So much life, so much food, so little time...

18th November 2011

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“Supermarket automatic doors open for me; therefore, I am.” ~Craig Bruce

9th August 2011

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“When science finally locates the center of the universe, some people will be surprised to learn they’re not it.” ~ Benard Bailey

I’m staring up into the blue umbrella above my head looking for inspiration. Looking for anything that might have collected up there as condensation after my brain has boiled and bubbled out of my ears as steam. I was hoping to see ideas condensing on the sun faded blue fabric like droplets of water. I’m staring and squinting my eyes until the Christmas lights I’ve rigged into the umbrella’s metal ribs slowly become blurry streaks and stars and splats of light. There has to be something up there. Maybe in the corners.  

Nothing. 

I’m not really the epiphany type.

Just bugs. 

Bugs that fear no citronella or mosquito spray. Bugs that lazily buzz around in the waves rippling through the summer nighttime heat. Seemingly oblivious to the massive chemical attack liken to the Vietnam war I’ve laid upon them in sprays and rubber armbands and candles and clip ons. 

Damn them. In my arrogance I thought they would fear me.

I was so very wrong I think as a huge brown beetle bounces off my cheek then off in another direction wobbly but alive. 

It’s hot. 

So very goddamn hot. 

I haven’t turned on the old white electric stove in days. I haven’t really been hungry. I’ve lived off half eaten bagels and air-conditioned pizza joints.

There’s really nothing better then being a chunky guy, dead in the middle of hot stinking summer, living in a cinderblock hotbox on an island. The way they split this house to make it into two apartments is a real feat of hyper advanced geometry. Not one of the seven windows is directly across from another. Not a one.

Get it. No cross breeze. None. 

Ugh.

Sweating.

From everywhere. 

The constant humming of the two little window box air conditioners behind my head struggling to cool the inside of the apartment is rattling my fillings in a sympathetic vibration. These little Walmart specials create an insane whirlwind of airflow equal to the little round plastic airplane vents that gun a tiny beam of ice cold air directly into your eye. This makes it almost impossible to enjoy the latest edition of Sky Mall while your breathing other people’s used but filtered air and your “average American body” is hot and stuffed into an “averaged sized human” seat and your eye is being slowly dehydrated by Boeing’s idea of basic human comfort.

Does anyone really buy stuff from that catalogue? Is anyone sitting there with their elbows tight against their sides t-rexing their seven free peanuts into their mouths thinking: “I so need a four bottle rotating barbecue sauce caddy with LED accent lights and brushes made of a space aged silicone composite”?

Does anyone need a life size bronze garden Sasquatch?

Do they still serve peanuts on planes anymore? Last time I flew, all I got was a dry cookie and a half a can of Coke. 

Yeah. It’s like that.  

There may be much digression here. Many tangents from a slowly melting mind. My skull feels like a microwave.

Ugh.

I’m not hungry at all. 

How make this inane rambling about food?

Hmmmm. 

“Your life is way too food centric.”  My doctor would say. 

Yeah well that was predestined. 

Born half Italian half polish. Both sides were into huge eating events. Every holiday every get-together always included at ton of food.  Growing up I lived in my kitchen. I was a oversized kid. When I wasn’t in front of the TV staring at the Thundercats or garnering a dirty crush on Jem, I was at the table stuffing my fat head. Eventually, my family kitchen became my teenage friend’s favorite hang out spot. My parents must have loved the late night laughing and howling and wrestling around their big round kitchen table the group of us dubbed the “center of the universe.” They never complained though and there was always food.  We ate our weight in buffalo wings and pizza and french fries around that table. We drank iced tea that was crunchy with way too much sugar. I think there was an incident with a Betty Crocker chocolate cake that my two closest friends tried to stuff down their gullets before anyone else had a piece. They snuck up to the kitchen while the rest of us were playing Nintendo, pulled it from the oven, iced it, cut it in half and just stared shoveling it in their faces. 

No one else helped them make it after all.

To this day, I’m surprised the glass that floats above the wooden table top on four little round rubber circles survived.  

We even brought girls there if you can believe that. We really didn’t know how to integrate them into our thing. They sit at the edge of the center of our universe and watch us act like asses, listening to us recant the countless ridiculous stories of our youth that we absolutely found hilarious. Stories about being chased by cops, breaking into abandoned buildings and playing Dungeons and Dragons and eating entire chocolate cakes and destroying family shore houses. Most of us are married now. These were the only women with gumption enough to listen to our endless boring feats of immature adolescent behavior over and over and over again and actually stick around. 

They must have found us endearing. Like big drooling puppies sliding in circles on a linoleum floor.

Saints. All of them. I’m still looking for mine.

Inspiration. 

Inspiration.

Inspiration.

I miss that table. That kitchen. Mine looks like a laboratory decorated by a group of people trying to rebuild after a zombie apocalypse using stuff looted from a devastated Ikea. 

I need that table.

The table was a hand me down from my grandparents. At their house everything happened in the kitchen around it. Every holiday was spent in the family’s kitchens.  My father’s parents had two kitchens. One “everyday” kitchen and the other tucked away in the basement seeming to exist just for Christmas and Thanksgiving.

Oh and funerals.

When they both passed on, my father brought the table to our house to replace the old butcher block table that was just a little too high for my mother’s comfort. 

She really is my main food inspiration. Between her and her sister who was a chef, my mother instilled in me a love for “comfort foods.” Her world has its big ups and downs and she says a big bowl of rigatoni in her own tomato sauce is better then any mood enhancer or antidepressant.  This was a constant in my life. To this day I hide my pain in a bowl of pasta with my own red gravy thats not quite hers, but a good attempt. She never never fed me from a foil tray or box or bag. She was a fifties mom in the kitchen but a seventies woman with a job and everything. She brought money to the table waking up every day getting me ready for school, my father ready for work, and walking a mile to a bus stop and then taking the bus to the subway terminal in a shit neighborhood and then taking the subway to the city and then walking from the subway to the tiny basement office where she still to this day is inputing insurance information from a hospital’s emergency room reception desk into a big old IBM computer. She always found time to make dinner. She had and still owns a huge cookbook collection that doubled when her sister who was a chef passed away. My father and I ate home cooked meaIs mostly every night. I remember a conversation in third grade and very specifically the look on her face when I explained that my best friends family must be unhappy because they eat frozen pizza and frozen dinners and take out every night in front of the TV. She had a look like she was thinking about calling in DYFS and reporting a severe case of child abuse. 

She still tells that story.

She hates the heat as much as I do. More actually. 

I need to eat something. 

To the chagrin of the squadron of flying bugs above me, I jump up and head to the kitchen, grab the watermelon out of the fridge and cleave it in half with a big butcher knife. I shave off a few odd shaped slices and arrange them on a white plate. I grab the olive oil thick with big green chunks of this summers basil crop from my potted porch garden and drizzle it across the red drippy pile. A pinch of Maldon salt from the salt pig on the stove top snows onto the plate. 

The beetle makes another attempt at my face as I wander out to see if any new inspiration clouds have appeared. I eat my salad with my fingers and leave big green and pink finger prints in the drippy beads of condensation on my iced tea glass.

Why is it so hot?

I smash a bit of the cold fruit against the roof of my mouth, squint and lean back into the chair and search the blue umbrella.

Nothing but bugs.

17th July 2011

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“Have a mouth as sharp as a dagger, but a heart as soft as tofu..” ~ Chinese Proverbs

What?

“Um… I don’t really eat meat anymore… I’m basically a vegetarian now…”

What?

