Things Change

Things change, and one thing that seems to change consistently is the name of this blog. And I’m not going to apologize for that. Currently its taking on its third and probably most drastic transformation, which only makes sense since 2010 has so far, for its author, been a year of drastic transformations.

Easy Pizza at Home

My Dad is an honest man. He's I-want-to-hit-you-over-the-head honest. Yes-you-look-fat-in-that-dress honest. So I value his input on the things that I make because I know he's not going to sugar coat his opinion or take into consideration my, you know, feelings or obsessive desire to please. So here's a recap of my culinary exploits and my dad's subsecuent review of them:

- Libyan Spaghetti-- "I don't like it, it tastes weird."
- Fried Rice-- "Its too spicy, why did you make it spicy?"
- Salad-- "Doesn't taste like much."
- Cassoulet-- "You added way too many beans." (He repeated this to me at least ten times over the next day or two.)
- Moroccan Stew-- "I don't like that it has a sweet smell, I'm going to have a steak."

So you can imagine my relief and feeling of utter triumph when last night he finally, really, truly, without reservations or critiques liked something I made: Pizza.

My Grandmother's Cooking

My grandmother might be one of the best cooks around but I wouldn't know it. While my brother and I were raised by my grandparents on endless portions of vibrant and savory rice and beans, fresh tostones made from both plantains and pana, fork-tender meat I've never seen anyone be able to reproduce, and chicken that actually had flavor and depth, my grandmother didn't do much more than reheat it in the microwave and serve it to us. All my childhood food memories, and my current lunches on Tuesdays and Fridays, come from one of the best cooks I know: Carmen.

**Three recipes at the end of the post.

The Ick Factor

For strictly research purpose, I've been watching old episodes of Julia Child's The French Chef show. Needless to say, its amazing. As RX (R's new title on the blog), once pointed out, "She could not get on television today." And its true. She couldn't even get on television in Britain back when she was a star (they thought she was drunk on camera). What's wonderful about her show is all her quirks and the overall lack of polish (except when it comes to the food, of course)-- she's out of breath halfway through the episode, she drops things, and she often forgets what she's going to say and glares directly into the camera. I'd like to think the sheer amount of butter and oil she pours into everything would make modern cooks blush but then Paula Deen, or as I like to call her, Satan, does unfortunately exist in this world. (Deen is the inventor of the Lady's Brunch Burger.)

But what blew me away about Julia's show is her embrace (girly as it is) of what I've dubbed the Ick Factor. She starts off the Boulaibasse show with a close up on a giant fish head which she then rips the gills out of to show why you shouldn't cook with them (they're full of "impurities"). In the same show she tosses whole fish into broth and continually refer to them as cute. When a live lobster protests against being boiled alive by slapping Julia's fingers with its tail she turns it into a little goof by adding sound effects-- pampampampam! Yes, adorable. In the age of icanhascheezeburger and Hello Kitty, cute as edible wouldn't exactly fly on mainstream television and neither would putting a face to what you're eating. At least not for your standard American audience.

Food Nazi

Yesterday I engaged my family in a mini-WWIII. As a card carrying CSA member and vegetarian who makes exceptions for humanely raised meat, I'm firmly anti-processed foods and I've joined the party seeking to eliminate them from the face of the earth. Stepping off the plane in my knee-high boots and black coat, venturing into my Burger King obsessed homeland with unusually straight posture, the food nazi in me decide it was game on.

I stormed my parent's house like the Gestapo, proclaiming everything in their fridge an offense punishable by death-- I'm not exactly exaggerating since processed ham and cheese products, "Whole Wheat White" bread, and sugary box cereals are in fact killing the US... but I digress.

But my Dad, the Winston Churchill of daily meat intake and ice cream doused with cognac, armed a defensive strike against my blitzkrieg by making fun of me and shaking his head while laughing at my young, hippie ways. The processed ham would stay. The family fridge officially became Poland.

A Lunatic's Harmonious Recipe

Aside from food writing, my other preoccupation is film production. Its what I studied, its my long term relationship, and even when I've broken up with it I can't help but come back for one last hook up.

So, of course, my first instinct when I moved out to Austin was to look for freelance film work, preferably on set and paid. In no time, I had a UT student film shoot lined up. And that, my dear reader, is what I've been doing most of today and what I will be doing all of tomorrow.

If you know me personally, then you're probably aware of the fact that I am a crazy person. Not a take medication, see a shrink (though I should), hear voices kind of crazy, but the irrational, puzzling, why on earth are you doing this, kind of crazy person. I like to think its part of my charm... (Cough)

Tito- Cuento ganador del Certamen de El Nuevo Dia

This story won the Certamen de Cuento de El Nuevo Día 2009, along with Cezanne Cardona's El silencio de Mefisto. You can bug him to put his on his blog. Here for your enjoyment (Spanish-speakers only, I'm afraid) is Tito.

