How many people does it take to reach Anthony Bourdain?
One, if you're me and you know how to find him.
How many people does it take to reach America's writers? To be exact, the specific subset of writers that attended Vassar College?
I don't know. That's where you folk come in.
(FYI, Bourdain attended but did not graduate)
Currently, due to budget cuts, the creative writing program at Vassar is facing severe budget cuts. If passed they threaten to undermine the integrity of the creative writing program.
To follow the fight against these cuts and find out how you can help visit SAVE Creative Writing
Showing posts with label poughkeepsie my love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poughkeepsie my love. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Thursday, January 10, 2008
happiness is a warm...
what if someone could give you everything you ever wanted?
or, better yet, what if you could create it together?
Make all of those things you talked about when you were wee Vassar students be more than great and wonderful and crazy dreams(things that later click into odd sorts of sense as scientists become farmers become stagiares and writers become cooks)? One day is what we always said...we shall see what we shall see but somehow we keep pushing and growing closer together toward something. tangible becomes intagible. i'm betwixt and between. meet me here, at the borders?
Just got off the phone with my favorite person in Po-town. Who may come visit me here in the next couple months, oh I hope, because she would adore the FPFM and everything else.
or, better yet, what if you could create it together?
Make all of those things you talked about when you were wee Vassar students be more than great and wonderful and crazy dreams(things that later click into odd sorts of sense as scientists become farmers become stagiares and writers become cooks)? One day is what we always said...we shall see what we shall see but somehow we keep pushing and growing closer together toward something. tangible becomes intagible. i'm betwixt and between. meet me here, at the borders?
Just got off the phone with my favorite person in Po-town. Who may come visit me here in the next couple months, oh I hope, because she would adore the FPFM and everything else.
Sunday, December 02, 2007
whiteness, the elephant in the room
How do we read culture? How do we read across cultures? I've stepped up to the plate this month in my editorial duties for Fringe, and as we are preparing for an Ethnos themed issue, our inbox is full of submissions concerning the other. That which is not us. And our us-ness, of course, is a presumed whiteness.
I do on occasionally call people racist.
I do sometimes call people out on their assumptions about race, classifications and bias. A couple of years ago I found myself at the trans-forming feminism conference at SUNY New Paltz getting very angry at the things the panel was saying. I knew many of the panel members because they lived with my farmer.
They were a progressive lot of vegans, vegetarians, activists, artists and though most of them were straight or bi they were active in the intersection of feminism and queer culture. When I first visit their house, one street removed from Main Street Poughkeepsie, a ghost town of blacks and West Indian immigrants, I remarked to my friend that I bet her housemates got a kick out of living so close to the black part of town, and about a year later she told me it was true.
(These people, who had offered me such hospitality and who lived with my friend, ethnically Filipino, were angry and upset about the prevalence of white leadership in the queer community and they were saying that they'd tried to get non-white panelists and leadership, but no one came forward, and if the issue arose next year and still went unresolved they might not continue being active in the conference, or some such thing. I grew very angry in turn that they would assume that their white audience lived in the same white world, and called them on it. Do You Hang Out With White People, Mostly? I asked them. Do You Assume The Rest Of Us Do, Too? I told them how offended I was, because some of my best friends and ex lovers were not white, because I had real relationships with people across those demarcations, and because of my white skin color they were assuming otherwise about me, about all of us. It was real fun.)
Ethnos. def: (1)an ethnic group. (2) people of the same race or nationality who share a distinctive culture
The submissions for the Ethnos issue span a range of ethnic and racial identities and situation. Some are better than others, of course. What makes me feel uneasy is a certain intensity I feel in the reading process concerning what "counts" as Ethnos or whose story is telling us "something new." One of the editors remarked how exciting it was to be receiving so many submissions that were different from us.
Tell us something new. Yes, that is a story. But when you solicit what is different from you for entertainment, when you rank it on its newness and its degree of otherness from what you see yourself as, you skirt a dangerous line. Do you like that piece because it's well written and the dialogue is snappy? Or do you like it because it's about people whose skin is a certain color, people who live in poverty you will never know even if you can't pay your student loan bills, people whose life experiences you feel do not mirror your own?
My attitudes and feelings toward race are one of the many things I have to thank Vassar for. I grew up in an all-white suburb of Boston where "inner city" kids were bussed to our public schools from failing, crumbly Boston schools. As a graduate student many years later I worked in one of those schools {in South Boston, where the Irish population met the integration buses with rocks, and whose entrenched population of lower class Irish-Americans are being met by an influx of Vietnamese immigrants and wealthy white gentrification}. I consider myself fortunate to have gone to college in a town that had so many interesting ethnic enclaves, and to have befriended people who are not "like" me in those ways. I think I feel some of the same dis-identification and dis-orientation they feel with mainstream white American culture. That's not my life and my choices and my experience reflected on your television. And it's fine, really, except I disengage from a lot of media and want my stories and writing and reading material to be about More than a lot of stories tend to address.
I don't think we have the power to say what is new or different with such a qualitative voice. What's new to me may not be new to you. I don't want a scale ranking whose authentic experience bests whose, whose imagined conflict between whiteness and nonwhiteness covers more new territory. As an editor it's a rough decision because I have to pick and choose. I could stand up as I did in that conference room and tell them that our whiteness is not a uniform blanket and if they desire more or different cultural experiences, to go out into the world and make more friends. Why should we get to decide whose voice is hot or new or most compelling?
Are we even a "we"?
Who gets to write whose experiences? Who gets to control? When we choose to read or write these kinds of difficult stories what are we saying?
I came to the kitchen from the academy and sometimes I feel like I need to go back, back out of the real world and into the bookishness. I've been feeling that pull a lot lately. I could be reading obscure essays and writing critical studies of current queer and trans fiction, the L word, what have you. I could be teaching a room full of eighteen year olds obtuse theories. But that room and that life became a promise of someday and when-I'm-published-and-esteemed and I came down from that world and fell into kitchens. And you can't stay in kitchens unless you are Doing and Doing and Thinking get all up in each other's way. I'm all up in my head these days and I'm not sure why or how to come back down. Things are best at home when I'm baking, and when the thing is in the oven and I can come back to the computer and work with words. Maybe because those spaces are fluid and there is no need to move awkwardly among roles, I'm doing and then I'm writing, and when I'm stuck over a scene or sentence there is the timer to distract me. How to move in and out of worlds, how to cross boundaries and borders, how to slip past guards and guardedness, how to occupy illicit spaces, do I always have to be so queer?
Bring me back down, Out of the cloudedness. Give me a persimmon, a yuzu, tell me it'll be okay.
I do on occasionally call people racist.
I do sometimes call people out on their assumptions about race, classifications and bias. A couple of years ago I found myself at the trans-forming feminism conference at SUNY New Paltz getting very angry at the things the panel was saying. I knew many of the panel members because they lived with my farmer.
They were a progressive lot of vegans, vegetarians, activists, artists and though most of them were straight or bi they were active in the intersection of feminism and queer culture. When I first visit their house, one street removed from Main Street Poughkeepsie, a ghost town of blacks and West Indian immigrants, I remarked to my friend that I bet her housemates got a kick out of living so close to the black part of town, and about a year later she told me it was true.
(These people, who had offered me such hospitality and who lived with my friend, ethnically Filipino, were angry and upset about the prevalence of white leadership in the queer community and they were saying that they'd tried to get non-white panelists and leadership, but no one came forward, and if the issue arose next year and still went unresolved they might not continue being active in the conference, or some such thing. I grew very angry in turn that they would assume that their white audience lived in the same white world, and called them on it. Do You Hang Out With White People, Mostly? I asked them. Do You Assume The Rest Of Us Do, Too? I told them how offended I was, because some of my best friends and ex lovers were not white, because I had real relationships with people across those demarcations, and because of my white skin color they were assuming otherwise about me, about all of us. It was real fun.)
Ethnos. def: (1)an ethnic group. (2) people of the same race or nationality who share a distinctive culture
The submissions for the Ethnos issue span a range of ethnic and racial identities and situation. Some are better than others, of course. What makes me feel uneasy is a certain intensity I feel in the reading process concerning what "counts" as Ethnos or whose story is telling us "something new." One of the editors remarked how exciting it was to be receiving so many submissions that were different from us.
Tell us something new. Yes, that is a story. But when you solicit what is different from you for entertainment, when you rank it on its newness and its degree of otherness from what you see yourself as, you skirt a dangerous line. Do you like that piece because it's well written and the dialogue is snappy? Or do you like it because it's about people whose skin is a certain color, people who live in poverty you will never know even if you can't pay your student loan bills, people whose life experiences you feel do not mirror your own?