I look down at my phone and see the picture of the pretty dark-haired girl who I’ve been feeding for years. She is the best friend of an ex that I won shared custody of after our break up. I made her meatballs once a week for a year. She has a key to my house just to get at the food I make for her and leave in the fridge.

Oh, and to feed my fish.

I’m looking into the big beautiful two dimensional eyes of someone who’s eating habits are so important to me that this new declaration causes blood to flush my face. 

“I really kinda like tofu…” squeaks from the tiny speaker like a far off voice from beyond my screaming psyche.

This this just can’t be. 

After verifying who I was talking to, I slowly lift the phone back to my ear. I could hear her explanation rattling on and on as if I never took the phone away. 

No. Please don’t say it.

If she says that she doesn’t eat animals because they are “just sooooo cute”… I might vomit. 

Everything I believe in will die. 

Just a little.

This has rules.  My rules. You eat what I make you. You eat with unbound ferocity. You eat with your hands if you have to and not stop ‘til way past full and sleeping with sauce stained fingers and garlic breath. Half my forks are missing cause you stole them to eat the plates off food I prepared for you in your car before work. You have my crusty discarded Tupperware under the seat of your car like so much forgotten underwear from a night of parking lot sex.

…and you never share.

You eat my food! 

…and meat is wonderful.

It’s every canine tooth bearing carnivore’s right to eat slower, dumber, and tastier animals. Isn’t it? We have organs in our bodies whose job it is to break down raw meat for Christ’s sake.

I would choose my god, if I believed in one, by how his (or her) religion treats the concept of dietary sacrifice. 

“oh… no pork? huh… um…. no thanks… no meat on Fridays? noooo… Who did this cow used to be??”

I’m one of those terrible people that go to petting zoos and imagines the potbellied pigs that are being fed handfuls of tiny brown feed pellets by kindergarteners from little red vending machines attached to wooden polls outside their pens, being expertly broken down into their primal butcher cuts and slow roasted over a low fire.

Little shiny red apples in all their little hand fed mouths.

Skin getting all brown and ears getting all crispy.

Imagine that fat structure and marbling from years of just sitting in their pristine zoo pens and being spoiled and massaged all day by streams nanny driven toddlers and daily school trips with permission slips in hand. 

Delicious.

I can’t have a god that judges that wrong. If I were to be of a religious nature I would have to believe that properly and thoughtfully raised and perfectly butchered and wonderfully caramelized animal flesh is my gods apology for male pattern baldness. 

“Sorry about the hair… Have you tried the bacon? It’s delicious.” Says a loud voice omnipresently from a burning bush.

I’m barely listening to her explanation.  I’m hurting dully on the inside for some reason. When I put together a meal. A real meal with all the passion and intensity of what I believe is true carnal pleasure, she is usually my inspiration.

“…and you know how I feel about animals…”

Oh man, here it comes…

In seconds between this and the next line a horrible memory floats up…

Ugh.

I am about to admit something.

Something heart breaking.

Terribly embarrassing. 

For a year…

or two.

In my late teens.

I was a vegetarian.

(Air rushes from my puffed cheeks trough the lips of my mortified expression)

It was a very hard time for me. 

I was trying to “find myself”. 

I ate an amazing amount of french fries and pasta. I watched as my friends ate crispy fried hot wings and I ate the celery. I ate the almost nonexistent vegetables at my family’s holiday parties. I refused my mother’s meatballs and ate the salad. I didn’t touch the turkey at Thanksgiving dinner. I couldn’t eat my grandmothers stuffing that was, on the behest of my father, ninety percent pork sausage and turkey giblets.

I didn’t really care about the health or the feelings of the cute and fluffy animals I wasn’t eating. I didn’t believe they were the reincarnated souls of my ancestry. Deep down inside I really didn’t care about being healthy.  I just wanted to be unique. I wanted to be different. 

…and cool.

Blah!

Add that to my attempt at being a Wiccan and listening to any band with a screaming vocal and playing Dungeons and Dragons at my parents kitchen table, I’m surprised I ever got laid in high school. 

Thank god for the pretty, petra-natural pollard goth girls who hated themselves just as much as I hated me. 

What I wanted. Really, REALLY wanted was a cheesesteak. With a side of cheesesteak.

Maybe with some sauce made of a blended cheesesteak.  

I gained so much weight on a diet of almost strictly carbs. I so wanted to stop the madness but having a horrible teenage reputation for half-assing my way through everything I did, drum lessons for instance, was haunting me. I “almost” finished everything I  barely started and this time I had every intention of sticking with it.

“It’s good for you…” I would tell my friends as they looked at my ever expanding form sideways and with raised eyebrows.

“I bet I’d get sick from all the toxins in meat if I ate it now…” 

Ugh. 

A chill runs through me now as the image of me sitting on my bedroom floor rocking back and forth with my arms hugging my knees while my mother cooks bacon for my father’s breakfast. The posters of the tattooed Henry Rollins and the Ramones in their matching haircuts and leather jackets judging me a veggie eating wuss.

Just go get a damn piece… You know you want it.

You want it bad. 

Then one day I just couldn’t take it. It was horrible. It was a cold autumn day at a Boston Market. I walked inside with every intension of leaving with a meal made up of three of the vegetable side dishes, Boston Market’s answer to the vegetable platter. Clouds with hearts of crackling electric blue lightning pool and churn dramatically above the restaurant. Standard horror movie music drifts by as an army of taunting birds on spits basting each other with their own rendered juices and crispy browning skin thick with company secret spices turn inside a huge glass case before me. The camera zooms in on my big wanting eyes, then back to a close up of the chicken. Then a close up of me licking my lips. Then a smash cut edit back to the chicken. Then smash to me, then smash to a halloween decoration on the store’s window, then smash to me again just my right quivering eye, then smash to the chicken!!!!

The horror. (lighting cracks)

Imagine if you will the carnage of a fat kid, deprived of animal protein and living on sugar and cake and coffee from the shop where I worked, DESTROYING an entire Boston Market rotisserie chicken in under two minutes. Then ordering a second. There’s nothing sexier then a fat kid gnawing on chicken bones and then tearing the bag in two and licking the foil insides clean.

She’s still explaining I think. I don’t remember hearing the words “cute” or any statement containing the words “soul” or “reincarnation” or “animal rights” or “PETA”.

“I just feel like it’s not right, ya know? Do you know how they treat animals raised solely for food?”

She goes on to explain about all the good vegetables and soy protein she eats. All fresh all simply cooked.  At least she’s not making my adolescent mistakes. She makes herself chicken once and a while but not too often. 

…and canned tuna. 

“Um..” I muster.

“Are you ok?”

“Yeah… I think I need a minute.”

I hang up the phone. In the end she promised to eat anything I ever make for her.

It didn’t make me feel better.  

I picture the awkward feeling of going through restaurant menus hoping to find something she’d be able to eat. I picture me having a torsion of pork belly while she eats a “vegetable platter”. I picture myself at a book store in the cooking isle holding a vegetarian cook book leafing through the chapters of “meat substitutes” scowling in disgust.

What the hell is nut loaf anyway? I think as I go outside to mop the pork shoulder slowly breaking down in the smoker. 

I might have to take her key away. 

4th March 2011

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“High-tech tomatoes. Mysterious milk. Supersquash. Are we supposed to eat this stuff? Or is it going to eat us?” - Annita Manning

God I’m sore.