Tito

Por Andrea Moya

Titubeando por el calor húmedo de una ciudad ajena, Tito fuma sin inhalar. El cigarrillo le guinda del labio como el palo de una paleta le guinda a un niño haciendo como si fumara. Los letreros en chino son una anomalía cotidiana que nunca fallan en hacerle sonreír sin proponérselo. Es la persona más alta en su canto de calle y se mueve a un ritmo distinto al torrente de personas que chocan contra sus piernas, sus brazos, se lo llevan por el medio.

Desde el primer día se había sentido en su casa aunque fuera de su casa. Él era así desde chiquito, más cómodo tirado en el sofá jugando con el Playstation de su amigo y cenando con los vecinos, que estando en su propia casa, comiendo con su propia familia. Nueva York lo llevaba esperando con los brazos abiertos hacía tiempo ya. Al fin decidió tirársela por eso de, y a ver cómo se las hacía para no perder la cordura, el sabor y el ritmo, y el anhelo del regreso que es patrimonio de su cultura fugaz.

Porque a Tito disque no le importa eso. Tiene el cool muy alto, muy desarrollado para sentirse extranjero. Por eso, después de aterrizar en Kennedy, Terminal 5, JetBlue, se metió en Chinatown, el pueblo de inmigrantes donde todo el mundo viene de otro lao, y nadie pertenece. Es como un pueblo transitorio que lleva ya cien años en transición pero sin llegar a un acuerdo en cuanto a donde coño quieren ir. Vino ese día a comer perro con salsa soya y tofú y se quedó. Después de cuatro meses fumaba más para protegerse contra la peste a pescado y basura que por adicción. En ese rincón de todo lo sucio y olvidado en Nueva York tenía su casa, un estudio más closet que cuarto, donde un matres, un tocador y un “hot plate” compartían el piso sucio que no barría nunca porque no le cabía una escoba. No era su casa en Dorado ni la casa de sus padres en Montehiedra pero era pleno Manhattan y completa libertad. Esa libertad que se forja cuando uno voluntariamente abandona la comodidad.

Caminando por la calle empinada y estrecha, casi solo, con la excepción del vagabundo que yacía casi vivo junto a sus Adidas, le entra uno de esos toques filosóficos que transitan con las brizas contaminadas de esa ciudad de artistas y financieros. Todos pagamos un precio por lo que ya nos pertenece, se dice sin rencor ni malas mañas. Todo en la vida es alquile, se dice sonriendo.

Knives!!!

A few weeks ago I attended my first ever cooking class. We prepared nothing, no oven or burners were lit, we did not consume anything during or after class (except for some female hipsters I was unfortunate enough to share a metal counter with who kept munching on the raw produce in the way rabbits would if rabbits were annoying), we in fact did not cook at all during this cooking class. Because this was a cooking class about one of the most elemental aspects of cooking: knife skills.

The class took place in a converted-warehouse space in Williamsburg with a butcher/cooking supply shop in the front leading to two classrooms, one on the ground floor and one upstairs, their entrances just next to the meat counter. The space was once a mattress storage facility that little by little was being transformed into a teaching kitchen. On polished metal kitchen islands set diagonally in front of a large counter space, about ten cutting boards lay side by side awaiting the arrival of knife-toting students wanting to learn how to cut things more betterer. Our teacher was fairly young, a professional cook with a thick Brooklyn accent a la Joe Pesci (you-know-what-I'm-sayin'), a fun sense of humor about cutting into arteries, who was completely and cleanly bald, with tattoos peaking out from under his long-sleeved shirt and a really wonderful ability to explain things quickly and understandably.

In a little under two hours Joe, as I'll call him, went through a number of French cutting techniques with us that were life-changing. Dinner will be ready that much quicker, be cooked that much more evenly, look that much better and our carpal tunnel syndrome will not get worse. Those 90+ minutes were an emotional roller coaster ride, comparable to some of the best action films like Independence Day or The Poseidon Adventure. There was fear at first, German steel flashing as we learned how to realign the knife's teeth (more on that soon) to a perfect 20 degree angle on an iron. Then enlightenment when banging our knives down on defenseless vegetables became easy gliding blades. Surprise at the ease with which we could now make plateaus, juliennes, and itty bitties (forgot the proper French name for these) and humor when Joe pointed at the plateaus "$12 salad," the juliennes "$14 salad" and the itty bitties "$18 salad, add some truffle oil and you got a $22 salad." (It was funny to us.) Then there was the turning point, a whole new perspective on life as Joe showed us a move that should be patented in how obvious yet not obvious it is. It involved an onion, that's all you get for now.

The class itself was a lot of fun and the things learned were worth every cent of those $40. If you are interested in a Knife Skills or even a butchering, pickeling, wine making, or any number of other potentially life-chaning one-nighter cooking classes like this one check out Brooklyn Kitchen Lab (look for the cow outside, you'll see what I mean).

But now the...

Three Ingredients, Three Recipes

While I know I owe all you all a knife skills posting (have yet to take the pictures to go with it, I promise it'll be ready next week), I just got back from PR. This means I have done little to no cooking, so upon our return R, moreso than I actually, was excited to get me back in the kitchen. Unfortunately, we only had a handful of things available for me to cook with, namely onions, garlic, and Parmesan Regiano cheese. I'm setting these guys apart from my regular kitchen staples like rice, pasta, bread, olive oil, butter, and so on. And while I've often denounced the college student diet of carbs and cheese, here it was staring at me in the face. Luckily I knew what to do.

