bean from their menu of over twenty, and they weigh, grind, and brew your selection to order. It's a bit of a change to wait longer for a cup of coffee than an espresso drink, but it's worth it. My cup of Guatemala this morning, brewed in a French press because the electronic press was down, had a pleasing weight and viscosity, a near-chewiness, that I haven't encountered before. I know it's a little strange to talk about coffee in wine-snob terms, but the coffee from Lulu's demands it. It also demands a healthy glug of half-and-half, the only addition to coffee that elevates it beyond its natural state (excluding, perhaps, whipped cream). Black is fine, but you skim milk-ers, you two-cube-ers, you Splenda addicts, you soy aficionados, you are all lovely people I am sure, but you are bad at drinking coffee. Throw your fears of fat and dairy out the window and do a side-by-side, blind tasting. So good, right?

Right.

A note about the food writing in Santa Cruz: so bland! One writer describes the staff at Lulu's as "nice and knowledgeable," and calls the atmosphere "casual and sophisticated." Bah.

On Hemingway, hunger.

I have always thought of Hemingway as a food writer, so today I pulled out my copy of A Moveable Feast to find the parts that made me hungry when I read them in high school. They abound. Eating runs through the book like a baseline of pleasure, each story tethered by the fundamental ritual of hunger and its satisfaction. And what hunger! The book reinforces the old stereotype that an empty stomach fuels genius. Feast is a memoir of Hemingway's time spent in Paris as a young, struggling, and sometimes starving writer:

"By any standards we were still very poor and I still made such small economies as saying that I had been asked out for lunch and then spending two hours walking in the Luxembourg gardens and coming back to describe the marvelous lunch to my wife. When you are twenty-five and are a natural heavyweight, missing a meal makes you very hungry. But it also sharpens all your perceptions, and I found that many of the people I wrote about had very strong appetites and a great taste and desire for food, and most of them were looking forward to having a drink"(101).

And what does Hemingway eat when his hunger finally gets the best of him? A beer and some potato salad, but he writes it like no other beer and potato salad I've ever read:

"The beer was very cold and wonderful to drink. The pommes a l'huile were firm and marinated and the olive oil delicious. I ground black pepper over the potatoes and moistened the bread in the olive oil. After the first heavy draft of been I drank and ate very slowly. When the pommes a l'huile were gone I ordered another serving and a cervelas. This was a sausage like a heavy, wide frankfurter split in two and covered with a special mustard sauce"(73).

He does not shy away from the verb "to be," simply stating how things are, delivering their taste with the sparing use of adjectives like "wonderful" and "delicious." From Hemingway, these sound both effusive and special. Most importantly, he describes what it is like to eat after being very hungry, the effort of holding oneself back, of eating slowly to make it last. Taste and flavor are not, as many food writers would have it, constants. They are the most variable of variables, as much a product of a specific moment in time, a single eating experience, as they are of the ingredients used. This is why I remember spectacular meals at mediocre restaurants, and why a three-star meal can be spoiled by a sour dining companion.

I can't decide whether to eat lunch or skip it, and write one instead.

Blackout!

Power outages are inconvenient and scary, especially when the wind whips around the eaves like a banshee and slams sheets of rain against the windows. Fortunately, there is a cure for winter storms and their attendant stresses: the hot toddy. Variations on the drink abound; here's the one that put my waterlogged woes to bed:

In each glass mix the following:

the juice of 1/2 Meyer lemon
a healthy dose of Meyer's Dark Rum (serving size depends on severity of the storm)
1 t. agave syrup (honey is a good substitute)

Fill with hot water. Sprinkle over the top:
pinch cinnamon
pinch freshly grated nutmeg

Stir and enjoy in front of the robust flames of a Duraflame Firelog.

On resolutions.

Some people make lists of resolutions that resemble the following:
1. Lose weight
2. Quit smoking
3. Quit drinking
4. Join a gym
5. Get a boyfriend
6. Give up [enter any number of things here, including: ice cream, chocolate, one night stands, men who are bad for me, bread, fat, coffee, talking on cell phones in restaurants/while driving/in public (I would like to give my full support to this last {note the many layers of parenthetical remarks})].