My attitudes and feelings toward race are one of the many things I have to thank Vassar for. I grew up in an all-white suburb of Boston where "inner city" kids were bussed to our public schools from failing, crumbly Boston schools. As a graduate student many years later I worked in one of those schools {in South Boston, where the Irish population met the integration buses with rocks, and whose entrenched population of lower class Irish-Americans are being met by an influx of Vietnamese immigrants and wealthy white gentrification}. I consider myself fortunate to have gone to college in a town that had so many interesting ethnic enclaves, and to have befriended people who are not "like" me in those ways. I think I feel some of the same dis-identification and dis-orientation they feel with mainstream white American culture. That's not my life and my choices and my experience reflected on your television. And it's fine, really, except I disengage from a lot of media and want my stories and writing and reading material to be about More than a lot of stories tend to address.
I don't think we have the power to say what is new or different with such a qualitative voice. What's new to me may not be new to you. I don't want a scale ranking whose authentic experience bests whose, whose imagined conflict between whiteness and nonwhiteness covers more new territory. As an editor it's a rough decision because I have to pick and choose. I could stand up as I did in that conference room and tell them that our whiteness is not a uniform blanket and if they desire more or different cultural experiences, to go out into the world and make more friends. Why should we get to decide whose voice is hot or new or most compelling?
Are we even a "we"?
Who gets to write whose experiences? Who gets to control? When we choose to read or write these kinds of difficult stories what are we saying?
I came to the kitchen from the academy and sometimes I feel like I need to go back, back out of the real world and into the bookishness. I've been feeling that pull a lot lately. I could be reading obscure essays and writing critical studies of current queer and trans fiction, the L word, what have you. I could be teaching a room full of eighteen year olds obtuse theories. But that room and that life became a promise of someday and when-I'm-published-and-esteemed and I came down from that world and fell into kitchens. And you can't stay in kitchens unless you are Doing and Doing and Thinking get all up in each other's way. I'm all up in my head these days and I'm not sure why or how to come back down. Things are best at home when I'm baking, and when the thing is in the oven and I can come back to the computer and work with words. Maybe because those spaces are fluid and there is no need to move awkwardly among roles, I'm doing and then I'm writing, and when I'm stuck over a scene or sentence there is the timer to distract me. How to move in and out of worlds, how to cross boundaries and borders, how to slip past guards and guardedness, how to occupy illicit spaces, do I always have to be so queer?
Bring me back down, Out of the cloudedness. Give me a persimmon, a yuzu, tell me it'll be okay.
Friday, November 23, 2007
cozy, warm
knitting lots
(winding loops around and around, creation and its opposite)
black yarn creates invisible spaces, darknesses
leftovers, and cozy semolina pudding recreated from yesterday to snuggle up to.
writing again for the first time in...weeks? remembering this is who i am. this is what i do. this fulfills something in me that is necessary.
sleep, dog, flirting through the thin wires of the telephone, having conversations that evoke conversations of years ago, curling up with a pile of dogs against the heater, remembering spaces east.
the clear blue lake, aqua tint a freakishly blue green, serene surface broken occasionally though almost never by--what--scuba divers?!?, and in the summer a trail that winds around through love's first blush (rosy like a quince you know) and in the fall through dangerous entanglements, the leaves, posturing for closeness with people you will grow closer to, secrets revealed, sometimes most evocatively though a pile of snow shards ice in winter, in the last months of a friendship that has something of love in it, and if the roads are not too icy we know someplace to go, down by the jazz barn and the railroad bridge. i see that lake in my mind, those cliffs i always intended to climb. a backdrop for everyday in a season of labor. i tell myself i shall not leave those things here, untouched. the gunks. i dream of them lately. and a winter spent spinning wool with tired, aged hands on twentysomething girls, in stilted tiny houses in potown. beautiful straight girls who smoke imported cigarettes and run for the train, run down to the bronx, though more to forty fifth where dressed like russian molls they wait until you pick them up make illegal left turns and wind your way slowly down through the city over the red bridge (you look for the sugar factory) and into brooklyn.
this to say, there are other places on my mind and sometimes it hurts. this to say, will i always be trying to get back there?
but thanksgiving. four desserts and four bottles of wine for four people. we hovered around the kitchen some but not too much, giving instructions for choux. the scrabble game of lore took place. i've got pictures of the stress, the food, the ridiculousness.
if you want to know the breakdown of how the week went, it was like this:
monday 7-12 work on pies, 2-830? restaurant work
tuesday 10-3, work on pies, 3-11 restaurant work, 11-4a work on pies.
wednesday 3-9 restaurant work.
this all entailed working three services, cleaning/inventorying/prepping, preparing batter for 50-60 pies, baking 90+ pies, baking shells, boxing pies, checking orders, being the dishwasher.
and holy hell, a week with two days off!
tomorrow is another 18 hour day.
i hope to finish my new scarf if not tonight very soon. it will have pockets, all the better for persimmon stealing!
(winding loops around and around, creation and its opposite)
black yarn creates invisible spaces, darknesses
leftovers, and cozy semolina pudding recreated from yesterday to snuggle up to.
writing again for the first time in...weeks? remembering this is who i am. this is what i do. this fulfills something in me that is necessary.
sleep, dog, flirting through the thin wires of the telephone, having conversations that evoke conversations of years ago, curling up with a pile of dogs against the heater, remembering spaces east.
the clear blue lake, aqua tint a freakishly blue green, serene surface broken occasionally though almost never by--what--scuba divers?!?, and in the summer a trail that winds around through love's first blush (rosy like a quince you know) and in the fall through dangerous entanglements, the leaves, posturing for closeness with people you will grow closer to, secrets revealed, sometimes most evocatively though a pile of snow shards ice in winter, in the last months of a friendship that has something of love in it, and if the roads are not too icy we know someplace to go, down by the jazz barn and the railroad bridge. i see that lake in my mind, those cliffs i always intended to climb. a backdrop for everyday in a season of labor. i tell myself i shall not leave those things here, untouched. the gunks. i dream of them lately. and a winter spent spinning wool with tired, aged hands on twentysomething girls, in stilted tiny houses in potown. beautiful straight girls who smoke imported cigarettes and run for the train, run down to the bronx, though more to forty fifth where dressed like russian molls they wait until you pick them up make illegal left turns and wind your way slowly down through the city over the red bridge (you look for the sugar factory) and into brooklyn.
this to say, there are other places on my mind and sometimes it hurts. this to say, will i always be trying to get back there?
but thanksgiving. four desserts and four bottles of wine for four people. we hovered around the kitchen some but not too much, giving instructions for choux. the scrabble game of lore took place. i've got pictures of the stress, the food, the ridiculousness.
if you want to know the breakdown of how the week went, it was like this:
monday 7-12 work on pies, 2-830? restaurant work
tuesday 10-3, work on pies, 3-11 restaurant work, 11-4a work on pies.
wednesday 3-9 restaurant work.
this all entailed working three services, cleaning/inventorying/prepping, preparing batter for 50-60 pies, baking 90+ pies, baking shells, boxing pies, checking orders, being the dishwasher.
and holy hell, a week with two days off!
tomorrow is another 18 hour day.
i hope to finish my new scarf if not tonight very soon. it will have pockets, all the better for persimmon stealing!
Monday, October 15, 2007
eating locally, in nyc
if you live in New York City or state--or have friends, lovers, colleagues, etc, who do--perhaps you can help me help a friend of mine currently getting her Masters in New Media Journalism. She runs the Fringe blog and is super new to NYC living, and is doing her thesis project on eating locally in New York. I've put her query out to friends and colleagues and now I'm putting it out here.
Lizzie says:
Basically, we're focusing on how to get local food in NYC and may be traveling to upstate (or elsewhere in the tri-state area) to see some of the farms that supply it, as well as looking at people who farm in the city. However, it'd be fabulous if you could put me in contact with some upstate locavores/farmers...
I've clued her in to writers who are local food activists and serious food writers. I've set her on to chow, the nyc eat local people, the current issue of Gourmet and the New Yorker food issue, and I should tell her about the edible publications and Hudson Valley Table. But any other suggestions are appreciated.
The Hudson Valley...it's experiencing a food renaissance. It's got foamed cuisine now.
Is it because the Zagat children went to Vassar or because locally sourced food got trendy or the population of NYC-living second home folks reached a critical mass? I should be happy for it, right? The density of seriously cute towns up there is exploding. When I worked on the farm sometimes Robert DeNiro's helicopter would fly overhead. He owned a place in that town.
But the more the Hudson Valley becomes a plaything for New York City, the more it is never going to be affordable for people like me. Meanwhile the river's still dirty, Potown itself is...meh, I love it but I'm crazy, and the economy of the towns next to those cute towns sprinkled throughout Ulster County is still depressed.
Lizzie says:
Basically, we're focusing on how to get local food in NYC and may be traveling to upstate (or elsewhere in the tri-state area) to see some of the farms that supply it, as well as looking at people who farm in the city. However, it'd be fabulous if you could put me in contact with some upstate locavores/farmers...
I've clued her in to writers who are local food activists and serious food writers. I've set her on to chow, the nyc eat local people, the current issue of Gourmet and the New Yorker food issue, and I should tell her about the edible publications and Hudson Valley Table. But any other suggestions are appreciated.
The Hudson Valley...it's experiencing a food renaissance. It's got foamed cuisine now.
