Anniversary

A year ago, the bombs at the Boston Marathon went off. 

Since then and now, a couple of bombs have gone off in my life, too. My dad's in a nursing home. My mom has had two stent procedures, a lung cancer surgery, and is still waiting to have a cancerous kidney removed. My husband's godmother is watching her husband, a man who has been a fixture in my husband's life for thirty years, die from pancreatic cancer; he was diagnosed a couple of weeks ago and his decline is swift and terrible. 

My husband and his mom used to own a camper in the Poconos. Someone they knew, an old Irish New York guy, died, and David still remembers a bunch of veterans at the wake saying, in heavy New York accents, "My brothers, we are gathered here by the Angel o'Death." 

I think about that New York-inflected Angel of Death a lot these days. 

Every time I see footage from last year's Marathon, and see the familiar route in Wellesley-- where I was raised-- or Brookline-- near Brighton, where I lived in an apartment so small my bedroom was a closet-- and Boylston St-- near my very first apartment on my own, a couple of blocks away on Garrison Street in the Back Bay-- my eyes well up. All those places seem so close I could reach out and feel the pavement under my feet, the sounds of the Green Line running down the middle of the street, or the sight of runners going by the CVS in Wellesley where my brother worked in high school (he was an ACE at that job, by the way. In another life he could have been a manager of CVSes.) . And these places seem impossibly far away at the same time. So much has changed.

When I was a kid, I worried about everything because I was afraid of everything. The farther away I was from my house, the more nervous I got. I didn't get my license until I was 23 because I was terrified of driving. So when I worked summers at a bookstore or the library, I got there by my bike or my mom dropped me off. I would feel weirdly exhilirated as I got off my bike, the relief of getting to my destination in one piece washing over me. 

As a single woman in my 20s, I was still worrying, but this time about whether I'd ever find a job I liked, or ever find someone to love. I was happy that I'd overcome some of my anxieties enough to be able to take the subway with impunity and drive on the Mass Pike, but I still was restless. I ended up going home most weekends; when I didn't, especially the first years when I had my own apartment, I'd walk restlessly all over the neighborhood, spending too much money at Whole Foods near Symphony Hall, looking at the fountains at the Mother Church of the Christian Science Center as I walked back, put my stuff away, and thought, Now what? I logged a lot of time at Avenue Victor Hugo, a used bookstore. It's gone now. 

I'm forty. I did those things I worried about. I got married, had a kid, moved away. But every day I remember that weird adrenaline, of being independent and living in the city. It was a time when I was brave and very lonely. And I guess the Boston Marathon explosions showed me the cracks in those memories. I think one of the bombs went off near the Boston Public Library, where I used to wait for the #39 bus. I thought, hey, that's MY city-- there's blood on MY sidewalk. But it was never really mine; it was a part of me, sure, but it was something I borrowed and then left behind. 

My childhood was anxious, but I always remember my home as being a place of love and security. It was a sanctuary from being bullied and worrying about what other kids thought of me. And of course, that vision, like the notion of Boston belonging to me, had holes and cracks in it, too. No one is perfect, and in a house of high-strung people prone to melancholy, there's going to be dark days. 

Now that the Angel of Death has hovered over me, I see that my sadness about the marathon is a sadness about a past that was probably never there to begin with, but is no less precious. 

I watched on television and on the web with horror as smoke and blood and screams filled the street I walked on every single day, whether it was to the bus stop when I lived in Jamaica Plain, or home when I lived in the Back Bay.  I yelled at my mom for driving to Watertown when the whole area was under lockdown. Her reasoning was, "I was going to buy fish. Terrorists don't eat fish." I wept throughout a memorial service as I watched online, one of my dearest friends singing in the chorus, thinking of my high school friend who couldn't finish the race because the bombs went off before she got to the last mile. 

I spent a week of sleepless nights, waiting for the results of my mom's PET scan, knowing with dread certainty that cancer would have riddled her body. Little malevolent gray masses, springing out of nowhere and evil simply because they could grow so easily and so fast. I imagined, in the dark, the sound  of my mother's voice, deadened with shock, telling me, "Emma, it's everywhere." I wondered about where she wanted to be buried, who would tell my dad. 

But you know what? It's spring.  

Tens of thousands of people are running the Marathon this year, beating back the fear and the sadness of that day in 2013 because they refuse to let this terrible event poison their lives. They will be happy and proud because there are beautiful people and things in this world, as terrible as it can be. 

And the PET scan didn't show additional cancer; it actually showed less than we thought. My mom's cancer surgery in her lung went as well as can be-- the surgeon said it was early-stage, with no lymph node involvement, and they got it. Of course, my mom then promptly caught C. diff. in the hospital and was laid out for almost two weeks at Mass General, but the day she got out, she visited my dad, bought flowers, and took a giant bubble bath.  Damn right she did.  

There is nothing redeeming to be found in someone dying quickly and terribly from pancreatic cancer. All I can think is, if he were able to think about it and speak, that our family friend wouldn't regret a thing about the way he lived his life. He had good times, that one, cooking, listening to music, fishing, and watching really awful bootlegged martial arts movies. The pain and senselessness of his death should not, cannot suck the goodness out of the life he lived. Even with that fucking Angel of Death hovering over us, ready to drop down at any time, life is still there to be lived. 

Every time sorrow watches over me, when I think I can hear the beating of the wings of that cursed Angel, I see my son, who cannot go anywhere, not even to the bathroom, without skipping and humming tunelessly. In a world where even walking to brush your teeth is so great that you have to hum to celebrate, how can I give way to despair? 

 

Dear Father

People on my dad's side of the family don't get senile-- they get mean. Or so the family lore goes. My mom's side is a different story. She had a great-great uncle who used to bicycle around Crystal Lake in Illinois singing Methodist hymns at top volume, until the family took him to the asylum in Elgin and he got a lobotomy. He died when he fell out of an apple tree- apparently, people were picking apples in a local orchard, he got startled, and he fell. 

