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.

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.

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?

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)

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.

Food Blogs

On Tuesday night my long-lost friend Lisa, who had been hiding in New Hampshire for two years and now works for a comedy agency, invited R and I to come along with her on assignment to Housing Works Bookshop's Tuesday night comedy show. Overall it was very good, a super funny line up and a surprise performance by Jim Gaffigan. The only joke I can remember, though, came from the least funny comedian in the show. He was talking about blogs and pointed out that almost everyone he knows has a food blog and how its the equivalent of telling someone that you're going to write about the restaurant you went to in a diary, take pictures of the food, stick them in the diary, then hang it out the window of your apartment so everyone can read it. For some reason everyone laughed, he was probably getting the residual laughs from Jim Gaffigan's set, so mostly we were laughing because we'd been laughing before, but the blog joke struck a chord with my little troupe for... obvious reasons. R and Lisa both looked at me smiling and I laughed along with them because if you show people you can make fun of yourself they like you. But really I was thinking, Sigh, it so f-ing true.

Since my discovery of food writing and subsequently the food blog culture, I've come to realize I'm paddling a small raft in a big ocean full of ocean liners, pirate ships, yachts, Coast Guard boats, abandoned kayaks, and runaway jet skiis, but aside from the wide-range of vehicles traversing these oceans you can't help but notice the sheer amount of boats. There is actually such a thing as foodblogblog.com, which serves as a directory exclusively for major food blogs run by professional writers and photographers. Then there's the little guys like me that simply want to obsess about food in hopes of somebody hearing me and thinking its funny. And then paying me. Unfortunately that's also what the big guys are doing and they have nicer boats that actually fit a genre.

What I mean is there are several categories food blogs tend to fall into. If you look at Delish's Best 20 Food Blogs you begin to notice a pattern: recipe blogs with professional looking photography like SmittenKitchen, baking blogs with professional looking photography like Bake or Break, recipe/musings blogs with professional looking photography like Orangette, fun vegan blogs with recipes and professional looking photography like Vegan Yum Yum (I'm not kidding), food travel blogs by inherently odious people with semi-professional looking photography (no control over their lighting situation, I'm afraid) like Traveler's Lunchbox, and the English-writers based in foreign countries like Lobster Squad, who who writes about Spanish food and is based in Madrid. She does drawings. There are also the handful of unique career-launching blogs like Wine Library TV (which became a multi-million dollar one-man corporation on how to become successful doing what you love... and you know selling wine). But I won't go into the beverage blogs, they're a whole other ball of wax.

Basically what I'm trying to point out is that blogging is no longer, and hasn't been for years, the turf of 19 year olds Live Journaling their romantic forays and mishaps... or more to my point, about what kind of cake mix they used to baked cupcakes last Saturday. Blogging is now the terrain of professionals looking to maintain a presence online (or amateurs trying to go professional by maintaining a presence online), by writing and photographing (well) what obsesses them, tweeting about it, and hoping people respond. And they do. Its becoming so that readers now trust bloggers as much or more than professional, published food writers. And the reality is, bloggers are now becoming their brethren and vice versa. Since the advent of Julie Powell, this has been the dream, but then where does that leave the food magazines like Bon Appetit and Food & Wine? And the proper websites like Leite's Culinaria and Epicurious, are they now just more sophisticated blogs? I should hope not.

An observation my teacher David Leite made when he was forcing me and my classmates to exit our comfort zones and interview food industry professionals and stuff hours of primary resource material into an eloquent 999 words that might never see publication (while we wondered, is this what I signed up for? We just want to obsess about food!) was that the presence of blogs was actually a very positive thing for professional food writers. In his reasoning, it would force them to actually do their jobs and be reporters. Leave the op-eds and the recycled recipes to the home cooks, food writers are supposed to inform and innovate! But a big problem that has arisen within the publishing world is that professionals are no longer getting paid what they used to and that was pretty meager to begin with.

So what's going to happen to all of us? Will we suck all the oxygen out of our ocean? Will we reach the firm land of professional food writer-dom only to realize we're walking on a melting glacier?

I think the more interesting question is, why are we all doing this in the first place?

Aside from the use they serve for the blogger, I know blogs are actually super useful for the reader as well. At least the good ones are. Recipes are the most obvious benefit, but they also teach you how people talk and think about food in their own terms. There are no editors, there's no "magazine's voice" or word count they need to subscribe to, this is what they really think and sound like. I think if our comedian friend's observation of the over-abundance of food blogs indicates anything, though, its that there is a very strong demand for food writing, specially during a time when the food industry is stuck between a rock and a hard place, the economy on one side and the obesity epidemic on the other. Cooking is experiencing a reawakening. Julie & Julia, Michael Pollan, and Super-Size Me have forced us back into the kitchen with a laptop propped open on the table in place of a cookbook. This is good for the reader and in a way good for the writer because if you can't get paid for it, at least you have an audience. Of course if after a while we still can't make money off of this then maybe we should consider starting blogs featuring funny animal pictures with captions over them. Put those professional photography skills to good use.

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?