Is it because the Zagat children went to Vassar or because locally sourced food got trendy or the population of NYC-living second home folks reached a critical mass? I should be happy for it, right? The density of seriously cute towns up there is exploding. When I worked on the farm sometimes Robert DeNiro's helicopter would fly overhead. He owned a place in that town.
But the more the Hudson Valley becomes a plaything for New York City, the more it is never going to be affordable for people like me. Meanwhile the river's still dirty, Potown itself is...meh, I love it but I'm crazy, and the economy of the towns next to those cute towns sprinkled throughout Ulster County is still depressed.
Thursday, October 04, 2007
new york, day two
Thank you to all New Yorkers and ex-New Yorkers for your wonderful suggestions.
So I said the pretzel croissant was all right. I forgot to mention the part where on day two I woke up and I had a breakfast destintion all planned out but really...I just kinda wanted another pretzel croissant. It's like how I felt about zaatar the morning after. Sometimes things just take a day to be brilliant to you. I *almost* bought another more than once that day...but I ended up with something even more instructionally interesting.
From the beginning, however: I woke up in my friend's dorm room at a too-early hour and due to my not having coffee hopped on a Brooklyn bound train. Figured out somewhere around Schermerhorn Street things were not quite right. My farmer was waiting for me, all dolled up in a pretty dress, by the time I got to West 4th, and we got the last available table in Patisserie Claude. Croissant for me, roll of cake for my friend. My croissant is buttery and flaky, and the coffee is good although I am initially skeptical, and we sit in the too-hot bakery amidst the other people who have no work obligations, maybe because it is Rosh Hashanah and the whole city seems to be free, and we tell each other the big news. I haven't seen her since February. She's one of those people I love so fiercely that we can't stop hugging, we find little excuses to touch one another, and as we walk down Christopher Street afterward I stop and take her hands in mind. I Have To Tell You Something. I tell her all about how I Love New York Again.
We both know what this means, and we get there, as I take a look at my notebook full of pastry suggestions and decide that if we walk down Spring Street we will hit three of my selections. The Hudson Valley House, one day...in whatever town I can afford. I've been making calculations based upon this house for years now. Maybe I'll Be Bi-Coastal, I say, a sigh, San Francisco a kink in all my well laid plans. But not even San Francisco can take that upstate house from me. It's in my blood, or something {and I do have relatives buried in the cemetery in Wappingers Falls}.
On the bakery tour, I fall in love with Balthazar, which is so adorably European and otherwordly, but we're too stuffed from breakfast so instead we muscle past the hostess and stare at the pastries and I decide to save it for next time. Just a little further down the street is button-cute Ceci Cela, with the most luscious looking glazed puff pastry and pear tartlets I have seen Ever. Jewelboxes glinting in the sun. But I'm still too full for something so large, so settle for a financier, which is smaller in size. Almondy and brown buttery and fine, but as we walk around the corner arguing about which way is uptown I'm longing for the puff pastry.
My farmer demands real food and she kind of wants French, so when we stumble upon Cafe Gitane it's great. I'm wearing my Harlem shirt and when the cute server comments I mumble about how I used to live in Brooklyn. My farmer orders a lentil-cranberry-walnut and smoked trout salad, which she succeeds in making me try. And like, despite my mistrust of cold foods and suspicion of smoked fish. Seriously good. I was more than happy with my cucumber mint yogurt salad dusted with rose petals, topped with a mound of hummus and perfectly toasted warm pita points that were faint echoes of Aziza's wonderfulness. I *did* kind of want a lil sumac on my salad, and a dash more rose, but it seemed outside the lit of reasonable requests.
Sometimes you can sit in silence with people and it's better than talking. Sometimes it's okay that someone is three thousand miles from you because they love what they're doing and they worked so hard to get there, and since you love them you know it's for the best, even if your heart is jealous.
After lunch we walk to one more bakery, the Build A Green Bakery/Birdhouse endeavor. I almost buy another pretzel croissant, which, it's worth noting, is fifty cents cheaper at the 1st Ave./13th St. Green outpost than the actual City Bakery. I also almost buy a giant cookie, but instead go for the miso plum cake and stash it in my bag for the long bus ride home. My farmer catches a cab uptown and we try to say goodbye. Too many hugs. Kisses. Promises. I shuffle off to my old place of employment to use the Zagat guide and get directions.
I walked up to Kalustyan's and almost bought so many things. Reminisced about my friends' old Murray Hill apartment and nights spent wanting so many things. I'd walked so far that I was trying to remember the quickest way back to a subway without walking the ten or so more blocks uptown to Grand Central but couldn't recall and ended up in Herald Square catching the F to Canal, where it was just two exactly and I was going to have to wait an hour for the bus.
But at Canal you can catch the JMZ, and if you go one or two stops you're back on the Lower East Side which is not all that far from Doughnut Plant and though I've already got a pastry in my bag for the bus I think some sugar and caffeine will get me out of the so-tired-I'm-going-to-pass-out and back into happy. Doughnut Plant is smaller than I expected, at least the retail side. I inspect the doughnuts and ask the man: peach or blueberry jelly? There's a note that explains they've started making their own jams and jellies. Blueberry, he says, then grabs a fresh rack from the back room and turns out he's been a baker, too, so we discuss the life. Kitchens. I take a bunch of photos and leave, tearing into my doughnut on the walk toward Chinatown. Square doughnut. Blueberry Jelly. Vanilla Bean Glaze. I'm not expecting the way the glaze flakes apart onto my hands as I eat. I've never actually *liked* a jelly doughnut before, certainly not the Dunkies version, but the blueberry jelly is wonderful and falling all over my hands. I've got no napkin so I'm licking it up and continuing to eat and stumbling closer to Chinatown. I'm revived. I'm in love again. I can't wait to come back.
Lest you forget I still had the miso plum cake to eat. If there had been more plums...mountains of plums! As it was, the cake alone was kind of crumbly-dry and hard to eat, but when eaten with the juicy plums it was heaven. I sort of resisted eating it for a few hours because I had that doughnut aftertaste in my mouth and didn't want to ruin it. But the cake was so intriguing, and the whole time I kept eating it I couldn't stop thinking about my upside down cake dilemma. What else was the miso cake but another form of that (well, I'm sure it wasn't baked upside down, but what is the seed behind the idea? what shape does the form take?)? I didn't have to make something I didn't like. Even if it was Chez Panisse. Even if it always sold well.
After all that, I went home and ate BBQ and was then convinced into going for ice cream to JP Licks. I got my favorite choice from there: oatmeal cookie yogurt with caramel sauce. But I also asked to try a new flavor: noodle kugel. It was amazing. I'm going to have to figure out how they did it from the tiny tasting spoon bite I had. Milky, cinnamony, tiny shards of noodles.
What's Kugel? my friends all asked.
It's A Jewish Food...I said.
So I said the pretzel croissant was all right. I forgot to mention the part where on day two I woke up and I had a breakfast destintion all planned out but really...I just kinda wanted another pretzel croissant. It's like how I felt about zaatar the morning after. Sometimes things just take a day to be brilliant to you. I *almost* bought another more than once that day...but I ended up with something even more instructionally interesting.
From the beginning, however: I woke up in my friend's dorm room at a too-early hour and due to my not having coffee hopped on a Brooklyn bound train. Figured out somewhere around Schermerhorn Street things were not quite right. My farmer was waiting for me, all dolled up in a pretty dress, by the time I got to West 4th, and we got the last available table in Patisserie Claude. Croissant for me, roll of cake for my friend. My croissant is buttery and flaky, and the coffee is good although I am initially skeptical, and we sit in the too-hot bakery amidst the other people who have no work obligations, maybe because it is Rosh Hashanah and the whole city seems to be free, and we tell each other the big news. I haven't seen her since February. She's one of those people I love so fiercely that we can't stop hugging, we find little excuses to touch one another, and as we walk down Christopher Street afterward I stop and take her hands in mind. I Have To Tell You Something. I tell her all about how I Love New York Again.
We both know what this means, and we get there, as I take a look at my notebook full of pastry suggestions and decide that if we walk down Spring Street we will hit three of my selections. The Hudson Valley House, one day...in whatever town I can afford. I've been making calculations based upon this house for years now. Maybe I'll Be Bi-Coastal, I say, a sigh, San Francisco a kink in all my well laid plans. But not even San Francisco can take that upstate house from me. It's in my blood, or something {and I do have relatives buried in the cemetery in Wappingers Falls}.
On the bakery tour, I fall in love with Balthazar, which is so adorably European and otherwordly, but we're too stuffed from breakfast so instead we muscle past the hostess and stare at the pastries and I decide to save it for next time. Just a little further down the street is button-cute Ceci Cela, with the most luscious looking glazed puff pastry and pear tartlets I have seen Ever. Jewelboxes glinting in the sun. But I'm still too full for something so large, so settle for a financier, which is smaller in size. Almondy and brown buttery and fine, but as we walk around the corner arguing about which way is uptown I'm longing for the puff pastry.
