Category: Food

I live vicariously…

My friend Jim is in Argentina. I imagine I will get to Argentina around the time it ceases completely to be cool. Same goes for Berlin.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying Jim’s blog he’s writing with his boyfriend, Apio y Albahaca, and one post in particular is killing me: Food = Love. “Food = Love” comes, of course, from the late, great Chef Barton Rouse, who had such a wonderful influence on us all in our highly moldable years (thanks to Barton, I have a greater appreciation for chicken feet, orgies and manscaping).

And Barton would be proud that Jim’s writing a paragraph like this one:

When you’re well fed and boozed, life is just better. You become relaxed, gracious, magnanimous. You don’t speak, you enthuse. You don’t get up, you rise. You don’t burp onions, you exhale. And you don’t vomit – you certainly don’t vomit, even after drinking a ginger cocktail and two bottles of Malbec – because the red meat absorbs all the alcohol. You simply glide slowly toward the door, carefully avoiding steps and tables.

Bon voyage, Apio y Albahaca. I live vicariously through your meat-eating.

Amsterdam Wrap-up

Maybe a little premature, since I don’t leave till Friday a.m., but barring disaster (cue ominous music), here’s a handy summary:

Number of days in Amsterdam: 30
Number of days riding bicycle: 30
Number of times I encountered a car blocking the bike path: 3 (in NYC, it’s at least 3X/day)
Number of times I clumsily got on or off my omafiets (granny bike) and then looked around to see if anyone was watching: 876
Number of days when I felt like I’d gotten the hang of getting on my omafiets: 1 (today)
Number of days when I felt like gotten the hang of getting off it: 0
Number of frites stands visited: 5
Number of culinary epiphanies: 6

1) Basil ice cream is good (I’m a little behind the times on this one).
2) Pom–a food I never even knew existed until this trip, but see explanation here.
3) Van Dobben, the famous old-fashioned vendor of kroketten (croquettes), is heartbreakingly wonderful. All this time I thought it was just for drunk people.
4) Bitterballen (basically, little round croquettes) signify a great cultural gap between me and Dutch people. I mean, sure, I like them, but it’s just not the same.
5) Intestines can be good. After my tragic andouillette incident in Lyon, I’ve been leery of the chitlins. But Tjon’s food stand at Kwakoe, the Surinamese fest, did me right.
6) Most important: Frites should be done at 150 C/302 F, then 170 C/338 F. I can’t believe all the American cookbooks I’ve read that say to fry everything at 365 F. (For the record, I was told by the master that croquettes are perfect at 180 F/356 F.)

Number of times I thought, “This place is so beautiful!”: 30–basically, every evening as the sun fades away, my heart just plops out on the street. (By contrast, I’ve had that thought in Queens only about 5 times in 10 years, and 2 of those times were provoked by the steam from the power-plant towers, which hardly counts.)

Essay Section:

High point: Talking to all the people I did “Local Voices” interviews with: a rad tour guide in the red-light district, a cool girl who knows a lot about the theater scene here and had a lot to say on post-Theo van Gogh Amsterdam, a smart woman who taught me a lot about Dutch food and some inspiring bike freaks. Anyone who read my earlier post about this trip knows that I hate talking to strangers. But part of my assignment is to find people with an interesting POV on the city and interview them. When I had to do this for the Cairo job, it caused me no end of stress–and then turned out to be fun. But could I remember that lesson this time around? Of course not. It’s just like how, while I’m drinking, I can never remember that drinking too much is bad for me–but with a positive twist.

Secondary, literally high point: Late Sunday night, I was walking along a street in the center. I was a bit stoned–I’d been doing my coffeeshop research, and entertaining a visiting friend of a friend (if you can call staring at the wallpaper in the coffeeshop and smiling thoughtfully “entertaining”). I’d just dropped him off at the train station, and the air was balmy, and I was enjoying walking in the beautiful night. Until some dude next me said, “Beautiful night, isn’t it?” “Grumble” replied my defensive brain. I smiled wanly and nodded. Dude kept talking, and, whaddya know, he turned out to be nice. He just genuinely wanted to share what a nice night it was with someone. We got to the end of the pedestrian zone and biked our separate ways, and I was smiling thoughtfully again. (The fact that the guy was Moroccan somehow makes sense–I have never gotten that “let’s just share the joy of being on this earth!” kind of human contact in the First World, except from people on drugs, and sometimes at home in Astoria.)