I’m standing in the shower stall with the finest, hardest, hottest settings on my shower nozzle drilling into the back of my head.  In the next room, the stereo drifts in and out on a play list that indescribably ranges from Son House to Henry Rollins. My forehead is against the rough untiled wall and I’m watching the big droplets roll around from the back of my head and drip off my nose and disappear into the steam before dying on cracked seventies pink tile floor and joining the rest down the drain.

It’s been a long couple of months that I’ve just capped off with forty eight hours of work and insomnia and take out and ignored TV and forgotten books and more work. My neck sounds like its filled with broken lightbulbs. My eyes won’t focus.

I stretch my fingers up as high as I can on the wall and with my chin to my chest I roll my head back and forth in the stream of hot water. I need to eat something that didn’t come out of a white cardboard box that says THANK YOU in red letters next to a pagoda in the same smeared ink. I need to eat light because sometime real soon afterward I’m going to crash into whatever is on my bed. Clothes I think. Clean I hope. Hopefully my head will find a pillow.

Drying my self off, I find the large scrapes on my shin I got while dragging myself into a crawlspace. I find another scrape I didn’t even know about on my elbow.

With a towel wrapped around my waist, I pad barefoot to the kitchen and pull open the old yellow fridge.

Not a lot of options. No options really.  So I close the door.

I drag on my jeans and a tee shirt. Its summer outside but this day is cool. The breeze through the window is so rare and so nice.

Again, with the old yellow fridge door open I’m staring hard at a ten jars of home made pickles and a shrunken blood orange, I make a decision. My only option is the local farmers market. I can’t bare the shitty supermarket in this town today.  I just can’t happily wander the stacks and stacks of pre-made foods and canned foods and boxed foods and frozen foods like the small island’s consumer masses. 

In my little blue car with the windows rolled down and Dharohar Project screaming on the iPod, I head down the highway. Halfway off the island, I start to feel a little human again. The sea air rushes around me and my lungs inflate and my blood oxygenates. My eyes focus for a second as I watch the seagulls follow my car over the bay bridge.

I pull onto the macadam lot of the farmers market. I smile at the big hand painted signs and the tables and tents.

My shoes are instantly covered in gray dust from the lot as I walk along the stalls and look at bins of fresh flowers and house plants. There are rows of decorative pines and topiary and garden statues. I’d love a yard, if for anything the garden gnome potential.

I wander by tent after tent and pick up a big waxy cantaloupe. Cantaloupe was a staple at my grandparents summer table. I run my fingers over huge organic carrots and muddy, leafy beats. Rows of zucchini and squash and yellow and white corn blur by.  

I grab a huge bag of sugar snap peas. I know someone who dies for peas.

Big big yawn.

Tired is starting to catch up.

I’ll probably wax poetic some other time about this place. 

Just ahead of me are tomatoes, piles of them.

Yes. Tiny grape tomatoes and roma’s and Beefsteaks and multi-colored heirlooms. These are mostly grown locally and have never have been shipped. They’ve never been refrigerated. Thats important. A tomato becomes so much tasteless mealy detritus when stored below fifty degrees. Locally in the winter you can be confused by the boxes of pretty red tomatoes. Don’t be. They are worthless fakes. Shipped from hothouses around the world in refrigerated containers.

In the winter I switch to canned tomatoes for my tomato sauce.

Pay attention.

I make my own butter, but in the winter I use CANNED tomatoes.

I’m trying to learn how to jar my red gravy so I have stores for the winter. 

I recently finished an article where the tomato has fallen so far down on the American favorite list that biologists are working to crossbreed a new more flavorful tomato from heirlooms to take over for the current terrible mass produced one. They’re also adding a genetic trait that will resist bruising.

Wow think about what I just said.

By no means am I under the uninformed assumption that the produce we eat is natural. Google it. I dare you. You would be amazed at humanities influence on their food sources. Our fingers have meddled in the genes of everything we eat. I mean picture herds of black and white spotted dairy cows roaming the plains with their enormous milk filled utters lolling back and forth under them. It just never happened.  They are bred like dogs and cats and created for food.  Just read Pollin’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”. Your mind will be blown. Corn has become an enormous corporate dietary situation. I think it may destroy us. But I’m only on chapter 3.

I jump in my car with a crate of bright red romas and brown paper bag of heirlooms. I grabbed a silky ball of mozzarella from a local dairy where I also buy my milk and eggs.

I head home on the road that will eventually take me over the bridge to the island where I eat and sleep.  My mind is drifty and it takes allot of energy to keep my eyes open. The cool breeze is not doing its job.

In the kitchen I pile a few heirlooms in the sink and wash and take off the little green crown of leaves where it was plucked from the vine. a big bumpy yellow tomato and a kidney shaped purple tomato and an assortment of little green, orange, and red grape tomatoes.  The tomatoes get cut into bite sized pieces.

I take a few cloves of garlic that I slow cooked in olive oil and smash them into a paste and add it to a bowl with a heathy gulg of olive oil and a drizzle of reduced balsamic vinegar. I stir it up and add the tomatoes smashing them to crush out the natural juices and press in the dressing.

Big, HUGE yawn. The kind that takes over your face and sends sparkles across your closed eyelids.

Tired is taking over.

I sprinkle in a healthy pinch of sea-salt and fresh cracked black pepper. I wander to the deck garden and pick a bunch of broad leaf parsley and wonderfully green basil. The herbs get chopped and tossed in.

I’m not gonna make it. I need to sleep.

I cover the bowl and toss it into the yellow fridge and wander to the bedroom. While I sleep the salt will draw out the juice of the tomatoes and the flesh will absorb the thick balsamic vinaigrette.

When I wake up I’ll pull out the bowl and stand at the counter tearing pieces off the milky mozzarella ball and with the crusty nose of a fresh loaf of bread I will ravenously shovel the multicolored salad into my mouth. I will most likely stain a shirt with dressing and tomato seeds. 

I push the laundry to the floor and stretch out in the cool sheets. My shin is throbbing but its almost unnoticed as I doze off. My last thought as I drift away is back to the yellow fridge.

What should I make with the peas?

23rd February 2011

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The perfect lover is one who turns into a pizza at 4:00 a.m. ~Charles PierceI

Oh yeah… She’s gonna love this.

I snap a picture of my dinner and text it to one of my favorite crushes. Our relationship has reduced to pizza porn and flirtatious smiles from across the room.

In my hand is a crispy thin crust slice of pizza covered in capicola, crushed red pepper (tons of it), aged provolone and a thick sweet tomato sauce. Its salty and sweet and very spicy all at the same time. Its folded and the tip curls downward. Its bite is hot and amazing. The crust crunches and has a smokey flavor. The cheese has blistered in the intensely hot dome shaped oven. The capicola has caramelized nicely. (God bless you Louis Camille Maillard) The red pepper maces my senses (in a good way).

This isn’t the first naughty pizza picture I’ve sent her. There was the hot and assuaging black truffle and fontina pizza last month and the wood fired pepperoni and sausage number in December. I like to think that she sucks her bottom lip between her teeth and nibbles it when she sees the picture I’ve sent. She hides it from her boyfriend and lets a moan escape her throat when she looks at it in private.

Last summer I was on a grilled pizza kick. I burned an amazing amount of dough directly on the grill top and broke 3 store bought pizza stones before I came up with a system. I put half a dozen quarry tiles bought at Home Depot on the left side of the gas grill and warm up the grill slowly. When it comes up to temperature, I fill a shallow pan with a scary mound of red hot coals from the starter chimney and lower the gas. The pan is right next to the tiles creating a smokey blazing hot chamber.

