Category: Food

Self-Absorption, Procrastination Reap Rewards: Spanish Dessert Edition

In an attempt to stave off actual writing, I was investigating the mystery of why my old blogspot URL still gets all the action. Following some links in my stats, I happened across a truly mind-expanding item on now-defunct Saute Wednesday: a recipe for toast topped with melted chocolate, olive oil and sea salt.

I don’t recommend it if you’re still trying to get your head around salt caramels, but for those who’ve made the leap, it’s really just the next logical progression. (It’s like guitar with feedback. Could you listen to, say, Wham! after you heard the Pixies? I couldn’t.) And because it’s salty, it seems like a totally legit afternoon snack.

However, it must be said that this is further evidence that the Spanish are very scary (hence, fascinating) when it comes to food. Thanks to the Spaniards, I have nearly a quarter of a whole farm animal in a closet, held in a magical state between rot and not-rot.

More specific to dessert, AV told us all about the highly medieval candied egg yolks (scroll to “For science”), and it seems like every Spanish sweet I’ve seen comes in a super-Goth-looking all-black wrapper and is either stark white or bright yellow. (One exception: the maraschino-cherry-studded egg marzipan I’m eating now–but of course those cherries are red, like BLOOD.)

I would not be the least bit surprised if some Spanish village specialized in, say, rabbit brains slow-simmered for nine days in sugar with saffron, sold in a black box sporting a not-cute-at-all bunny on the label. They would, of course, be a strange texture, yet delicious in a very rich way. You would savor a little bunny brain for an hour, probably, with bitter coffee.

And even though this chocolate/salt/oil toast is apparently some Ferran Adria modern invention, it is not out of keeping with more traditional Spanish sweets. In fact, come to think of it, even the color scheme fits right in with tradition: black chocolate, white bread, yellow oil. It’s so dour and joyless in appearance that it can’t possibly be dessert. You cannot possibly enjoy it. Clever, perverse Spaniards.

Why I love Astoria

I talk a lot about the fabulous produce of Astoria, and how a pile of eggplants made me decide to move here. But I’ve never shown photographic evidence before.

astoria night

Look at that. It’s nighttime. The veggies are beautiful. And it looks like that all night long, because it’s open 24 hours! And there are about three more places just like this one on the same street.

Here it is during the day:

astoria day

One day I was standing on that corner, mooning over some piles of peaches or something, when this troop of out-of-towners (you can tell by the white sneakers and sweatshirts) went by–it looked like maybe a resident was showing his family from Iowa around. The little brother said, in a voice dripping with scorn, “Geez, and everything’s always on special here.”

Boy, no city slicker’s gonna put anything over on that little brat.

But it was funny, because I’d until then I’d never even noticed the “SPECIAL!” signs. That’s how distracting the produce is.

And then there’s this. (Squeamish people, don’t scroll down!) As with produce, I have a choice of at least four butchers within a ten-block stretch, plus the all-halal butcher department at the Trade Fair. This sort of selection is an average day–when it gets to be any holiday period, there are double the number of carcasses crammed in there.

astoria meat

Astoria: it’s not just for vegetarians.

Lahspers

LahspersWhen he was little, my brother called lobsters “lahspers.” I’m not sure why he was even talking about them, though, because we lived in New Mexico, where there are no sea critters to be found. There was a Long John Silver’s, and that was it.

But I had the real thing over New Year’s, and maybe it’s due to my landlocked upbringing, but damn, those fuckers are delicious.

And I do say “fuckers” because my hands are still covered with tiny, painful nicks and jabs from where the shell gouged into them. But maybe that’s my fault for eating in a frenzied whirl, like a starved maniac? Maybe, also, the melted butter all over my fingers made me a little clumsy.

This was the first year I got to participate in what is now Karine’s NYE tradition in Vermont, but she’s been doing it for several years, after being faced with the challenge of a turkey deep-fryer: a big ol’ stainless-steel pot, with a temperature regulator, just begging for something to be cooked in it. She appreciated the theater of a deep-fried turkey, but wisely saw that all that dirty oil was not something she wanted to face with a hangover the next day.

Thus, the lobsters were summoned, from the northern reaches.

As a way of celebrating the new year, the lobsters seem perfect. On a superficial level, they’re the logical complement to champagne, and due to price and difficulty of eating, they have the suitable just-once-a-year feeling about them that good holiday food should have. (I know, New Englanders are scoffing right now. But for me, lobsters average out almost to once-a-decade.) They’re also a lovely bright red, the importance of which can’t be overstated in the middle of winter.

And this year, when Karine had chosen a dinner theme of “The American Apocalypto,” well, those little beasts looked just right on our plates, burnt-red as Satan’s hide, with waggly eye stalks, wiggly legs and other demonic details.