Maybe high/maybe low point: I tried to get frites at the Eiburgh Snackbar, allegedly the best in the city, but people probably say that because it’s in the middle of nowhere by a gas station. Sour grapes? Maybe. Just as I rolled up, a crowd of Dutch rockabilly rednecks swarmed out of their beat-up muscle car, all tattoos, sleeveless shirts and mullets and yelling, “Stop, Elvis!” at their jumpy dog. They ordered about 80 fried snacks each. The counter woman, who was wearing a T-shirt that said “Fuck You!” on it, had to stack all the frozen bricks of kroketten, kaassouffle and frikandel (creepy sausage) on the counter to keep track of them. And the rednecks all kept saying, “…met mayo!” (with mayo) at the end of their orders. I turned around and left because I saw the grease would go cold before my frites got in. I would’ve been grumpier, if it hadn’t been such a culture/food train wreck.

Low point, pretty literally: the day when, due to poor planning and lack of food, I slumped down so far in my cafe seat that the end of my braid fell in my coffee. Sadder still: I didn’t even realize this until hours later, when I noticed my hair was hard and globbed together with milk foam and sugar.

Which, all things considered, is not bad at all.

Erm–now I just have to write the book…

Two Quality Blogs (and a bonus)

It was a good day browsing. I found:

Vegetarian Duck, by Mark Morse, who lives in Amsterdam and happens to be writing about not only the kind of food I like to eat when I go out (and would like to add more of to the guide I’m working on), but also what I’d like to be cooking in my own kitchen here in A’dam, but am a bit too uninspired by Albert Heijn to pull off

Mexico Cooks!, which I found through Veg Duck, and which I haven’t burrowed into yet, but looks super-enticing

Actually, there’s a third good one, but only in Dutch: Klary Koopman’s Alles Over Eten. This will be the blog I subscribe to to keep my Dutch reading skills up…

Nice to have new troves of info on two of my guidebook beats… Now I’m off to cook myself dinner with my Albert Heijn groceries. Damn–I’d been looking at tinned sardines in the store, and for some reason didn’t get them–and here’s Veg Duck’s perfect reason.

Overheard in Whole Foods

Not by me, but by Peter, who’s in Santa Monica right now:

I was in the produce section and some packs of carrots fell about 5 feet behind me. I went to help the worker pick them up, and he said, “That happens, because this stuff is alive. Over there in the junk food, stuff never moves. Not on the shelves. Not in your body.”

Ha. Even better is that it wasn’t some standard California wheatgrass-drinking hippie who said this, but a middle-aged, not-hippie black guy.

Mayo, the Gateway Drug

A few months ago, Marla Garla tipped me off to Elyse Sewell’s LiveJournal, which has now become my guilty-pleasure blog. I only call it a guilty pleasure when I’m recommending it to someone, because it sounds bad to say you’re reading the blog of someone who was on America’s Next Top Model. But hey, I also kind of enjoy working at Us Weekly–I’m not proud. And she was the smart one on ANTM, so there.

But never mind the modeling. What is fucking fantastic about this blog is that this woman takes pictures of all the bizarro stuff she sees in grocery stores in Asia, and of all the sometimes-alarming stuff she eats on the street. This is great, because it’s exactly what I do when I travel–anthropological insights on Aisle 9. But since I still haven’t been anywhere in Asia, it’s all completely new, and it only stokes my mental image of the other side of the globe as this dazzlingly strange alternate universe.

What’s finally making me link to her blog is this post: Bourgetto. The horrific pastry detailed in this post made me laugh out loud.

And it also made me ponder the universal appeal of that magical substance we call mayonnaise. In so many cultures, mayonnaise appears to be the first baby step toward “Western” food and culture–and once people get a taste of that lovely white goo, there’s just no going back. Next thing you know, you’re hankering for meatloaf, and then pretty soon you’re test-driving SUVs. (I’m not making the meatloaf thing up: documented instance of meatloaf being seen as “exotic” in Mexico–scroll down.)

I have previously documented the Mexican fixation with mayo (here and here, to start), and the Japanese are total converts (mmm, okonomiyaki), but I wonder how mayo plays in, say, Kenya, or on the steppes of Mongolia? (Tell me in the comments! Oh, sorry, no–still broken. F***ing Yahoo.) I know it’s an integral ingredient in salads at “fancy” dinners in Cairo–it’s just a matter of time before it trickles down.

