Just because everyone should know, and I’m never sure who stumbles across this domain: All Strangers Are Kin is out in paperback March 7. Available at fine bookstores everywhere.
All further book details are over at www.allstrangersarekin.com.
And my personal site is www.zoraoneill.com.
And, because I still like writing small things from time to time, I also have a newsletter.
A few ways to explore:
As I said in my last post, I’m about to shut this blog down for good. But before I go, I’m posting all the nitty-gritty logistical stuff I currently know about travel. This post is about airfares. Next week’s is about renting cars.
There are a million blogs that drill down deep into the world of booking flights. But unless you’re flying every month, I doubt you’re reading them–and they’re so full of jargon and codes, you can’t understand them anyway.
So here’s my starter set of tips for people who buy airplane tickets only once or twice a year.
1. Check a few websites.
But not all of them! It’s easy to make yourself crazy.
For domestic flights, you likely won’t find a lot of variance. But for international trips, some sites are better than others at digging up weird routings.
My starting points are:
*Annoyingly, sometimes the various big US airlines (American, Delta, United) also decide not to participate in aggregate-search sites. As I’m writing this, I think that might be happening with American and Delta. So if you notice a conspicuous absence of results from one airline, I guess bite the bullet and go check directly at their websites. Argh.
2. Look at one-ways.
If round-trips are looking higher than you want, try breaking your trip into two one-ways. On almost all domestic routes, this works fine and often better, because you can cherry-pick flight times and prices. I fly JetBlue to Albuquerque, for example, because I like that nonstop flight–but flying back, I go with American or United, because I can’t hack JetBlue’s red-eye.
On international routes, it’s not quite so foolproof, but it’s worth a shot.
3. Pick the right dates.
Flying mid-week (Tues, Wed, Thurs) is usually cheaper than other days.
On the other hand, that old rule about staying over a Saturday night is rarely true anymore.
4. Look beyond your destination.
If you’re flying to a city that’s a hub for an airline, it may very well be cheaper to buy a ticket to somewhere else, routing through the city you want, and then just toss the second leg.
For example, this past summer I wanted to go to Salt Lake City. But it was cheaper to buy a ticket to Park City, via Salt Lake, and just skip out on the last leg.
NOTE: You must travel with only carry-on luggage, as the airlines don’t like this practice (it’s called “hidden-city ticketing” if you want to read more about it) and will not check your bags only halfway.
To find these kinds of deals, start at skiplagged.com.
5. You can cancel in the first 24 hours.
This is a biggie! All US-based airlines will cancel your ticket and refund all of your money, no fee and no questions asked, within 24 hours of purchase.
The exception is American, though it’s not really an exception, just a different way of offering the same thing. On the American website, you can place your reservation on hold for 24 hours before purchasing. (Look for the “hold” button at the bottom right, as an alternative to credit cards, PayPal, etc.)
A lot of international airlines do this too, provided the ticket starts in the US. Google “[airline] 24 hour cancellation” and see what pops up.
6. Book directly with the airline when you can.
Orbitz et al. (aka online travel agents, or OTAs) add almost zero value, and if you need to make changes, they actually make your life a lot harder (“Sorry, we can’t help you—contact the airline”; “sorry, we can’t help—call your travel agent”).
So if you find a deal on one of the OTAs, try searching on the main carrier (or, if it’s a foreign airline, its US-based partner) to see if you can replicate it.
Sometimes, though, you can’t find the same price at an airline’s site, and you’ll have to go with the OTA. That’s not the end of the world. Just be prepared for serious phone time if you need to make changes.
7. Set up a frequent-flier account, even if you’re not playing the miles game.
Having login info at the airline website just makes it easier to check your flight details, change seats, etc.
8. You might be able to afford business class.
Biz-class fares to Europe drop very low in summer and over holidays like Thanksgiving, while coach class spikes.
On some routes in summer 2015, the difference was only $300 or so. Summer biz-class sales usually start in the spring, but can pop up any time after that.
9. Let luck rule.
If you’re not sure where you want to go, keep an eye on theflightdeal.com. It’s probably the current best site for random deals (airfarewatchdog.com is also good).
The instructions on how and where to find the particular flights are very detailed, and this can at first can look overwhelming. Don’t get stressed—just take it step by step.
In the process, you’ll learn some of the trickier ways to search for flights (and you won’t need my help anymore!).
