Excuses, excuses

I've been traveling, I've been writing for the paper, I've been watching Mad Men...

Here's is a recap of what I've had published this month.

Música 24/7: Cierran las calles. Empiezan con la famosa 6th Street, la calle de las barras, en Downtown. Poco a poco, durante la semana, el tránsito humano reemplaza el tráfico de carros por casi todo el sur de Austin, Texas. Y se desparrama la música. Baja por South Congress, cruza los puentes y se insinúa por South Lamar, la escuchas aunque no te lo propongas, aunque no estés viendo en el show.

Vibrante el East End de Londres:  Salir de la estación Aldgate East del Underground es ingresar al meollo de la acción y el bullicio. Decenas de personas de todas partes del mundo recorren con prisa, esquivando vendedores y promotores, las calles laberínticas del East End de Londres, donde se conectan los barrios de Whitechapel, Brick Lane y Spitalfields.

In One Cook's Hands: I grew up on carne mechada and fried plantains the way most American kids my age were raised on pot roast and mashed potatoes. My brother and I would get home from school and dart through the kitchen past Carmen, the woman who’s cooked and kept house for my grandmother since as far back as I can remember, as she flipped a fork-tender bistec (steak) as it sizzled or hovered over a pot of simmering beans that exhaled the smell of recao and garlic with the steam. Yet it never occurred to me to ask her how to make any of the soul-soothing comida criolla, or comfort food, she piled high on my plate. Puerto Rico is where I was born, where I grew up, and where I currently reside. But it’s not where I learned to cook.

Quiz Night at the Dial Arch

It’s amazing how quickly the brain sorts information, specially when lubricated with a room temperature ale at an English pub in Southeast London. The quizmaster—a thirtyish bartender with a microphone and a list of questions—made the rounds of the booths and tables, repeating the question, “What is the capital of Uruguay?”

My brain, a depository of useless information, ideal for activities such as this, went through the following process: map of South America, Uruguay is not Paraguay, Uruguay is across the river from Argentina, Buenos Aires is across the river from… “Montevideo!”

Five of us at the table, my friends looked up at me. “Are you sure?”

Crema de Zanahorias y Calabasa

Whenever Julia Child dropped something on camera or flipped a potato pancake too early or generally fumbled about the kitchen in a manner that made the BBC believe that she was drunk, she would look at the camera, her trademark smile fading for a moment.

"Never apologize," she said, looking the housewife taking copious notes of her deceptively easy recipes straight in the eyes. "Just smile and serve your food as if nothing was wrong."

Most of the time, no one except you thinks anything is wrong anyway.

Me, I cook with disclaimers. "Its too spicy, its a little messy, I know what I did wrong..." But heaven help you if you don't eat the damn thing.

Homesick?

Feels like all I talk about lately is New York.

Its like that scene in Mean Girls when pre-cocaine Lindsay Lohan is talking to her friend about how much she hates Rachel McAdams and that's ALL she talks about. I guess its not entirely inaccurate to say New York is that hot girl in school that's also a bully and who is absolutely fascinating for some reason.

Below are the links for the respective articles. Two out of three are about food (surprise, surprise). And, not gonna lie, pretty excited to go visit the city in October on the heels of my London trip.

Impressions of Amsterdam

“I watched the universe fall apart. Twice. When I went to Amsterdam,” was one of the first thing my now ex-boyfriend told me when we met. A concise, albeit dramatic, summary of what Amsterdam means to the uninitiated. Mushrooms are no longer legal in Holland, by the way.

Amsterdam is an idea, a threat really. When someone says, “I’m going to Amsterdam,” the first thing that pops into your head isn’t the Van Gogh Museum (for some it might be, some people have class), its brownies. Special brownies.