My farmer demands real food and she kind of wants French, so when we stumble upon Cafe Gitane it's great. I'm wearing my Harlem shirt and when the cute server comments I mumble about how I used to live in Brooklyn. My farmer orders a lentil-cranberry-walnut and smoked trout salad, which she succeeds in making me try. And like, despite my mistrust of cold foods and suspicion of smoked fish. Seriously good. I was more than happy with my cucumber mint yogurt salad dusted with rose petals, topped with a mound of hummus and perfectly toasted warm pita points that were faint echoes of Aziza's wonderfulness. I *did* kind of want a lil sumac on my salad, and a dash more rose, but it seemed outside the lit of reasonable requests.
Sometimes you can sit in silence with people and it's better than talking. Sometimes it's okay that someone is three thousand miles from you because they love what they're doing and they worked so hard to get there, and since you love them you know it's for the best, even if your heart is jealous.
After lunch we walk to one more bakery, the Build A Green Bakery/Birdhouse endeavor. I almost buy another pretzel croissant, which, it's worth noting, is fifty cents cheaper at the 1st Ave./13th St. Green outpost than the actual City Bakery. I also almost buy a giant cookie, but instead go for the miso plum cake and stash it in my bag for the long bus ride home. My farmer catches a cab uptown and we try to say goodbye. Too many hugs. Kisses. Promises. I shuffle off to my old place of employment to use the Zagat guide and get directions.
I walked up to Kalustyan's and almost bought so many things. Reminisced about my friends' old Murray Hill apartment and nights spent wanting so many things. I'd walked so far that I was trying to remember the quickest way back to a subway without walking the ten or so more blocks uptown to Grand Central but couldn't recall and ended up in Herald Square catching the F to Canal, where it was just two exactly and I was going to have to wait an hour for the bus.
But at Canal you can catch the JMZ, and if you go one or two stops you're back on the Lower East Side which is not all that far from Doughnut Plant and though I've already got a pastry in my bag for the bus I think some sugar and caffeine will get me out of the so-tired-I'm-going-to-pass-out and back into happy. Doughnut Plant is smaller than I expected, at least the retail side. I inspect the doughnuts and ask the man: peach or blueberry jelly? There's a note that explains they've started making their own jams and jellies. Blueberry, he says, then grabs a fresh rack from the back room and turns out he's been a baker, too, so we discuss the life. Kitchens. I take a bunch of photos and leave, tearing into my doughnut on the walk toward Chinatown. Square doughnut. Blueberry Jelly. Vanilla Bean Glaze. I'm not expecting the way the glaze flakes apart onto my hands as I eat. I've never actually *liked* a jelly doughnut before, certainly not the Dunkies version, but the blueberry jelly is wonderful and falling all over my hands. I've got no napkin so I'm licking it up and continuing to eat and stumbling closer to Chinatown. I'm revived. I'm in love again. I can't wait to come back.
Lest you forget I still had the miso plum cake to eat. If there had been more plums...mountains of plums! As it was, the cake alone was kind of crumbly-dry and hard to eat, but when eaten with the juicy plums it was heaven. I sort of resisted eating it for a few hours because I had that doughnut aftertaste in my mouth and didn't want to ruin it. But the cake was so intriguing, and the whole time I kept eating it I couldn't stop thinking about my upside down cake dilemma. What else was the miso cake but another form of that (well, I'm sure it wasn't baked upside down, but what is the seed behind the idea? what shape does the form take?)? I didn't have to make something I didn't like. Even if it was Chez Panisse. Even if it always sold well.
After all that, I went home and ate BBQ and was then convinced into going for ice cream to JP Licks. I got my favorite choice from there: oatmeal cookie yogurt with caramel sauce. But I also asked to try a new flavor: noodle kugel. It was amazing. I'm going to have to figure out how they did it from the tiny tasting spoon bite I had. Milky, cinnamony, tiny shards of noodles.
What's Kugel? my friends all asked.
It's A Jewish Food...I said.
Friday, August 10, 2007
jam-time!
I figured out what I want to do with those pluot-plums in the freezer, and the wad of rose petals I ganked from the Albany shoreline trail and my old Fruitvale house. Plum-rose jam!
I haven't made jam in a long time, not since culinary school when we made buckets of jam, any and all flavors. Some of them are still sitting around my Somerville house. Some were given away as presents. Not sure when I will get around to this jam, but likely I'll try to get a sourdough starter going so that my the time I'm jammed up there will be good toast. I am such a bread-brat these days; I only eat Acme.
My favorite jam excursion is from my days on the farm, when I went across the river to my favorite farmer EVER's house and we had gallons of strawberries from the PFP and we made jam all day long, some with pectin and some without. I'm sure we talked about love, and why we love the wrong people or love too soon, too long, or without giving away all of ourselves. But now I only remember the jam.
I've got three fresh burns from last week as a reminder not to work distracted, and worked distracted all day.
I just got to say to a friend Autumn leaves and apples!
This is why I'm going to Boston in October (and hopefully NYC, the city I love to hate, as well). I make up little lists that go something like apples, apple cider, apple cider doughnuts, apples, ICA, Oleana, East Coast Grill, Lydia Shire stories, Herrell's, Harvard square, crunch of leaves
or
finding the Doughnut Plant for real, McNulty's, Bklyn, Grand Central, the 6 train, my two favorite places on Broadway ever, will I ever eat at Gramercy Tavern, I could go to Babbo, maybe I'll go be a line cook like Bill Buford, still haven't been to Cafe Lalo, or the Cloisters, Spuyten Duyvil, did I really ever live here.
God I love apples and I'm so nervous they won't have my apples here.
Thinking of doing utterly crazy things, specifically two, but they are secrets.
No more cooking with herbs. Get over this lavender, rose geranium, lemon verbena, slight thyme kick. Find something else and it better not be a spice.
Ai, forgot to make Chez Panisse reservations. I'm gong to have to put Chez Panisse in my cell phone and that is kind of sad. Determined also to go to another fine restaurant while Leah's here...Where I have been in this town: A16, Delfina, Frisson, Jardiniere.
I haven't made jam in a long time, not since culinary school when we made buckets of jam, any and all flavors. Some of them are still sitting around my Somerville house. Some were given away as presents. Not sure when I will get around to this jam, but likely I'll try to get a sourdough starter going so that my the time I'm jammed up there will be good toast. I am such a bread-brat these days; I only eat Acme.
My favorite jam excursion is from my days on the farm, when I went across the river to my favorite farmer EVER's house and we had gallons of strawberries from the PFP and we made jam all day long, some with pectin and some without. I'm sure we talked about love, and why we love the wrong people or love too soon, too long, or without giving away all of ourselves. But now I only remember the jam.
I've got three fresh burns from last week as a reminder not to work distracted, and worked distracted all day.
I just got to say to a friend Autumn leaves and apples!
This is why I'm going to Boston in October (and hopefully NYC, the city I love to hate, as well). I make up little lists that go something like apples, apple cider, apple cider doughnuts, apples, ICA, Oleana, East Coast Grill, Lydia Shire stories, Herrell's, Harvard square, crunch of leaves
or
finding the Doughnut Plant for real, McNulty's, Bklyn, Grand Central, the 6 train, my two favorite places on Broadway ever, will I ever eat at Gramercy Tavern, I could go to Babbo, maybe I'll go be a line cook like Bill Buford, still haven't been to Cafe Lalo, or the Cloisters, Spuyten Duyvil, did I really ever live here.
God I love apples and I'm so nervous they won't have my apples here.
Thinking of doing utterly crazy things, specifically two, but they are secrets.
No more cooking with herbs. Get over this lavender, rose geranium, lemon verbena, slight thyme kick. Find something else and it better not be a spice.
Ai, forgot to make Chez Panisse reservations. I'm gong to have to put Chez Panisse in my cell phone and that is kind of sad. Determined also to go to another fine restaurant while Leah's here...Where I have been in this town: A16, Delfina, Frisson, Jardiniere.
Friday, August 03, 2007
you're not here to make my sad songs more sincere
Hot damn, I MISS ME some Berkeley Bowl!! The things I miss about the east bay are the things I expected to miss. So today when I was given the afternoon off from my second job, and I boarded a Richmond-bound BART to Ashby, it felt like cheating on my new city. But the slight shame gave way to home-coming thoughts when the transbay tube shifted to perfect blue skies of the West Oakland industrial land. I knew which way to walk when I got out of the BART, but it felt odd to be on foot in that area. It was a sunny day, gorgeous and hot, and I wanted to walk to Sweet Adeline and to Bakesale Betty and to my old haunt, the Oakland Public Library, and maybe around Lake Merritt for good measure, but there is only so much walking one can reasonably do.
At the Berkeley Bowl, I scored a giant bag of plums and a giant bag of something else--pluots, I thought, for their skin was reddish-pink like the Dapple Dandys from Frog Hollow, but the interior turned out to be bright fuchsia, so plums, perhaps, but more likely not--and a giant bag of mushrooms, all for 79 cents each! That plus some Arborio rice and a little snack mix for me, and then I made myself go before I started buying up loaves of Acme bread or anything more from the bulk aisle.
