Very often, I will write something over the course of a few days and it’s complete junk except for a line or two. I used to try and file them away but I’m in a sharing mood:
I:
Extenuating evenness isn’t to be trusted—one can hide in the chaos of ripples.
I’m back on the sauce! The 75 Poem project is back. I left off at Epigram, so this is my first attempt at one:
Epigram I
You are a sail
And I am—silly woman—
the wind that pushes you away.
Wordpress is so polite. When I deleted my account, it wished me “Happy trails, until we meet again.” Something tells me I might already be addicted to the Tumblr interface, so it doesn’t seem likely. Below you will find a smattering of food writing and poetry. Most of it is fairly old, so for ease of use, I added the publication dates. Happy reading!
(Published on March 17, 2009)
It’s been oddly cold in LA lately and I’ve been having a nonstop French Onion Soup craving for about three weeks. Now, I can’t eat tremendous amounts of dairy so I’ve had to space these indulgences out like a carefully orchestrated march into foreign territory.
The first craving hit hard and I didn’t have time to research, so I went to the closest purveyor of FOS to my house, Figaro Bistrot. The thing about Figaro is that the decor is perfect. It’s all sconces and rose-colored imitation Tiffany glass. Zinc bar. Fresh macrons. It is the kind of place that makes having a moody bowl of hot and cheesy soup sound like the most romantic solo date possible. I was perfectly primed to have a Dining Experience, especially when a waiter brought me a pillow to sit on so my height (or lack thereof) wouldn’t leave me looking like an alcoholic 5-year-old, downing Chimays while waiting for her order. The lighting was perfect, the people were beautiful, the soup was underwhelming.
Maybe I’m a bit oldschool, but when I want French Onion Soup, I’m thinking beef stock, butter, onions, bread, and gruyere. I do not want stewed tomato chunks and celery, both of which I fished out of my Figaro broth, holding up to the candlelight to make sure my palate wasn’t imagining things. Needless to say, this soup experience left me totally unsatisfied and two days later, I found myself pining away for some more dangerous elixir.
Riverside Cafe in Burbank is not quite a hole in the wall, but it’s damn close. The tables are covered in sticky 80s oilcloth, the menus are crushed, and the outdoor bathroom is not much different than something you’d find at a Mobil station. But the food is home cooked heaven. They have a baked potato menu for God’s sake. Their French Onion Soup is divine, cooked-to-order. The crocks arrive at the table accompanied by a warning, DO NOT TOUCH THEM. Indeed, they are ingenious miniature ovens, keeping the cheese perfectly melty throughout the meal. With no extraneous vegetables in sight, Riverside’s take on this classic was simply perfect and enough to sate my appetite. For this week at least.
(Posted March 5, 2009)
Let’s be clear—I love Los Angeles and its incredible mix of fancy pants dining establishments, greasy burger joints, and ethnic outposts full of exciting new treats. But I’ve been finding something lacking even in my favorite spots. Namely, the experiences never feel like mine. Maybe that makes sense for a city of roughly 9,878,554 people and it’s too much to ask for a really intimate meal that makes you feel utterly at home in the City of Angels.
But then I discovered Wood Spoon and this gripe had to be removed from the list. Simply put, Wood Spoon, a tiny Brazilian café located in a spare, comfortable storefront downtown, is the answer to many of my culinary prayers. There you can look into the quasi-open kitchen and observe Natalia, the owner, zipping between industrial stoves and the refrigerator actually singing to herself. A happy cook is a good sign for any meal and the food she prepares is certainly worthy of song.
Potpies cooked to a golden crisp reveal a meaty inside full of shredded, tender chicken, hearts of palm, fava beans, and green olives. The coxhina are soft and flavorful and not too greasy. And the homemade truffles….oh the homemade truffles. They are dusted with cocoa powder and beyond rich. Even the water is amazing—infused with piles of cinnamon sticks, raw sugar cane, or refreshing orange peel.
Most people associate Brazilian cuisine with the costumed pomp and circumstance of the meat orgy occurring at Fogo de Chãos across the country. But the food at Wood Spoon transcends traditional recipes transplanted and made cliché with nostalgia—it tastes joyfully alive.
Wood Spoon
107 W 9th St
Los Angeles, CA 90015
(213) 629-1765
(Published March 3, 2009)
I am terrified of cooking. And yet, I have one of the most well-stocked kitchens of anyone I know. This includes those of a gourmet baker and a former sous-chef. Sea-salt from Provence? Check. Red enameled Dutch oven? Check. Citrus reamer? Check. What is a citrus reamer? I have no idea. But it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Some people feel rich when they buy a pair of designer shoes. Or drive an expensive, hard-to-import car. I feel the most wealthy when I spend an afternoon comparing the merits of microplanes at a Sur la Table. I get this close to the promise that one day, I will wake up and intuitively know how to make a coq au vin perfectly. Instead, I settle for a silicone oven mitt and throw it in the backseat on my way to grab some takeout.