If you ever need to go Iron Chef on your weekday dinner, here are three simple, highly delicious recipes that go very well with a poached egg on top or, if you're feeling fancy, a side salad. And wine. Remember, we're never too broke for booze.

When Food Hurts

It happens without you realizing it. Things are hunky dory, life is better than you could ever have expected it could be, and then... you reach the line. Sometimes in the heat of passion, often fueled by alcohol or starvation, you're three miles in before you even realize it and then there's no turning back. Other times you cross it knowing full well what you're doing but praying that maybe this time, maybe today... it won't be so bad. But it is. It always is. Its worse than awkward sex because it lingers and it adds rather than subtracts calories from your already substantial thighs. Its that feeling of eating WAY TOO MUCH.

I'm there right now. Smutty Nose Pumpkin Ale and three... yes, three.. helpings of Savory Pumpkin Pie. There was no need, and no amount of whole wheat crust will ever set things right. Overeating on weekday nights is tantamount to shooting up heroin in some people's minds. I'd venture to say in most. Overeating on the weekend or on vacation or at food events is a relatively harmless offense, often a cause for celebration, an achievement, its fun! But when you cross the line any time from Monday to Friday its the end. You had no business drinking in the first place and who told you to make something so decadent anyway? That's a WEEKEND meal.

Don't get me wrong, it was good. Very good. Even though I burnt the pumpkin and the crust was too thick in places and it tasted mostly of cheese and onion (as if this was bad), the bits of pumpkin that did shine through were intoxicating, and once you cross the one stick of butter threshold you know you're in a good place. So why do I feel guilt ridden and sick?

Heroin. I can picture skinny model-type girls in Gestapo uniforms breaking down the door of my den of decadence and grease, taking away my kitties, while I sit strung out on cheese, too busy shoving homemade quiche and muffins down my throat to stop them. One of them helps R up, takes the pancakes and bacon out of his hands, hell, out of his mouth, gone slack from an intense food coma. She determines his waistline is still salvageable. Handing him a piece of celery and a small container of low-fat Ranch dressing, he crunches down greedily, his lovehandles deflating almost instantly. His eyes come back to life, cleared of the haze of fat and sugar. He smiles. So R and Ms. Skeletor walk merrily out the door holding hands, happy to be rid of the odor of smoking oil and spilt beer.

OK, maybe I'm being just a bit melodramatic.

I've already covered this topic in various manifestations, from how the French do it and stay beautiful, to the place gorging on food holds within all important events and celebrations. In light of both extremes its impossible to miss why the weekday binge becomes such an unpleasant hiccup in the landscape of your self-image. A plague worse than swine flu chokes this great nation of cheeseburgers and French, pardon, Freedom fries.

Obesity hangs heavy and menacing over our heads, threatening like a vulture to inflate an ear, a foot, a nose, a tummy to gargantuan proportions, if ever we neglect to pay attention. Here in New York the dangers of obesity are spoon fed to us, so to speak, in Bloomberg's subway ad, in the calorie-counting menus of chain restaurants, in the food blogs. As New Yorkers we figure we're safe. Just stay out of McDonalds, we say to ourselves, we'll never be fat, we say, chomping down on a bagel with cream cheese and lox, we walk everywhere, we tell ourselves, our mouths full of perfect chocolate chip cookies six inches in diameter, we shop at Farmer's Markets and Whole Foods. That can't happen here.

In California its worse. They ritually purify themselves of their desserts on treadmills and in

weight rooms, exorcising any suggestion of flab from their perfectly toned bodies which threaten to let loose, droop, and swell if ever you dare miss an appointment with your trainer. Everyone knows you die then, alone, hated, judged. The people of the coasts, we walkers, joggers, yoga-addicts, we young and beautiful foodies of the coasts have declared war on this affliction and confined it to the center of the country, to the fat states where the clown and the Colonel to reign unchecked, a lawless land of fried chicken, high fructose corn syrup, and MSG. We beautiful, young foodies turn our noses up at the fat tourists who take up what could've been our seat in the subway, self-righteously congratulating ourselves on losing more and more weight the longer we remain standing, holding onto the pole with out muscular hands. We are the true martyrs of America.

OK, I'll stop right there. I know overeating once in a while is not the fast ticket to death, isolation and obesity. But doesn't it sometimes feel like it, though? It must be those ads on the subway. They make one feel fat. But I know I'm OK because those pumpkins... they came from the Farmer's Market so its OK. Everything will be OK.

***While the first picture is from Flickr and was now taken by me, it resembles the final product that I made. I promise to start taking pictures again.

Baked Goods, Cheese, and Peanut Butter- Eating Alone

My dinner tonight has been the simplest I've had since.... since last time R went away for a video game convention.

Hmmm, what a coincidence.