10. There might be a better way than flying.
Check rome2rio.com. Especially good if you want to fly in to one city and out of another, and need to know how to get between the two.
So of course I would say Gabrielle Hamilton’s cookbook, Prune, is brilliant in nearly every way. Because I am the very person around which its conceit is built–I, the hapless line cook who might very well ruin everything if I’m left to my own devices.
But it’s also great because, contrary to appearance, it’s a solid book for a home cook. Prune, after all, is one of those rare restaurants that combines the specialness of dining out with the immediacy and simple satisfaction of eating at home. Even if you haven’t eaten there (or worked there), I think it’s possible to appreciate this book and learn from it.
First of all, YES, it sucks, there is no index. I almost didn’t buy the book, out of spite, and vain hope that a second printing would include an index. Then I decided I’d just make one myself. Or at least a master list of recipes, organized a little bit better. HERE IS MY INDEX FILE. Download away! Pass it around! Doctor it up the way that makes sense to you and print it out and tape it in the back of your book, like I did. (Also, here is an online index of sorts; the bonus is that it’s easily searchable. **And OH LOOK! Now there’s a PDF version of that online index, on the Prune website.**)
Aside from this, it’s a marvelously designed book. The “kitchen notebook” look may seem like a gimmick, but it’s not. That binder exists; I have worked from it. It is just as stained, scrawled on and taped up as the book looks. It’s also in drab old Times New Roman, just like that.
Also, the photos: Some are harsh or strange or blurry. But they’re real too, in a way that so many food photos aren’t today. Yes, the kitchen lights bounce off the stainless steel so much it strains the eyes. Yes, the range is greasy, and the steam from the roesti potatoes makes them look like some unfortunate shag carpeting. Yes, cardoons and beans look disgusting–but they taste great. That’s real life.
Which is funny, considering how cookbooks generally peddle in fantasy. Usually, they’re softer and fluffier fantasies: You host grand regional-Italian dinner parties, or you live at River Cottage and raise wholesome pigs and raspberry canes.
Prune presents a fantasy too, of course. But it’s a tougher one—you work in a restaurant. Not like in a reality show–but like in actual reality. You’re a lowly line cook, and you probably get paid $12 an hour, if you’re lucky (assuming wages have gone up in twelve years; I got $10). You don’t know half the words people are using, and you don’t know where to find the knife you need.
So, on first pass through this cookbook, give in to this fantasy. Don’t read thinking you’ll jump up and cook from it tonight. Read like you’ve just started a new job, and you are desperate to learn because you are in way over your head. (This book captures that feeling perfectly. By the time I got to the end, I was sweating and had a headache and wanted to throw the book down and run.) Read in fits and starts, grabbing what you can.
Close the book. Take a deep breath and be glad you don’t really have a job in a restaurant. That shit is hard work.
NOW you can go back and read it like a regular home cook, like you’re going to figure out what this book’s all about, and what you might cook from it.
But wait! Don’t start at the beginning. Read the “Family Meal” chapter, the last one. This is the actual introduction to the book, where Hamilton lays out the philosophy of her kitchen: thrift, creativity, clean presentation, the joy of feeding others. That’s what guides everything else in the book, and in the restaurant.
Next, give a quick skim through the “Prep Daily/Weekly” chapter. The sauces and spice mixes in here are the backbone of many of the recipes. Full recipes will cross-reference back here, and you want to have a passing familiarity with some of the more distinct combinations (Smoked Tomatoes, for instance, or Salsa Verde). This way, when you’re reading and deciding whether to cook a recipe that calls for one of these ingredients, you can imagine all the flavors in the dish.
Equally important, the “Prep Daily/Weekly” section gives you a little window into how a restaurant kitchen runs. Almost never is a dish cooked from scratch, but rather assembled from parts, many of which can be reconfigured.
I don’t normally think home cooks should mimic restaurant kitchens, because a lot of it is bullshit-fancy and inefficient. But Prune is not a bullshit-fancy restaurant–the first recipe in this book is canned sardines on Triscuits, after all, with strict instructions not to make them look too “restauranty.” And it is most definitely not inefficient. What the cookbook reveals is how a kitchen runs to keep cooking every day. You too, as a home cook, should aspire to have a system in place so you can cook every day without reinventing the wheel. Take the pan juices from one dish to spike another one; take the scraps from vegetables to bolster stock; heck, decorate with leek ends and hollow bones.