My fear of cooking started young. My parents weren’t very handy in the kitchen. My father made dry chicken, an underdone baked potato, and limp, flavorless broccoli once a week. My mother attempted to broaden our horizons with a series of epically bad meals, one of which included a ceramic dish full of eviscerated bread, white wine, and raw shrimp. The recipe she was following, culled from God knows what salmonella cookbook, promised great results and in a bowl of half cooked crustaceans drowning in a lukewarm bath of swill.
It is unsurprising then that the only food I would enthusiastically eat until the age of 15 was buttered spaghetti.
Like most things that you aren’t permitted in your childhood, food became a kind of dream for me. But not the attainable kind. Hence the minestrone where I cooked the noodles along with the soup, inadvertently inventing a kind of semolina sponge that absorbed all of the liquid until the pot was a solid mass of starch and tomato residue.
Restaurants are what make me happy. I love the intricate process of becoming a regular. I look forward to the moment where a waiter will stop bringing me the menu and just arrive at my table with a mild papaya salad and deep fried tofu. Even as a waitress, I never got sick of being surrounded by edibles. I looked forward to the moment when one of my customers would say, “What do you recommend this evening?”
And yet, when I’m feeling down, nothing makes me feel better than cracking open a cookbook and assembling my collection of very fine tools and beautiful ingredients. The worry doesn’t kick in until I’ve turned on the gas and realized that my stove mimics the slope of the floor, sending all of the cooking oil to the far left of the pan, leaving the ingredients stranded on the right with no protective coating. Or that it will be impossible to successfully coordinate the seared chicken and mushroom stir fry without seriously neglecting one of them. And that risotto is a pipe dream invented by women with kankles who were raised chained to a stove.
I feel like I can identify this as an addiction because no matter how badly I screw up, I’m back for more a week later, seemingly having learned nothing about my inability to properly braise a chicken.
(Published August 6, 2007)
Getting one’s start as a food writer is a rather perplexing. It requires a fair amount of tenacity, patience, and putting up with some unfortunate but inevitable food snobbery. So it was rather surprising when Chef Michael Thomas struck up a friendly conversation with me when I was seated across from his prep station at Bar Ferdinand and he noticed I was deeply engrossed in Molly O’Neill’s American Food Writing anthology. He asked about my choice of reading material and I somewhat guiltily admitted to my intended career choice. He recommended the work of former New Yorker food writer M.F.K. Fisher and then promptly invited me downstairs to have a look at the kitchen.
It’s safe to say I’ve been in my fair share of industrial kitchens and they’re all pretty much the same—lots of heat, lots of steam, and lots of squishy rubberized mats on the floor. The brain of Bar Ferdinand was no different except it was by far the cleanest kitchen I have ever seen, barring my mother’s. Michael introduced me to owner Owen Kamihira and Executive Chef Blake Joffe, who both looked a bit surprised at encountering a strange woman wandering about but were incredibly accommodating of my questions. They even invited me back during the day to help prep vegetables and observe the inner workings of the restaurant.
After returning to my seat and nursing a cold glass of white sangria, I wondered why I’d never thought to write about the food at Bar Ferdinand. Perhaps because it’s so close to my house and seemed too obvious a choice. Or perhaps because every meal I’d had there was uniformly delicious and understated in such a way that it simply slipped by my radar. And as if the cosmic food gods wanted to underline the point that one should never, ever take great cooking for granted, I experienced something akin to Proust’s flood of Madeleine-induced memories when I took the first bite of my paella and was instantaneously reminded of the year I spent living with an elderly widow in Seville, Spain.
Carmen had been taking in study abroad students for over twenty years and never seemed to stop moving but for the two hours she spent parked in front of the television, snoozing away the hottest part of the afternoon. She began her days by laundering and meticulously folding all washable objects in sight. I would come home from class and find everything from towels to underwear mercilessly creased into manageable cloth envelopes stacked on the coverlet of my sagging bunk bed. For the other half of the day, Carmen disappeared into the kitchen. No matter how much I protested, she refused to allow me to watch her cook. It was six months before I was permitted to carry my licked-clean dishes from the table to the kitchen. That was as far as I got. For all I could tell, the woman with terrible arthritis had a wand that conjured the most delicious arroz (varying rice dishes with meat and shellfish, though differing from than the traditional Valencia paella), plates of deep-fried sardines, albondigas, croquetas, and subtle green salads adorned with tuna and dripping fried eggs. Not everything was perfect—there were frightening plates of trimmed fat and a mayonnaise-iced cake made from layers of tuna, carrot shreds, and white bread. Years later I continued to dream of her cooking and pretty much despaired of ever trying anything similar ever again.