I ate the remains of meals pasts. Biscuits I baked this morning for our spending-the-weekend-apart breakfast, cheese I bought for a quiche I made for a dinner at the apartment, and some wine leftover from earlier this week when a friend came to visit. I won't go so far as to say I was looking to relive them or found any special nostalgia in these relics of time spent with friends, with R, with the stove. While over the past couple of week meals have involved hours of slaving away, allowing to rise, and special ingredients from Murray's cheeses, whenever R goes away, and I don't have friends over to make up for it it, I usually make due with some baked goods, cheese, sometimes peanut butter, and whatever alcohol is left in the house (no, I don't need it, I prefer it). That's what I eat when I'm alone.

During the summer, reviews were everywhere for Deborah Madison's "What We Eat When We

Eat Alone," a cookbook and story book about the liberties people take with their meals when they are eating with no one to judge them and no one to impress. My approach to eating alone is very similar to my friend Marc's who, upon moving into his apartment in Greenpoint shortly after arriving from France, barely had furniture, slept on a mattress on the floor, and lived on ramen, cheese, and peanut butter. When I asked why he has such a spartan diet he explained: "I ate it and then I wasn't hungry anymore." What I realized is that during the past year, whenever R was away, which was often, I usually made due in a very similar way. A slice of pizza on the way home happened frequently, as did a solitary beer at Think Coffee, bread and hummus was a classic, recently a loaf of banana bread and a jar of peanut butter became breakfast and dinner almost every night for a week. The most elaborate solo meal I fashioned was a fake fettucini alfredo and I even went so low as to buy a can of Mushroom Cream Soup. I can't be bothered to stew a chilli or sear meat or chop garlic when the only ones who are going to watch me eat are Tito and Spider, specially since they've eaten already. But it wasn't always like that, which is the funny part.

My love affair with cooking started in my little kitchen in Madrid. I began to experiment with recipes, ingredients, flavors, and cooking styles in order to save money. The semester before I lived in Prague, dining out almost every lunch and dinner, drinking at bars and clubs several times a week, and luxuriating as 25 crowns to the dollar. But when I did my little stint around Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest, and ended up flat broke in Paris at the wrong airport, then flat broke in Madrid with a three day wait for my flight back home, I learned a powerful lesson about my relationship with money: I suck at handling it. So when I went back to Madrid for the next semester, I turned a new leaf. I got a part time job tutoring the inimitable Angel Aragones twice a week for 100 euros, and packed my lunch almost every single day, splurging on drinks and food twice a week with the theater class and only one night per weekend. I guess I should also mention that was my brief stint as a vegetarian (Spain fixed that pretty quickly, though) so it was a necessity for me to provide alternatives to the countless menús del día that included jamón serrano and chorizo.

So I began making rice dishes with vegetables and curry, simple pastas, chilli, baked apples in lettuce leaves (disastrous), roasted potatoes and vegetables, even tortilla española every so often. Not much compared to what I pull off now, but then it was revelatory. When I came back to the world of carnivores, I went so far as to make chicken breast cooked with white wine, tomato sauce, and cheese. I learned to cook alone, cooking for myself. When I began cooking for others my little bubble was shattered, but also my repertoire expanded.

When R is alone all day with the cats, I know exactly what his diet is like: cereal with milk,

pastrami sandwiches from the deli, leftovers from dinner that I remind him to heat up and eat, eggs, and every so often he calls me at the office and asks, "What should I have for lunch today?" and I look through my mental inventory of available ingredients, discuss possible preparations and combinations, and reply, "I'll email you the instructions." When I create this instant recipes I go back to that time in Madrid when I could invent something on the spot with whatever was on hand, some spices, and a frying pan. I can only imagine that I'm able to do for him what I don't for myself anymore because by writing out the recipe for him to follow and asking him how it turned out (usually burned or "not as good as when you make it"), it is a form of me cooking for him but through him.

And just so you know, while I wrote this post, I finished off half a bottle of wine and several spoonfuls of peanut butter. Why can't I have a boyfriend who calls me and offers me a recipe?

They Need Me to Feed Them

One morning I woke up surrounded on all sides by the three most important men in my life: R, Tito, and Spider. Looking at the three of them all cuddled up to me I realized: I have to feed them every day. They rely on me for this.

There was something strange about that realization because while its a given that cats have to be fed, its odd to think that my human does as well. But its really not that strange, Hispanic and an aspiring foodie I insist on feeding everyone who comes over, like it or not. I've spontaneously made cookies, beer bread, and muffins, the occasion being we had another person in the house. And alternatively, when R goes away on a trip for even as long as three days, unless I have guests over, I eat out my lunches and have toast with cheese and jam for dinner every night. Cooking just doesn't seem worth the trouble. Even making a simple pasta seems a tediously long process during those times. Yet when I have someone to cook for I go all out, like last night: rotini al telefono, braised bok choy, cornmeal cookies with lime glaze, and the dough of a quiche tart. I went to bed at 1:30 am and I'm up at 7 am. Why? My cats demanded to be fed.