That's the way to go, I think, sometimes. 

My father is going into a nursing home. My father, a man of huge brain, passionate interests, and an outsize personality, left us a long time ago. A geriatric psychiatrist by trade, my mom recalls waiting to pick him up at Leonard Morse Hospital in Natick, and hearing him bellow at his patients, "WHADDAYA MEAN YOU DON'T CARE? WHAT THE HELL KIND OF ANSWER IS THAT?" He worked at the Veterans Administration in Boston and had at least one mercenary as a patient. He worked for the Archdiocese of Boston and used to come home with tons of edibles from the North End.  He worked for Blue Cross Blue Shield, which he loathed-- one time, a patient drove through the plate glass window of a restaurant, and Blue Cross didn't want to pay for hospitalization; that summed up that job. 

Secretaries and nurses loved my dad. Other doctors and administrators wanted to kill him, because my dad was smart and he knew it. He did things his own way. When he had finished his work for the day, he left, regardless of what time it was. He took long, rambling lunches. He would take three hour walks and my mother would try not to worry. 

My father was brave. He married outside of the faith and my grandfather, who never left the Bronx, showed up in his apartment and told him that if he married my Methodist mother, Grandfather would wear a sandwich board that said, "My Son Has Shamed Me." My dad was not impressed, and he and my mom got hitched at the Harvard Club, where they ate tuna sandwiches and drank champagne, and only ten people attended. 

My father instilled in me a love of classical music, Woody Allen, good food, and above all, reading. He gave me a biography of Sigmund Freud when I was ten, and I read it. He also taught me the value of a grand gesture. One summer, when we rented a house in Chatham, he gave my brother and me a garbage bag each, filled to breaking with toys and books, just because it was summertime and he loved us. 

My father accidentally packed two left shoes for my graduation and had to wear Birkenstocks instead. Good thing I went to Wesleyan. 

When I had a genteel nervous breakdown junior year in Ireland and came home, my father told me, "Home is where your head is."
Now he is silent-- a man defined by talk-- now just sits. He doesn't look miserable. He smiles slightly. He moves his hands, but the nails are long, the fingers are beginning to look fleshless. His dark eyebrows jut over his face in a vaguely James Mason-ish way-- he's lost his round Yeshiva boy face. He still gives me huge hugs, and my mother tells me that he reads this blog and it makes him laugh, which is amazing because as far as I can tell, he doesn't really read any more. That makes my heart break, because above all else, my childhood was filled with bizarre books my father would leave around the house. A history of philosophy, a Georges Simenon mystery, the Michelin guides, the poetry of Kenneth Koch-- you name it, it was somewhere in our house.

And the cookbooks! My mom is a dynamite cook, but my dad was a dynamite reader of cookbooks. Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Indian Cookery,  Simple Cooking. Noshing is Sacred. From My Mother's Kitchen. 

He keeps on falling.  Years ago, he suddenly couldn't walk without falling, and despite batteries of tests at various snooty Harvard hospitals, no one could determine why, and has gotten worse with each passing year. He also, somewhere along the way, stopped talking. My mother has to carry him from place to place, essentially, and cannot lift him herself-- she is a tough broad, with a huge amount of patience, but she also has pins in one of her legs and it cannot be easy to lug an inert person to any sort of upright position. She cannot keep on calling the fire department every time he falls and my brother isn't home-- yesterday he fell three times, and after years of this, she realizes that he needs to be safe, and she can't guarantee his safety any more. My brother asks my father, "Well, Dr. Merowitz, what do you think?" "I should go," he says, in a rare sentence. 

They are in Massachusetts, and I am here, in New Jersey, alternately feeling nothing and then feeling crashing waves of sorrow. Not sadness- I feel like sorrow is a deeper word, something that tugs at your roots with an inexorable pull until you cannot breathe, until, mercifully, it recedes. 

For the past year, there has not been a single hour where I do not think of my father or see his face. But if you ask me how I feel about it, I don't know. Or maybe I do know, but the effort of articulating it is something I don't want to think about. There is a feeling that once those gates open, they cannot be closed, and I will be swept in the wake of giant, messy, unresolvable tears. 

 But I am grateful for the long time I had when my dad was, well, dad. Did I want to kill him sometimes? Hell yes. Was he unfair and nuts about stuff? Oh my GOD YES. But he was a good dad, and I love him. I wish that he had not experienced this strange, glacial descent into the madness of old age. Are you gone, Dad? Because if you aren't, you need to know, you did so good by me, I can't even tell you. Thank you for being. 

Dear Father- Colin Hay

Guest Post-- Of Soup and Storms

Stacy’s “Souper Sundays” are legendary. That all changed when Superstorm Sandy came to town. With her home destroyed and her family packed into her dad’s house, she had a lot of time to think about the connections between food, family, and home. She will have her first Souper Sunday since the storm next month.

Regardless of my mood or mental state, I can say with certainty that I truly love my family, not just the crazy blood relatives, but my extended family of neighbors and friends that prove time after time they are the stuff that holds my head on my shoulders. There was no truer test of this than the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. While my husband and I shifted through the rubble that was now our life, trying to pick up the pieces and make things normal again, my entire family was knee deep in the literal muck with us, clearing out our house and holding our lives together. As the new normal set in, it became important to me to re-establish old traditions, making whatever house we landed in a home. Being from a huge Italian family, those traditions all include food. Massive amounts of food.

When I have a gathering, it is never small. I mean, who do you cut out? The simple solution is to invite them all. And, when you are not a gazillionaire and you want to actually socialize with your guests, what the heck do you serve that doesn’t have you glued to a stove or grill? Well, for me, the answer became soup. And, so began a few years ago Souper Sunday. I make several different kinds of soup, cut up some bread, throw some bowls on the counter and we have a no frills hell of a time. And, I am pretty damn good at it, If I do say so myself. My soups are YUMMY.