For every perfect piece of Carmen’s rich, eggy tortillas I ingested in 2001, I’ve had as many hackneyed interpretations of Spanish cuisine. Which is why that bite of Bar Ferdinand paella was such a revelation—when I think abut it, their creamy jamon croquetas, carne a la plancha with a fried egg, pollo asado with apples, shallots, and wild mushrooms, and fried churros with impeccable chocolate dipping sauce have been the most toothsome and accurate interpretations of Spanish cooking I’ve had in over six years. Carmen would be proud.
(Published August 1, 2007)
I spent the last week visiting family and friends in the oven known as south Florida. It was actually better than expected and I had one spectacular meal at a little Cuban seafood joint known as Garcia’s, located on the Miami River. If you’re ever in the neighborhood, I highly recommend the conch fritters, fish ceviche, shrimp creole, yellow rice, and sweet plantains. However, I must admit I was stressing about the trip the week before leaving. After all, I associate Florida with white loafers, bad drivers, and fake boobs. So before I boarded the plane, I engaged in some retail therapy at the Italian Market. It’s been awhile–I used to live in South Philly and I always associate 9th Street with near fatal bicycle crashes while avoiding the flaming oil drums vendors set afire in the winter.
I went to Fante’s and admired their stacks of Le Creuset (which I will likely never afford but love to ogle) while picking up a thermometer, whisk, citrus reamer, hanging fruit basket, and kabob skewers. Not terribly exciting, but necessary. I had to drag myself away before I did some serious damage and returned home with a much-coveted grill pan, slow cooker, and crepe pan. There’s something about a well-stocked kitchen that naively makes me believe that some day my cooking won’t taste like re-hydrated filth.
On my way home, I noticed a painting of Johnny Depp gracing the outside of the Spice Corner, which really just increases my respect for that establishment all the more.
(Published August 15, 2007)
I suppose it’s human nature to love that which you cannot have. In my case, this usually extends to all things relating to cows, which produce magical milk products that render my stomach useless. However, every August, I am visited by the nagging sensation that I am missing out on something other than brie, gelato, and whole milk.
That thing is a tomato.
One of my best friends is legitimately allergic to the things and so when she says she can’t eat them, it’s true. My reasons are more complicated. Quite simply, the texture of a raw tomato turns my stomach. I can eat them grilled, toasted, roasted, and cooked in every which way. But what I really yearn for is the ability to take a bite out of one of those ripe Jersey tomatoes everyone won’t shut the fuck up about without feeling the need to retch. ‘
Tis the season for tomato worship and every Tom, Dick, and Harry seems to be holding some kind of festival showing off their seasonal crop. As a foodie, it feels criminal to stand by and watch as people lovingly salt tender red skins and eat heirlooms like apples. When I fantasize about what I’m missing, I turn to Pablo Neruda to express the inexpressible.
(Published June 25, 2007)
Last week, I did two important things: I got a digital camera with which to capture my eating adventures and I visited my mother. She moved to the middle of nowhere in Connecticut two years ago and ever since then, trips to her neck of the woods have turned into mini culinary tours of towns I’d most likely never have cause to visit. This past Saturday, my mother, my camera, and I spent the day wandering around a small hamlet several miles across the Connecticut border. Katonah, New York is one of those places evenly divided between curmudgeonly locals and disturbingly wealthy people with opulent summer houses. As such, the restaurant scene is pretty excellent and not as pricey as one might imagine, given the fact that Katonah successfully managed to keep the behemoth that is Martha Stewart from trademarking its name.
We ate lunch at the Blue Dolphin (175 Katonah Avenue, 914-232-4791), which was reviewed by the New York Times back in May. The ambiance was terrific–the place is situated in what looks like a converted caravan with wood-paneled ceilings and bouquets of dried peppers. The Blue Dolphin takes its cues from the cuisine of Capri and was surprisingly affordable. Never having been to Capri, I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the cooking, but the orecchiette with pesto and marinara was at once comforting and refreshing.
I also managed to have the best donut of my life at The Katonah Restaurant (63 Katonah Avenue, 914-232-9241). This cruller, with its crumbly, cakey flesh encased in a thin layer of cinnamon, barely managed to survive the time it took to take its photo. I think I devoured the entire thing in 5 seconds flat.