Which brings me back to the gashes all over my hands. I wouldn’t normally say getting wounded in the course of dinner is good, but this seemed like a suitable kind of penance for the utter sweetness and perfect texture of the meat.

Or maybe it’s proof that working hard for something makes you appreciate it more–which is a lesson I have to say I never internalized. While most people’s parents told them this, mine in fact told me the opposite: that just skating through is the way to go, as it makes you feel exceedingly clever. Perhaps if we’d had lobsters when I was little, I might’ve had a stronger work ethic? Perhaps if I’d eaten lobsters at every new year, I’d be inspired to actually make resolutions.

At any rate, as with the crabs in Maryland and the sea urchins in Greece, I was also reminded just how much some things don’t want to be eaten. And yet we are such ingenious humans that we now have dedicated tools for doing so: giant pots, tiny pokers, silver-plated claw-crackers, even little bibs to protect us as we gouge out the livers, like so many ancient Greek oracles. (My liver augured well for the coming year, I’m sure.)

Wait, I’m getting carried away, the music is swelling for the dramatic finale–and I didn’t even mention Julia Child! We spent all day watching old episodes of the French Chef, which, like the Muppet Show, has aged very well.

As fortune would have it, there was a lobster episode, which was sort of like Faces of Death, but for crustaceans. Luckily you’re spared the vision of 20-pound “Big Bertha” drawing her last on camera, but you do get to see Julia cheerfully put a brick (or was it an old-fashioned iron?) on top of the lid to make sure the smaller critters don’t escape their boiling torment.

So, dinner at the gates of Hell, welcomed by Julia Child–a mighty fine way to start the new year. I feel like I can handle anything now.

Something is terribly wrong.

Not that I was all that skeptical before, but now I believe in global warming.

As I’ve been sitting here on the couch in New York City today, January 6, I’ve had the windows open to balmy breezes of 70 degrees. That alone was a little spooky.

But what really did it was first, about an hour ago, the smell of lighter fluid, which it took me a minute to place. And now, the distinct smell of meat cooked over fire. My neighbors are having a barbecue in January.

To counteract these evil forces, I just drank a glass of eggnog.

Last-minute gift idea: Frappe Nation

frappe nationAttention all Greeks! All friends of Greeks! All people who’ve ever visited Greece! All residents of Astoria and Melbourne! All Manhattan- and Brooklynites who don’t really get what’s so cool about Queens! Hell, just anyone who really likes coffee!

This new book, Frappe Nation, by Vivian Constantinopoulos and Daniel Young, is truly wonderful.

But first, for all the people who fall into that last two categories, allow me to explain what a frappe is.

It’s simply the most genius coffee drink ever. It involves powdered Nescafe, cold water and ice. If you happen to like sugar or milk, you can have that too. You shake the bejesus out of the Nescafe and the cold water (and maybe sugar), till you get this beautiful velvety beige foam, then you pour it over ice. Then you add a little more water, or milk if you like. Then you sip and sip and sip. (Or, if you’re like me and have poor straw-management skills, you slurp too fast and have heart palpitations.) It kicks the ass of your standard iced coffee, because the sugar is blended in, and it lasts a lot longer. If you’re shuddering at the thought of instant coffee, get over it. It works perfectly.

I act as though I was born to frappe-ness, but of course I didn’t learn about it till relatively late in life. I’m sure it was Peter who first made me a frappe, and I can’t remember if it was before or after I moved to Astoria. You’d think I’d recall that formative moment, but I suppose it changed my life so irrevocably that I can’t remember what it was like pre-frappe.

But about the book: It’s a pretty, glossy bilingual coffee-table book. And rare for coffee-table books, the text is actually worth reading–it’s the best kind of food-writing, in which some foodstuff is analyzed and refracted back on the culture that produced it, so that you don’t have to be a frappe drinker (yet) to appreciate what this coffee concoction represents to a whole country.

In the book, you learn about Greek kids secretly making frappes in their bedrooms, and about the early Nescafe campaigns promoting it. You learn about Greek coffee culture in general, and you get some recipes and strategies. Ferran Adria, that master of foam, is name-checked by a Greek chef! You hear the ad-man who promoted Turkish coffee as Greek coffee in the 1970s admitting that, really, the frappe is the true “Greek coffee.”

And the photos are great, particularly because they counterbalance the common depictions of Greece as a land of black-shrouded, wizened, toothless women, bleary-eyed old men in a perpetual state of backgammon-ness, and goats. Who would’ve known: young, cool people live in Greece! They’re hot, they’re sexy! They’re even vaguely “European”-looking! And they all drink frappes.

If a ticket to Greece or even the book is out of your reach financially, you can still visit the authors’ website, Frappe Nation, for recipes, general info and even cute “Frappe Nation” tank tops (I happen to own one myself).