But if smoking weed is all Amsterdam is to you then the words of Wells Tower’s customer in a recent GQ article become unavoidably true: “For a visitor, there are two very happy days in Amsterdam—the day you get here and the day you leave.” Granted, I don’t like weed. But even I couldn’t avoid the fact that coming to Amsterdam meant making a certain type of commitment: the universe better f-ing collapse.

5 Food Places I Wish I’d Taken Advantage of When I Lived in New York

I don’t miss living in New York. It’s a difficult, cold city if you’re not head over heels in love with it. But I also think back on all the missed opportunities—the places I now wish were only a $2.50 subway ride away from me, the flavors and atmospheres I missed and the ones I should’ve been devoted to instead of wasting my time on… other places I don’t currently miss or even remember.

While I won’t get that era of my life back, I know where to go when I visit. And I visit a lot.

Northern Bohemia: Part One

Mosquito Mountain

Northern Bohemia is a region north of Prague where fourteen NYU film students spent 48 hours they would have otherwise spent in clubs and bars. But when our professor Otto Urban—a Czech art historian and curator who is as cool as his name—told us he was taking us to Northern Bohemia, it didn’t set up much in terms of expectations. When we pressed him for details he said things like mosquito mountain, bone chapel, mining town performance art piece… In other words, we really just had to trust his judgment on this.

Middle of Nowhere Little Towns

Sprawling metropolis are always fun, as are days out in total wilderness, although small islands with perfect beaches probably head the list of desirable destinations. But few are the accounts of those little in-between towns, the one-road, semi-suburban dots that connect on the road to the big city or the big mountain. For road trippers and bored twenty-something year olds with a car, those middle of nowhere little towns are pure traveler anecdote gold. Here are some of my small town stops, what are some of yours?

Soup & Sandwich

Lunchtime in Puerto Rico sounds like this:

“Me das una medianoche.” (“I’ll have a midnight.”)

“Un Cubano, para llevar.” (“A Cuban to go.”)

“Nada, un bocadillo y un café.” (Eh, just a little bite and some coffe.”)

Like most things, when translated literally the above phrases become almost comical but if you’re a resident of Puerto Rico you’re probably really hungry after reading that list.

The rest of your order might sound like:

“También me das un Mondongo.”

“¿Tienen Caldo Gallego?”

“Y un sancochito.”

Mondongo, Caldo Gallego, and sancocho are Puerto Rico’s answer to broccoli cheddar, chicken noodle, and clam chowder. Except there’s nothing light about having a soup and sandwich for lunch in Puerto Rico.

Cheat Sheet: Spanish Bakeries

Medianoche: pork, ham, swiss cheese with mustard and pickle on yellow egg bread. (Light)

Cubano: pork, leg ham (some places serve it with sweet ham, Altamira included), swiss cheese, mustard, pickles, sometimes shredded lettuce and sliced tomato on pan criollo (soft, baguette-like bread).

Choripan: Spanish chorizo, sweet ham, swiss cheese, on pan criollo.

Caldo Gallego: a Spanish stew consisting of shredded cabbage, diced ham, chorizo sausage, white beans, potatoes, and greens.

Mondongo: tripe soup.

Sancocho: a Puerto Rican stew with lots of root vegetables, shredded chicken, and ham.

Croquetas: Deep-fried, cylindrical pieces of heaven made with a seasoned flour batter and stuffed with either ham, chicken or fish.

Quesitos: Sweet puff pastry full of sweet cream cheese and glazes with sugar. [see picture]

Pastelillos de carne: Savory puff pastry stuffed with picadillo—seasoned ground beef.

Pan Sobao: a very soft, sweet white bread.

Pan de Agua: a soft, baguette-style bread

Café: generally means coffee with hot milk, if you want it black then ask for a Café Negro, if you want it with cold milk, then you’re in the wrong place.

Sleeping and Eating

Hi. You may have noticed this posting says it was put up around 4 am, and you may be wondering why. Well, currently I'm sitting at my computer, having just finished off a delicious frittata and decided this is it for me in terms of what you mortals like to call "sleep."

