Things I Ate That I Love

Gather ‘round the table, we’ll give you … um. ...

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:31:16 -0500

Gather ‘round the table, we’ll give you … um. A beer?

Belly full

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:22:00 -0500

We made popcorn cookies on Cooking the Books on Saturday; this involved inadvertently and ill-advisedly ingesting a whole lot of popcorn. Gross. I dunno, popcorn has never really been my thing, but we had an unprecedented number of technical difficulties and also there was a lot of standing around and trying to be non-awkward with Anna Jane Grossman, who was understanding about the technical difficulties but still, it can’t have been fun for her to watch me and Val trying to be “professional” when it was clear that we both at one time or another wanted to storm off “set” in a huff, diva-style. The result was that I just kept reaching into the bowls of popcorn and stuffing it into my face out of displaced stupid anger. By the time we finished up, around four, neither Val nor I had eaten anything all day except coffee, jew-donuts, popcorn, and popcorn cookies. I felt like a child on Halloween, sickly-full but still hungry for Real Food.

We salved our wounds with a quick nap and a trip to Umi Nom for dinner. A few months after opening they are still BYO, which is awesome (though probably not for their bottom line). We ordered greens, sweet sausage, sauteed tofu, crispy wings with Anaheim chilis, and garlic rice. The portions have gotten slightly bigger since the last time I’d eaten there, which was great except it meant that we had ordered at least one too many dishes — there were five wings, a hefty pile of tofu, a heaping bowl of oil-slicked steamed baby bok choy, and a fair number of candied-spicy curls of Chinese sausage to get through. We made a valiant effort but ended up focusing a lot on the garlic rice. I have no idea how they make this stuff but it is so amazing, super-salty with a mellow, nutty, satisfying roasted garlic flavor.

So the food was great but almost better was the “Saturday night at the only really good restaurant in the neighborhood” ambiance. On one side of us a couple was on the worst date ever; the man was trying to impress the lady by bragging about his business and throwing around internet buzzwords like: “We are gonna get our blogs going, get up on Facebook …” When the waitress came to ask if they wanted dessert he responded quickly in the affirmative and I caught his date’s fleeting wince.

On the other side of us were two married couples on a double date; one of the ladies was pregnant and obviously I do my best not to eavesdrop but the one thing I did overhear was when the pregnant lady’s husband was talking about a fight they’d had and he said “Yeah, [baby’s name] definitely wasn’t conceived that night,” and it made me remember how embarrassed and grossed out I’d been by pregnancy as a child because I felt like pregnant ladies were essentially walking around wearing a t-shirt that said “Look, inside me are the results of a specific sex act!” I told Val this as we were walking back down Dekalb after dinner and she was like “Well it is gross because obviously, yeah, you had sex and now the sperm is still in you, getting bigger and bigger.” I love Val.

Level II cat yoga: supine twist

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:33:01 -0500

Level II cat yoga: supine twist

Val rolled the sufganiyot in sugar. These were harder to make...

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 10:33:03 -0500

Val rolled the sufganiyot in sugar. These were harder to make than I thought — deep frying sans deep fryer is hard, for one thing. The ones we’d thought were burned came out the best. Some of the paler ones were a little too raw inside. Joan Nathan’s supposedly child-friendly recipe is a little annoying; I’m not sure why she has the dough “rise” overnight in the fridge (it did not rise). Perhaps I will try another sufganiyot recipe before Hanukkah is over, not that these weren’t delicious. I mean, fried sugared dough, right?

Just ate four of these

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 10:28:01 -0500

Just ate four of these

By "celebrate Hanukkah"

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 09:28:32 -0500

I primarily meant “make sufganiyot.” And, okay, other fried things. Happy eight days of having sort of a quasi-religious or historical/cultural duty to fry things in oil!

Menorah update

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 18:17:29 -0500

I bought the menorah.

Salad rules YES: romaine, red-leaf, or butter lettuce simple...