I’ve used my hundred and twenty five dollar Target gas grill in so many dirty, inappropriate ways.

I have a bit of dough rising in a metal bowl on the counter and throw a few roasted garlic cloves and some sea salt into the mortar and pestle. I grind them into a pulp and add an egg yolk and a squeeze of lemon juice. I grind the mixture against the side of the mortar and slowly drizzle in the olive oil until its a nice silky homogenous aioli.

I spin and press the dough out into a circle and stretch it across my knuckles to clumsily mold the mass into a reasonable oval that will fit nicely on the tiles. I lay it across my wooden cutting board and cover it in olive oil and and a sprinkle of sea salt. I tear apart a ball of buffalo mozzarella and arrange it on the oval. I slice a red onion and a few cloves of garlic and rip a few leaves of basil from the potted garden on the deck. This is the trick you see. Don’t pile on the toppings. You need just enough to have a good crust to topping ratio. Anything else is that deep dish travesty, that I secretly love.

This morning I bought a small bag of steamer clams from the fish store while I was on a search across the island for a whole grain bagel. I rinse the clams and wrap them in a foil packet with a swig of white wine and put the packet on the tiles to open. When they give up they get moved to the side.

I take the cutting board and use it as a pizza peel and as I slide the pizza off on to the hot tiles it immediately starts to cook and I close the lid. In a minute, I open the lid and the cheese has started to melt. I put the clams on, shell and all and drizzle on the aioli and close the lid.

Last year, I was eating in New York City at a pizza joint that made pizza in one of the rumored oldest and last coal fired ovens in town. It was basic, just cheese, crust, and sauce. But it was very, very good. I scarfed down the entire slice and had to order a second just to snap a picture of it for her. I’m very dedicated to this affair.

Maybe it was the third slice.

I pick up the edge of the pizza with my asbestos fingertips and and drag it back onto the board. My knife crunches through and slices it into odd shaped wedges and I fill my glass with the remaining white wine. I kick off my shoes and put my feet up on the other plastic chair. I pick the clam off my slice and knock him out of his shell on to the pizza with the clam juice and aioli that pooled there with him. The sun is in my eyes so I adjust the blue umbrella over the table. I squeeze a lemon wedge over the top of my lunch and basically inhale the first slice.

Cheesy and salty and fishy and garlicky.

Perfect.

I snap a picture with my phone. Its the food equivalent of the naughty Facebook underwear picture, taken over the shoulder in the bathroom mirror, when your parents aren’t home.

“God I hate you” She texts back.

She doesn’t really mean it.

16th February 2011

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Bread and butter, devoid of charm in the library, is ambrosia eating under a tree with a book. ~Elizabeth Russell

It seems lately that I find myself sitting alone in noisy restaurants with a pile of books and plates and glasses and magazines. My apartment is tiny you see, so sometimes I just have to get the hell out of it. The walls close in and the ceiling grows spikes and slowly sinks towards me. I think I can smell my socks two rooms away in the bottom of the hamper.

I need to escape.

It’s kind of like having a ever changing dining room where I pay for food I’d never cook at home and mostly rarely like. There’s not allot of places locally to sit down and eat and almost none that have food worth bragging about. If you love mediocre pizza or “chinese” food or little joints that have four thousand bland dishes served with “vegetable medley” from a freezer bag or mashed potatoes, twice-baked potatoes, fries, or coleslaw, I have a town for you.

I’m sitting in one right now and reading Bourdain’s newest book. The bell above the door rings and I find my self across from a man about mid-seventies, getting ready to eat alone, and read a book.

Um.

Am I’m sitting across from my future?

As he sits down the waitress asks him about his headlights still being on in his car outside the window.

“What?!”

“Your car sir, the lights are still on…”

They make small talk about his car and in his day he had to remember to shut them off and this car turns them on and off for him. He’s talking very loudly, he must be losing his hearing a bit.

The headlights fade away slowly as he orders his “usual”. Fried flounder I think and coffee.

Uh… Hot coffee with dinner.

I turn the cold, folded block of flounder on my plate hoping a new perspective on it will brighten up the possibility of eating it.

My attention back on Bourdain telling his readership once again that he did insane amounts of drugs and worked like a dog at all hours of the day, three hundred and sixty five days a year while using drugs and he can’t remember the eighties because of the drugs and how he can’t believe the shit people eat while doing drugs. The shit I’m eating right now I can’t even believe I ordered without any drugs at all.

It’s the start of the new year and I resolve to explore off this island to find better dining rooms to read in.

I look up from my book and the old man looks down at his.

When does this happen? He has a “usual”. Would I eventually have a “usual”? I always eat mussels at my center city gastro-pub. I wonder if I could just go in and order my usual?

My mother and father have usuals. They even have a weekly usual schedule. They eat the same things over and over again. When I visit, they almost never have food in the fridge. At least once a week they eat Chinese takeout and once a week they eat at a diner, their night out.

I think I have a usual or two but I try to ignore their hold on me. Their siren call.

Sigh.

When I was young my mother made food out of enormous collection cookbooks and recipes she saw on PBS. Remember kids, before Bobby Flay, Emeril Lagasse, and Rachel Ray there was Jeff Smith and Martin Yan and Graham Kerr. They taught the TV viewing audience to cook. The world was deep in a Betty Crocker coma. Women resented being in the kitchen, men would only grill. 2 career families were eating frozen dinners in front of the TV and the one dish casserole was king. Nuggets were born.

Damn you Robert C Baker.

My mother and father took me to real restaurants and they never let me eat off the children’s menu. I ate all of my mothers kitchen experiments and the Italian-American foods that were passed to her from my grandmother. I ate smokey grilled octopus and fresh whole fish filleted table side at a Greek restaurant that I still eat in today. I sat on the floor and ate crispy pigeon pastilla off a brass table in a dim North African restaurant. My mom still tells stories about me eating raw clams on our vacations to the Jersey shore.

“The ladies at the restaurant just giggled as you ate them.”

They might not giggle now… I’ve been known to damage the backup stock at a raw bar or two.

When did this happen? When did they forget how great eating can be?

They base restaurant choices on price and eat way too much diner food. They live in one of the greatest eating cities in the country and eat the same orange chicken from the same Chinese take out joint every Wednesday.

The waitress asks me if I want a doggie bag for the rest of my meal.

No. No I don’t

I fold down a page to reference later and close the book. I stand and put on my coat and look up at he old man holding his book above his fried fish platter. He glances over his glasses and eyes me getting ready to split.

“Watcha reading kid?”

I show him the cover of the book and give him a half smile.

“Ahhh. I loved his first book but his new show is shit compared to the old one….”

29th November 2010

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It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes. ~Douglas Adams

This one is going to work. This will be the one.

You will be my first. My perfect little angel. My baby

Lovely.

I tenderly pick up the tiny pillow of dough. Lite, airy. It looks so delicate in my big, flour covered fingers.

I lay it gently on the back top of the fork, where the tines meet the handle and hold it there with my thumb.

I pray.

Here goes. I hold my breath and try not to close my eyes and roll the dumpling down across the fork…

I visualize.

I press.

I roll.

It’s ROLLING!

It’s really WORKING!

I become way too sure of myself.

Foolhardy move jerk.

YOUR LOSING IT! PULL OUT!

I push it just a little to hard and slide uncontrolled and with too much force across the fork tines. At the bottom, the gnocchi lays too flat and only lined and curled on one half.

Ugh.