Nearly a year after the storm, I unpacked a nice big green soup pot a friend gave to me and decided it was time to soup again. As a small thank you for the tremendous show of love, support, gift cards, baked goods, holiday ornaments and shoulders to cry on, I had some of the office ladies over to my house last weekend for our first Souper Sunday of 2014. Sometimes there is nothing better than having an all female crowd pack the house and this was no exception. I gotta say, I truly love these women. Regardless of career path, home town, fashion sense or marital status, we just gel. Souper Sunday was a prime example. And, while we bitched and drank and laughed and yelled, we ate soup. A LOT of soup.

I am going to try my best to spell out for you my favorite recipe of the day, maybe even give it a name. You see, I am not one for the order and precision required for baking and complicated meals. Cooking for me is a giant experiment that can always be fixed with the right amount of seasoning. Here is the way I made this particular soup it most recently, cannot say it was the same the time before. Be daring, throw away the measuring cups and check this out:

Super awesome chicken soup with coconut milk:

·         2 cups-ish of cooked chicken (I cannot stand looking at raw meat)

·         veggie broth (or chicken broth) – one of those giant cans should do it

·         1 can of coconut milk – whatever the standard size is they come in, similar to a can of veggies

·         2 sweet potatos  - I don’t peel any vegetables but you may want to

·         Normal size onion – white or yellow, never tried red

·         A big can of diced tomatoes – I used fire roasted this time

·         A bag of frozen corn

·         Some little grape/cherry tomatoes. I prefer the yellow ones and I like the number 12 so that is how many I halved and threw it

·         Curry power

·         Cumin

·         Fresh Cilantro

·         Lime

·         Olive Oil

I don’t measure so first step, get a decent size soup pot and coat bottom with olive oil. Dump in about a teaspoon of curry or chili powder and the same amount of dried cumin and let it simmer for a few minutes. Then add the veggies all diced – onions, tomatoes and sweet potatoes and let them cook for a few minutes. Shred chicken and throw it in with the corn, diced tomatoes and broth and let it simmer/boil under fresh veggies are edibly soft. Lower heat and add coconut milk. Do not let boil. If you are a messy cook like me, you should probably just do this before you are ready to serve.  Ladle into bowls and top with some cilantro and a squeeze of lime juice. Yeah I said squeeze. Isn’t that “Souper?”

Some Things Not to Cook and One Bitchin' Cake

On Sunday, while my husband went to a weirdly elaborate party for a one-year old with our son, I cooked. And regrettably, two of the three things I cooked SUCKED. So, gentle reader, take my advice: the Food Network's recipe for Mushroom Barley Risotto smells and tastes like a foot. Maybe it's the vegetable broth. Maybe it's the barley. Either way, the smell reminded me of Grandmother Merowitz's apartment in the Bronx, which smelled like extremely terrible Jewish cooking. I do not have good luck with slow cooker recipes. My husband, who simply uses the recipe on the back of a  McCormick's Pulled Pork Seasoning packet, makes a great pulled pork, but otherwise, I feel I could use our slow cooker as a decorative planter and my life would not be greatly impacted. 

I also made-- and this is probably going to distress people-- the Marcella Hazan tomato sauce recipe that has been floating around in the wake of her death. My mom used to cook from her cookbooks all the time, and the stuff was GOOD. Also, I liked the simplicity of the recipe. I like butter. I like onions. I like tomatoes. Maybe it was because I used canned tomatoes (although I did use the fancy San Marzano tomatoes all you young people seem to like), but it tasted like-- dare I say it?--Campbell's cream of tomato soup. I just discussed this with my mom on the phone, and she informs me that Marcella's recipes are hit or miss, so I feel less bad. Unless of course, she's lying to me because I am her fragile lil dumplin'. 

That said, I will say the one recipe that came out well was a roaring success. It's from this month's issue of Bon Appetit and it is one of the best things I have ever eaten. Gateau Breton Aux Pommes (ie Breton apple cake for all you peasants) is not particularly hard to make, although it takes a while-- and the salted caramel sauce is SERIOUS, people. It calls for creme fraiche, but since this is not 1980 (my childhood seems full of stuff cooked from The Silver Palate Cookbook that always involved creme fraiche) I used whipped cream. From a freaking can. Although it was Extra Creamy, so maybe that makes it classier.  Anyhow. It's only Wednesday and with solely my husband and I eating this thing, there's less than half of it left. I want to eat it all the time. In fact, at work, I contemplate telling people I am going to the bathroom and then actually quietly driving to my house, getting a piece, hiding it on my person, and then eating it in my office with the blinds down and the door closed, because I am not going to share, not even a little bit. 

Stew-Stew-Sudio.

Oh yeah. Who doesn't like stew? Well, since I rhetorically asked, I don't. I wish I did. I feel that if I liked stew I would also be a person who enjoys family get togethers, playing board games, a sensible diet, and other wholesome things. My husband loves stew, which makes sense. He is the type of person that makes me think of Snow White in the woods- small children and picturesque animals gravitate towards him because he's so good. I, on the other hand, am way more like the witch-queen. In fact, my gay Great Uncle Fred (I always think of him in that one phrase, because it sounds weirdly melodious) insisted that our family (the non Jew side, clearly) descended from a Salem witch. 

Wait. Where was I? I lost consciousness for a minute there. 

Oh. right. Stew. So. I find stew depressing and damp, the eating equivalent of a mildewed towel. That said, I like my beef bourgignon because it's doused in an entire bottle of red wine and a packet of onion soup mix. II got it from a now defunct magazine  called Fresh Home. It had really annoying decorating tips, but it did have some good recipes. Also, since my mother tended to cook with wine a lot, I love the smell of wine cooking. I also am white trash and love dip made with onion soup mix, so really this recipe had me at hello. Hello, gorgeous. Well, hello gorgeous taste. It looks, as with most stew-type concoctions, like someone threw up, or as we in the industry call it, Throw Up Meat.  Oh stop it, you know I speak truth to power here. 

