Church Avenue Chomp

Do you know Elizabeth Rozin’s books? She’s a food historian and author of Crossroads Cooking and Ethnic Cuisines, two books that I own and love, as well as the book Flavor Principles, which I do not own but predict I would love, since the most compelling part of the lovable EC is the index in the beginning that describes the different “flavor principles” that make a dish recognizable as part of the canon of a particular cuisine. It’s brilliant stuff to think about.

Like, cinnamon and tomato, that is Greek. And one Chinese combo that makes a flavor principle is soy sauce, ginger, and rice wine, while fish sauce, chilis, and lime spells Thai. This is building block knowledge for anyone who loves to cook. Or eat! Are you people as excited about this as I am? What are your flavor principles? Today, I feel like mine might include cinnamon, raisins, and almonds, with something salty and a little acid (like tomatoes, or lemon, NOT DRUGS ACID, MOMMY) thrown in for good measure. And some heat.

I don’t love the conceit of Crossroads as much (simply because, how could I, Ms. Rozin? How could I?), but it’s still pretty awesome, because it documents recipes that result when one cuisine bumps up against another. This isn’t fusion, which is fun but fakity, but a catalog of real dishes that people eat in real places. Like East Africa. This book is the source of my favorite curry, Shrimp with Cashews in Spicy Coconut sauce.

Basically, it’s Indian spices gracing the East African flavor principle of coconut, tomatoes, and hot pepper. The olive oil is Portuguese, and cashews are Portuguese via Brazil.

In brief, saute in EVOO a base of onions, garlic, and ginger cooked with cayenne for heat, sweetness, and savoriness, then simmered with tomato for body and acidity, then seasoned with salt, pepper, cumin, and coriander for depth of flavor, coconut milk for some creaminess, supplemented by shrimp and nuts for protein and texture, finished with lemon for brightness, and dressed with cilantro for color and freshness. Plus, in our house, we add okra around about the tomato step (for fiber and those slickery little beads?)

This is an absolutely incredible dish, and like most recipes I like, it teaches you a process and once you know the process, you could switch in a different protein, or add different vegetables. (I like it with eggplant, added between the cayenne and the tomatoes, or broiled separately and added at the shrimp step, but then again I pretty much like everything with eggplant.) And it’s super easy, once you’ve wrapped your brain around the process. I always find that’s the most challenging part of cooking: figuring out the ways to be efficient about it, and with experience comes efficiency, and with efficiency, anxiety is dissipated. So, I love this recipe, and I love this book, but honestly? I don’t cook too much from it, which doesn’t make sense.

So the other day I browsed it again and found one for a sauce using these DELIGHTFUL ingredients, all of which we had on hand, because, read the parentheticals.

• 1/3 Slivered almonds, toasted (crucial to oatmeal, but not the toasted part: I would freak out and die if I had to toast nuts before I could eat breakfast)
• 2 T pickled jalapenos (a prime taco enhancer)
• ½ C cilantro (good for many things, but procured for the curry mentioned above, made earlier this week when we needed something spicy to kick our colds)
• 4 cloves garlic, RAW (it’s 2010 and I live in a city and who would I be without garlic?)
• pinch salt (duh)
• ½ C extra virgin olive oil (stands to reason that I’ve got to have some sort of moistening ingredient around that isn’t butter.

Put everything save the evoo in a food processor and pulse til coarse. Then stream in the oil. I address tarator, romesco, and pesto, as well as this sauce when I shout from the rooftops I LOVE YOU NUT-BASED SAUCES! Rozin claims that this one is great on hot green beans, or cauliflower, or cold shrimp, or baked or broiled fish, and that it’s common in Mexico, and that it’s a conflation of Spanish nut-based sauces (romesco) and spicy nut or seed based sauces of ancient Mexico (mole).

We got some cod last night, rubbed it with this sauce, and baked in a cast iron pan 425 for a very short time. Specifically, the amount of time needed for me to nurse a father-pajama’d Henry and put him in his crib. Oh, with chopped mixed olives on top. Olives on the fish, rather than the baby, though I’d by no means swear that the baby didn’t have any olives on him. (His last pre-nursing action was to grab a slice of green olive, shove it into his mouth, then spit it five feet down onto Matthew’s sock.)

Regarding the fish, I threw some steamed carrots into the pan around the edges at the end, just to heat them up again, and served it over brown rice with arugula salad on the side. This is a really delicious, compelling, well-balanced sauce, that will keep for a while in the fridge, but you (I) want a lot in every bite. So maybe keep the fish simple with salt, pepper, evoo, olives, and maybe some lemon, and dip your carrots (or beans or cauliflower) into vaster quantities of the sauce than you’d get with just a mouthful of fish with this as an accent.

If you’re still not getting enough of the sauce, feel free to grab some in your fist, and slurp it.