Or you can just come out to Astoria and sample one yourself: see Alpha Astoria for ratings on the best of the cafes. I know it’s a little cold for a frappe now–I guess you can wait. But I’ll remind you when the springtime comes.

Cool Sushi Site

Sushi is not my forte. I get all worried when I start reading how-tos, because they’re very persnickety, and there doesn’t seem to be much wiggle room at all.

Then I found this site: Make My Sushi. First I watched the “funny sushi video” (link in the left column), then I read about how to pick fish. I had laughed enough that when it came to the part about slicing up carrots in a very precise way, I didn’t immediately run screaming. I’m also fascinated by the process for making tamago, the little omelet slabs.

I still haven’t found the promised “pictures of celebrities enjoying their sushi in partial nudity,” but maybe I haven’t looked hard enough yet…

The Glutton’s Dilemma

I have to admit to a slight feeling of smugness when I say: I eat everything. I have never “watched” what I eat or otherwise been concerned with my health and weight, and I’m doing just fine, thank you. Maybe I’m lucky, but I also think moderation and cooking for myself does the trick. La la la–aren’t I great?

Oh, well, now I also have to admit: There was a little interlude of jeans-digging-painfully-into-my-burgeoning-gut this summer, but that seems to have disappeared. No thanks, though, to (OK, admitting more) about ten days of thinking maybe I should eat smaller portions and cut down on some of the desserts. And those were some incredibly depressing days–I did begin to understand how this fear of food has developed in so many people. It’s just the end of all pleasure as soon as you start looking at everything you put in your mouth in terms of where it might wind up bulging out on your body–midsection or butt? Or inner thighs, which are rubbing together in an unpleasant way?

Incidentally, the upshot of these ten days of vigilance and semi-abstinence is that I began to crave the strangest, junkiest things–whatever I could get from the office vending machine, frozen pizzas, Ho-Hos, you name it. For me, anyway, even thinking about “dieting” was very, very bad for me.

So, once I was through with that little thought experiment, I settled back into my usual habits, and now my pants fit again.

But perhaps what distracted me from my weight–and I guess I should be grateful for that–was another dietary issue altogether.

Without getting into specifics, let’s just say I take a little something daily to prevent the arrival of Roving Gastronomettes or Roving Gastronomitos. That little something also has the benefit of giving me dewy, smooth skin–the sort I should’ve been entitled to as soon as I stopped being a teenager, but for some reason just never got around to arriving on its own. Presto–a magic pill, and I am no longer looking at myself aghast in the mirror in the morning before I grab the concealer.

In recent years, however, even though my skin texture could be mistaken for a French woman’s in some light, it has taken to getting unattractively blotchy when I spend even four minutes in the sun. By the end of my Greece sojourn last summer, I looked a bit like I had been standing by during that terrible mishap at the self-tanner factory (the one that maybe also hit Lindsay Lohan?)–though fortunately I’d been wearing my safety goggles.

Like any disfigurement, I’m sure it looked worse to me than anyone else, but I decided I needed to adjust my daily treatments. So I started on a new formulation that held some promise of an even skin tone, though certainly no guarantee. One large perk, however (sensitive boys, block your ears): my period would dwindle away to next to nothing! Hooray! Oh, and the packaging was much cooler.

But then came the pendulum, swinging back the other way. Within a month, my skin texture was an utter fiasco–I felt like I was back in high school or worse, that year in Cairo when everything was just like being in high school again.

Then I remembered something a friend had mentioned, about how dairy products really made her skin break out.

I subsist on dairy products–they are my go-to protein source. This summer I ate either feta or yogurt or both every single day, and in my normal routine I eat milk for breakfast, maybe a grilled-cheese sandwich for lunch or a cheesy omelet, and then when I don’t know what else to put in the salad, I put in some Parmesan or little grated Cheddar bits. Cheese keeps forever in the fridge, and it’s available in amazing variety. Yogurt is good for the gut. Milk just hits the spot on certain occasions. Cream spruces up some dishes in a lovely way. And butter–I think I must be made of butter by now.

But I tried going without for a week, and, lo, my skin returned to normal. Then I ate a slice of pizza with a dollop of fresh ricotta, and woke up with a massive bump on my chin.

So. Vanity or gluttony? Do I give up a major part of my diet in exchange for the convenience of no period and the social confidence that comes with a flawless complexion?

I fretted for about a month, thinking maybe I was wrong, or my body would adjust. Making little mental negotiations like, well, if I give up butter, I guess that just means more opportunities for duck fat? And I _guess_ I prefer the intensity of fruit sorbets…

But that month was a pretty long time (frankly, I didn’t realize I was so vain in the first place), and it’s not like I really stayed on the wagon in the first place. I just could not face a life of placing food in ‘yes’ and ‘nooooooo!’ categories.