Earlier last year I had gnocchi at a celebrity-ish chef joint in a casino. They were absolutely amazing. Perfectly formed dumplings the size and shape of penny root beer barrel candy, with perfect ridges filled with just enough of the rich cheesy cream sauce they were paired with. I know your thinking that gnocchi and a cream sauce would be way to heavy. I thought the same thing. But you and I are wrong. The gnocchi were so light, so airy they were barely a texture. If you scooped one up with no resect for it’s delicateness you could easily crush it into nothing.

I stop myself from swiping the whole thing into the sink. I pinch my nose at the top and try to squeeze the headache out of my eyes.

Why is this so hard? Italian grandmothers do this all day long. I’ve seen Batalli do it on Iron Chef for Christ’s sake. I went to cooking school and sat in pasta class for hours. I’m half Italian. Why are my genes not picking up and taking control? Last week I almost bought a gnocchi board but I lost my nerve with the image of my great grandmother looking down on me from her basement kitchen in heaven. I already hide my ravioli mold in shame. Once I ate Chef Boyardee at a friends house in high school.

God the nightmares.

I picked up the ruined blob of potato, flour, and egg and unceremoniously toss it into the pile of it’s misshapen peers. Join the failures. The gallery of Chef Frankenstine’s mistakes. The oddballs. You don’t fit with my image of gnocchi perfection.

Your just an ugly dumpling.

Oh you’ll taste ok.

But you look wrong. You’ll be denser in some places and you won’t hold the right amount of sauce in your short shallow groves.

I try again.

Different result. Still bad.

Again.

Bad.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Bad.

Wrong.

Gushed.

Ugh.

Two dozen malformed gnocchi lay before me on the flour dusted board. Their twisted forms mocking my soul, my heritage, my sense of “me-ness”.

I take a deep, calming, breath of acceptance and fill a pot with water and put it on my electric stove top to boil. I toss in a huge pinch of salt and drizzle in a healthy pour of olive oil. I take out a tomato and some onion and garlic. I rough chop the tomato and onion and smash and mince the garlic. I saute the vegetables, pour in a little wine and cover to simmer.

I plop the little monsters into the water and wait for them to rise to the surface of the water. I remove the lid on the sauce to find everything broken down and reduced nicely. Salt, pepper, and some capers from the stoneware jar in the fridge. I mince some basil and grate some parmesan and toss that in, add the drained gnocchi and give them a shake in the sauce.

“This is not over…” I say to myself as I slowly chew each bite, staring at the fork on the floured counter.

This has only just begun.

Source:

15th November 2010

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A fish may love a bird, but where would they live? ~Drew Barrymore

This is the worst my insomnia has ever been.

Summer was bad. Real bad.

But fall is leaving me with long sleepless nights. Half asleep one minute, the next I’m really not tired. I’m ironing and doing laundry and watching movies at three am, four am, seven am. I’ve finished more books then ever before. Books I cant even remember a word from. It’s god awful to watch the sun come up and the hours tick away and not even be tired. The zombie feeling behind my eyes. Like I’m looking at a movie of my life.

But summer.

Summer was very long for me.

One long day in particular I remember waking up after a few scant hours of sleep, smelling like limes. I look groggily up to the bathroom mirror and find a small green piece of cilantro on my upper lip.

Last night, ummm.. or this morning…

I made ceviche.

The sting of the lime juice was still in every cut on my hands.

The sun was bright and creeping through my curtains and my little window box air conditioner couldn’t keep the heat out of my tiny cinderblock apartment.

My grumpy cloudy mind decided that sunlight and a walk on the beach was better for me then the third season of Heros sitting on top of my DVD player. My body painfully threw a crying tantrum in disagreement but the smell of the ocean drifted through every crack and weakness in the room and the mind won.

Stupid mind.

On my counter was an avocado. I tossed it between my hands and ran my fingers over it’s bumpy surface. I used my thumb to feel for that little bit of give, that hint of softness that a ripe avocado uses to tell you its ready.

I slice it around the long circumference, split it in half and pop out the prize of all middle school science fairs, the pit. I scoop out the flesh and drop it on my cutting board, gave it a quick rough chop and toss it into the wooden mortar and pestle given to me by one of the greatest humans on this earth, Andy Conga.

“You use it for making mofungo…”

I also use it for salsa, peanut butter and any other things I need to crush the shit out of. I toss in chopped onion, cilantro, a couple chopped chiles, sea salt and some grape tomatoes and squeeze in a whole lime. I use the mortar and pestle to grind it up.

It’s funny to think that the lack of sleep is causing me to experiment with acid cooked fish recipes. This is the third ceviche this month. Last month it was roasted chicken. I roasted like twenty chickens in the middle of the night.

Each on different nights that is. Twenty in one night would just be weird.

I dig a plastic bowl with a lid out of the cluttered cabinet and take the ceviche out of the fridge.

Last night I used the waste end of a fillet of coho salmon and a few scallops. I sliced the salmon real thin and cut the diver scallops in half. I tossed the fish in to a container with the juice of three limes, red onion, garlic, cilantro, a diced chile, and a splash of coconut milk. The acid in the lime juice cooks the fish. Its amazing. Its currently my last meal request. Stuff it into my feeding tube. While your at it, go to Guavate, by a fire roasted pig and stuff that on in to.

Skin and all.

I scoop the ceviche into the bowl and top it with a dollop of the avocado and drizzle on some thick olive oil.

I put a bag of fried plantain chips into my bag and toss in the bowl and a fork.

Flip Flops on I start the hundred or so steps to the beach.

The sand is hot and there’s a warm breeze blowing from the ocean. I kick off my shoes and sit on the highest part of the dune. Sitting on the beach, I wonder how long this insomnia is going to last.

This is the best way to eat breakfast for me, on the sand under the sun. Fresh food. The salty chips really add to the buttery avocado and the tangy lime. The scallops have a fresh sweet flavor and the coho is an amazing deep orange. I watch the waves break and the tan girls walk by. This is what good days are made of. I think I’m going fishing later when the tide comes back in.

Little did I know that later I would crash hard and sleep for four hours and miss the tide.

I wonder if Booberry would taste good on the beach.

12th October 2010

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“I was seven before I realized that you could eat breakfast with your pants on.” ~Christopher Moore

God this bed is hot.

I can feel the late fall air from outside the covers creeping in and trying to chill the oven thats been created under the covers.

I hate winter.

Cold. Ugh.

But I hate sweating in bed even more.

My body wakes up inch by inch and when the wave of reality creeps up to my mouth, I can taste the box wine from last night’s art opening that my last truly arty friend drug me to. I’m not a real heavy drinker. I’m a faker from way back when. If everyone has a glass I also have a glass to act as a beard against the endless pokes at my sobriety.

I need to brush last night out of my mouth, but I’m thinking about breakfast.

Waffles.

A couple of mornings ago I saw a street food truck selling “Real Leige Waffles”. The last time I had a waffle like that was a chilly Christmas Eve morning, in New York City, walking to the tree at Rockefeller Center, arm and arm with someone who three days later would tell me she was in love with someone else.

“But you can keep the gifts.”

Awesome.

I crawl out of bed, pull on a shirt to fend off the chill, and pad to the kitchen.

Yesterday I bought a little bag of pearl sugar. This is the ingredient that makes or breaks this kind of waffle.

…and I have a real waffle iron.

A couple of years ago my father gave me a Viking Waffle maker he found and restored. It’s restaurant grade, which makes me very happy.

Last night’s show consisted of three rooms of found object colleges and nudes of people who could only be described as “way too old to be naked in a picture”

Or ever.