Everyone wants to fire their cat when they have a baby; some people even fire their dogs.

I’ve had Kitty for 10 years and I like to think that we’ve still got the old magic between us. Except. Except when it’s 3am and I need more sleep. Or, you know, 4 or 5.

Like a baby I know, the tireder I get, the less likely I am to get a good night of sleep. So when it’s late and things aren’t going well, sleepwise, and I start to think about how tired I’m going to be, I start to panic. And as you likely know, panicking wards off sleep like mirrors ward off Draculas.

So when husband and I stayed out til 1:something the other night, I was a little worried, since I am up at 5:something for a feeding, and sometimes in between if someone is cold or needs a drink of water, and then at 7:something for the day. To be fair, I have it really good, with husband getting up early with the baby plenty of the time. But when he’s sick and it’s the weekend and it’s my event that kept us out late . . . it should be me.

So when dear, coldy husband began snoring like a farmer, and even the baby’s whitenoise machine and earplugs couldn’t save me, I reviewed my options: where could I go?

We live in a comparatively huge apartment. I mean, for New Yorkers. Our bedrooms are in the back WING of a house, for crying out loud. (There may be only two wings, but two wings is standard, right? At least for birds. At least for standard birds.) Anyhow the other bedroom is taken up by the baby. It has a full-sized futon in it, which I sometimes doze on in the early morning with him after he drinks some milk, but I’ve tried to sleep in there at night. And no matter how silent and possumy I am, he wakes up, and he knows I am there, and he stands up to point out, in a yelling tone of voice, that it’s creepy to sneak into someone else’s room and sleep and pretend you are not there. I actually agree with him on this point.

So I rule that option out. Bathroom, no, and that is the only other part of the house in the back wing. So it’s out to the front of the house, to the couch, the abode of the Rejoicing Nocturnal Cat. She doesn’t rejoice all day, but perhaps she’s happy at night because no one is enthusiastically trying to hang things off of her whiskers, or snuggle to her actual eyeball.

Kitty during the day.

In anticipation of her “reading,” which is what we call it when she claws the books off the shelf for attention when she wants to be fed, I get her a bowl of kibble. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Then vomit, vomit, vomit, as kibble that’s almost as good as new rains down in front of the front door. Because it’s on wood and not the rug or the furniture, because it is 4:30am, I decide not to clean it up. I even figure that it might clean itself if I leave it there, if you know what I mean.

Then, presumably because she’s excited to have the barfing portion of the night behind her, Kitty finds some sort of paper bag to scrounch in. Scrounch, scrounch, scrounch. Then comes a run over to her Alpine Scratching Device.  Scratch, scratch, scratch. At which point I freak (freak, freak, freak) and put her into the bathroom, which is in the back of the house, actually adjacent to the baby’s room.

Where she presumably meows and meows and meows, because though I can’t hear her, moments later I hear the baby, and he is barking through the monitor. Woof, woof, woof. (Baby is VERY excited in re: animal noises these days. He’s mastered meowing so his main response to anything animal related these days is barking.)

Then Baby falls back to sleep, and I fall back to sleep, and who cares what the cat is doing, and I am in the midst of dreaming vividly of fighting with Husband about whether we need a new VCR. He is maintaining that we do need one and I am putting forth the position that we do not need one when I am woken up by Husband letting the cat back into my wing.

If I wasn’t afraid to sleep in my car, I’d do it. Oh, I’d do it.

Last night we went to the ALS Victory Ball for the Connecticut chapter of the ALS Association. Our team, the Phillips 66, was honored to receive a fundraising award! On the invitation, the dress for the event was described as Caribbean or Black Tie. Basically, opposite ends of the spectrum.

Dressing up may seem more complicated, but after some conjecture, it’s not as complicated as digging around for something vacationy that fits postpartum that one can wear in 20 inches of snow with a February pallor. We chose black tie. It was as easy as shucking the everyday clothes and slipping on a luxurious dress of heavy silk. Excellent! Oh, and my snowboots, good for climbing through drifts. (I did bring acceptable shoes in the car.)

After summoning our sitter and unsnowing the car, we drove out to Westport, only to learn on arrival that every other invitee had opted to dress Caribbeany. We joked, on seeing the satin bowtie and cummerbund of the coat check girl, that it was fine — that everyone would probably just think that we worked there.

It was fun, except for the whole fact of how much ALS totally sucks, and except for when I assumed out loud that a woman seated at our table was married to her own, dear, grieving , much-older-than-her, father, who was seated to her left. As opposed to her actual husband, of her same generation, who was seated to her right. (Uh, who did I think that guy was?) And when I realized my mistake, I described (in actual voiced words, that everyone could hear) the scenario of being married to your own dad (while my own dad was sitting to my left) as “totally creepy.” Which it is, of course, but it’s not like that helped the situation. And then I fell silent, listening my words echo roarfully in my ears, while I desperately tried to think up some followup comments. Matthew somehow managed to engage those folks on the topic of steel drums, something he definitely knows absolutely nothing about. Thanks, honey!