I am extremely pro-mayo, so I find this delightful: “See? It makes your sandwich/taco/bun/peas-and-carrots slide down your throat like nothing at all!” I feel like saying to everyone I meet in other countries. My father, on the other hand, probably has the allover heebie-jeebies at the thought of mayonnaise infiltrating the deepest Amazon rain forest.

All that said, I don’t know if I’d be able to handle Elyse’s nightmarish “blueberry streusel brioche with a filling of mayonnaise, tomatoes, cucumbers, and raw onions.” (She forgets to mention the corn kernels–also hilariously European, like a crappy Dutch salad.) Here I thought I had to worry about fertilized duck eggs in Asia, but now I see I’m going to have to deal with some far more insidious flavors.

I think I’m strong enough…

(Oh, what’s also genius about Elyse Sewell and her blog: she’s from Albuquerque too. Between her and Neil Patrick Harris–with whom I went to theater camp, let me just name-drop–the Duke City has some real celeb cred.)

I feel dirty.

I am so not cut out to be a vegetarian. I spent this whole week eating super-delicious leftovers from last weekend’s all-veggie Indian feast. When I got tired of that, I had an awesome salad with hot boiled potatoes, grape tomatoes and tuna. I made myself a very satisfying lunch one day of leftover salad, some buttery carrots, hummus, wasa bread and olives.

I’m saying all this to emphasize that I was truly enjoying my almost entirely vegetarian food this whole week.

But last night as I was biking home, I started thinking about hamburgers. And I remembered Aces, on 36th Avenue, which serves a good one. I also toyed with getting manti at Mundo, rounded out with veggie sides, but once I gave myself over to the burger idea (Tamara by that time had agreed to meet me for dinner, selecting Aces from among three options), I was really in a rut.

Once at Aces, Tamara and I were completely spooked by the fact that this place clearly does not cater to a normal dinner crowd anymore–we were the only people there on a Friday. All signs pointed to major dinner failure, but I still would not give up the burger dream.

“Uh, I can’t hack this,” Tamara hissed at me while we sipped our mojitos and looked nervously at the kitchen–we hadn’t eaten here for many months, and the place had gotten substantially more marginal-feeling. “After last weekend, I can’t take this risk.”

Last weekend, Tamara had a hideous allergic reaction to something she’d eaten–but she’s not sure what. She’s understandably a little jumpy.

I think she even went so far as to say, “Please don’t make me eat here.”

But the more of my mojito I drank, the more I realized manti at Mundo were not going to cut it. I had to have the burger. I twisted Tamara’s arm. We ordered the meat, and extra drinks, for sterilization. The meat was delicious–big, crusty burgers on quickly grease-laden English muffins, nice medium fries. We did not become ill.

But even though I ate every little bite of this enormous thing, it still didn’t quite satisfy me. This morning, I was salivating over the idea of chicken-fried steak brunch at Hill Country (thanks for the tip, Homesick Texan!), and I just now I caught myself ogling burger porn online, and calculating my next trip to the Corner Bistro.

Maybe I have a meat debt to pay off–like a sleep debt, but more delicious?

A Great Day on the Job

Huh. I wrote this in a frenzy last week, and never posted it. Sad how the glory of pit-roasting wears off after just a few days back at the city grind. But right now I’m working at the building down at the WTC site, which is so beautiful, and the people in the office are so friendly, and the kitchen is so stocked with free cans of seltzer, that I’m getting a little giddy all over again…

********

Last night, while sitting at the prime table on the balcony at the restaurant at a super-prime resort in the prime tourist zone of the Riviera Maya, about to enjoy a seven-course tasting dinner, I began to experience a strange and novel feeling.

I’m pretty sure it was a sense of cheer brought on by loving my job.

And I’m not just saying that because I was being comped at this particular resort–though that certainly didn’t hurt–and not because I happened to be wallowing in luxury at that moment.

In fact, I wasn’t pleased precisely with that moment, though it was beautiful, but because I was wallowing in the afterglow of a kick-ass afternoon.

I’m drawing this out because even as I’m typing this, I’m having a hard time keeping my feet on the ground, keeping myself from jumping up in the middle of the Miami airport and clapping my hands together with glee.

Dude: Yesterday I got to cook something in a pib–a genuine Maya-style barbecue pit, with the freakin’ hot lava rocks and everything!!!!!

I should be more jaded–I mean, I started this blog back in 2004 with a post about roasting a whole lamb and a pig on Tamara’s balcony in Queens.