OK, NOW you can look at the recipes. It’s pretty much up to you from this point on. What you’re hungry for, what you feel up to tackling. Some dishes are easy; others are fiddly. Bite off what you can chew–and there’s plenty even for beginners to chew, especially the various stews and braises, and many of the vegetable preparations.
A lot of the reviews I’ve seen have wished this was a more user-friendly book. Really, it’s friendlier than it appears. It’s intense where it matters (Breton Butter Cake, my god). By contrast, where the instructions seem dangerously cavalier—those cases are almost always where if you wing it, you’ll probably be OK. Because in order to cook well, you, the home cook, need to do your own thing.
This isn’t the case in a restaurant, where consistency is what matters, and your job as a line cook is to perfectly reproduce the vision of the chef. But you don’t work in a restaurant, remember? Isn’t that a relief?
So this book is in fact nudging you, the non-professional, out into the world to cook better, gutsier food. Cooking is not a matter of quarter-teaspoons or simmering for precisely 12 minutes in precisely the right pan. Cooking is making do with what you have, and developing your own instinct for when vegetables will be just the right texture.
Rare for a restaurant cookbook, Prune is good at helping you develop that side of cooking. Discussing how long to cook eggs, GH warns that it can vary–are they cold from the fridge? In the roasted capon recipe, you get a great and thorough warning to keep an eye on the bird–sometimes your croutons can get too dry, or, if the bird is quite juicy, the crouton can get soggy. Paying attention to details like this and making adjustments as you go is how restaurant cooks make dishes consistently well, even with inconsistent ingredients. And this is how good home cooks succeed too. It is never due to setting a timer for exactly 48 minutes or whatever the book says.
Read the recipes for technique, and listen up when Hamilton hectors. Because what matters most of all is your attitude. Lazy, sloppy, making excuses–none of that is appreciated at Prune, or in any kitchen. “I understand the egregious lack of oven space here,” Hamilton writes in one recipe, “but let’s do things right anyway.” In that sentence is a pep talk for anyone with a too-small kitchen.
Thrift is critical too–and always key for a home cook. “Don’t throw your mistakes away” is a tip that comes along with a way to salvage cream past its sell-by date. It’s encouraging you not just to rethink your blunders, but to value ingredients. “This is how we show our respect for the people who made this,” Gabrielle once told me as she wiped a mustard jar clean with a spatula. The natural outgrowth of that attitude is the entire “Garbage” chapter, a beautiful testament to the nobility of scraps.
In this way–that is, in the way of putting you in the right mindset for running a good kitchen–the Prune cookbook is very helpful. You want the kind of rustic, tastes-like-the-home-you-never-had food that Prune serves? It’s all in here, and you can cook it.
GH’s only-in-this-restaurant-kitchen instructions actually strike me as a perverse reality check. This is how we do it, she’s saying, and you’ll never be able to do it quite this way. But that’s OK—we all know the restaurant thing is a conceit, a bit of fiction. The important, real thing is that you get in the kitchen and make it. What matters is that you care enough to make it good.
If you doubt this last part, go back and read the “Family Meal” section again.
Bonus glossary!
Here’s some lingo that caught my eye, and some of the more cryptic admonitions. Feel free to ask about others in the comments.
Balsamic = In the “Family Meal” section, GH says never to use this. That’s because the good stuff is insanely expensive and should not be tossed on a salad. (There’s also crappy balsamic vinegar, the cheap stuff you get at the supermarket. Presumably you could use this in a Prune family meal, but let’s be honest, there is something a bit cheesy about a balsamic vinaigrette. Salad should not be sweet. I wrote about the various grades of balsamic vinegar here.)
Blended oil/”our oil blend” = EVOO cut with vegetable oil, 70% EVOO/30% veg, for applications where EVOO would be overwhelming or a waste. (It’s explained on p463, but of course, without the index, you have no way of knowing this until you happen across it.)
Football = A plate shaped like a…football. Regular people would probably call it an oval. Of course, how you plate things in your own home is entirely up to you.
Half sheet = A full sheet pan is the right size to fit in one those rolling bakery racks; it is too big to fit in your home oven. A half sheet pan is, obviously, half that size and will fit in your home oven. (It is somewhat bigger than a cookie sheet you’d pick up in a grocery store, though.) A Silpat (nonstick mat) fits a half sheet pan perfectly.