I went to Ici and hung out for a while. It's really great when people are passionate about what they do. Especially when it's something I'm passionate about too. On the ice cream front, those pluot/plums have been pureed for future sorbet making, the plums have been diced and frozen for something, and I made caramel for the THINGy ice cream and plan to make the base tomorrow, a chocolate base, as was requested.
I wish the meal I made tonight was a local meal, but it wasn't. It was amazing though. I used up those beautiful leeks I bought from Ella Bella last week and some of my 79 cent mushrooms, and and old shallot. Cooked them down in butter and olive oil, added some of the arborio rice and the chicken stock (not homemade, sorry) I'd defrosted and made myself some risotto. I tried to find a recipe for the rice-broth ratio but was having trouble, so just decided to wing it. I threw in 2/3 cup of rice and figured I'd either have enough stock for it or I wouldn't and if I didn't I'd use water because I wasn't going to open some of my really nice white wine for the risotto. No joke, it was the best risotto I have ever made. Plenty of black pepper and some salt, and when it was *almost* done, so close that you could taste it just needed a couple more minutes, I tossed in some parmesan cheese. My landlady was quite shocked to find I "just decided to make risotto." Apparently she's been inspired by myself and the other female roommates before me who cooked and has decided she should start cooking for herself more. I preceded the meal with some heaping spoonfuls of the blackberry ice cream...risotto does take some time to cook.
There aren't many things that could tempt me back to New York but Molly O'Neill is one of them {well, I need no temptation back to the Hudson Valley, just a chunk of money to afford the real estate there}. Which upstate town is she kicking around? Is it one I know? Does she live in Red Hook or Rhinebeck, Germantown or Rosendale {somehow, I can't see her on the other side of the bridge}? I just read an essay by her today in an old Best Food Writing anthology (2004, I think) and it reminded me of reading her memoir and feeling like that was my life on the page. I would really love to talk with her one day about food and writing and what the Boston cooking scene was like when she was there. Maybe I'll have my farmer-friend find her, and if she can do this, and if she will go here and eat with me, then yes, I'll go east.
A coworker's husband is going to Tarrytown for a business trip and she was contemplating going with him. I told her the foliage would not be at its peak, and it would be an hour or so from NYC and there wouldn't be much to do. But I didn't tell her I was jealous. There's been a lot lately, making me miss the East coast. The spread on Brooklyn dining in my GQ {Alan Richman, can you really be advising we move to Bushwick?!?}, the profile of North Fork + Table in Food Arts, the Molly O'Neill...
Safe enough to say now that my honeymoon phase with SF is wearing off. Which is good-I've been here five months already, which feels like a long time. Four in the East Bay, one in SF, a few friends to speak of, a job I still like...
Speaking of jobs I think we're going to start making full sized cakes at the cupcakery. ?!?
At the Berkeley Bowl, I scored a giant bag of plums and a giant bag of something else--pluots, I thought, for their skin was reddish-pink like the Dapple Dandys from Frog Hollow, but the interior turned out to be bright fuchsia, so plums, perhaps, but more likely not--and a giant bag of mushrooms, all for 79 cents each! That plus some Arborio rice and a little snack mix for me, and then I made myself go before I started buying up loaves of Acme bread or anything more from the bulk aisle.
I went to Ici and hung out for a while. It's really great when people are passionate about what they do. Especially when it's something I'm passionate about too. On the ice cream front, those pluot/plums have been pureed for future sorbet making, the plums have been diced and frozen for something, and I made caramel for the THINGy ice cream and plan to make the base tomorrow, a chocolate base, as was requested.
I wish the meal I made tonight was a local meal, but it wasn't. It was amazing though. I used up those beautiful leeks I bought from Ella Bella last week and some of my 79 cent mushrooms, and and old shallot. Cooked them down in butter and olive oil, added some of the arborio rice and the chicken stock (not homemade, sorry) I'd defrosted and made myself some risotto. I tried to find a recipe for the rice-broth ratio but was having trouble, so just decided to wing it. I threw in 2/3 cup of rice and figured I'd either have enough stock for it or I wouldn't and if I didn't I'd use water because I wasn't going to open some of my really nice white wine for the risotto. No joke, it was the best risotto I have ever made. Plenty of black pepper and some salt, and when it was *almost* done, so close that you could taste it just needed a couple more minutes, I tossed in some parmesan cheese. My landlady was quite shocked to find I "just decided to make risotto." Apparently she's been inspired by myself and the other female roommates before me who cooked and has decided she should start cooking for herself more. I preceded the meal with some heaping spoonfuls of the blackberry ice cream...risotto does take some time to cook.
There aren't many things that could tempt me back to New York but Molly O'Neill is one of them {well, I need no temptation back to the Hudson Valley, just a chunk of money to afford the real estate there}. Which upstate town is she kicking around? Is it one I know? Does she live in Red Hook or Rhinebeck, Germantown or Rosendale {somehow, I can't see her on the other side of the bridge}? I just read an essay by her today in an old Best Food Writing anthology (2004, I think) and it reminded me of reading her memoir and feeling like that was my life on the page. I would really love to talk with her one day about food and writing and what the Boston cooking scene was like when she was there. Maybe I'll have my farmer-friend find her, and if she can do this, and if she will go here and eat with me, then yes, I'll go east.
A coworker's husband is going to Tarrytown for a business trip and she was contemplating going with him. I told her the foliage would not be at its peak, and it would be an hour or so from NYC and there wouldn't be much to do. But I didn't tell her I was jealous. There's been a lot lately, making me miss the East coast. The spread on Brooklyn dining in my GQ {Alan Richman, can you really be advising we move to Bushwick?!?}, the profile of North Fork + Table in Food Arts, the Molly O'Neill...
Safe enough to say now that my honeymoon phase with SF is wearing off. Which is good-I've been here five months already, which feels like a long time. Four in the East Bay, one in SF, a few friends to speak of, a job I still like...
Speaking of jobs I think we're going to start making full sized cakes at the cupcakery. ?!?
Sunday, July 29, 2007
bakery roundup of the last week more or less
Dianda's, where I went because of all the people of Chowhound who can't stop going on about it. Or maybe just those one or two. I had an eclair. Basics: vanilla pastry cream, ganache or some kind of chocolate frosting on top, choux. The pastry itself was okay but there was something violently wrong with the pastry cream. It was really cold and fairly grainy in my mouth. About the only good, enjoyable facet to the eclair was the chocolate on top. I don't think I'm going back, not even to give them another shot. I tend to shy away from places with gaudy or scary looking pastries. Maybe it's just the snobbishness of my French training rubbing off on me. But I don't think so. In Poughkeepsie I used to go to the little Italian bakery right by the train station and get a big box of assorted cookies, and one morning Jes and I went there for cake, and the cakes were quite nice. I forget what that place is called, which makes me sad, but I can still see the interior, the parking lot, the neon sign, the Poughkeepsie streets leading down to the water, where many important conversations were had with loved ones. Caffe Aurora, I believe, was the name.
Delessio, where I went because I was starving and it was across the street from the DMV, where I went this week to change my car over to California plates after a good three and a half hours of waiting. This Delessio outpost was tucked into an Italian foods shop and my first thought was that everything looked amazing. But I was totally starved. I bought an excitingly crunchy looking pastry with intriguing red fruits inside, which turned out to be a plum (or pluot?) muffin. I'm not a muffin person but this was quite good and the fruit almost tasted spiced. I was intrigued also by the little cupcakes. They had so many and they were all very elaborate and cutely decorated. I got a lemon one, with lemon curd inside, and coconut-kissed lemon frosting outside. The cake was dry (sigh) but otherwise it was great! Same thing with the banana cake...banana cake, cream cheese frosting perhaps(?), and butterscotch chips. Lovely tastes, dry cake. But I won't let that stop me from going back and trying oodles more, although the large-style pyrex pans of bread pudding, tres leches, etc...totally unappealing.
Mission Pie, where I went because I wanted some pie and book-reading. It was cute inside. The pieces needed a little love. Either in the decorating department and lord knows I'M hardly one to talk there, or in the size department...they seemed to have deflated loads on their way from oven to store. And for 3.50 for a piece of pie, I want a piece of pie bursting with fruit, nuts, flavor. They did win me over by offering me free whipped cream and even bagging up the whole operation so I could carry it and still walk cutie pie. And also by having compelling food writing on display and lots of postcards about sustainable agriculture. The pie was good, not too juicy. The peaces were pretty flavorful (suncrest if I recall). But I missed the complexity of the peach pie I made last month.
I've got blackberry ice cream in my freezer and I keep stealing bites as I walk by. It tasted just like blackberries and cream with a slight graininess but the most gorgeous creamy mouthfeel. I kind of want to make it some chocolate sauce. Would that be wrong? And since I've got milk that expires soon and lots of heavy cream it seems time for more ice cream...