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:09:39 -0500

Salad rules

YES:

romaine, red-leaf, or butter lettuce

simple homemade vinaigrette dressing

cucumbers

radishes

sliced hardboiled egg

mushrooms (in moderation)

oil-packed tuna

parmesan, feta, cheddar, goat or gruyere cheese

nuts (in moderation)

beets

cucumber

avocado

tomatoes in season

thinly sliced onion soaked in vinegar to remove bitterness

pepperoncini

arugula

watercress

baby spinach

crisp bacon or other bacon type things i.e. pancetta

snow peas

NO:

bottled dressing

prewashed mesclun mix

frisee

candied anything

fruit (except pears in extenuating circumstances)

gorgonzola or bleu cheese (controversial!)

ham

steamed vegetables

raw cruciferous vegetables

raw red or green bell pepper

big chunks of onion

peas

water-packed tuna

celery

mayonnaise

raisins/craisins

I saw this fetching menorah in the window of the Jonathan Adler...

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:12:36 -0500

I saw this fetching menorah in the window of the Jonathan Adler store on Atlantic the other day and had the thought that if somebody would give it to me (it costs $98) I would be a lot likelier to celebrate Hanukah.

I always order oxtails from Jamaican restaurants and...

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 10:52:04 -0500

I always order oxtails from Jamaican restaurants and they’re always freaking amazing — these little slices of the vertebrae at the base of the steer’s tail have a super-rich, deeply meaty flavor and a tender, buttery texture, and also eating them is fun in the same process-oriented way that eating anything with bones or a shell is fun — you get to feel you’ve earned the morsels via the effort you’ve expended at winkling them out of whatever they were in or on or attached to. (Some people hate this — like for example the judges on Top Chef, who are always complaining that something was “hard to eat.” What whiners!)

Anyway, I’d fantasized about cooking oxtails for years but I never had, because there is such a serious time commitment involved. Like, we’re talking all day starting in the (loosely-defined) morning of possibly the day before you want to serve them, if you want to chill the broth in order to remove the fat from the top. To get around the 2-dayness of the operation, I bought a fat seperator. Perhaps you are like me and you’re thinking, “But I love fat. It tastes so good! Why would I want to remove it?” If you could have seen what was left in this thing after I put the broth through it and then let it sit in the freezer for half an hour to solidify, you would not be asking that any longer. It was a scared-straight moment along the lines of when you go to the Baltimore Science Museum as a child and they show you what a pound of fat physically looks like. Even after the fat was removed, the stew still had an unctuous texture that coated the egg noodles we served it on like shiny meat varnish. “Like heavy cream,” Lukas described it.

I followed this recipe pretty much to the letter. Roasting the vegetables separately is a dynamite stew technique. I’ve started putting a dampened-then-wrung-out, bottom-side-oiled sheet of parchment paper over roasting vegetables for half the roasting time ever since I read this Jamie Oliver recipe for squash and I think it helps them roast more evenly and not get too dried out. The only other change I made was adding slightly more stock than called for, enough to cover the meat and vegetables entirely, and transferring the stew from the stovetop to a 350 oven for the final hour of cooking because I had to leave the house.

Oxtail stew!

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 14:32:50 -0500

Oxtail stew!

Oxtails.

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 14:30:11 -0500

Oxtails.

It is really kind of appalling how often this happens and also...

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:32:00 -0500

It is really kind of appalling how often this happens and also how often I don’t even really notice.

I am obviously at some far-off point in my life going to be the worst Mom ever. “In a minute, honey, Mommy just has to obsessively monitor her blog traffic! There’s some formula in the cupboard, maybe learn to fix it yourself?”

He ate my heart

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 17:10:07 -0500

I am just going to title things after Lady Gaga song lyrics all week, heh. Ok but so I wrote about cooking … on my blog? I know this is getting a bit ridiculous but for some reason this post seemed more like the jurisdiction of my blog.

“Like you’re angry at it!” (I took this...

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 08:21:27 -0500

“Like you’re angry at it!” (I took this literally and my first punch hit the bottom of the bowl)

Today my grandfather spent the afternoon teaching me how to bake...

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:05:05 -0500

Today my grandfather spent the afternoon teaching me how to bake his signature bread, which he bakes weekly. I think I’ll stop there because that sentence alone makes me feel sort of like how I felt when, while riding my bike down Myrtle Avenue with four pounds of swiss chard dangling from each of my bike’s handlebars, I caught myself absently humming “The State I Am In.” Anyway, I am bringing a loaf home tomorrow so please get in touch if you would like to help me eat it before it goes stale, it really is the best bread in the world.