Hotel pan = A deep rectangular stainless pan, the kind you see in hotel buffet lines, that slots into a counter with a steam bath underneath. Of course you won’t have one at home, and you won’t need one because you’re cooking smaller quantities. A flat-bottomed pot with straight, medium-heights sides will do. Also, there are third pans and half pans. See pics here. You don’t need any of them.
Quenelle = What’s wrong with a quenelle? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with a quenelle: It’s a bullshit high-toned unnatural shape for a scoop of ice cream. Would you make a quenelle at home? No, of course you would not. Plus, it requires the garde manger person to fiddle around with two damned spoons, when she could be doing something a lot more productive with her limited time and space.
Sacramento tomato juice = The internet swears this is the proper brand for Bloody Marys. (I personally have not developed my palate much in this respect; I have no idea.) The reason GH stresses this in the book is because she’s letting you know why her Bloody Marys taste so good. Should you not make a Bloody Mary from this book if you can’t find Sacramento tomato juice? Of course not!
Sally/salamander = When God makes open-face cheese sandwiches, he uses a sally and it’s all oozy and blistered brown in about six seconds. When you, mere mortal, want to broil something, you will have to use the thing in the top of your oven, or the broil setting in your toaster oven. It’s wimpy, but what’re you gonna do? (On the plus side, you will probably not inadvertently scorch your meal by turning your back for a second too long, nor will you singe all the hair off the back of your hand from reaching into your toaster oven, as you would in a sally.)
Wax = Jargon peculiar to Prune, I think, for a freebie given to a good or familiar guest. (I think it had something to do with bikini waxes, and zipping that charge right off the bill…maybe?)
Freelancers! I finally cracked it!
And it’s the most boring thing in the world:
Pretend you have a real job.
Starting time is 10 a.m. You get a lunch hour–that’s when you do all your fiddly errands, like running to the frame store, or looking at rugs on eBay. (Ignore the unfairness that, in a real office-job situation, people don’t relegate eBay searches to lunch hour.) You knock off around 7 p.m., and spend your evening painting the living room, reading books, whatever.
I KNOW. The whole point of being a freelancer is so you don’t have to do this crap. But…it works. At least it worked for me for the last critical two months of finishing my book draft. (It’s done! It’s done. 150,000 words, give or take. Now: the long wait.)
But, of course, fooling yourself into thinking that your writing is as important as a regular office job, and that you absolutely have to show up for it–well, that requires a whole other bag of tricks. Such as:
1. Clock in with Toggl.
Usually I use Toggl to make sure I’m earning an OK hourly rate on low-paying jobs. For the book, I just used it to make sure my butt was in my chair for at least seven hours every day.
2. Clear your schedule.
For a freelancer, saying no to work is the most painful thing in the world. But you’ll have to do it until you get this one thing done. You know how you tell yourself that you work more efficiently when you have a few projects to play off each other? It doesn’t work when one of those projects is massive and genuinely requires all of your time.
3. Be married.
It’s nice to have someone to pay the bills and cook meals, in the background.
4. Don’t be married.
Regular human interaction, such as giving and receiving love, is just too distracting. Also, another human in your space who keeps different hours from you can be too distracting.
5. No, wait, be married.
What am I thinking?! Of course you need love and human support. What would I have done without Peter? Then again, it did help that he went to Australia for ten days. That was when I could really set up a regular work schedule.
6. Embrace electronica.
You need low-key, nonstop music. No lyrics. I like SomaFM: Deep Space One for mornings, Earwaves for afternoons. Def Con Radio occasionally, because the weird motivational samples make me feel like I’m at a different job.
7. Log out of Facebook.
Some people resort to turning off the Internet, but I found that if I just logged out of Facebook, I quelled the urge to visit it all the time, because logging back in was a hassle. All my other time-wasting strategies are relatively harmless (except for those eBay rugs…). If you do need something stronger, Concentrate is a good Chrome plugin.
8. Eat an easy breakfast.
If you are, for instance, waking up hours before your partner (and not because you’re one of those oh-I-can-only-create-in-the-cold-clear-light-of-dawn people, no sir, but only because said partner sleeps till noon) and you want to get right to work with a minimum of fuss, you must dispense with all morning food creativity.