Cupcakery's been pretty zany lately. Busy today, but also lots of confusion about who is responsible for what. What gets done when. And last week's words are forcing me to be on best behavior. Communication keeps changing even barely after it's been established. All day I kept telling myself I wasn't going to own any of their stress. I as just going to pretend I was on a desert island, drinking tropical drinks and playing cards and watching a gaggle of bikini-clad girls play beach volleyball. And that worked, for a while. I really function well in places where there is clear communication. Or when I'm the one in charge.
Spent some time tonight reading submissions for the journal I'm involved with, Fringe. I'm working on a review of The Hours for the Fringe blog rollcall of our top/most influential 25 books in counterpart to all the standard-bearers by old white men. It's hard to say why Michael Cunningham is one of my favorite authors, but to talk about it in a detached way. I was never very good at nonfiction. I got one of those encouraging-rejection letters from a journal of note, too, today, which about made my day. The issue is that when they ask you to please send more, usually you've sent them your best piece, so you just kind of slink away. Note to self to get back to writing. It can't be all food all the time...
Delessio, where I went because I was starving and it was across the street from the DMV, where I went this week to change my car over to California plates after a good three and a half hours of waiting. This Delessio outpost was tucked into an Italian foods shop and my first thought was that everything looked amazing. But I was totally starved. I bought an excitingly crunchy looking pastry with intriguing red fruits inside, which turned out to be a plum (or pluot?) muffin. I'm not a muffin person but this was quite good and the fruit almost tasted spiced. I was intrigued also by the little cupcakes. They had so many and they were all very elaborate and cutely decorated. I got a lemon one, with lemon curd inside, and coconut-kissed lemon frosting outside. The cake was dry (sigh) but otherwise it was great! Same thing with the banana cake...banana cake, cream cheese frosting perhaps(?), and butterscotch chips. Lovely tastes, dry cake. But I won't let that stop me from going back and trying oodles more, although the large-style pyrex pans of bread pudding, tres leches, etc...totally unappealing.
Mission Pie, where I went because I wanted some pie and book-reading. It was cute inside. The pieces needed a little love. Either in the decorating department and lord knows I'M hardly one to talk there, or in the size department...they seemed to have deflated loads on their way from oven to store. And for 3.50 for a piece of pie, I want a piece of pie bursting with fruit, nuts, flavor. They did win me over by offering me free whipped cream and even bagging up the whole operation so I could carry it and still walk cutie pie. And also by having compelling food writing on display and lots of postcards about sustainable agriculture. The pie was good, not too juicy. The peaces were pretty flavorful (suncrest if I recall). But I missed the complexity of the peach pie I made last month.
I've got blackberry ice cream in my freezer and I keep stealing bites as I walk by. It tasted just like blackberries and cream with a slight graininess but the most gorgeous creamy mouthfeel. I kind of want to make it some chocolate sauce. Would that be wrong? And since I've got milk that expires soon and lots of heavy cream it seems time for more ice cream...
Cupcakery's been pretty zany lately. Busy today, but also lots of confusion about who is responsible for what. What gets done when. And last week's words are forcing me to be on best behavior. Communication keeps changing even barely after it's been established. All day I kept telling myself I wasn't going to own any of their stress. I as just going to pretend I was on a desert island, drinking tropical drinks and playing cards and watching a gaggle of bikini-clad girls play beach volleyball. And that worked, for a while. I really function well in places where there is clear communication. Or when I'm the one in charge.
Spent some time tonight reading submissions for the journal I'm involved with, Fringe. I'm working on a review of The Hours for the Fringe blog rollcall of our top/most influential 25 books in counterpart to all the standard-bearers by old white men. It's hard to say why Michael Cunningham is one of my favorite authors, but to talk about it in a detached way. I was never very good at nonfiction. I got one of those encouraging-rejection letters from a journal of note, too, today, which about made my day. The issue is that when they ask you to please send more, usually you've sent them your best piece, so you just kind of slink away. Note to self to get back to writing. It can't be all food all the time...
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
comfort food
Feeling a bit better today. Went out for lunch with my old buddy Brandon who just moved to SF from the Sacramento area--he's a Californian and we've been friends for five years more or less, and I am at this point one of his oldest friends. He took me to a Chinese restaurant on Ocean Ave called Emmy's where they gave us a big table for 8, because it was all they had. Perched in between large groups of older Chinese men we ate sesame chicken (for him) and orange peel chicken (for me) which wasn't all that spicy. In fact it was so not-that-spicy that I kept eating pieces of the jalapenos (and wondering why they didn't use fresh or dried red chilies) and ate the piece with all the seeds still attached. And then ate lots and lots of rice.
Man, I miss the Millhouse Panda and their spicy orange tofu. Sigh.
I used to always wonder in places like that if the chicken is really chicken, and if not what it is. I used to care much more but these days not as much. Lots of rice and watery tea and discussion of various girls and crushes and jobs. It's nice to be with someone whose patterns you know. And who knows yours. Eating warm, greasy, crispy food and lots of fluffy soft rice and feeling hemmed in by the low-lying fog--but in a safe and comforting way--is good. I don't have many connections here in SF, but I do get little bits of what I need from various people out here and so it's nice to have something like an old friend. Brandon is the one who drove with me here, and the only person I think that I know who would help me travel three thousand miles to change my life.
After Emmy's we drove out to Ocean Beach and scuffed through the sand, and then back to his apartment in sunny Visitacion Valley, and then he left for bartending and I came home to take the cutie pie to Bernal Heights park.
We went blackberry picking and I came home with enough to make wild blackberry ice cream courtesy of Chez Panisse Desserts, which I am a little skeptical of because it contains all cream and no eggs. If I were a better pastry chef I'd know how to cut down the cream, add some milk, and supplement the fat with yolks. But ice cream experimentation usually ends in ice crystals and not silky-soft perfect ice cream. Lucky thinking ahead, I put the cuisinart bowl in to freeze this morning. Also considering using up the rest of my cornmeal dough (if it's any good) and making some pies even though the berry seeds tend to annoy me. The dough's less than a month old (just barely) and came over here from Oakland with me. Meditation class tonight, good for the stressed out baker.
Cornmeal in the fluffy, soft sweet nectarine cakes, maybe? What is my recent obsession with the grit in things?
Man, I miss the Millhouse Panda and their spicy orange tofu. Sigh.
I used to always wonder in places like that if the chicken is really chicken, and if not what it is. I used to care much more but these days not as much. Lots of rice and watery tea and discussion of various girls and crushes and jobs. It's nice to be with someone whose patterns you know. And who knows yours. Eating warm, greasy, crispy food and lots of fluffy soft rice and feeling hemmed in by the low-lying fog--but in a safe and comforting way--is good. I don't have many connections here in SF, but I do get little bits of what I need from various people out here and so it's nice to have something like an old friend. Brandon is the one who drove with me here, and the only person I think that I know who would help me travel three thousand miles to change my life.
After Emmy's we drove out to Ocean Beach and scuffed through the sand, and then back to his apartment in sunny Visitacion Valley, and then he left for bartending and I came home to take the cutie pie to Bernal Heights park.
We went blackberry picking and I came home with enough to make wild blackberry ice cream courtesy of Chez Panisse Desserts, which I am a little skeptical of because it contains all cream and no eggs. If I were a better pastry chef I'd know how to cut down the cream, add some milk, and supplement the fat with yolks. But ice cream experimentation usually ends in ice crystals and not silky-soft perfect ice cream. Lucky thinking ahead, I put the cuisinart bowl in to freeze this morning. Also considering using up the rest of my cornmeal dough (if it's any good) and making some pies even though the berry seeds tend to annoy me. The dough's less than a month old (just barely) and came over here from Oakland with me. Meditation class tonight, good for the stressed out baker.
Cornmeal in the fluffy, soft sweet nectarine cakes, maybe? What is my recent obsession with the grit in things?
Sunday, July 22, 2007
local eating 2
I went down to Rainbow last week to get some supplies for locally-made pizza. Really just an excuse to play with some yeast. It was actually my first time using active dry yeast so it was a little intense and I ended up throwing out the first batch because I wasn't sure why the yeast wasn't blooming. By the second batch my internet was working enough for me to understand it really would take ten minutes, but anyway, the groceries...
organic heirloom tomato (cherokee purple)
organic scallions
bulk bread flour at last (and you'd think the Berkeley Bowl would have gotten on that long ago)...which may or may not have been local but I went with it anyway cause I've been wanting to play with breads for a while.
It was the cheese that posed the problem. I intended to just go to the FB and hit up Cowgirl but they were closed, so I wandered in the Rainbow cheese aisle for a while reading the little signs and trying to gear myself up because I don't even like cheese anyway. I try it raw and it makes me gag. I was sad and frustrated in the cheese aisle knowing there's all these little Sonoma county cheese maker people and wondering why Rainbow didn't have more of an emphasis on their products. Thinking whether I wanted to go with goat cheese, which I tend to be ambivalent toward or not like at all, or non local fresh mozzarella. I had the mozz in my hand and was going to leave, but rounding the corner of the cheese aisle I caved and went back. I picked up some Redwood Hill goat cheese that looked oozy and unappetizing and said fuck it. I'm buying heirloom tomatoes and I don't like tomatoes really. I'm making pizza dough. I ate goat cheese last week in the new Frog Hollow turnovers (summer squash, corn and goat cheese, yum!)This is the only night I have to give this project this week and I'm not pussying out in the cheese aisle.