I found myself studying a floor to ceiling piece of a woman my mother’s age, height, and weight, contemplating never being able to have sex again because this image was slowly burning into my retinas and hoping that a time machine was on the horizon.

Art.

I drag open the fridge and take out the left over roasted and pureed pumpkin from last night’s raviolis, butter and toss them into a pan to warm. I add a little brown sugar from the clay jar. I grab a package of yeast and mix it with warmish water, salt and a little sugar and let it do its thing. I stir the pumpkin and add some maple syrup.

At the gallery I was rolling my glass between my fingers and standing in front of a two by four, studded with glitter coated suction cups called “The Finality of Us” when I realized I was standing next to a very attractive women eyeing the same piece, nibbling absentmindedly on what earlier tasted to me like pre-cut ACME Cheddar. Without looking at me she asks “What’s so final about this?”

Hmmm.

“Maybe it was their last rainbow sparkly two by four.”

She smiles brightly and becomes my partner as we tour the gallery. We stop at every piece and and spend way too much time giggling. She muffled her uncontrollable laughter into my shoulder as we critiqued a piece called “Life. People. Shit” which incased in a glass box, consisted of a board-game and a child’s action figure covered in what could only be, well… shit.

Her name is Evie, she studies music here in town. She has very dark mousy hair and her eyes squint amazingly when she laughs. She was thirteen before she stopped believing in santa and she was mad about it through her twenties.

After the yeast has had enough time to eat and burp, I pile some flour in a bowl and fold in the yeast mixture. I add a few farm fresh eggs and some melted butter. I knead the dough and set it aside to rest.

I fight the urge to crawl back into bed while I wait for it to double. I take the pumpkin off the stove and take a walk to the store and pick up some coffee for the press and a magazine. I walk out to the beach. The storm last night has whipped up the sea foam into a heavy froth. Big drifts of chilly, ivory colored foam wander the sand under the mid-morning sun.

I wander back to the house and start the kettle for coffee and turn on the waffle maker.

Pearl sugar is what takes these waffles over the edge. They are little nibs of sugar that don’t melt into the dough but mix in like chocolate chips. When you cook the waffles, the sugar-bits melt and caramelize creating a crispy lovely outside. Pearl sugar is from Sweden and you can find it in gourmet stores or online.These waffles are denser and breadier then the Belgian waffles your used to. They have just the tiniest sourdough flavor.

I dip the spoon into the dough and drop it on the buttered, sizzling bottom plate and close the lid. I daydream right through burning the first one just shy of a cinder. The second and third one went much better. Halfway through cooking I flip the handle. When its done I put a second on and butter the first and sprinkle a little cinnamon on top. Plop on a dollop of the pumpkin.

As it cools, I wander back into the bedroom and sit on the edge of the bed. I run my fingers through the gnarled pile of covers and find a warm shoulder and give it a gentle squeeze. Evie stretches her arms above her head and wipes the sleep out of her eyes.

“Breakfast?”

5th October 2010

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“Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts” ~Robert Fulghum

Howling wind rattles my windows.

Rain drives into the foggy glass.

My fingers run along the jagged edge of the bones where each one was incised with a bone saw.

I’ve done a terrible, terrible thing. 

I don’t regret it.

Not one little bit.

(Pause for dramatic thunder and lightning…)

My doctor is a raw foods vegan raised by vegetarians. He has never eaten bacon. Ever. He has no idea what it even tastes like. No bacon. Ever. None. No ham. No steaks. No fried chicken, hotdogs, or bologna. NO MEAT EVER. He says he experimented with goat cheese in college. What does that even mean…

He’s over six foot, fit as hell, and runs marathons. Bastard.

He. Has. Never. Had. BACON.

(Loud theatrical thunder!!!!!)

What? 

My blood pressure is high for someone my age. I need to lose weight.

He’s making me cut down on the fat. Reduce my salt intake. 

My arms and legs are sore from the exercise regimen I’m half-assing.

He’s forcing me to drink gallons of water and give up junk food.  He wants me to cut out red meat. 

But I love red meat…

So what happened last night was his fault. He caused this. His sadistic restrictions have driven me over the edge! I just couldn’t take it any more.

I woke up this morning with greasy fingers and a pile of bones, picked clean and white on a dirty plate next to the sink.

Beef shank bones cut about two inches thick. I got them from my butcher.  The guy behind me in line asked me if I was buying them for my dog.

On the way home I stopped and got a few crusty loaves of bread at the bakery.

When I got to the house I pulled some shallots from the basket and a bunch of parsley from the fridge. I minced them and toss them together with some lemon juice.

Fergus Henderson has a recipe for this salad in his offal filled bible; “The Whole Beast; Nose to Tail Eating”. He adds capers and some other ingredients that I don’t currently have in the pantry. So I made do. 

I mix together butter and garlic and rub each bone top to bottom and place them on a broiler plate. I sprinkle each one LIBERALLY with sea salt and put them in a four hundred degree oven to roast. 

I slice and toast the bread, wait 20 minutes and and pull the bones from the oven, arrange them on a plate and sit down to eat.

I take a picture with my phone and text it to my doctor.

Ha.

Now this is not for the faint of heart. basically you scoop out the marrow and spread it on the bread like butter. You top with a little of the salad and eat. The bright lemony salad is the perfect way to cut the deeply intense, gelatinous fat.

It’s like everything you love about beef… in a spread. 

(Pause for dramatic thunder…)

Gross right?

Its amazing.

Those of you who are judging me a disgusting, carnivorous ghoul need to take this into consideration…

The next time your siting at your local “Aussie-themed Eater-tainment steak house” slathering your bread with “home made” honey butter.  What your eating is bovine mammary secretions that were sucked out by machine, processed, and agitated until the solids separated from the liquids. The solids (fat) were then collected, molded, and chilled and shipped across the country where your friendly neighborhood franchise trained chef mixes it with a gallon of flower nectar that was collected (slurped up), digested, and regurgitated by thousands of insects.

Mmmmm… Honey butter.

17th September 2010

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The sky broke like an egg into full sunset and the water caught fire. ~Pamela Hansford Johnson

I woke up face down in the pile of clean laundry that I decided to sleep in rather then put away.

I drag myself from the clothes covered bed and wander to the bathroom rubbing the blood back into the engraved relief of a shirt button on my cheek. 

This is how I look when I wake up?

I brush my teeth and wash my face. My fingers still smell like the garlic and onions I chopped last night during my all night tomato sauce mission.

Late last night a favorite crush of mine reminded me that I hadn’t cooked for her in months. I obliged her. She loves my tomato sauce. 

I grimace as I walk to the sink and look at the mound of dishes. 

Sleeping on piles of laundry and neglecting the dishes. I’m becoming mildly undomesticated in my old age.

The TV is on for a little background noise. Adam Richman is about to eat a large amount of something. Giant pancakes or some kind of esophagus melting hot wings. I like the show, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes I feel like the restaurant owners just made up the “Sixty Pound Hamburger Covered in a Pound of Ghost Chilies Challenge” just to get him and his Travel Channel cameras into the restaurant.  Just before he takes the first bite you can almost see in his face a glimmer of mistrust in his host. The pangs of deeply pushed down “Why me?” in his eyes. A twinge of producer hatred in his TV smile. 

I hate washing dishes.

Halfway through the process my mind drifts to the tomato sauce in the fridge. It was real good. I’m going to feed her meatballs slow cooked in the sauce. Maybe I’ll stuff them with a tiny bit of the sharp provolone from the joint in the Italian Market in the city.