To this end, I have started every day since, oh, October 2012, with two slices of a particular Swedish-ish fruit-nut bread. The indomitable Cristina Topham, aka The Wayward Chef, gave me the recipe, in a slightly more Swedish form.
I cannot praise it enough. It’s like granola, but granola you can spread butter on. It keeps you full until noon, when said partner may awake and fix you lunch.
Freelancers Breakfast Bread
This bread may actually be the one crazy trick to working productively at home–many thanks again to Cristina Topham.
I buy all the ingredients in bulk and keep the nuts, rye flour and seeds in the freezer, so they don’t go rancid. The original recipe used dried figs and hazelnuts, which is excellent, but hazelnuts are often rancid before you even get them home, so I most often use pecans. Don’t ignore the flax seeds–they have a nice slippery quality. I made it without them once, and it was meh. [BUT a note in hindsight, in 2018: flax is very high in phytoestrogens, and so are (to a lesser degree) rye, oats and pumpkin and sunflower seeds. This is excellent if you want to adjust your hormonal balance–if you’re doing seed cycling, for instance–but if you don’t want to…don’t eat this every day.]
For a denser, more sour bread, you can shift the flour more toward 2:1 rye:AP. If you use a kitchen scale and go by weight, it’s easy to tinker with this proportion. In fact, a scale is much easier all around, as it leaves you only the bowl and liquid measuring cup to wash.
And note the long bake time: You must make this on one of your free evenings, not in the morning.
Preheat oven to 350.
Mix together in a big bowl:
1 1/4 cups (195g) rye flour
1 1/2 cups (195g) all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups (150g) rolled oats (regular, not quick-cooking) OR quick-cooking steel-cut oats (these make a fluffier bread, but they must be the quick variety!)
1/4 cup (35g) flax seeds
1/4 cup (35g) pumpkin or sunflower seeds
1/2 cup (70g) nuts (pecans, walnuts, hazelnuts; first two, break up by hand, no need to chop)
1 cup (150g) dried fruit (cranberries, cherries, apricots, figs; for latter two, better to chop roughly or cut with scissors)
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
In a measuring cup, combine:
1 3/4 cup buttermilk (or regular milk with the juice of half a lemon squeezed in; or yogurt thinned with milk)
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup molasses
Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and stir. Every time I make this, it’s a different consistency, but it tends toward super-thick, like glue. Don’t make yourself crazy stirring in the flour–if there are a couple of dry spots, it won’t matter too much.
I bake this in two smaller loaf pans, so I can freeze one; you could also use one large one. Either way, butter it or line it with parchment paper. Squash the batter into your loaf pans and smooth the top with a wet knife (that’s the Cristina Topham pro-tip right there).
Bake on the bottom rack for between 1 hour (two small pans) and 1 hour 20 minutes (one large pan). Let cool on a wire rack. Slice thin and eat with lots of butter and pinch of crunchy sea salt, plus very milky coffee, which, Cristina tells me, is the Swedish way.
Phew. Went off the radar there for a while. Much of January and February was spent writing a draft of my book (I guess it’s safe to call it by its name now), The Crimson Sofa.
It got a little hairy at the end. After weeks of wrestling with the structure of the Morocco section (so many tiny details Morocco has!), I read a New Yorker story by John McPhee about his various strategies of organizing his stories. That provoked this:
It didn’t really work. The draft I turned in frayed at the end like a faulty piece of rope from which our hero has already plunged to his death. I’m trusting the solution will come to me.
So I took a break. I went to Santa Cruz and the Bay Area, where I savored a fine Irish coffee at Brennan’s in Berkeley.
The nice thing about San Francisco is that Irish coffee is a year-round drink, not just a St. Patrick’s Day thing. This is likely due to the climate and lack of central heating. Irish coffee warms the insides when you need it most–like, say, July.
My father, Patrick O’Neill (so right there you know he’s qualified to judge), has strong opinions about Irish coffee.
First of all, the glass has to be just right: tapered, so the cream stays in an even layer as you drink to the bottom.
After a scare, they are now available again from Libbey, even retail. (Before, you had to buy them in cases of 36, which is how I came to have 24 and my father has 12.)
Then, the coffee has to be strong. And the sugar goes in the coffee, not in the cream.