Three apple pies (two cardamom, one streusel crust), one pumpkin...

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 21:45:36 -0500

Three apple pies (two cardamom, one streusel crust), one pumpkin pie, one Kahlua-chocolate pecan pie, one normal pecan pie, one carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, pumpkin and chocolate-mint-chip cookies, boston creme pie, fruit tart, chocolate cake. If I’m forgetting anything it’s probably because megadoses of sugar kill brain cells.

The noodle and the damage done

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:46:19 -0500

We are still feeling the last aftershocks of the Cooking the Books episode. Last night I used the excuse of not wasting the few long-lived sage leaves left in the package to cook some premade gnocchi with the same browned butter and sage sauce that went on the malfatti. I also made a shrimp and broccoli stir-fry with some geriatric broccoli from the last CSA delivery of the summer share. Either one of these dishes would have been an acceptable dinner if I was just cooking for myself but having an audience makes me feel pressure to have a “main dish” and a “side dish.” Sometimes I think that instead of photos of a pizza slice wrapped around a bacon cheesburger stuffed with the creme from five oreos, the This Is Why You’re Fat tumblr should replace all its content with just the words “Because You Are In A Relationship.”

Also Amy blogged about being on the show at HER BLOG, which exists. It is hilarious. It’s true that I did make her take off her shoes, and also that I did tell her what my advance was. (She was like “I heard you got a million dollars for your book” and I was like “Uh hello look at this apartment, where I live, do you think that could possibly be true? That was just a rumor that the Internet started so that they could later debunk it like ‘actually she got [way, way less than a million dollars], what a failure,’” and Amy was like “Oh that makes sense.” Clever!)

The next episode of CtB will feature Anna Jane Grossman. Anna Jane is the author of OBSOLETE, which is a funny book with lots of useful information about typewriters, landlines, and other things our children will never believe existed, when we describe these things to them. Then as evidence we’ll hold up this book, OBSOLETE, and they’ll be like “What’s that?” and we’ll be like “It’s called a book” and they’ll be like “Weird.”

SPOILER ALERT: We are going to cook something obsolete, obviously.

Yakisoba, a Japanese “fast food” dish of fried...

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:20:00 -0500

Yakisoba, a Japanese “fast food” dish of fried noodles, pork, cabbage, onions, carrots and green peppers topped with scallions and pink pickled ginger, is one of my favorite things to eat — it’s my go-to restaurant meal when I’m alone and I want to treat myself well, but don’t want to spend a million dollars. Last night I tried to recreate it with mixed results. Basically it was a fail in terms of yakisoba versimilitude but a success in terms of tasting good. I had already done a specific shopping excursion to get the pork (to THE MEAT HOOK aka meat paradise. They gave me a free sausage. It was so good. They have a TUMBLR for god’s sake!), so I lacked the energy to trek to an Asian market to buy yakisoba sauce. Instead, I scoured the internet and concluded that some combination of soy, mirin, and oyster sauce would have to stand in.

The ad hoc sauce worked okay, but lacked the specific super-salty almost-dashi-ish richness of real yakisoba juice. Owning a jar of pickled ginger is a thrill, though. I am excited to put it on lots of random things.

Anyway I am going to revisit yakisoba obsessively until I nail it, and then I will post the internet’s only definitive English-language yakisoba recipe, so STAY TUNED. Also please email me if you are Japanese/have suggestions.

Cooking the Books with Amy Sohn, produced by the genius Val...

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:57:00 -0500

Cooking the Books with Amy Sohn, produced by the genius Val Temple. Oh my god, we had a good time making this. Hot dish: we learned that Amy is writing an as-yet-untitled sequel to Prospect Park West (I like “Union Street”), that kids at Amy’s toddler daughter’s school are not allowed to bring peanut butter and jelly in their lunches (peanut allergies), that postnatal yoga class can be somewhat “bullshit,” and that if a man doesn’t buy you a bag of frozen peas after you walk into a glass door, he is not worth marrying. Amazing. Authors who wish to appear on future episodes should email emilymagazine AT gmail.