I need bread and the rest of the dishes can wait.

Walking down the mid-morning street in my town in the fall is strange. All the vacationers are gone and the population reduces by ninety percent. The locals are working. Kids are at school. Summer was over like yesterday. Winter is coming. There are giant crates of pumpkins at the produce market. Drugstores are selling rubber masks and tiny chocolate bars.

The rusty bell bangs into the glass door and I get a halfhearted smile from the girl behind the counter. She talks me into some crusty Italian bread and I talk myself into a couple of pistachio biscotti and out of a huge cannoli.

Walking back to my house against the breeze I can feel the loving warmth of the bread creeping through the brown paper bag. I’m getting hungry and it takes all I have not to rip a fist sized chunk from the nose of the bread and eat it while I walk.

At home again I open the windows to let the breeze push out the old, dusty summer air from the house. 

I fish out a pot from the dish sink and rinse and dry it. I walk to the fridge and ladle a few cups of the brick red sauce into the pot. With that heating up on the stove I slice some bread on the bias and turn on the broiler.

While things are heating up, I throw in a load of laundry and get to work on those dishes.  The sauce just come to a bubble as the last dish hits the rack by the sink.

The white clay pot I keep my garlic bulbs in has a huge crack in the base and almost slips from my hands and finishes itself off on the kitchen floor. I crush the bulb with the heel of my hand and dig around for a couple of chubby cloves. The paper skin gets peeled away and the naked cloves get set aside.

I toast the bread under the broiler, just till golden and rub each slice with garlic cloves scraping it into all the nooks and crannies. I drizzle a little olive oil across the top. 

I chop some basil and parsley, the last I think from this years garden, and mix it into the sauce. I dig some sausage leftovers from a day or two ago from the back of the fridge slice it long ways and run it under the broiler to heat up and caramelize. 

Earlier this week I got farm fresh eggs from a farmers market somewhere out towards Philly. Free range and from happy chickens they have a nice flavor, the whites are thick and clear and the yolks are a deep yellow. 

I crack two right into the hot tomato sauce and cover the pot.

I think I got the recipe from my mothers Batali cookbook last year. Uvoa in Puratory. I know made a version in school with cumin and coriander and smoked paprika over naan with goat cheese.

The eggs poach in the sauce and it’s tomatoey, acidy, sweetness will be amazing with the fatty yolk and the crusty bread.  The sausage and bread on the plate and I scoop out the each egg and lay it across the top. Top with basil and crumbled parmesan.

Sitting at my kitchen table drinking a half glass of a good friend’s father’s basement red wine and dragging the bread through the yolk and sauce I think about other ways this would be good. Nestled in a dish of polenta or leftover risotto. The salty sausage is amazing and it would kill my doctor if he knew I was eating it.

Really? Can a raw foods, vegan, marathon runner judge me? What would he know? 

I take the empty plate to the sink. I think it need to soak for a while.

I pull the laundry from the dryer and pop a chunk of biscotti into my mouth.

I should have gotten the cannoli.

8th September 2010

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“This could be the start of a beautiful love affair with the scallop.” ~ Eric Ripert

I’m sitting on my wood porch drinking a beer and reading a magazine. The warm summer sea breeze flicks at the loose pages.  This is my day off and this is what I want to do. I work really late nights and they’re starting to hurt just a little bit.

As the constant pervy peeping tom, I’m pretending to read while I listen to my new neighbor talk to her mother on the phone. I can’t understand a word she is saying. She’s french. You can tell shes talking to her mom. You can hear it in her voice. She’s telling mom she will be fine and she’s a big girl and its going to be fun,  Relax mom.

Next to me is my makeshift grill. The coals are glowing nicely under the well seasoned cast-iron pan. Last week I almost bought a nice new red Webber.

Nah. Not yet.

I glance at the pan on the coals. Its just starting to smoke. On the table next to me ten huge diver scallops sit inside a glass bowl on ice. They’re glossy and just off white. I drove forty minutes south to get them.

I love scallops. Well, in the right context.

Those freezer bagged scallops pre-coated in dense industrial breading served on a wilted lettuce leaf with a side of tarter sauce on a crab shaped dish will never pass these lips. Little bread flavored erasers. I can’t believe in this day and age people still order the freezer bag fried fish special. I’d rather eat the obligatory lemon wedge, speared with a clam fork or maybe even the wet nap.

Share a ceviche with me on the beach and I’ll marry you.

Maybe. 

I’m guessing her mother is telling her to eat well, wear clean underwear, and don’t kiss boys. Obviously I have no idea what moms tell daughters.  There is something about how the lips wrap around the french language. It sounds as if she is passionately kissing each word, each syllable. 

The scallops are plump and fresh. My fish guy swears they’re local caught. Its hard to tell around here. My local super market sells only “Previously Frozen” fish. 

Wow.

It’s three blocks from the ocean.

I can hear the break from the parking lot.

There is a fish store on the island, all the fish seems  to be “Previously Frozen”. The girl behind the counter swears the scallops are fresh. I’ve gotten stuff from there before. They don’t sell any fish whole and seem to make all their money selling platters to vacationers. More fried fish platters from freezer bags. 

Plus if your shopping after seven thirty your screwed because you will find  butcher paper covered fish cases and closed fish stores.

Apparently nighttime shoppers do not buy fish.  

I’m still listening to her voice drifting down from the deck above me and to the left. I glance over the top of the magazine. She’s sitting barefoot on the top of the steps leading up to her back deck in a white dress covered in faded blue flowers smoking a cigarette. The breeze is parting her curly auburn hair in the middle and blowing it around her face.

I put two pieces of thick cut bacon in the pan. Its screams and sizzles as it crisps and quickly starts to render its unctuous smokey fat. 

Butter and bacon fat.

I pick up the scallops and rub each one in a compound butter made of shallots, garlic and tarragon. 

I put the crispy bacon aside and poor off most of the fat into a metal bowl and set the pan aside. I squeeze lemon juice into the cooling fat and mix parsley, sea salt and pepper to make a vinaigrette. I toss baby arugula in the smokey vinaigrette and let it sit.

She stands and stretches, hand on her lower back, and tries to slow her mother’s lecture. She smiles and waves when she catches me looking up at her. Rolling her eyes and making the ” cut my throat” sign. Mothers must be the same everywhere. 

I smile back and place the scallops one by one into the pan. No overcrowding. As they start to cook I tilt the pan to gather the bacon fat and butter in a pool and spoon over the top of each lovely abductor muscle, cooking the top because I’m not going to turn them.

“Bye Bye Mommy.”  She says as she opens her door and goes back into her house.

Really?

Not “Au revoir.” or “Ciao”.

Thats disappointing.

I shake the excess dressing off the salad and make a neat pile on the plate. I crumble the bacon across the top and arrange the scallops randomly around the salad and drizzle the dressing over their tops. 

Cheese. 

I go inside for the wheel of blue cheese, Valdeón I think. My cheese guy forced it on me yesterday. I have some bread somewhere too. I hear someone pad across the deck.

I walk back out on the deck and see my new neighbor sitting at the plastic table and chair set on my porch, leafing thru the magazine I was reading.

I know I said 5:30. She’s early.

“Do you have glasses? I have wine.”

Tagged: winescallopsgrillingoutdoor eatingfirst datebeach

2nd September 2010

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“If you throw a lamb chop in the oven, what’s to keep it from getting done?” ~ Joan Crawford

“So your a butcher and you don’t carry lamb and you buy pre-ground meats?”