We had to leave early because of the long drive back to the city. And indeed, just as M and I were about to make our exit, glowing with rum punch and an evening out and recognition of our efforts, faux pas forgotten, the very woman who had presented us the award for fund raising stopped him as he was about to enter the men’s room. Without really focusing on him, she just looked at his tux and told him that one of the lightbulbs in the men’s bathroom had blown out, and asked him to see to it that it got fixed.

Which frankly, he probably would have been happy to do — he really doesn’t like it when no one changes lightbulbs when they blow out. However, she quickly realized her error, blurted “nevermind no nevermind” as she turned on her strappy summer sandal, and sprinted off in horror. Hilarious.

While ALS robs some people of the ability to speak, others of us could stand to learn something from a little well-placed silence!

Henry is one!

And what this means that he is old enough to mock you. Well, mock me. He was probably raised too well to mock you.

But if I blow my nose, or sniff in, he’ll call attention to my indelicate body functions by saying a big long “ffffffffffffffffffff.” If I clear my throat or sneeze or cough, he’ll respond with a very dramatic fake cough. It’s hilarious.

He also meows with the best of ’em, and every evening when I start to real cook, he starts to fake cook. He gets a pot on the floor, and some spoons, and a colander, and clatters around and pretends to cook food. It’s adorable. Except that he won’t share his fake soup or porridge or whatever it is with me. (If it’s invisible, and I’m not allowed to have any, how the heck am I supposed to know what it is?)

Being one also means, of course, that he is old enough to eat cake. Well, eat cake and have me announce it publicly. If you must know, he ate a little cake before he was one.

I anticipated being the sort of parent who would outlaw cake, but the truth is that I am the type of parent who has to try REALLY hard not to squirt Redi-Whip directly into my little one’s gaping mouth. (I have not done this. And I feed him spinach and carrots and myriad other fruits and veg and whole grains every day. But I have thought of doing this — because it has the capacity to bring SO MUCH JOY.)

The thing is that I hail from a very cake-oriented family. Some husbands might believe it is too cake-oriented. He comes to this conclusion simply because we have about 30 different cakes every time someone has a birthday. It’s because we love the person who is having the birthday! It’s because we love singing! (It’s because we love cake.)

A few weeks after Henry was born, my parents came to stay overnight and in order to celebrate his existence, I ordered a cake that had “Happy Henry” scrolled across the top. He was too little to do much more than sleep through that song, but we did celebrate his initial birthday. I can’t get my hands on the picture of that cake right now, but it was sort of a fake black forest cake from a bakery down the street, and it had goopy cherry filling, and that bad white frosting. It looked WAY more special than it tasted.

For the one year birthday celebration, we started with a family party. We held it at my sister’s house so she could participate, though as it turned out she was exhausted, and ended up sleeping through the bulk of it. Upsetting. But my in-laws came from Chicago, and Henry’s other set of aunts came from New Hampshire! Lots of cousins came, along with Henry’s great aunt and uncle. It was very wonderful once it started. But it was also enormously stressful before it began. Like, my eyeballs almost flew out of my head from sheer pressure that morning, though I got it catered (!!!) and everything.

(Do you know how much getting things catered costs? Enough to make your eyeballs fly out, etc.)

The catering was done by Bliss Market, which is a great butcher and has delicious prepared foods. I bought paper and plastic things so that we wouldn’t have to wash stuff. I ordered all the food. I even chose food that didn’t need to be heated up. (You know about this theory, right? If not, let me know, and I will post.) Still, I stressed. So my new theory is that for ease of entertainment, it’s very important to have parties at your own home, rather than someone else’s.

We had fruit and cheese (a hit), frittatas (a hit), and asparagus with orange essenced onions (not a hit, nope, not at all). Here’s a piece of advice: never order asparagus for 20 people. Maybe order asparagus for 3 people, and only in season. My cousins were swirling around the giant scary tray of thick-stalked, onion smothered asparagus talking about how much their pee would stink just from looking at it. Man, do I love my cousins. No, really, I do. But I also really love asparagus, and somehow, this was just gross. Even grosser than my lovable cousins.

Our own contributions were few and far between, and included a green salad, the expensive sort from a box that we do not wash that we eat with every single meal, topped with imported vinaigrette. (It’s imported from Brooklyn: my husband is great at salad dressing. His secret? Rice wine vinegar combined with one other kind, as well as mini bits of chopped red onion.)

I made a country pate. After I unearthed it from the pan and plated it, I showed my mother, because I’d had nightmares that it wouldn’t come out well, and I was frankly terrifically proud that it had. “Nice, honey,” my mom said, in that highly uncertain way mothers have of speaking when they feel suspicious that their nutty daughter is about to willfully foist raw meat upon everyone in the bloodline. “Are you planning to cook it?”