While I don't usually wake up in the middle of the night and cook myself a lovely meal, I do often wake up in the middle of the night. This 3 am in particular, though, I was inspired. I haven't had those flashes of recipe that keep me up for long after I should've drifted off, thinking of variations I can make with ingredients I have since Brooklyn and the CSA. But more to the point, the past few weeks-- between the family reunion, my trip to New York (to attend a Food Network event), my brother visiting, and Mother's Day-- I haven't had ingredients to daydream about, just endless days of pork, fried things, and cakes.

Spanish Hamburger

I'm not really a vegetarian. R's stepmother was the first to point this out to me during a rather tense dinner during a rather tense trip to Bali. My sweet, charming "mom-in-law," who I got along with as famously as territorial cats get along with each other, said she didn't see how only eating fish qualified me as a vegetarian because she also only ate fish and didn't call herself a vegetarian. I decided to give her match point and ordered the filet mignon. I try not to be a sore loser.

But she did make a point and I think many "vegetarians" such as myself have tried to cover up the ifs and buts and onlys of their diet by inventing all sorts of terms like "pescaterian" and "locavore." At the end of the day, you're still killing an animal for food and crowning yourself humane just because its not a cow. So why did I, and to an extent still do, call myself a vegetarian?

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.

The Future of Food Journalism

With an imminent relocation from New York to Austin, monthly metro card to auto insurance, from aspiring filmmaker to aspiring food writer, I bought a seat to a panel called The Future of Food Journalism. I wanted to know what I was getting myself into and, with a cocktail hour preceding the event, I thought maybe I could make some connections on the way. I even packed some business cards (the ones for the company I no longer work for, still, business cards). But the mass of people I came upon when I came through the glass doors of Culintro, the venue hosting the event, put a stop to any delusion I had of talking to anyone that night. Not while wearing snow boots and a shirt from K-mart anyway. This panel was already proving to be informative.

Networking is the bread and butter of the freelancer and I was learning how to do it by making a series of mistakes. Lesson one: dress well. Lesson two: bring writing utensils. Lesson three: get your business cards up to date. Lesson four: talk to people. While lesson four was being forced upon me (someone sat down next to me and started talking to me, prompting me to respond) the panel, finally, started.

The industry professionals who would be talking to us tonight included: Gabriella Gersherson from Time Out New York, Nick Fauchald of Tasting Table, Francis Lam of Salon.com, and Eric Halweil of the Edible magazines. It was the quality of the panel that had sparked my interest in the first place. I was expecting very gloom and doom prophesying on the death of food writing (akin to my professor David Leite's slap across the face to my food writing class: "You can't make a living doing this.") but hoped for good news. The moderator, Andrew F. Smith, gave a short intro centered around the folding of Gourmet magazine and started off by asking Francis Lam, a former Gourmet editor, if he thought print was dead. Francis' answered with another question, "What is print? Do you mean paper?" Or writing in general? This was an interesting distinction that became a central topic during the discussion.

Food writing is more popular than ever (similarly film box office numbers broke records during a horrible recession yet people are still lamenting the death of film) and what's been happening is that the industry is reinventing itself by embracing new tendencies in the demands of their readers (which in turn satisfy the needs of advertisers):

Shorter attention spans (because of getting most information from a screen) means shorter articles. The days of 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 word pieces and leisurely entering into a story are over. "You gotta give them the sex upfront," said Nick Fauchald, whose entire publication is email-based. Now you get 800 words if you're lucky.

People now want to experience/make/visit what you are writing about rather than just be satisfied reading about it. This has in turn given way to the success of smaller, more community-based publications, niche publications, and an abundance of recipe resources. The Edible magazines, which are small city by city magazines are basically given away at strategic locations but are doing very well economically. Meanwhile, bigger, national publications are straining under their own weight as subscriptions are down (because so much is available for free on the internet) and advertisers go with the numbers. Which leads to the next point...