And yes, I referred to a Phil Collins song in my title. My friend Jessica Smock had a dog named Sussudio once. Then again, she also grew up with a hippie kid whose parents named him Concrete. She informs me she called him Connie for short, though. 

Beef Bourgignooooonnnnnnn 
(I refuse to include a photo because it looks like a scene from a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie so just paint a picture in your brain)




Serves 6, maybe, but really 4. 

• 2 pounds cubed stewing beef at room temperature (no idea why, but I do know Gabrielle Hamilton says stuff tastes better at room temperature, and I am afraid of her, so I do it)
• 2 tablespoons flour
• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 3 tablespoons olive oil (I ignore this and just dribble olive oil in the pot)
• 1 bottle dry full-bodied red wine (no clue what constitutes dry full-bodied red wine. I used Primal Roots Red because it tastes okay and I think you should only cook with wine you'd actually drink, when possible)
• I package onion soup mix (the recipe calls for low-sodium mix but I have never seen this)
• 2 large onions, coarsely chopped
• 2 peeled carrots, cut into bite-size pieces (I usually add more)
• 2 or more garlic cloves, minced 
• I teaspoon thyme, cut up so there aren't tons of stems
• 1 bay leaf
• mushrooms- optional (I think they made it taste soggy, but if you want to be a jerk and ignore me, it calls for one cup of sliced mushrooms)

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Place stewing beef in a big ass ziploc with the flour (although I totes don't measure it, I just use a handful because I am a wild stallion), zip that sucker up, and then shake the hell out of it. 
2. Put  butter and olive oil at medium heat in a big dutch oven. I am lucky because my mother-in-law gave us a giant Le Creuset which is probably worth more than one of my internal organs. Let it get mildly sizzly (the recipe actually says "until shimmering," which really aggravates me. Is this a recipe or an episode of She-Ra?) 
3. Take half the meat and attempt to pat it dry-- this helps it brown better. Apparently. Brown half of the meat, nice and slow, maybe for ten minutes. Then do the other half. Then lie down. I kid! Not really.
4. Once that's done and you've gotten up from fetal position on the floor of the kitchen, throw all the meat into the pot and cover it with the red wine. Totally pleasing, right? Add the onion soup mix and bring to a boil for three minutes. Then cover it, let it simmer, and go cook the vegetables.
5. In a frying pan, heat a generous splash of oil to medium- if you throw water on it and it goes insane, that's a little too high. Not that I am judging you. Add the onions and carrots and cook for about ten minutes, until they are transparent. If they start to brown, you've cooked it too long, but I wouldn't freak out about it. 
6. Add the vegetables, the garlic, the thyme, and the bay leaf to the meat. Cover that sucker and put it in the oven.
7. It should cook for three hours, but check it every hour. My last batch took two and a half, and I did the last hour at 300 degrees because I didn't want to dry it out. Toss in those mushrooms ALTHOUGH I WISH YOU WOULDN'T in the last hour, and when you check it, give it a stir. 
8. Take out the bay leaf, if you can find it, and then serve this sucker over nice buttered egg noodles.

Mark Bittman, you Complete Me.

Like a lot of people, I suck when it comes to grocery shopping. I have grandiose plans of well-balanced, easily prepared dinners filled with vegetables and protein and deliciousness, and they never materialize.  I cannot tell you how many nights my husband and I have peered hopelessly into our fridge, hoping for...what? Delicious Orchards in there? Instead, what we find in the freezer are egg-free waffles for our son, sweet potato fries aforementioned son CLAIMS he will eat but in fact will not, and multiple half-empty pints of ice cream. The fridge seems to have a lot of cheese and a plethora of Capri Sun juice pouches, and that's it. And yes, I have seen the story about mold in juice boxes and I say that a little mold bolsters the immune system. Maybe. 

I mean, we have stuff to cook, but it all requires effort and patience. At the end of the day nobody got time for that. So we eat something with cheese melted on it and call it a day...and then feel both fat and guilty, which is a good time. As for lunch? Please. The lunches I bring to work take 3209924 years to make because I can't figure out what to bring, and then they still suck. 

So when I read Mark Bittman's column about making lunch in last week's Food Section of the New York Times  I was interested. Now, I should admit, I have Mark Bittman's cookbook and did not particularly enjoy it. It's very serious and sensible. There's no fun food essays, there's no pretty pictures, and it makes me feel like I have ADD. That said, I made two of the three recipes in the article and they were Dyn-O-Mite. 

Now, to be fair, they were not "easy" because Mr. Bittman assumes I am not a pig and have leftover vegetables and cooked chicken at my disposal, and I don't. I mean, I AM a pig. I have cheddar cheese and Schweppes Ginger Ale and possibly some Lake Champlain caramels. And three billion vats of the melted plasticine that are Danimals. 

So I bought two chickens and a ton of veggies, which completely defeats the purpose of using leftovers, but be quiet. I roasted the chickens using the old Joy of Cooking recipe-- basically, heat up the oven to 425 degrees or so, coat chickens in olive oil, salt and pepper and then stick something inside (I did a halved lemon and mashed garlic) and then throw them in, lowering the heat to 350. Cook 20 minutes per pound and use a damn meat thermometer to make sure you don't kill your loved ones (165 degrees). Baste every twenty minutes or never, or all the time, if you have OCD. 

Now, see, I had one chicken for a nice dinner, and one to make the damn lunch thing. Chicken 1 was dinner Labor Day night. I served it with steamed green beans and asparagus tossed in a little olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and salt and pepper, and then some sauteed yellow squash and onions (they don't taste good unless they're burned. Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Snootbasket, I meant CARAMELIZED). 