Really?

My heart sank as the kid behind the counter shrugged. He looked at me almost like he could hear the angry sarcasm building inside my head.  I felt strange inside as I glanced up at a tattered, sepia picture on the wall over his left shoulder. A picture of what I assume was his grandfather and his father feeding pieces of meat into a huge electric grinder. A machine of such manly power, no safety measures, no emergency stop, no auto-feed chute. A machine that if I looked through the door right behind this boy into the back meat cutting area, I might be able to see the corner of it gathering dust. 

I left.

I have been feeling this way a lot lately. I understand that we as a species don’t have the time we used to have. We all can’t raise, kill, and butcher our meat. Grow our own food.

But do we need all of this convenience? Do we need pre-made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in crust free white bread pouches?

Do we need the white styrofoam tray?

I hate that tray. For sooooo many reasons. 

When I was a kid my grandpop and grandmom had piles of old cooking tools, unused ancient, appliances and ’50s era kitchen time savers in their second kitchen in the basement. Yes they had a second kitchen in the basement. I know they had an old meat grinder, I saw it a hundred times, but I never saw it used.  It must have been a hold over from their parents. My dad still tells a story about going upstate to his grandmothers and watching her kill, clean, and butcher a chicken for dinner.

I googled meat grinder.

(I don’t recommend looking at the images section if you decide to do this.)

Google took me to Amazon.com and ordered a Weston # 1O grinder. Hand-cranked. it was cheap like 25 bucks. How hard could this be?

It came by Fed Ex in four days. It took way too long to put it together.

Now what to grind?

Lamb. For a bastardized version of a middle-eastern kabob.

I picked up some lamb shoulder from Whole Foods. (No tray, butcher’s paper.)

It looked like the right cut, it had enough fat. 

It took about 20 minutes to bone and cube the shoulder and take out the hard fat and the sinew. I mounted the Number 10 to the table and cranked as I fed it the lamb being sure to keep the fat ratio equal. 

It wasn’t too bad. I mean if I had to feed hundreds it would be a pain in the ass, but eleven dollars worth of lamb shoulder ground out to enough for four.  

It makes an wonderful horror movie crunching, whirring, squishy sound while it uses its screw fed dye and knife to extrude long skinny tendrils of neatly ground meat.  It takes about 15 minutes but I make short work of the lamb. Clean-up is kind of a lot, but it was no match for my “let it soak forever and finally wash it when the fruit flies gather” method.

I chop up some mint, rosemary, and oregano from the garden and throw in some garlic, toasted black cumin, and turmeric, salt and pepper. I mix it all with my fingers and feel that the texture is right. There’s no big chunks and the fat is distributed nicely.

I form out the skinny, football shaped patties and skewer them on rosemary branches. 

The coals in the grill are glowing orange as I chop an onion into thick pieces toss them in olive oil, wrap them in foil and put it directly on the coals to roast.

I lay the kabobs on the grill to cook and mix mint, parsley, and Harissa with yogurt that I made yesterday and had left over from breakfast for a sauce. 

When they’re done I set them aside and let them rest. I push off the wonderfully caramelized little pellets onto a plate of warm pita bread, add the onions and the sauce.

Oh and olives. I got them yesterday in a shop in a tiny town with a tinier Greek community.  

I should have made hummus. Next time.

Total time one and a half hours. 

Now I’m sitting on my porch an in the middle of the night re-reading Kesey’s ‘Sometimes a Great Notion” and listening to my iPod on random. In a few years I’m going to open this book again, and find old greasy fingerprints that smell of rosemary  and mint and remember the day I gave up on the white styrofoam tray filled with anonymous meat, forever.

24th August 2010

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“Life is like an onion: you peel off layer after layer and then you find there is nothing in it” ~ James Gibbons Huneker

Driving at dusk on a rainy, strangely cool night in August. 

Fall is coming. I can feel it. Smell it.

I’m not ready.

I’m on my way to visit someone I haven’t heard from in years. A woman with an amazing mind and deep brown eyes that held me enamored for a short but extraordinary time.

I’m going to make her dinner.

Pasta. Easy.

I’ll knock on her cracked varnished door which will bring back memories. She will welcome me into her house with a kiss on the cheek and a long hug. We will laugh about how much we both have changed or didn’t change.

On the passenger seat next to me is a brown paper shopping bag filled with things from my kitchen. Perciatelli pasta, onions, white anchovies, olive oil, garlic…

Cheese. Parmesan.

Two days ago I drove to a shop in the city to watch a seventy two year old man with wrinkled, yellowed fingers work for twenty or so minutes with two small, spade shaped knives split apart a whole wheel of parmesan. He started perforating the top, inch by inch. The outer skin cracked across the top as he worked slowly piercing the wheel, using the second spade to work and pry the crack bigger and bigger until the mammoth cheese split down the center releasing a smell that knocked me back twenty years to my mother’s kitchen. Five minutes later he split from one half a small half-pound wedge and wrapped it in paper and twine, just for me.

I’m going to have to stop on the way. I want to get some fennel and tomatoes for a salad and lemons. I used up all the lemons in my kitchen in a limoncello experiment last week. Whole Foods is just a mile up the road and four miles from where she lives in a brownstone with an old porch and fireplace in the living room. 

We’ll go to the kitchen, where I’m most comfortable. We’ll talk about what we do now, where we have been, what we have done, who we loved, or love. We will chat as I slice the onions and laugh about the time we walked around the zoo after it closed eating hot dogs and sharing a root beer.  She will give me a sauté pan from her pantry and turn just a little red as I joke about the price tag still on the handle.  I’ll cook the onions and garlic slowly in the dark green olive oil until they almost dissolve, until they “die” as my grandmom would say.

The pasta will be in the water as I watch her slice the fennel just a bit too thick for me. I’ll be scared she might cut her fingers. While she’s slicing,  I’ll chop up the tomatoes. At the supermarket I’ll look for heirlooms or yellow tomatoes.  Something with style for a real good impression.  I’ll juice the lemon for dressing with olive oil, cracked pepper, sea salt, and basil and zest the peel for the top of the pasta.

As the pasta drains and rests in the sink I’ll chop the anchovies and add them to the onions and stir until the small white filets break up and join the onions in their demise. 

The conversation will be light and personal. Way in the back of my mind I’ll try and remember what didn’t work, what wasn’t here.  Was there anything more? Something I might like or love?  There has to be more then great conversation and her fathomless eyes. The conversation will be more mature now  and her eyes will be even deeper, I think, who knows.

She will tell me a story about her mom’s pasta bowl with the big rustic eggplants painted on the side. It had matching pasta tongs but she lost them during a move right after college.  I’ll toss the pasta and the sauce together, sprinkle the top with the lemon zest, cracked black pepper and the cheese. 

God the cheese.

I can smell it through the brown paper as it sits on the passenger seat warmed by the heater thats just barely on.

We will sit on the floor in the living room maybe by the fire place. Shoes off, shoveling down the pasta, its salty, oniony, fishiness mixed with the crunchy, bright, fennel and tomato salad. Talking and laughing while drinking sweet white wine inappropriate for the meal but great for washing down the crusty bread dipped in the sauce. I will realize I forgot to get desert because thats what I always do. I’ll realize what isn’t here.

The meal and the talking and the laughing will die down and I’ll reach across the table to push her hair out of her face.  She will blush and look away as I pause my thumb at the corner of her mouth. 

I pull into the store parking lot. 

I really hope they have yellow tomatoes.