He who fails to embrace the web is destined to perish. Even Gabriella Gershenson, who is food editor for a print magazine (to which R and I subscribe to) admits that while she received Gourmet in the mail, she read it mostly online. "I'm both helping and killing this medium," she admitted. Gabriella told of when she was hired as a staff writer at Time Out (a position that rarely exists anymore, ergo the need for networking) and how different the goals and priorities of the magazine were back then. She remembers having no web responsibilities whatsoever. But where Time Out has succeeded (and where Conde Nast has failed) is that they did not go into denial about the power of the internet and how important it would be to their magazine's survival. They recognized that print and web are friends. They feed each other and there are things you can do on the web that you simply can't on paper. It's telling that the day Francis Lam was let go from Gourmet (along with the rest of the staff), he was hired by Salon.com.

Those were some of the key points about how food writing was going to live on, but inevitably the question of money, and specifically paying writers came up. Food writers are famously underpaid, having to teach, write books, and become editors (or marry rich) to be able to do what they love. Things have only gotten worse because of the free for all that is the internet. Tasting Table and Salon pay their freelance writers but that's an anomaly. Most websites want writers to work for free, paying them $50 is they're lucky. Meanwhile the bigger publications have brought their rates down considerably. While this question wasn't fully addressed (its hard to answer something nobody knows yet), I did get the impression that we're that much closer to the answer. That the panel was composed of (young) people who were making a living at this particular profession and who have embraced the change of tides that come with innovation, is a clear indication that its still possible to make a living as a food writer. There's also the fact that with the New York Times setting up a paywall on their site, a precedent may be set that, if it sticks, might be what the web-publications need to be able to shell out cash for better work. More importantly, a demand is in place for the product food writers peddle and people are working with creating new ways of selling it (I think Tasting Table is a great example of that).

But in response to the question of print, of magazines, of paper, Francis told the story of a man he met at a bar who spoke very sensuously (Francis admitted the man may very well have been trying to pick him up) about the experience of reading magazines and his love of magazines. And when the audience was asked if they would take the iPad to bed to read, barely anyone raised their hand. When asked if they would take a magazine or a book, it was almost unanimous. What gives me hope is knowing that these questions are not exclusive to one particular form of media. In film, the question of 35mm versus HD, seeing movies in a theater versus on Blu-Ray, the rebirth of indie film without studio involvement, hell, the moneyless film world of Youtube, are all weighing down on the industry but people are figuring it out. The music industry still exists, even after Napster and Pandora.

Overall, it was a very informative evening and while of course there are still questions up in the air, I had a sense that I knew what to expect, both in my pursuit of food writing as a career and as a networking freelancing writer. After the panel, I walked into Grand Central station and couldn't help stopping by the newsstand and showing my support. $10 for two magazines, how much cheaper do you want it to be?

Home's Cooking

I'm getting the impression that the only culture that truly accepts vegetables as food and not seasoning for meat is the Indian culture and the liberal urban well-to-do hippie culture. And my cat, Tito. Or maybe I've decided to make a sweeping generalization because I've been living in a bubble of Hispanic and Middle-American culture for the past week. Or because I've frequently been attacked by some of my close friends (Mexican, Guyanese, Libyan, respectively) for proposing that meat, like cookies, is a "sometimes food." Or maybe its just them and my family who regard me as the vegetable-eating black sheep. Like my cat, Tito.

Circumstances have conspired against me, and high cholesterol or not, I've been in a meat-induced high for days. Texas was only different because my sister-in-law humored me and let me add some braised cabbage and a salad to the Thanksgiving menu.