Recently I was chatting with my friend Mario about why we cook. A newly minted Culinary Institute of America student with lofty dreams of a Momofuku-style restaurant empire, he and I differ quite a bit in terms of our approach to cooking but are bonded by it (and our mutual love for R). The chef of Savoy Cabbage in South Africa explained it best in an article he wrote for Gastronomica: its the difference between men and women. For men its about showing off what they can do, for women its about making sure people are well-fed and satisfied. This symbol seems to be a motif but its no less true, its yin and yang. Mario and I embody that. He cooks

the way artists paint and actors perform. For him cooking is more than just nourishing, feeding, and palatal pleasure, its spectacle, presentation, and above all experimentation. So I asked him why he cooked, having recently discovered my own reasons for it. Forget about passion and love for food and creativity, if anything that's a given. The question was, what is the driving force that makes you want to cook?

Mario loves working in restaurant kitchens, loves standing around in a small cramped space all day with people yelling. He loves the kind of food you can only get at restaurants, specially the ones that use chemicals to transform them into something completely different from what they were or could ever be in nature. He loves the hierarchy of the restaurant, the chef's coat, and went so far as to admit for him being a chef is a power thing. He loves standing by the table and having people looking up at him, he loves that whole culture of fine dining and innovative cooking. And at 22, he's rather good at it. But at the end he put it quite simply: "I cook to be loved."

For me, restaurants are not my bag. The hierarchy intimidates me, I can't take the structure and prestige of it too seriously because I can't shake the feeling that at the end of the day, its just food, except when there's a business and stocks and employees and benefit plans involved its not just food. Maybe because I don't go to restaurants often, because I don't have a sense of presentation, because I'd rather control my kitchen than be part of the kitchen factory. While I consider culinary school and cooking professionally on a daily basis, an idea borne of the philosophy of making a career from what you love to do, the more I think about entering the restaurant world the less appealing it sounds to me. I like that in my kitchen there are no rules, no pressure, I'm alone and free to do what I want. Its how I unwind and express myself creatively. I cook because I enjoy feeding people and eating good food, but I like sitting at the table with them and eating with them. I'm the home cook to Mario's restaurant chef.

If you boil it down, though, we're not really that different. I had a telling moment a few days ago when my friend D was here. He stood in front of me as I offered R a taste of something I was making for the first time. He says my eyes widened in anticipation in this please like it sort of way, something I wasn't conscious of doing. I'm sure I make that face every time I ask R if he likes what I've made. At the end of the day Mario and I are still cooking for the same reason, even if we approach cooking very differently. Like him, I cook to be loved.

Disaster and Redemption

I've had a few disasters happen in the kitchen, and though none involved fire, broken limbs, or deep, hospital-enducing burns, none has ever been quite as disastrous as my attempt to make Day of the Dead Bread. I've tried making pumpkin fritters that disintegrated, I've made bread that tastes like yeast, I've burned onions to the point of being inedible, those would all qualify as run of the mill "fails." This sweet bread was what the internet calls an "epic fail," a train wreck in slow motion, and I knew it had the potential for failure from the very beginning yet I held out hoping beyond hope that it would work out. I figured if it failed to be bread it could at least be cake, at least it can taste sweet and delicious even if its rocks hard and dense. No, I was wrong.

The problem was two-fold and it involved the yin and yang of cooking: heat and cold. My first mistake was to mix scalding hot milk milk fresh off the stove with delicate, vulnerable active yeast. I never read this but learned through osmosis from my boss that high heat kills yeast yet all recipes

involving yeast require lukewarm water. I failed to put these two pieces of information together and ended up trying to get a three from the equation 1+1. I had unwarranted faith in my two packets of yeast, I believed they would fight and prevail, like when you go to a holiday dinner and promise yourself you won't overeat or drink too much. There's certain thing that science simply does not allow. The second mistake was an honest one and once again, my boss called it. Following the advice of my now two most trusted cooking gurus, Bittman and Smitten, and in consideration of limited weekday time, I decided to let it rise "overnight" (

while I was at work) since I've heard doing that allows the dough to absorb flavors better. I don't think that works with this bread, granted it would've been nice if it had rising agents to begin with. But when I took it out of the fridge and felt the cold sticky dough I knew I'd put the

last nail into this experiment's coffin. I went through the motions, fingers still crossed, I even pretended to let it rise one more time, glazed it, baked it. We didn't cut into it until next morning because I needed to photograph it for F&F. While very pretty on the outside, inside it looked like something dead. It seemed to have not cooked through so the innards were an uneven, white-ish-yellow-ish color even though the exterior had browned. It was cold, too, and damp. R wanted to try it, also hoping that maybe it would taste good, but I didn't even let him. It didn't taste like anything, cardboard maybe. I threw it out.

I think the epic fail of this dead Day of the Dead bread inspired me, though, to make something bigger, better and also very time consuming and hard to make. A winter squash was sitting in my fridge for a couple of weeks asking me to do something with it, throwing out suggestions like soup, sautee, beans... But at the end I decided I wanted to stand in front of a stove for an hour stirring rice.