The leftover veggies, plus the meat from Chicken 2, went into Mr. Bittman's Escabeche Salad:

True, it reeks of garlic, but it is really good-- the vinaigrette is not too overwhelming and goes well with the vegetables. Plus, it's a way for me to eat vegetables and actually enjoy them because they are coated in something tangy. NO YOU ARE. 

So fresh from that triumph, I embarked on the Cold Sesame Noodles.

One note. I bought a can of cheapo tahini that had one of those metal ring pulls, which promptly flew across the kitchen. I then had to figure out how the hell to get the goddam tahini out of the can, because my can opener was totally ineffective. Like an ape, I was. It didn't help that I decided to make this ten minutes before I had to go to work-- my husband had to work, my son had no school, and I was tag-teaming with my husband to race out the door once he got home. My poor kid kept on saying plaintively, "Mama? You said you'd draw Darth Maul for me." 

Eventually, with much cursing and sweating, I managed to get this all tupped up and run out the door only looking a little like a Hobo. Go me. Plus, I began the infinitely wearisome job of drawing Darth Maul's head. Do you know how many black squiggles and horns that man has? My God. 

The noodles were great. Spicy, a little peanut-y, a little whatever tahini tastes like-y, and filled with very crunchy vegetables. I used very quickly steamed snow peas, red pepper, and these grim shredded carrots we buy because they are the only vegetables my son will eat. We ate them for dinner instead of lunch, just because I am spiteful that way. 

So I guess there's something to be said for sensible recipes, huh?  

Enchiladas without Subtext.

So now I am just going to give you a damn recipe instead of musing about life because sometimes life makes me tired, and this is one of those times. 

My husband mocks me because I believe that certain foods are hot weather foods while others are cold weather foods. But he's a dummy, because I am totally right. Who on earth wants to eat a stew in 100 degree weather? Not this broad, I tell you what. That said, spicy foods are good in the summer. I don't know why, but they just are and I am pretty sure my Time-Life Foods of the World cookbook series told me so.

Oh, and if you have not read any of those Foods of the World books, you are missing out. For one thing, the photos are awesome, because they are from the 1960s and everyone has absurd hair and terrible glasses. They are also exceptionally well-written, and they were ahead of their time, exposing Americans to ethnic cuisines from all over the world. I have maybe ten of them, but I yearn for more. YEARN. See? You can hear me yearning for them. It's like a low buzz  emanating from the Jersey Shore. 

Anyway. Where was I? Shut up. 

Wegmans Delightful Black Bean Enchizladas

I stole this recipe from Wegmans because that's how I roll. The only way I tweaked it was to use sharp cheddar instead of wussy shredded Mexican cheese that's not even authentic, and also, I refuse to spend $5087 on Wegman's Caribbean Black Bean Soup. I used a can of freaking Amy's Black Bean Soup and it came out just fine. 

This is spicy but not too spicy because I know you are all very fragile. And because I want to die young, I smother it in sour cream. I embrace my American right to become morbidly obese. 

1/4 cup of Olive Oil
4 cloves of garlic
1/4 cup of flour
3 Tbsp Mexican-Style Chili Pow der
1/2 tsp ground cumin
2 Tbsp chicken broth
1 quart water (four cups of H20)
1 can (15 oz) plain, canned, nasty tomato sauce
2 cans (15.5 oz each) of Black Beans, rinsed and drained, divided
15 oz can of Amy's Black Bean Soup 
1 pkg (16 oz) + 1 pkg (8 oz)  Shredded Mexican Cheese (or, if you are cool like me, Sharp Cheddar)
 divided
2 pkgs (10 oz each)  White Corn Tortillas  
1 bunch green onions, trimmed, sliced thinly
You'll Need: Stockpot, two 9 x 13 casserole dishes, potato masher

Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.Go lie down. No, kidding! Get your ass up and make this stuff. Stop it. 

1. Make sauce: Add oil to stockpot on MEDIUM; add garlic. Cook, stirring,
1-2 min. Add flour, chili pow der, and cumin; stir to combine. Cook,
stirring, 1-2 min. Add bouillon, w ater, and tomato sauce. Bring to a boil
on MEDIUM-HIGH, stirring continuously. Cook 1-2 min, until sauce is
slightly thickened. Set aside. Note: I don't like that Wegmans capitalizes MEDIUM and MEDIUM-HIGH. it seems hostile. 

2. Make filling: Mash 1 can beans in mixing bow l. Add second can of
beans, soup, and 16 oz cheese. Mix to combine. Set aside.

3 .Spread about 1/4 cup of sauce on bottomof each casserole
dish. Spread 1/4 cup filling dow n each tortilla center. Roll one long
edge towards middle to enclose filling; keep rolling into cigar shape. (By the way, it depresses me that you need a recipe to tell you this.) Set
aside.

4. Arrange enchiladas in 2 row s of 6 in each casserole dish.Pour remaining sauce over enchiladas. Sprinkle half of remaining 8 oz pkg cheese over each; top  with green onion.

5. Bake uncovered 25-30 min, until sauce is bubbling.  Rest 5-10 min before serving.

This makes about 500,000 enchiladas so be forewarned. But it's so, so, good. 

Comfort Food

Sometimes, when the world is too much with you, the only way to crawl out of it is to cook.

This fall was filled with the blues. Hurricane Sandy made a direct hit on my county, and while I didn't lose my home or even suffer any signficant damage, I was witness to a lot of sadness. All of us lost power for the better part of a week. I never experienced a natural disaster like this, and even just losing power spooked me-- the silence, except for the buzzing of gas powered generators-- rang in my ears. I'd pick up branches with my son and watch people just sort of wandering around. Gas was scarce, and on the second day of the blackout, our local grocery store had teenage cashiers helping customers get nonperishable food through suddenly impossibly tall, narrow grocery aisles, only a weak flashlight to guide us. We bought some soup and I had visions of heating it up on our grill's side burner so that it was boiling hot-- did I mention it was pretty damn cold? Well, I am here to tell you, before a hurricane comes, check your damn propane. There is nothing quite as soul-sucking as huddling over a bowl of tepid soup on the third day of a blackout. 