And the cream has to be thick, but not whipped stiff.
Brennan’s understands all this. The rest of the world does not always, and will sling you all kinds of crap (the world does this a lot; be vigilant).
So, in honor of St. Patrick, and my father Patrick, and what the heck, a book that’s still as drafty as a San Francisco Victorian…make yourself an Irish coffee today.
Don’t balk at the sugar. It helps support the cream on top.
For each glass:
1 tsp sugar
Glug Irish whiskey
1 tsp Greek Nescafe (or any euro-brand instant espresso)**
Heavy cream, whipped till thick
Pour boiling water in the glasses to heat them up while you get everything ready.
Rinse out each glass, add your sugar, whiskey and Nescafe, then fill with hot water till about a quarter inch below the rim. Gently spoon on the cream.
**OK, fine, if you don’t want to use Nescafe, then brew strong, un-fancy coffee (no top notes of grapefruit or leather or whatever) and fill the glass 2:1 coffee:whiskey, leaving about quarter inch at the top for cream.
Irish Coffee, the Brennan’s Way
Here’s Brennan’s advice, in video form. Watch it for the excellent justification of the use of non-fancy coffee.
And don’t fret about the manufacturing cream: its main asset (aside from being extra-creamy) is that it holds its peaks longer than regular cream. But you’re not running a bar where you need to keep the cream whipped all day. Are you?
I’ve been traveling so much, I’ve really lost the thread with New York. I mean, on Wednesday I got on an uptown train instead of a downtown train by accident. I don’t think I’ve ever made that mistake, at least not while I’ve lived here.
So what better way to feel New York-y than to go to the august American Museum of Natural History? You know, the one with all the taxidermy.
I went to the preview for the new exhibit Our Global Kitchen. It opens today, November 17, and runs through August 11, 2013. (I shouldn’t tell you that far-off end date–it’ll make you feel less urgency, and then you’ll wind up missing it. This happens to me all the time.)
In short: You should go. It’s fun, and you’ll learn something. And, since it’s the AMNH, the dioramas and models are great.
The details: This is a really ambitious exhibit. Where to begin when you want to cover what the whole world eats, three times a day? Oh, and it’ll cover the food-supply chain as well.
As a result, it feels a little compressed, a little rushed–each section of the show could easily be expanded into its own exhibit. Then again, I spend an awful lot of time thinking about global food, and food production, so maybe it’s a perfectly good introduction to the issues and to non-American cuisine–which everyone should get.
To my taste, the food-industry section, which starts the exhibit, could’ve taken a stronger “It’s time to change this!” stance. And certainly the curators’ comments before the show were more in this vein–the word “unsustainable” came up a lot.
But there’s some progress. This same exhibit 30 years ago would’ve been sponsored by ADM and Cargill, and had a thoroughly gee-whiz-technology-is-great tone. At least now we get the cons of fish farming listed alongside the pros.
After all the supply-chain stuff, the rest of the exhibit feels a lot more colorful and fun. There’s a fancy show kitchen, where you can eat actual food, and there’s a mirror where you can stick out your tongue and see how many tastebuds you have. There are buttons to push to smell things, and touchscreens to learn about banana transport. You can post your food pics to Instagram with the tag #CelebrateFood, and they’ll show up on screens in the exhibit.
But the meat of the exhibit is still the actual physical stuff. There’s a whole wall of cookbooks from around the world. There’s a vaguely obscene-looking Mesoamerican popcorn popper, and beautiful molds for Korean rice cakes.
And there’s a vivid diorama of a just-before-Cortes-landed market in Mexico.
I also loved the set rooms and meals from different places and times in history: a Roman empress’s breakfast, Kublai Khan’s buffet on the hoof…
In the same room, the juxtaposition of Gandhi’s typical breakfast with Michael Phelps’s is fascinating. It struck me as the stealth message of the exhibit. If Americans learned to eat more foods from elsewhere–more vegetarian staples, more flavor and spices–we might all put a lot less stress on the world’s food systems.
And definitely settle in for the second big video presentation, at the end–all about celebrations and special foods from around the world.
I’m glad such an august institution as the American Museum of Natural History has taken on such a huge and meaningful subject as food. And I hope it sparks some thoughts in people who haven’t thought so much about food yet. There’s a lot more to taste out there…
Our best souvenir of Turkey was not a rug, a set of tea cups or some blue evil-eye charm.