But there is something amazingly kick-ass about being led through a grove of palm trees to a little Maya-style hut, and then being led into the hut to find that it is 400 degrees inside, and there is a fire going in there, and it’s been burning since 8.30am, and pretty soon, we’re going to put something in there ourselves!

Never mind that this was on the grounds of a crazy-swanky resort, so it’s hard to call this an “authentic” experience.

Never mind that all we’d be putting in that giant pit was a wee little fish, because I was the only one in the cooking class.

Somehow, the fact that I was put directly to work chopping things on a wobbly table, under the bright midday sun, cut through the pampered setting. My knife was a little dull, and the handle–it was one of those all-metal Globals–was scorching from the sun. Behind me was a portable burner set in a bamboo rigging and fueled with a bottle of propane. This was rigged-up outdoor cooking in a way I could get behind.

So we prepped the fish–well, Chef Cupertino did, with that awesome take-the-bones-out-while-leaving-the-tail-intact fancy move–and covered it with crazy-red achiote sauce (magic ingredient: cloves! I had no idea) and my chopped-up vegetables. Then we stuck the whole thing in the ground! I’m about to jump up with glee again.

I cannot tell you how delighted this made me–I mean, hilarious that there was enormous fire and elaborate setup for…a teensy little sea bream. I can only imagine I would’ve fainted if we’d been sticking actual whole pigs in the ground.

The fish was crazy delicious, I got schooled on the difference between a lima and a limon (which I knew, but somehow never made the connection with sopa de lima–duh) and I got to talk shop with Chef Cupertino over lunch and yummy Mexican wine, all while sitting outdoors in what felt like the middle of nowhere. And then we tramped around in his herb garden and looked at the habanero plant that seemed to have gotten all eaten up–I never want to meet the bug that’s strong enough to eat a habanero , even if it’s just the leaves.

If I were a more helpful blogger, I’d tell you the specifics of what I learned–maybe I’ll get to that–but for now I’m still just basking in the idea that for once, on one of my research trips, I really got to do something. Usually I’m just racing around with my notebook, saying, “That looks fun–how much does it cost? And how many people in the boat? kthxbye, maybe next time…” And since I’m very familiar with my various turfs now, I rarely get to learn something new.

But throwing a fish in a roasting pit–that makes up for years of stagnation! And it was simply great to talk shop with someone about things I really cared about: cooking, what the Yucatan is like compared with the rest of Mexico, more cooking. Usually, I spend most of my days in the Riviera Maya hearing gossip about the latest condo developments.

Basically, I got a glimpse of what it would be like to write about only the things I’m really, really interested in. And then get served some amazing food on the side. Thanks, Chef Cupertino!

Lard! Glorious Lard!

I hope Rick Bayless was online recently to read The Homesick Texan’s inspiring post on DIY lard.

Bayless is such a lard advocate that Peter and I now imagine him popping up everywhere, magically, like a leprechaun, every time the word lard is uttered, or even thought, and proceeding to rub his hands with glee and proselytize as to its wonders. “Oh, Rick Bayless! How’d you get here? So nice to see you!” we say every time we pull the grease from the fridge.

And he’s definitely on the case when someone is bad-mouthing lard–or confusing it with Crisco. (When I was growing up, I knew a lot of people who used the word “lard” to refer to hydrogenated vegetable shortening. I’m not sure if this was because I was in backward New Mexico, or if it was the times, or what.)

If you’re not already a lard convert, you can start with The Homesick Texan, who explains how to make it at home, and also generally makes it sound appealing–and look beautiful. After that, you’ll be ready for the full-on Bayless baptism.

Righteous Clambake Nation

Great story in the New York Times yesterday about preserving obscure native foods of the US: An Unlikely Way to Save a Species: Serve It for Dinner.

The main source for the story, Gary Paul Nabhan, raises Churro sheep (an old variety brought by the Spanish, used by the Navajo, but one that fell away when merino wool and associated weaving techniques arrived with later Europeans) and has written a book about Bronx grapes, Datil chiles and Makah ozette potatoes.

He has also divided North America into regions based on their most indigenous flavors. East Coast: Clambake Nation, yo! Though I of course can’t forsake my boyz in Chili Pepper Nation. (Except, uh, Gary, it’s Chile Pepper.) Who knew there was a Sonoran white pomegranate? And I do feel a simple sentimental attachment to Crab Cake Nation. Who’s gonna design the T-shirts?