There are other, more serious losses, but I was, as I said, only a witness to them. One of my closest friends lost her home-- she lives in an area near Barnegat Bay that completely flooded over, and since she lives in a ranch, everything was, literally, washed out. I will never forget sitting in my car (since we had a charger for our phones in there, plus, it had heat, we spent a lot of time in our cars), finally getting through to her-- cell phone reception was terrible the week after the storm-- and hearing my tough, funny friend tell me her kids' toys were floating through the house, her voice-- and then mine-breaking into sobs. My boss and his family, which includes four young kids, lost their home, too.

All of the places that have created blissful childhood memories for my five year old son-- Seaside, Spring Lake, Point Pleasant, local parks, Asbury Park's boardwalk-- suffered millions of dollars' worth of damage. It is amazing how the sea can twist giant structures into baroque knots, how it can remove all traces of boardwalks, how it can lift houses and boats and place them in completely random, terribly wrong, locations. There is no way, even months later, to act as if everything is normal.

But I have come to recognize that my adopted home state is nothing if not plucky. Seaside has already done an amazing amount of repair work, as have most of the other boardwalk towns I know and love. My friend refuses to give into despair and is becoming increasingly involved in her town's council meetings-- she demands to know when Barnegat Bay will be dredged, when homeowners will get actual, concrete information from FEMA as well as their local governments on when and how they can rebuild. 

When I think about all this, I realize that the best way to deal with these upheavals is to be with the ones you love and, well, cook. I baked about five billion cookies for my friend and my boss's families, because I didn't know what else to do. Even though it was highly impractical, I baked with all the feelings I had-- helplessness, love, sadness, hope-- and it felt really good. It felt good to make cookies loaded with spices, and to think about my boss's wife eating one after putting the kids to bed in their hotel. It felt good to make chocolate chip cookies with toasted walnuts and know that my friend's kids and her husband, who, for a skinny guy, can sock it away, were going to inhale them in about half an hour.

It felt good to see that in the midst of all the devastation wrought by Sandy, my favorite pizza place, Maruca's, in Seaside, was fine-- and to know that even if it takes a year, I will be there in the cooling light of an early summer night with my family and my friend's family, demanding that my husband buy one of their enormous pizzas to put in our car (and let me tell you, carrying one of those goddam things up and down the boardwalk, especially if you're holding various hideous stuffed animals your kid has won, is no picnic) and freeze for later. People are resilient, and there is nothing more healing than good food-- and the memories food carries.

Korean Tacos or Stop it, I'm Being Trendy.

It's been a while since my last post because 1. I have lost the will to live and 2. My office's internet browser is from 1993 (when I had a Mac Classic and thought I was living in the future) and I can't blog at work. THE NERVE.

When it comes to being trendy, I am crap. When you like reading Barbara Pym in college, lying under a down comforter while all your friends are getting high and having orgies, there's just no way you're ever going to be on the cutting edge. Oh please. On my best day I was miles away from a cutting edge. I was, like, a rural peasant in the land of dull butter knives. Did I mention I was wearing ear plugs and one of those sleep masks while I was reading about vicars? I rest my case.

 So we've established that I am not cool, right? So when I became aware of Korean Tacos I was ruefully aware that anyone in a city had been wallowing in them for at least a year. I don't care. They are delicious, and they're a nice change from the usual stuff you get at the Jersey Shore. Do you know how many goddam restaurants have Chicken Murphy on their menus?

 There's a new food stand, Mogo, on the Asbury Park boardwalk, and my is it delicious. I don't care if there are ethnic fusion food trucks all over the eastern seaboard-- in Monmouth County, Korean Tacos are frigging exciting. Luckily, the chicken tacos are extremely easy to make.


 Here's what you need:

• Flour burritos, the smaller the better
• Chicken thighs, diced 
• Soy Sauce
• The juice of one lime 
• 2 cloves of minced garlic. Or really, however much garlic you feel. You know, emotionally. 
• Maybe two tablespoons of minced fresh ginger. Again, take this as an opportunity to check in with yourself. Light some candles, take a bath, listen to Enya. Then judge how much ginger you need. Are you, in fact, in a ginger place right now? Sorry, where was I? 
• Asian Slaw-- you can get this packaged in your salad section, or, if you are a better person than I am, you can shred Napa cabbage, carrots, a little celery, a little red cabbage. My supermarket is awesome and sells it in a package.
•  Maybe four scallions, diced

 Dice your chicken and then marinate it in the soy sauce, lime juice, garlic, and ginger for at least six hours. I'm saying do it in the morning and then stop it before dinner. STOP IT. Saute the chicken until it's cooked through. I suppose you could stir fry it, but I suck at that sort of thing. I cook it as efficiently as possible without burning it, let's put it that way, and I use vegetable oil because I think it has a higher smoking point or whatever the hell that's called. Keep the marinade and when the chicken's cooked almost all the way through, throw it in. Then add the Asian slaw stuff and stir fry it, or do a reasonable facsimile thereof. Which. Upon. Whatever. It's past my bedtime, people. Now, sprinkle the freshly cut scallions on top and spoon the filling into burritos.

I like to smear the burritos with a little Hoisin sauce, but if you do that please don't use the freaking fake crap. Use THIS, please. 

Okay, now enjoy, but be aware-- it's very drippy. Get yourself some towelettes. Or better yet, force one of your loved ones to present you with a steaming towel, preferably scented with lime. Good luck with that, by the way.

I don't know about you, but I'm exhausted.