It was the newest member of our happy household, this sweet little guy:
We’ve named him Sugar Duck.
This is why:
See, we had dinner at a cheapie restaurant in Edirne where they had the red chili in these nifty flip-top caddies on the table: glass bottom, bright-green flip-top dome.
A couple days later, in Istanbul, we nipped (I was going to say ‘ducked’) into a restaurant-supply place just as it was closing, and they had the exact same form as the Edirne model, but in three colors…and with adorable eyes!
And labeled, in Turkish and English, sugar duck.
As Peter points out, we probably wouldn’t love him half as much if we didn’t know this adorable name. Heck, we probably wouldn’t even have put sugar in him.
Best of all, he’s made in Turkey.
Peter’s first thought was, Oh, we’ll use a better spoon. But then he appreciated just how flawlessly designed the Sugar Duck was. The spoon is his tongue, you see.
The only down side of our new Turkish pet: We definitely use more sugar than we used to.
File all this under Things I Wish I’d Eaten More Of.
1. Fresh mizithra
We drove to the next little town to visit the place that makes the killer sheep’s-milk yogurt, with its nice crusty top.
I’ve read rapturous descriptions of fresh ricotta, but I didn’t really believe it until they fed us the mizithra, scooped fresh out of the vat and still warm.
Mizithra is, in this form, basically ricotta. It’s also made from the whey from a sturdier cheese (in this case, feta), so it’s soft and jiggly, not too intense.
Having it warm is like eating little dairy clouds–but not so ethereal. More primal. I think people might love it so much because it reminds them of nursing?
2. Ladotiri
Same bat place, same bat channel. Same ‘Oh, now I understand!’ moment.
Ladotiri is literally ‘oil cheese.’ It’s a specialty of Lesvos, cured in olive oil. It’s normally kind of rubbery and salty and doesn’t seem particularly interesting.
This stuff, though, fresh–ah-ha. It was nutty, like gruyere. A tiny bit grainy, mostly smooth.
3. Ouzo
OK, actually, this was more of a visual thing than a taste thing. They make a lot of ouzo–most of the ouzo–on Lesvos. It’s great. I don’t drink all that much these days, but I always wish I’d drunk more ouzo so I could look at the bottles.
Ouzo Mini, which may be the best ouzo of Lesvos, is also conveniently the cutest. It has a hip new label:
And Ouzo Matis, another brand with babes on the label…well, they cut right to the chase. We’re not sure if this is new, or we only just noticed, but here’s Peter noticing:
What’s he noticing? Va-va-voom!
OK, so the photo is not the greatest. But yes, peer dreamily through your ouzo bottle, and you’ll see a girl in a red bikini (or blue, should you choose) on the inside.
3. Obscenely ripe fruit
Waiting for the early train in Soufli, we breakfasted on figs from in front of the stationmaster’s house. You know how everyone leers about figs? How they’re vaguely dirty-looking?
These weren’t even purple on the outside, and they were the dirtiest figs I’ve ever eaten.
Then, in Turkey, a nice old man gave me a tomato. It was hot from the sun. He smiled and kept walking. I cupped that tomato in my hand the whole rest of our walk–it felt like one of my own organs.
We ate it the next morning for breakfast, gulped over the sink.
Maybe the best tomato of my life? Almost all goo, perfect acid-sweet balance. No need for salt at all.
Days later, Peter said, “Agh! Why didn’t we save the seeds?!”
4. Hot sausage
No innuendo intended.
We were in Komotini, our first real stop after Eressos. Whole new part of Greece. The town is 50 percent Turkish, complete with a mosque and an Ottoman-era cemetery.
The streets were empty, which was partly due to Ramadan, and partly due to it being 108 degrees. One restaurant in the market was open, and fed us this:
We marveled at the sensation of hot chili in our throats. The Greeks aren’t so into spicy-hot, and we hadn’t tasted it for weeks. The sausage was spiced like basturma, which is to say, intensely, with coriander and pepper and more. It was a mix of beef and lamb. It was superb.
5. Turkish ice cream
I love Mado ice cream. To Turks, it’s probably only as exciting as Haagen-Dazs, but to me, it’s the most fantastic ice-cream brand, the height of luxury. It’s all goat’s-milk, and the fruit flavors (which I think are fruit-only, no dairy, but who knows?) are so intense, it feels like the fruit is communicating directly with your brain, bypassing your tongue entirely.