Vegetables just aren't part of my family's gastronomic repertoire and they aren't really part of Puerto Rican culture's repertoire either. The Puerto Rican diet consists of fast food, plastic wrapped cookies from boxes, chips, meat, rice and beans, root vegetables like potato, yuca, calabasa, either fried or boiled, meat, bread, cold cuts, meat, some heavy pastas like lasagna or spaghetti bolognes, pasteles (which are like tamales made with plantains and meat), and did I mention meat? Now, don't get me wrong, Puerto Rican food is delicious, so delicious in fact that vegetables actually taste boring, even nasty, in comparison to its meaty, fatty goodness. Take my brother.

My younger brother, whose body is composed primarily of burgers, decided to try salad for the first time during Thanksgiving because he found a dressing that reminded him of the Sweet Onion sauce from Subway. He took one bite of spinach and tomato and spit it out immediately, swearing to never to eat salad again.   

Going back to my sweeping generalization, there is a cultural defensiveness that comes over people when you threaten their meat consumption. I'm obviously discarding from this equation vegetarians, Indian people, French people (the bastards), and anyone who has ever lived in New York or California. But most typical, traditional, family meals have some sort of meat at their center. I understand that urge to anchor down a plate with a protein.


Since I started eating meat again I've realized how nice, how complete a dinner feels when you can include some sort of well-seasoned, tender animal flesh along with your vegetables. I usually try to make due with just with cheese or eggs but nothing really beats the saltiness, the firm texture, and the fullness that comes with eating meat, be it chicken, red meat, pork, or fish. I mean, what plant could ever replace the sweet-salty-perfect flavor of bacon?

But above and beyond the physical addiction that the utter and thorough deliciousness of well-prepared meat created in the human brain and body, there is also an entitlement that comes down from as far back as the cave paintings where picture-stories about packs of men hunting of bison, mammoths, and tigers decorated stone walls. Consider the Greek and Roman orgies where the blood of cattle flowed or the simple peasant's sacrificial lamb offered up the gods then greedily consumed by the worshipper. Hindu and Christian fasting usually consists of abstinence from meat and alcohol, Muslim fasting culminates in massive, meaty feasts, and all holidays have an animal assigned to them.

Unfortunately, unlike the warring Greeks, the nomadic tribes of cavemen, or the peasants, physical labor has all but disappeared from daily life as medical science has ballooned over the decisions people make about what to eat. And medical science is under the constant assault of the industrialized meat industry and the stubbornness of traditions. Trandition and money met and as they say in Spanish, el amor y el interés fueron al campo un día... (love and private interests went to the country one day...)

As I learned from Michael Pollan, the meat industry lobbied long and hard against the discovery that doctors made several decades ago that over-consumption of meat was responsible for the number one cause of preventable death: heart disease. The meat lobbyist weren't buying it so they demanded the scientists boil it down to something they could work with. So the white coats determined that it was the fat in the meat that caused high cholesterol, high blood pressure, high rates of preventable death. The meat lobbyists thought it over, nodded, and went to press with the story: Fat is Evil! And so was born the fat-free industry. Everybody wins.

Well, guess what's fat free. That's right. Because of the lack of government subsidizing which make them expensive and their more complex flavors which make them challenging, vegetables need to step up their game in order to beat this iron-clad money-tradition meat combo. I propose a few ways to counter the meat monopoly over the gastronomic preferences of the world:

1) Visit New York with someone who has lived there. California works too.
2) Eat Indian food.
3) Pick one day a week to not eat meat.

This last one I'm stealing from a litany of food writers who are better versed than me on this subject. But the brilliance of this suggestions, beyond its obvious health and environmental benefits, it also creates the ideal scenario of invention by necessity. You can do as much and often more with vegetables than you can with meat. If you're looking for a starting point, create traditional meals with meat but add vegetables you've never tried or prepare vegetables you know in a way you're not used to. If you want to go a step further eliminate the meat from the center and make up for it with new dishes of vegetables (use cheese and eggs if you're scared). For the more adventurous I recommend experimentation with curry, cumin, cayenne, and tumeric. Once you go down this road, you'll never go back. The point? Just try new things.

Be like Tito.

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.