Without judging any of these noble projects, my own list of resolutions looks something like this:

1. Make my own butter
2. Cure my own meat
3. Learn to brew beer
4. Finish reading The Wine Bible and finally stop confusing Bordeaux and Burgundy (really embarrassing when you work in a wine shop, but easier to do than you might think).
5. Make kasespaetzle
6. Write every day
7. Make more ice cream
8. Develop a refined palate for riesling
9. Become rich and famous beyond my wildest dreams

Doable, right?

Fleischgeist = genius.

My sister, cultural lightning rod that she is, delivered into my hands the other day a little slice of brilliance, otherwise known as the Premiere Issue of Meatpaper, "your journal of meat culture." The magazine is guided by "fleischgeist," thus defined by the editors: From the German, Fleisch "meat" + "spirit." Spirit of the meat. From Zeitgeist, "spirit of the times." Ahem.

A little over the top, you say? Intellectual snobbery meets hipster meets slaughterhouse, you think? Perhaps, but after some consideration I decided that's one neologism I can get behind. The world does not need another food magazine with recipes for the busy housewife, but a slim, artsy volume with two pages devoted entirely to a closeup picture of mortadella? How do I subscribe?

I'm a little less enthusiastic about the meat poetry ("Meat marinated in sweat. / Meat stewed in own bile" reminded me a little too much of that wretched pig's tail. Blech.) but the self-portrait in hamburger and the flank steak dress are right up my (slightly creepy) alley. Best of all is the article about the old-school butcher shop in San Francisco started up by three female butchers. Bad ass. The anti-supermarket butchers, they specialize in humanely and locally raised meats and rare, specialty cuts you can't find everywhere else. I sense a pilgrimage to the city in my future.

One small digression before I leave off - caught Anthony Bourdain on the tube eating lungs and goat brains on the street in India. I am SO EXCITED for our upcoming trip there. I can't wait to make myself sick on organ meats and strange curries.

Excess indeed.

Oh lord.

There was much revelry last night. At 5 pm I realized people would be descending upon the house in a few mere hours and we had nothing to feed them. So off I dashed to Shopper's Corner with decadence as my guiding principle instead of a shopping list. What could I make quickly that would still taste fabulous and celebratory? Into my cart went champagne, smoked salmon, prosciutto, crème fraiche, dill, capers, hummus, olives and olive tapenade, cashews, rosemary, salmon roe, goat cheese, a wedge of Petit Basque, truffle pate, and several loaves of francese bread. Not the cheapest shopping expedition I've ever made, and certainly not the healthiest, but I had the makings for a whole array of delicious crostini. Just slice up the baguette, drizzle a little olive oil, let the toasts crisp up in a hot oven, and then top them with whatever you please. My favorites were goat cheese with olive tapenade, prosciutto and Manchego with a kalamata olive, and smoked salmon, crème fraiche, a little salmon roe, and some dill. Hil picked up some guacamole from El Palomar, and I doctored up the store-bought hummus with lemon juice, salt, cayenne, and cumin, and drizzled some top notch olive oil over the top. It ended up tasting homemade, a new little trick I'm glad I have up my sleeve.

I also got a wild hair and decided that I had to, positively had to, make a batch of lemon bars. I was sick of those Meyer lemons staring balefully up at me from their bowl on the counter, daring me to make something of them. The lemon bars are delicious but turns out people don't really want to eat dessert when there's a night of drinking ahead of them. Let's just say I still have about 95% of them. Now the lemon bars stare at me balefully from their pan, daring me to eat them. I'm not sure if this is an improvement.

My first meal of the new year? A breakfast burrito from Chill Out about the size and weight of my head and 20 oz of the hottest coffee I've ever had in a restaurant. My tongue is still recovering. The burrito was also about 500 degrees and had a curious way of retaining heat. When it came to me, it was too hot to even pick up, and it simply did not cool down. Perhaps its surprising mass had something to do with heat retention - less surface area relative to volume or something like that. I would have been able to explain it better in high school when physics was something I understood. In any event, that sucker refused to cool down, boggling my still-drunken mind and burning my poor long-suffering tongue.

Tomorrow? Carrot sticks and herbal tea, preferably lukewarm. Sheesh.