In Edirne, we sat at the Mado cafe and had ridiculous Mado treats. Just for Peter, it seems, they have the ‘Red Fruits Passion’ (or some such) sundae on the menu. Sour cherry, raspberry and strawberry, plus raspberry goo, and some clotted cream for good measure.
I had a nice orange-creamsicle-ish thing with pistachios, but whatever. Need more red fruits, please.
6. Hazelnut meringue
Sorry, no photo. I bought it on the Istanbul ferry, along with my tulip-glass of tea.
I know from flying Turkish Airlines, which is neck-and-neck with Emirates for the best-food-in-coach prize, that Turkey produces like most of the world’s hazelnuts. They call it a miracle nut, and serve it instead of peanuts.
So I grabbed a hazelnut meringue cookie, and it must have been 99% hazelnuts, because it was more like an energy bar than a meringue or any cookie, really. So intense.
But then again, everything tastes more intense when you’re traveling. But then again again, America is the Land of Bland. These tastes will tide me over till my next adventure.
Want a real mind-bending experience when you travel?
Don’t worry so much about what to eat. Focus on the odd things there are to drink.
That’s where you get into severe mind-warping territory.
Exhibit A: Salgam Suyu
(Sorry–there’s a little cedilla under the s, and also under a c farther down. I’ve taught myself a lot about code in a decade, but never mastered those special characters.)
Salgam suyu is a Turkish purple carrot drink. Apparently it’s fairly common at juice stands in certain parts of Turkey that I haven’t been to.
I think if I encountered it in a juice stand, I’d be pretty giddy and think it was cool.
But I saw it as a packaged product, in a grocery store–and that was even more mind-blowing. It’s like it proved it was a major part of the culture, not just some health nut’s invention.
“Is that a…carrot? That’s purple?” I said, squinting at the label. I flipped it around to look at the ingredients. Yup, purple carrot.
At the checkout, the lady looked unimpressed with it, like it was a totally normal thing. I guess, for her, it is. Which is the mind-blowing part.
It’s really beautiful stuff:
By now, you’re probably wondering about the taste. The label said in capital letters BEST SERVED COLD.
But we had no fridge. We popped it open near the end of a long walk, standing on the top of a windy dyke at the edge of Edirne, with the massive Sinan mosque on the hill above us.
Peter gulped as I read out the ingredients: “Purple carrot, wheat, turnip, salt, red chili, pepper…”
“Huh. All those things really come through,” he said, scrunching up his face. “In that order.”
I took a swig. It was bracing. I wished it were cold. But for electrolyte replacement or whatever, and in lieu of food, it was pretty fantastic.
This product really made me rethink everything I knew about Turkey, Turkish food and Turks in general. Granted, I’m no expert to start with (the only Turkish I know is cok güzel, and I learned that from an Eartha Kitt song), but this made me realize there’s just so much I don’t know, there and nearly everywhere I go.
Like, what is the significance of this drink? Do grownups drink it? Do kids drink it? Does your mom tell you to drink it when you’re sick with something in particular? Do dudes drink it to feel studlier? Does it go with certain foods? Do you drink at night? In the morning? Is it old-fashioned? Or suddenly cool again? Is this a good brand? The only brand? Do people scoff at seeing it packaged at all?
I have no real answers, but I do see the word afrodizyak on the packager’s website. And, according to the ad, it makes you do backflips.
Each dish in every culture has all this resonance, but we barely begin to learn any of it when we travel. We can read up on some of the most famous dishes–it’s bachelor food, it’s court food, it’s imported-from-China-on-the-silk-road food… But a lot is just never even discussed, until someone thinks to ask.
It’s true for food, but it’s doubly true for drinks, because they’re almost always, by definition, a secondary thing.
Drinks also tend to be more personal, like breakfast–we have our routines, and we don’t want to mess them up (just think of your morning coffee).
And, more practically, travelers often shy away from water-based things for health reasons.
But one huge selling point about trying new drinks is: they’re cheap! Even if something’s disgusting and you’ll never put it in your mouth again, you only spent a couple bucks, max, on it. But you will have seen, for a gulp or two, a whole side of a culture you never knew before.
What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever had to drink in another country?