Squash Risotto.

Luckily I had a helper. No, not R, he would make guest appearances whenever I yelled at him

across the apartment to come cut the parsley or grind some cheese amid protests of I'm almost done with my work (lies). No, there's a reason kitchens are mostly staffed with Hispanics. My friend D, who inhaled a quesadilla in front of me while I sliced into the squash with the biggest knife I own. ("It's like cracking open a skull," said D, his face covered in cheese and guac, "just straight in and then down." I've cracked skull before, thank you very much.) I designated half of the squash to the rissotto and the other half to Tortitas de Calabaza, or Pumpkin fritters (in PR we think squash is pumpkin, but that's OK).

A word on Tortitas de Calabaza. For some children it was freshly baked cookies, for others hot cocoa, or a warm pie, or something else you can buy in a box and heat up. For me-- and I know I'm not alone in this because I got the recipe from a close friend of mine-- it was Tortitas de Calabaza. They're basically fritters: fried dough, except these are made with "pumpkin," brown sugar, and cinnamon. As I mentioned earlier, my first attempt at making these was disastrous. I was inventing the recipe and had no idea what I was doing. The dough disintegrated in the hot oil and I had throw away the whole mess. Flour and egg yolk are key, I discovered. I mean who needs nutritional value when you have a crispy exterior and a chewy interior and its fried? Its my childhood, dammit!

But I digress. D and I were in the kitchen for almost two hours making these two squash-laden dishes. The risotto took twice as long as it normally would and about a chicken's worth of chicken broth because I made the mistake of using brown rice. It really does seem the moment you try to add nutritional value to anything traditional it just ruins it somehow. People in China worked very hard to eat white rice for a reason. But it was the choice between long-grain risotto and short-grain brown rice risotto, we all have our choice to make in life. The consequence of this was that the squash almost completely dissolved into the sauce, thickening and sweetening it to astronomical proportions. It was almost too sweet at the end, though still delicious, and it was the first time I was the one to grab salt and pepper and doused something I'd made with it. Balance is important: heat and cold, sweet and savory, healthy and awesome. And yes, the tortitas were perfect-- can't go wrong with white flour, egg yolk, and sugar fried in oil, specially when there's squash involved. D fried them to their precise color, a dark, golden brown, some developed shapes like hearts or ghosts, they were sweet without being overly sweet, the perfect side dish dessert. (In case you were wondering, yes, I was fat as a child.) Between the three of us we ate an entire winter squash in one dinner. It was glorious.

My previously mixed feeling about the fall-- cold, short days, too much clothes, the official beginning of the eating season (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas)-- have been giving way to a true appreciation of it. The days are brisk and chilly which for the first time in my life I'm genuinely enjoying, the seasonal produce is outstanding, and its the official beginning of the eating season (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas). I think after this dinner I've officially been converted to loving fall. Winter is going to take a little more effort.

** Note: None of the pictures are mine, they were pulled from the web.

5 am: Thinking About Anise

I woke up around 4:30 am and could not go back to sleep. There's a somewhat ambitious project coming my way later today which is keeping me up. It involves 4 hours of work (ok, 2 1/2 of those require me to do nothing and I could even just let the thing happen overnight, but still, 4 hours!!!), it needs to be photographed and then written about, and then eaten. It involves a spice that is all but new to me, anise seeds. I've only ever known anise as a liqueur used in Spanish cooking so the the smell of these little seeds brings me visions of Roscón and Easter and the taste of sweet licorice embedded in a warm sweet bread encrusted in sugar and dotted with dried fruit and almonds. Spanish cooking at its very best. What I plan to make is only once removed from that. Its a Mexican sweet bread called Pan de Día de los Muertos (or Day of the Dead Bread). I'll post about it tomorrow when I make it.

Now I'm not doing this for myself. Squash and blue cheese pizza, I do for myself. Homemade whole wheat bread, I do for myself. Apple crisp, I do for myself. This is a project for work, which is another reason I'm up thinking about anise. I'm mentally writing my article, having decided on a new approach to this once annoying, now approaching cool website I work for called Fabulous & Frugal. At this point its smeared with enough of my writing that I'm starting to care for it. I'm particularly proud of my beer article and Part Two of the Student Loans trilogy (I don't pick the titles). So I want to start applying what I learned during my food writing course and start to incorporate structure into my articles as mindfully as I would if I were writing something for the New York Times (no, I'm not comparing Fab & Fru to the New York Times, one is my current place of employment, the other an aspiration, ok?). Lede, nutgraf, body, close.