I can't pretend anymore about food. I can't claim any relationship to vegetarianism when I eat fish and fowl and just had bacon and foie. No matter how much I love tofu. I have to own up to it now:I eat mushrooms and I eat tomatoes in things and I make grilled cheese and zaatar sandwiches and I can't speak anymore about the way that I eat in those terms that I used to, which is to say: egg whites only, all vegetables except mushrooms and olives, no tomatoes raw, no meat except for chicken, no cheese except cooked and then only some kinds, no food cold that could or should be eaten hot. No cold pizza, no cold leftovers, no picnics, no things. Oh! And no sandwiches, except pbnj.
Why? I didn't really have a reason, except "I don't like it." And still cold cheese makes me gag and un-warm food I'll choke down if I HAVE to but I won't like it. But those rules are all bent.
I moved out here for food (yes, it's ridiculous, but it's also true). I want to eat locally one time a week because it's a commitment to the culture of food and the values I try with my meager income to support. It's easy to say that you support farmers and farm markets. It's easy to tell everyone you love about the farm bill. But it isn't easy for me to go to the market once a week and put a meal together out of food that's traveled to me in an hour or less.
How, incidentally, was the pizza? The dough was ok. I used my recipe from school because it was in cups not ounces. It wasn't amazing but it was fine and I've got three balls frozen for later use. The goat cheese smelled bad in that funky cheese way. It wasn't great alone. When mixed with the tomato, the scallions and some parsley I had kicking around from the Berkeley market the week before, it tasted very good indeed.
On Saturday I stole ten minutes to shop the FB market. I zipped around in my Sox hat and got nods and smiles, picked up a few more heirloom tomatoes from Eatwell (Pineapple, Green Zebra) and some divine looking leeks and basil from Ella Bella, bread from Acme, and was back to tend the ovens without too much chaos in the Frog Hollow system. A little chaos, of course. Otherwise I wouldn't be doing my job.
Tonight I cooked up a sauce with the tomatoes and basil and some shallots and ate it with the remainders of my local vegan whole wheat pasta (sheesh).
How do you support the things you value? The things that are so entrenched within you that you don't quite see how other people don't hold them close the way you do? I've worked at farmers markets and I work for farmers now. I've worked on farms. I still hope one day to own some land in the Hudson Valley where my best farmer friend can farm and grow me some fruits and berries for pies and such, even though at this rate we'll never be able to afford to live there unless we live in the boondocks reaches of Ulster County.
Tonight while I made pretty use of the things that smelled of summer, I cut three tomato pieces and reserved them from the sauce. As a child I'm told I used to eat raw tomatoes, but never (and quite vigilantly) since, except in salsa (and just now I'm making the connection that it's rather odd to eat salsa, or pico de gallo, and not tomatoes, but if you know me then you know how I'm often odd that way). I popped them in my mouth to taste the difference. Green Zebra, you win. I'm taking you home again one day soon.
On my mind:
thyme-ginger shortbread
peaches...and rosemary? good or bad?
divine soft nectarine cake
whether the panna cotta should stay or go
what to do with rose geranium
when shall there next be good plums
why my dreams have been so intense lately
cinnamon ice cream, or oatmeal, if i can find some freezer space to chill the bowl
Keeping lots of secrets at the moment. Went back to Oakland tonight and going back again next week, I believe.
organic heirloom tomato (cherokee purple)
organic scallions
bulk bread flour at last (and you'd think the Berkeley Bowl would have gotten on that long ago)...which may or may not have been local but I went with it anyway cause I've been wanting to play with breads for a while.
It was the cheese that posed the problem. I intended to just go to the FB and hit up Cowgirl but they were closed, so I wandered in the Rainbow cheese aisle for a while reading the little signs and trying to gear myself up because I don't even like cheese anyway. I try it raw and it makes me gag. I was sad and frustrated in the cheese aisle knowing there's all these little Sonoma county cheese maker people and wondering why Rainbow didn't have more of an emphasis on their products. Thinking whether I wanted to go with goat cheese, which I tend to be ambivalent toward or not like at all, or non local fresh mozzarella. I had the mozz in my hand and was going to leave, but rounding the corner of the cheese aisle I caved and went back. I picked up some Redwood Hill goat cheese that looked oozy and unappetizing and said fuck it. I'm buying heirloom tomatoes and I don't like tomatoes really. I'm making pizza dough. I ate goat cheese last week in the new Frog Hollow turnovers (summer squash, corn and goat cheese, yum!)This is the only night I have to give this project this week and I'm not pussying out in the cheese aisle.
I can't pretend anymore about food. I can't claim any relationship to vegetarianism when I eat fish and fowl and just had bacon and foie. No matter how much I love tofu. I have to own up to it now:I eat mushrooms and I eat tomatoes in things and I make grilled cheese and zaatar sandwiches and I can't speak anymore about the way that I eat in those terms that I used to, which is to say: egg whites only, all vegetables except mushrooms and olives, no tomatoes raw, no meat except for chicken, no cheese except cooked and then only some kinds, no food cold that could or should be eaten hot. No cold pizza, no cold leftovers, no picnics, no things. Oh! And no sandwiches, except pbnj.
Why? I didn't really have a reason, except "I don't like it." And still cold cheese makes me gag and un-warm food I'll choke down if I HAVE to but I won't like it. But those rules are all bent.
I moved out here for food (yes, it's ridiculous, but it's also true). I want to eat locally one time a week because it's a commitment to the culture of food and the values I try with my meager income to support. It's easy to say that you support farmers and farm markets. It's easy to tell everyone you love about the farm bill. But it isn't easy for me to go to the market once a week and put a meal together out of food that's traveled to me in an hour or less.
How, incidentally, was the pizza? The dough was ok. I used my recipe from school because it was in cups not ounces. It wasn't amazing but it was fine and I've got three balls frozen for later use. The goat cheese smelled bad in that funky cheese way. It wasn't great alone. When mixed with the tomato, the scallions and some parsley I had kicking around from the Berkeley market the week before, it tasted very good indeed.
On Saturday I stole ten minutes to shop the FB market. I zipped around in my Sox hat and got nods and smiles, picked up a few more heirloom tomatoes from Eatwell (Pineapple, Green Zebra) and some divine looking leeks and basil from Ella Bella, bread from Acme, and was back to tend the ovens without too much chaos in the Frog Hollow system. A little chaos, of course. Otherwise I wouldn't be doing my job.
Tonight I cooked up a sauce with the tomatoes and basil and some shallots and ate it with the remainders of my local vegan whole wheat pasta (sheesh).
How do you support the things you value? The things that are so entrenched within you that you don't quite see how other people don't hold them close the way you do? I've worked at farmers markets and I work for farmers now. I've worked on farms. I still hope one day to own some land in the Hudson Valley where my best farmer friend can farm and grow me some fruits and berries for pies and such, even though at this rate we'll never be able to afford to live there unless we live in the boondocks reaches of Ulster County.
Tonight while I made pretty use of the things that smelled of summer, I cut three tomato pieces and reserved them from the sauce. As a child I'm told I used to eat raw tomatoes, but never (and quite vigilantly) since, except in salsa (and just now I'm making the connection that it's rather odd to eat salsa, or pico de gallo, and not tomatoes, but if you know me then you know how I'm often odd that way). I popped them in my mouth to taste the difference. Green Zebra, you win. I'm taking you home again one day soon.
On my mind:
thyme-ginger shortbread
peaches...and rosemary? good or bad?
divine soft nectarine cake
whether the panna cotta should stay or go
what to do with rose geranium
when shall there next be good plums
why my dreams have been so intense lately
cinnamon ice cream, or oatmeal, if i can find some freezer space to chill the bowl
Keeping lots of secrets at the moment. Went back to Oakland tonight and going back again next week, I believe.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
you said the world was magic i was wide eyed and laughing
Crushes...just when you forswear off the forever, decide you're deluded, you get a glimmer of hope faint down the line, and you're back on the train. This is proof that despite y tough guy act I really am a romantic at heart. Sssh.
Things that are stressing me out right now, despite the fabulous SF location:
I live in a creepy spider filled basement (but only for 2 more weeks).
I haven't written in 2 weeks.
I have not been working much or cooking much of anything. Apparently now I get weird when I don't cook as well.
Crap to deal with, but no internet connection.
The Leica dream... It showed me another way to see. To create. To give. It made me really happy, and I went off into the San Francisco night with it. But I don't have a Leica, and I'm not going to get one anytime soon if ever...so what, then, what?