So just a few weeks ago, I switched back to the original anti-kid, anti-pimple, pro-blotch formulation.

You can read this two ways: I have zero will power and restraint. Or I’m fabulously deep–surface beauty doesn’t matter to me in the least, darlings.

Naturally, I agree with the latter interpretation. I’ll just buy a much bigger hat for next summer–and eat a lot of ice cream.

Stupid Resort Food

First, let me complain that my desk in this room at this brand-new luxury resort is too high. My shoulders are already starting to seize, so this should be a brief post.

I know I shouldn’t complain at all. I travel along the most beautiful stretch of beach in Mexico and visit the nicest hotels. Everyone tells me what a fabulous job I have. And I gently remind them that I have to stay at the crappy places as well, and eat at the crappy restaurants.

Which brings me to this evening’s topic.

I feel ill. I feel like perhaps my best course of action would be vomiting before bed, then getting a fresh start in the morning.

This of course isn’t how Miguel, the dining room manager at this resort where the desks are too high (or the chairs too low?), would want me to feel. And he did pointedly ask if there was something wrong with my pasta. But I couldn’t tell him what I was really thinking, because it would have taken too long.

So, lucky you. Here’s what happened:

Course one: three Baja California oysters. Turns out Baja isn’t known for its oysters. Plus, there was a little chunk of iceberg lettuce mixed in with one. And quite a lot of grit.

Course two: a “salad” that consisted of a bundle of lettuce and cress standing vertically on my plate. Alongside were arrayed a few slices of pear, a soupcon of blue cheese and three hazelnuts. Atop it all: raspberry goo.

Course three: alleged pesto pasta with scallops. No basil in sight. Instead: mushrooms! Plus, the barest hint of cooked green pepper, just enough to trigger the old school-lunch memories.

In the background through all this: crap piano music (inside) and crap violin playing (outside on the terrace, but unfortunately audible). A simultaneously bland and cloying white wine. Not in the background: my waiter, who was pretty much nowhere to be seen at any point.

The really depressing part of all this is that this isn’t the only place this is happening. Just a couple of nights ago, Tamara was moved to say, “Huh, I guess I understand bulimia a little better now,” after we’d suffered through a meal at what’s purported to offer the finest all-inclusive dining on this coast.

So, what, are we just hateful food snobs? I don’t think so. I don’t think you need a trained palate to realize that this simulacrum of high-end dining is complete bullshit. I don’t think the elderly couple sitting in front of me on the terrace tonight–she removed his reading glasses for him while he was eating–took any particular delight in receiving their lettuce in a vertical bundle.

But there are a lot of places like this. It’s one thing to pay medium-range money to spend a week at a resort living the way you imagine rich people might (that appeared to be the target market for the place two nights ago), but it’s quite another to shell out twice as much and still get such utterly dispiriting and even hateful food as I did tonight. The two-nights-ago place served items like foie-gras ice cream, which I can’t imagine Middle America really has much taste for, or even understands the culinary lineage that brought it to their plates. The [resort name here] is to El Bulli what H&M is to Prada…or perhaps something more like Alexander McQueen.

Eating the Stupid Resort Food–usually in a dining room that’s lit very badly, with music that’s atrocious–is like eating in Bizarro Gourmetlandia. All the details are there–Michelin credentials, vast wine cellar, sleek furniture, some sort of challenging foam or savory ice cream.

But then it’s just Not Quite Right, starting with the occasional incident of bad English: “chocolate mousse souffle with an idea of Black Forest,” “Freshly Oysters.” Then it goes very, very wrong, as when Tamara noticed (fortunately, before we’d ordered it) that the house red was Citra, the heinous jug wine that Ali serves at the KC, for when we’ve drunk through everything good we’ve brought ourselves.

But I’ve also visited some really fantastically high-quality hotels that happen to have exceptional food and service, and make it all seem effortless.

So who’s to blame? Well, scale, for one: these resorts are trying to feed 400 to 800 people a night, which must require some enormous appliance called the Blanderizer. And I’ll go back to being a food snob and assert that people just don’t fucking know any better–yet they don’t even realize they don’t know, which only makes it worse. And usually they’re on some kind of group travel deal, or their company is paying or whatever, so they’re less likely to dwell on bad things. And then there are the just-plain-bad chefs who think they’re fucking awesome–all those dudes in the chili-pepper pants who are stoked to get a job on a Caribbean beach with all these hot mamacitas running around.

Basically, what I’ve learned on this trip is that real rich people live very differently from how not-rich people imagine them to. They do not require attendants in white gloves who call them “Mister” and “Missus.” They do not need absurdly thick terrycloth robes–at least not in the tropics. And they do not eat vertical lettuce.