Mmmmph. I suppose that steamed bacon can look kind of raw, if you are not accustomed to looking at terrines. The terrine goes like this: line a metal loaf pan with bacon. Put 8 strips across the bottom, with the arms flopping over the sides. Then put 3 up each short side. Then fill with filling, which is ground pork mixed with chopped bacon mixed with reduced cognac, eggs, savories, and spices. And then, since you may be tired of touching raw pork, layer with some strips of ham steak. (Cooked pork!) Once you have suitably recuperated, resume with the raw material, and then smother it down with the loose ends of the bacon strips. Place the loaf pan in a larger metal pan with a quantity of water in the bottom and cook for a few hours. When you’re done, weight and chill and wait. If you are really going to make it, please follow the instructions in the recipe linked above. (I should get paid to shill for Epicurious. Or sued for stealing all of their recipes.)

The best thing about terrine, aside from the triple delicious porkiness, is that you can make it 4 days in advance. FOUR! And you don’t have to serve it warm. It’s a great thing to make for a party. And it’s delicious, even if your own mother suspects that you’re serving raw liver (it’s not liver!!) to everyone on the premises.

The table’s coup de grace was a huge pistachio cake with white chocolate mousse filling within and buttercream frosting without. Well, with, but outside. As a rule I am against white chocolate mousse, but I decided, for once, to close my eyes, relinquish control, and trust. I was able to do this because I thought that a pistachio cake might be green, and I thought that would be fun, and the Bliss people make incredible cakes.

Good that I did, because this pistachio-flavored cake was insanely delicious. And one of the best things about it is that they accidentally gave me one that was several inches larger across than what I’d ordered. The cake just said Henry! across the top, because thinking that they’d give me the size cake I ordered, instead of the amount of cake I REALLY wanted, I’d supplemented the cake order with a cupcake order. And those were to spell “HAPPY BIRTHDAY,” one letter per cupcake.

As it happened, we ended up with enough cake for about 50 people, rather than about 20 people. Don’t worry, I finished it.

And for his first cake experience (on record), Henry chose a chocolate cupcake with a big bright pink “B” on it. He make slow but very thorough work of it. He may have his dad’s looks, but he obviously inherited the cake-eating gene from my side of the family. We are praying he also got what we call the Burgie gene, which is a gene for sleeping late.

A week later we also had a party for babies over at ours, and this is the lesson: even when you are cooking the food, and cleaning the house, even when you have invited 9 neighborhood babies over, it is somehow far less stressful to have a party at your own place. We had tea sandwiches (spinach dip on pumpernickel; almond butter and cherry preserves on wheat; cheddar chive rounds sans chives, since I couldn’t find any), in addition to fruit, veggies and dip, another terrine, and carrot / apple cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. Oh, and with the leftover batter, a tiny round cake that I made in the bottom of a metal bowl. Thinking, at the last minute, “I’ll make a monkey face cake!” Which is something my sister has done. Then realizing that chocolate frosting would be better, as would some sort of plan in addition to artistic ability. Then I thought, “I’ll make a snowman cake!” Wait, just a snowman head? So that was quickly replaced by, “no, I’ll make a mouse!” But people, this goes back to my whole Halloween costume situation. Great ideas, and lame-o-la execution.

“No, he doesn’t need a mouse, he needs an “H” or perhaps an “HAPS” stenciled in sugar!” No, he needs for his mother to calm the hell down.

Regardless of how simple it was, I was finally able to MAKE a birthday cake for my son, which was as it should be. Because no matter how beautiful and delicious the Bliss pistachio cake was, it’s actually my belief that birthday cakes should be homemade, and that they should look like someone loved them into being. Voila!

I love yoga. When it’s “good,” it reminds me of Catholic Mass when I was small. The sidelong attention you pay to the person in the front of the room, the rote comfort of the standing up, the getting down, the incantatory pattern of works from an unfamiliar lost language, the metaphorical application of one thing to another, the uplifting power of music.

I have so many favorite parts of yoga practice but one is when it’s really hard: after lots warrior poses, with arms lifted to shoulder level and held extended, the vinyasa that ends in “child’s pose,” and you get to feel your heart pound in such an exhilarating way while experiencing real relaxation.

This morning, during pigeon pose prep, we did pigeon prep including a spinal twist. (It included a bind for those who could hack it; mine was wholly bindless). During this pose, the yoga teacher said something that seemed directed straight to me:

“this twist is like a tray of ice cream . . . well, whatever your favorite thing is. Maybe this pose is like a tray of butter. This twist is like a tray of butter for your spine.”

Yoga is like the anti butter, but it’s also like butter for my mood.