Things are at maximum capacity at the FB...there's not much more I can do without another pair of hands or another day. That should make me happy and not stressed out. We'll work on that.
Important anniversaries that are probably also contributing to malaise:
The birthday.
One year ago I met _____, who changed my life immensely but will never know it.
Just before that time I lost most of my Boston friend base.
And after that I started at Sonsie.
Four and a half months ago I moved west.
Two weeks ago I moved out of Oakland.
That last one was really hard. People are different out here and though I've assimilated some I still don't have a community out here and I still don't get it right sometimes. When I first came, it was like a new set of rules every other day. I got NYC and I got Boston and I got Potown but the Bay area had never fit me right. I don't understand the intense but brief connections I seem to make here. With writers in bars or girls in cafes or poolhall players or neighbors or FB types. I don't understand the paranoia and gossip, or the strange generosity. It all ebbs and flows and, though I think mostly I forget the weirdness and just get my things done, it pops up still. Unsettled.
Trying to figure out how to give {better, more, and only what I truly value}.
Old patterns have been cropping up. Things that have faded into the past. Lots of talk about Miette, for one. What I'm supposed to do with that information I'm still not sure.
Right now, though, I wish the ice cream fairy would show up with some goodies. Still haven't eaten y dinner, but I' warming up some Delfina leftovers now. I can't get up at 5 and get through the next 2 days. I'm just not ready...all this time off, all these distractions. This weekend's gonna kick my ass.
Things that are stressing me out right now, despite the fabulous SF location:
I live in a creepy spider filled basement (but only for 2 more weeks).
I haven't written in 2 weeks.
I have not been working much or cooking much of anything. Apparently now I get weird when I don't cook as well.
Crap to deal with, but no internet connection.
The Leica dream... It showed me another way to see. To create. To give. It made me really happy, and I went off into the San Francisco night with it. But I don't have a Leica, and I'm not going to get one anytime soon if ever...so what, then, what?
Things are at maximum capacity at the FB...there's not much more I can do without another pair of hands or another day. That should make me happy and not stressed out. We'll work on that.
Important anniversaries that are probably also contributing to malaise:
The birthday.
One year ago I met _____, who changed my life immensely but will never know it.
Just before that time I lost most of my Boston friend base.
And after that I started at Sonsie.
Four and a half months ago I moved west.
Two weeks ago I moved out of Oakland.
That last one was really hard. People are different out here and though I've assimilated some I still don't have a community out here and I still don't get it right sometimes. When I first came, it was like a new set of rules every other day. I got NYC and I got Boston and I got Potown but the Bay area had never fit me right. I don't understand the intense but brief connections I seem to make here. With writers in bars or girls in cafes or poolhall players or neighbors or FB types. I don't understand the paranoia and gossip, or the strange generosity. It all ebbs and flows and, though I think mostly I forget the weirdness and just get my things done, it pops up still. Unsettled.
Trying to figure out how to give {better, more, and only what I truly value}.
Old patterns have been cropping up. Things that have faded into the past. Lots of talk about Miette, for one. What I'm supposed to do with that information I'm still not sure.
Right now, though, I wish the ice cream fairy would show up with some goodies. Still haven't eaten y dinner, but I' warming up some Delfina leftovers now. I can't get up at 5 and get through the next 2 days. I'm just not ready...all this time off, all these distractions. This weekend's gonna kick my ass.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
beginnings, endings
I have reconciled with the chocolate cherry cake. It has been much maligned in these pages of late, and so I'm glad that we have come to terms, because people really do like chocolate and cherries and flourless chocolate cake substances, even if they're not especially captivating to me.
When I originally made the cake I used David Lebovitz's recipe from Ripe for Dessert, substituting cherry conserve for the candied cherries, and I think this was actually my favorite version, but it didn't sell well at all. Next step, once cherries arrived of course, was cherries cooked in syrup with David's cake...too moist, and too dominated by chocolate.
The next step was to find a basic flourless chocolate cake recipe and add in the cherries. The chocolate was less dominant (actually only used cocoa powder), but it was too challenging to handle.
For the birthday cake it was requested I use up some of the ancient, pre-divorce Guittard semisweet from the Berkeley Bowl (there's a Bay area mouthful). I took (if you love me, buy me a digital scale) approx. 2/3 cup of the Guittard chips and approx. 3/4 of the bar of Scharffen Berger 70%. The blend of chocolates worked really well, ad the Guittard tamed down the winey intensity of the Scharffen Berger and allowed the cherries to really come through. A much better balance of flavors. It was really appreciated by the party guests. Which was nice, yknow, cause it didn't really look like much. Flourless cake or any souffle like cake tends to look like crap. I left it unadorned. We ate it with chocolate mousse and ice cream. It's been a very, very long times since I had a non-Sonsie chocolate mousse.
However, it is still too moist. There really isn't any liquid, aside from what little the cherries ooze out...maybe if I make it again I shall drain them well...Not really sure how to correct that otherwise. Cake being too moist, what an odd problem.
I've got lots of odd problems right now. Lots of things on the brain. I took a long bike ride tonight through Fruitvale and again was reminded of Poughkeepsie. There's even a building on International that looks just like the old mental health hospital on Route 9 right across from the CIA. Poughkeepsie, maybe I will see you in the fall? When there's not much growing on the farm except for bitter greens and my farmer friend is tired. But nevermind that. I'll never get to Poughkeepsie without a car. So it will be my last meal was here, and my last adventure was the chocolatier. Poughkeepsie. I've got to get back. Maybe the farmer will fetch me? Bus to New York and the the familiar train ride from platform 36? The places we love aren't always pretty and who can possibly understand my deepest love for Poughkeepsie, New York?
The east is coming to me, in packages and in persons, all month next month. I want to smell the salt on the water; I want to feel the heat heavy in the air.
Lately I've been thinking about intentionality and cooking. What we are cooking out of. What is on our minds during the actual act. I'm trying to cook only from positive places. It's a struggle to always hold on to that love and compassion for strangers. Cooking is giving away the best parts of yourself. So is writing, but you can't see words or their effect on people, and so it's almost still your guarded secret. In cooking the things you make are real, tangible, and to the outside eye not defined by or created by anything per se. But it really should come from the best place, because otherwise there's just so much heartache in the business, why bother?
Cooking. Making me a nicer person? I dunno, you tell me.
When I originally made the cake I used David Lebovitz's recipe from Ripe for Dessert, substituting cherry conserve for the candied cherries, and I think this was actually my favorite version, but it didn't sell well at all. Next step, once cherries arrived of course, was cherries cooked in syrup with David's cake...too moist, and too dominated by chocolate.
The next step was to find a basic flourless chocolate cake recipe and add in the cherries. The chocolate was less dominant (actually only used cocoa powder), but it was too challenging to handle.
For the birthday cake it was requested I use up some of the ancient, pre-divorce Guittard semisweet from the Berkeley Bowl (there's a Bay area mouthful). I took (if you love me, buy me a digital scale) approx. 2/3 cup of the Guittard chips and approx. 3/4 of the bar of Scharffen Berger 70%. The blend of chocolates worked really well, ad the Guittard tamed down the winey intensity of the Scharffen Berger and allowed the cherries to really come through. A much better balance of flavors. It was really appreciated by the party guests. Which was nice, yknow, cause it didn't really look like much. Flourless cake or any souffle like cake tends to look like crap. I left it unadorned. We ate it with chocolate mousse and ice cream. It's been a very, very long times since I had a non-Sonsie chocolate mousse.
However, it is still too moist. There really isn't any liquid, aside from what little the cherries ooze out...maybe if I make it again I shall drain them well...Not really sure how to correct that otherwise. Cake being too moist, what an odd problem.
I've got lots of odd problems right now. Lots of things on the brain. I took a long bike ride tonight through Fruitvale and again was reminded of Poughkeepsie. There's even a building on International that looks just like the old mental health hospital on Route 9 right across from the CIA. Poughkeepsie, maybe I will see you in the fall? When there's not much growing on the farm except for bitter greens and my farmer friend is tired. But nevermind that. I'll never get to Poughkeepsie without a car. So it will be my last meal was here, and my last adventure was the chocolatier. Poughkeepsie. I've got to get back. Maybe the farmer will fetch me? Bus to New York and the the familiar train ride from platform 36? The places we love aren't always pretty and who can possibly understand my deepest love for Poughkeepsie, New York?
The east is coming to me, in packages and in persons, all month next month. I want to smell the salt on the water; I want to feel the heat heavy in the air.
Lately I've been thinking about intentionality and cooking. What we are cooking out of. What is on our minds during the actual act. I'm trying to cook only from positive places. It's a struggle to always hold on to that love and compassion for strangers. Cooking is giving away the best parts of yourself. So is writing, but you can't see words or their effect on people, and so it's almost still your guarded secret. In cooking the things you make are real, tangible, and to the outside eye not defined by or created by anything per se. But it really should come from the best place, because otherwise there's just so much heartache in the business, why bother?
Cooking. Making me a nicer person? I dunno, you tell me.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
.jpg)
Posts