Really, What I am Doing Here is Saving you from Yourself

America—okay, all 4 of you who read this blog—you should be thanking me right now. Because my story will prevent you from cooking this appalling recipe and enduring the ensuing trauma. No need to thank me, I do this because I am a GIVER.

So, here’s the thing: I need to wrap my head around the slow-cooker concept. I keep on thinking I can use it to make wacky ethnic dishes, and you’d think I would have learned by now that I just don’t have the knack for them. I need to stick to things like chili, pulled pork, stroganoff, that sort of thing. But I am a massive dillhole and keep on thinking, Oh No, This Time Will Be Different. NO IT WON’T, YOU GIANT CLOMPING PEASANT.

Long story short: do not, under any circumstances, attempt to make the Moroccan Chicken in a Slow Cooker recipe from Better Homes and Gardens because it will make your house smell…disturbing…and it will look…disturbing….and it will taste…disturbing. Let me explain.

No. No no no no.

Smell: in theory, something Moroccan should smell like a mix of spices, the kind of thing you’d expect to smell in the hot desert, wearing something filmy. Wait. Is Morocco desert-like? I am pretty sure it is hot. I know it has a rep for being the home for expatriate closeted writers. Yes, I’m looking at you, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Bowles. And I know that some Moroccan food is cooked in these cool triangular things called tagines, and a tagine is also a toothsome spicy savory stew. Yeah, I said toothsome. Wanna fight? Anyway. What I smelled was something like boiled foot with a drizzle of cinnamon. Well, those few times I’ve had boiled foot with cinnamon, this is what it smelled like, is what I am saying.

Look: I used chicken thighs. This, combined with a brownish red sauce, made the whole thing look like something Hannibal Lecter would eat. Again, like boiled foot. But, you know, redder and browner.

Taste: see above.

So we had French Toast instead. The end.

Passover: Or, And then, G-d, uh, Roughed Up the First-Born

So, keeping in mind that I dropped out of Brandeis Sunday School in fourth grade, I decided that it was time to Jew my kid up a little. After all, he’s four, and he was baptized, and he peppers his Nana with all kinds of Catholic-related queries, but I wanted him to learn a little bit about my side of the family. So this year I held my first attempt at what I like to think of as a Slob Seder—quick, chaotic, but well-intended.

Now, I know that during Passover, anything even remotely leavened is not supposed to be in the house, and everything is supposed to be Kosher for Passover. Since I decided to do this maybe ten days before the fact, plus, I am slightly morally lazy, I settled for cleaning the house and not having anything overtly leavened (which would be a good name for a pretentious college band) during dinner.

Well, except for one thing: my kid has an egg allergy and hates what we refer to in common parlance as “food.” He subsists on carbs, and when I handed him a matzo he looked like I had handed him someone’s spleen. So  he had a biscuit and a Danimals while Nana, my husband, and I had this feast.

I roasted a chicken, which normally I do quite well, but I was rattled. See, Joy of Cooking says to make your oven 450 degrees and then the minute you put the chicken in, turn the oven down to 350. Princess forgot to do that. So the chicken was a mite dry. Okay, it was like my grandmother's balsa wood chicken. But I still made a fine gravy with very cheap white wine, lemon, and chicken juices.

I also made matzo balls from the fantastic New York Cookbook which came out, well, like matzo balls, and put them in frozen homemade chicken soup that my husband had made a month earlier. Since the chicken soup came from a chicken roasted with lemon and thyme, that was a pretty swell batch of soup. 

The charoset was a snap...Manischewitz, walnuts, random apples, cinnamon, ginger. I did not realize that Manischewitz is only $3.99. How come I never see bums drinking it, then? Are there no old school Jewish bums anymore? I digress.

So we had a ten minute seder because my son kept on looking at me plaintively, asking if he could go. He memorized the first of the four questions in Hebrew, and then I did the rest. But I suck because I forgot most of them, and I wrote the phonetic translation on my Haggadah like crib notes, so I could pretend I had Jew street cred.

The only sticky part was the whole Plagues thing. See, as a kid, I remember the plagues being this festive interlude during the meal because 1. you got to dribble bright red wine on someone's nice tablecloth and 2. the plagues were lurid and creepy. But when you're four, perhaps learning that God decided it would be a swell idea to kill a bunch of first-born children might be a little much. Princess don't go for that senseless violence, you know. I said, coughing, that He, uh, roughed up the first-born and then said, "Hey, how about watching 14 episodes of Adventure Time?" Now that's parenting.

The real point of this post is the dessert. I made Simone Beck's Passover Chocolate Cake because it is the only dessert that is kosher and un-chometz and all that jazz that actually tastes good, largely because the glaze consists of butter, bittersweet chocolate, and coffee, three of my favorite things. Regard the wonder:

The cake is basically an afterthought. I mean, it's good-- not too sweet, moist, doesn't feel like an anvil in your stomach-- but the glaze is where all the action is. I could develop a deep and meaningful relationship with that glaze.

Arid chicken notwithstanding, the seder was pretty good. Most important, my kid is learning about both sides of the family, sorta-Catholic and somewhat Jewish-- hopefully, he'll be really confused by the time we're done with him. But that's okay. Like cooking, like parenting, it's all made up as we go along anyway, right? 

Meatloaf, Why You Do This To Me?

Remember in The Exorcist when Father Karras goes to see his mother in the hospital and she's all, Why You Do This To Me, Dimi? Well, damn it, that's how I feel about this effing meatloaf.

Oh, sure, you look luscious, you bacon covered bastard, and you smell great. But then, when I sink my teeth into you, why do you taste vaguely like Comet-scented meat? That meatloaf was covered in half a package of bacon, by God. Bacon I could have otherwise fried up all crispy-like, and, you know, jammed into my mouth.