While thinking about the lede I realized something that makes Day of the Dead Bread particular, specially when made within the context of American culture: its sweet (and it contains anise, but that's what makes it particular to me). Even Jewish Challah and Americanized French Croissants don't quite make it to the sweetness level inherent in Iberian and Hispanic sweet breads. Roscón is a classic example. My best friend's mother, originally from Galicia, makes these bread cakes every Easter and every Three Kings Day. The texture is bready and flaky but the intensity is that of pastry glazed with granulated sugar and liqueur because even confectioner's sugar would be too light. Not that confectioner's sugar doesn't have its place. Take the Puerto Rican majorca, even when you eat it with ham and cheese its still sprinkled with white dusty sugar. The Portuguese have their own sweet bread, Massa Sovada, and like Roscón and Day of the Dead Bread, its baked mostly for Easter and Christmas. I would say, though, that Massa Sovada is closer to Puerto Rican Pan Sobao, a bread that's sweet but still more bread than cake. In any case, both are still sweeter than anything found in the American spectrum of breads. [Correction: I glanced at the backcover of my latest issue of Cook's Illustrated and prominently displayed was the Louisiana King Cake, an American version of Roscón doused in sprinkles for Mardi Gras.]

Since bread-making has become my new thing lately-- so far I've made two pizzas, 5 loaves of 100% Whole Wheat Bread and all but one have been light, sweet, and very good, two loaves of beer bread, and two loaves of something that wanted to resemble a baguette but wasn't sure how-- now I'm going to enter that netherworld of the cake-bread hybrid. Luckily, I'm not starting with the ones I know and love, the ones from home for which I have high expectations that can never be met (its me, not the recipe, take for example my disastrous experience with Sazón, the Puerto Rican restaurant that although good, wasn't up to snuff with my expectations; even the coffee I make here doesn't taste like coffee back home even though my mom ships me Yaucono and my favorite gourmet stuff that comes straight from the plantations in Yauco and Lares). When entering undiscovered territory you might as well go all the way so I'm starting in Mexico, with a tablespoon of anise seeds.

10 lbs. of Kosher Lamb

Two sets of ribs, some five pounds of nicely marbled ground meat, and a hunk of fat, flesh, and bone I can't even identify because the label is in Hebrew, are currently residing in my freezer. Meat has returned to my kitchen after nearly two years' absence. When I told my writing professor, a New Englander of Portuguese origin, he responded with a hearty, "Welcome back." 

We'll think of the slaughtered lamb from Mitzvah Meats as a sort of celebration.

Why I came back to meat is obvious: meat is delicious. As a foodie, my pseudo-morals about not killing animals and the fact that humans don't need to eat meat (it is bad for you to eat it every day, in my opinion) have never held enough water to keep me out of the blood and flesh pool for more than a few months at a time. Come on, I grew up watching entire hogs with metal poles sticking out of their mouths and rear ends rotate slowly over an open fire. Before my age had entered the double digits I picked at blood sausage and charred skin along with all of the adults, luxuriating in the meaty wonder of it. I've been a closet foodie most of my life and when I finally decided to embrace this obsession with food, meat was right there grabbing at my pseudo-vegetarian ankles, begging to be heard or, rather, prepared.

And finally I did. On Monday I made pork chops. The first meat I cook since I left Spain in 2007.

But my qualms about the killing of animals (and all the rampant cruelty of corporate America's industrialized farms, see Food, Inc.) for what I consider a luxury item still bring up images of horrifying cruelty, eyes wide with fear and confusion before a bloody, painful death. So I decided that the only way I could really enter the meat cooking world was to buy meat from a provider I knew had given my dead animal a good life. Enter my CSA and their connection to Mindful Meats, or Mitzvah Meats. Although the price for all the lamb was steep, it was kosher, humanely raised, and pasture-fed. And most importantly, you knew this meat was going to taste awesome.

The clincher was the idea of making a lamb ragú. I have no idea how I'm even going to make that with the weird cuts I was given and my utter lack of a meat cleaver, but a ragú will be made, along with a tajin and... ribs, I guess. This is a bright new world that has opened up for me in the kitchen and while chicken is off-limits for now and vegetables will still hold the upper hand, I'm finally catching up with the rest of Food World. Many great vegetarian cooks will argue that you don't have to make this stuff to be considered a foodie but the bloodlust is ingrained in me. My culture, my upbringing, my tastes all demand a meat fix every so often. Usually red. Usually rare.

I'm excited.

Simplicity, simplicity

While French and American haute cuisine has embrace a culture of complexity when it comes to food- reductions, confits, exotic ingredients, strange parts of an animal you didn't even know you could eat- there's been more than a few place that I've visited recently where what has prevailed is simplicity over engineering. Among them Momofuku Milk, Egg, Una Pizza Napolitana, and even 11 Madison Park, although the latter isn't as clear-cut as the others.

Momofuku is a dessert restaurant in the East Village that is part of the other Momofuku restaurants including Ssam bar (rated one of the top 50 restaurants in the world), Momofuku Noodle bar, and Ko. At Momofuku milk you have a wide range of desserts from cookies to cakes and pies, bread, milks, and if you're looking for savory, pork buns and beer. The kitchen is visible from the standing-only tables and the smell of sweet dough and cookies slowly baking is thick in the air. In the evening the line rivals that around Magnolia during the summer tourist season. The first two things I ever tried there set the tone for me and established it as my favorite dessert restaurant: cornflake and marshmallow cookie and cereal milk. I'd heard about this new trend that was happening among the pastry chefs in New York of incorporating breakfast flavors into desserts and breakfast being my favorite meal of the day, combined with a massive sweet tooth, this was heaven. The cereal milk was the remnants of a satisfactory bowl of Frosted Flakes and the cornflakes cookie was perfectly crispy around the edges and gooey and thick in the middle. They somehow manage to do this with all their cookies. But the cakes pushed it even further. Each is a three story affair with a distinctive identity- chocolate cake, chocolate chip cake, banana cake- but it's the small layer of filler in between each of the layers that demands to be heard. The banana cake, which my friends got, almost made me cry it was so good. The cake itself is soft and in between the layers of soft banana cake were gravelly sweet layers of cinnamon and brown sugar. This was repeated in the chocolate chip cake where layers of passion fruit offset the classic vanilla cake with chocolate chips embedded. Their most successful pie, though, is also one of the simplest things: crack pie, or just pie, the kind of pie people made when you couldn't afford to mix fruit and frills in with the butter and sugar mix. A sweet oat crust with a simple filling. Works every time. I could go on about their soft serve (last time I went they had Sour Gummy and Fireball as flavors) and the rest of their repertoire but I think the examples say it all. These are classic simple flavors reinvented within another very recognizable and accessible form. 

Egg is a variation on the idea of simplicity because unlike Momofuku Milk it doesn't strive to reinvent so much as excel. Their food is classic Southern cooking with fresh, seasonal ingredients produced locally (like their cheddar cheese and brioche) or grown upstate. While their dinner crowd is still rather (thankfully) thin, their breakfast and brunch crowd waits almost an hour for a table in their narrow dining room. I hate waiting for table. It makes me irritable and generally makes me more aggressively critical of the food. But Egg although always a wait in the morning is entirely worthwhile. The Egg Rothko (brioche with an egg cooked inside a hole in the middle and smothered in cheddar cheese with a side of either meat or seasonal vegetables and some roasted tomato) and the Grits and Eggs (also with a side of either vegetables or meat) astound because of their precise, fresh flavors that are so simple their natural complexity is brought out. This is even true in the coffee they serve, always in a french press with lots of grounds, the coffee is very flavorful and rich, even thick if that can be achieved with french press. During lunch their half-pound, grass-fed beef burger is pretty much the best burger I've ever had. When you ask for medium rare that's what they give you and the seasoning of the meat complements it rather than overwhelming the flavor of the meat itself. Skip the french fries, though you probably won't be able to. Recently they've also started serving wine and beer. They stock some local brews including Brooklyn One which gives continuity to their philosophy of fresh and local. For dinner, the duck and dirty rice still haunts me, although I can't say they have the best corn bread (Peter's takes the award for that) butvtopped with kale it becomes something else. Their mac and cheese is excellent (anything with cheese you have a good shot with) as are their biscuits. You will never leave Egg hungry and you will never regret having a meal there. As one chef put it when asked how he taught his child to eat well, if he made a macaroni and cheese with four cheeses and bread crumbs, it may be more fattening that your out of the box M/C but the ingredients are real, it is more wholesome. That's Egg in a nutshell. Basically you know you're eating something good.

I've already discussed Una Pizza Napolitana in my previous posting so take a look, it's a similar idea to Egg's just boiled down even further.

As for Eleven Madison Park, you could almost say the simplicity of their food is relative. Relative to other restaurants of their caliber that use more complex ingredients and preparations (and I'm sure 11 MP does too in certain dishes) but their was a great deal of simplicity in a lot of the dishes. Slow-poached egg with asparagus was bright and interesting, the Atlantic Halibut tasted like halibut with lemon and capers, even the duck had a simple symphony of lavender, honey, and rhubarb to offset the fattiness, but the red, soft meat still stood out among the undertones. The best dessert was the Tahitian Vanilla Souffle with Passion Fruit that beat out the intensely chocolatey Symphony No. 2 and the Cherry Crumble (that one was interesting, the cherries were sour and intensely sweet, almost like candy except for the texture). But their were little things served aside that really stood out for me. A bite-sized roll of cucumber and salmon that simply jumped out at you, the cucumber wet and sweet with a blast of salmon flavor packed into a pink square one square inch in size. An olive and rosemary bread, smaller than a normal rolls, served with either goat's milk butter and unsalted cow's milk butter with salt on the side (the separation of the salt and butter made a huge difference in the flavor). And finally, these small cookies you get at the end, with a flaky crust and a half inch layer of creamy filling, with flavors ranging from rose to peanut butter and jelly, those two in particular being the stand outs of the crowd. They're very small and anything but one note. The rose in particular was complex and unexpected, sweet with a flavor you're not used to, unlike the violet that definitely tasted of chocolate. I can't even talk about the wine.

Flowers might seem like something you wouldn't categorize as "simple" but they're as simple as it gets. Like when you have breakfast for dessert, the difference is you're experiencing something familiar in a different way. This is the testimony of complex culinary experimentation but the foundation of that is simple, fresh ingredients with classic preparations that take something ordinary and push it further, done especially well when it's an almost obvious direction you wouldn't have expected it to go in.