I should have known. I have never liked meatloaf. Well, that's not strictly true. There was a meatloaf I made based on an Emeril Lagasse recipe that I thought was swell-- which is saying a lot, because I don't really like Emeril's shtick-- but apparently my husband thought was the equivalent of meat-covered vomit. Since he knows I am a fragile wildflower, he did not admit this to me until a year after the fact.

My mom used to make meatloaf and I hated it, but I assumed that was because my mother used to make all sorts of appalling things with ground beef. Normally, my mother is a dynamite cook, but there are three hamburger based dishes in her repetoire that make me go pale.
1. Hamburger Noodle Casserole-- like chop suey, but with egg noodles. Please. I can't even discuss it.
2. Stuffed Peppers- what I imagine might be served in Soviet-era cafeterias: greyish green peppers, rice, hamburger, and extremely thin tomato sauce, the kind you get from a can of Hunt's.
3. Meatloaf- grey, nondescript, a little dry. The food equivalent of mild depression.

Meatloaf, I am terribly, terribly disappointed in you. I want you to sit in the sad chair and think about what you've done.

Jewish Foods of my Youth

The Motherlode.

Jewish food does not rank high in my list of preferred cuisines. Part of it is psychological—my initial exposure to Jewish food was during tension-filled visits to my grandmother, who lived in the Bronx and hadn’t left her apartment in years. She was a profoundly terrible cook, but, like all good Jewish mothers, was filled with anxiety at the thought that her family wasn’t eating enough. I still remember her baked chicken—I think it was Mimi Sheraton who once referred to badly baked chicken as balsa wood, and my grandmother’s tasted like paprika-soaked balsa wood. It was so dry that when I started choking on a piece, it took me a while to realize I was choking on a bone fragment rather than a piece of meat. Capped off with a goodbye which involved my grandmother shrieking and pressing bottles of Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Soda on us,this did not make me associate classic Ashkenazi cuisine with good times.

My father had a lot of nostalgia for the foods of his youth and one of the few times I remember him cooking, he’d make matzoh brei. I dimly remember jars of Manischewitz gefilte fish in our house around Passover. My mother, a nice Midwestern Methodist who converted, was a good sport and I think she tried to make gefilte fish.  Once. To this day, I can tell she shudders when the phrase gefilte fish pops up.

It could have been worse—in From My Mother’s Kitchen, Mimi Sheraton’s terrific collection of Jewish recipes and family stories, she mentions her parents buying a live carp and keeping it in the bathtub. The freaking bathtub.  If I went into my bathroom and saw a carp swimming in my tub, I would calmly turn around, walk out the door, and move into a hotel, thanks.

Bagels were a big deal to my dad. He was very depressed that my brother and I liked Lender’s Onion Bagels, and still do. He maintains that no one outside of the five boroughs knows how to make a proper bagel. I cannot confirm or deny this. I will say that when the husband and I were courtin’, I would travel from Boston to Staten Island to see him, and before he dropped me off at the train station, I’d stop for a bagel at Tottenville Bagel, and it was AWESOME—a crusty poppy seed bagel, with a generous frosting of especially creamy and not oversweet scallion cream cheese.

According to my father, the only remotely acceptable source of bagels in the Boston suburb where we lived was a place called Eigerman’s, on Route 9 in Natick. At this point, I think the store is now home to the politically incorrect Oriental Furniture Warehouse.  I believe the store had a sign in the shape of a bagel, and to my taste, the bagels were about as edible as that piece of lit-up plastic. These bagels were leaden, but my father didn’t care—every weekend, he’d buy a dozen. My brother liked their onion rolls, at least, while I always found them to be a big disappointment. I mean, the outside has these nice burned bits of onion, but the inside has no damn onion; it’s like eggy Wonder Bread in there. Give me a bialy any day. Now, there’s some damn onions. 

Really, the food that seems the most Jewish to me is distinctly non-kosher Chinese food, because it was usually what we ate to break our Yom Kippur fast. I use the term “fast” loosely. Our observance of the High Holidays, particularly Yom Kippur, involved waiting for my Dad to get into a good mood. During Yom Kippur we would tiptoe around Dad because this was a man who loved food, and fasting was his idea of hell. Yom Kippur was not a time to ask him anything—in fact, it was a great time to completely avoid eye contact.  We would not eat breakfast, or else we’d pretend we hadn’t, except for my mom, who serenely drank her Sanka; this was clearly Dad’s show, not hers.

Every year, we reluctantly accompanied him to Conservative services in an auditorium at Brandeis University. Since my brother and I didn’t have much Jewish education--we were Brandeis Sunday School dropouts (like Beauty School Dropouts, only less fun), we couldn’t understand anything and we were bored out of our minds. I remember being appalled that the eternal light in the space was clearly an-ill concealed light bulb. If my dad was feeling especially melancholy, we’d sit there for a couple of hours, during which time I would contemplate throwing myself in the aisle and screaming from boredom. The only thing that piqued my interest was the singing of the Aveinu because it sounded sort of operatic and dramatic to me. The rest of the time I would stare at the Hebrew and the English translation of various meditations and prayers and think, OH GOD, WHEN CAN WE EAT?

Eventually, when my father had decided we’d all atoned enough, or, more likely, he got tired of my mother hissing, "No, we're not leaving yet, stop asking," we would get out. Leaving services and getting outside was like emerging from a coal mine. I am surprised, given my penchant for dramatics, that I didn't weep and kiss the ground. 

In the car I would hold my breath, waiting for my dad to decide that we needed to go get something to eat. And then, oh then, a glorious Chinese lunch, with completely trayf pan fried pork dumplings, mu shu, and beef with broccoli. Happiness and peace restored!  My family is always happiest around a table. In contrast to the relentless, thudding solemnity of the morning, the spice and the bright colors of stir fry, the lunatic abundance of dishes (we always ordered way too much), the cheerful excess of it all-- it seemed to help us find our balance again, and be grateful for what was, after all, a pretty good life.

As we sat in the Pine Garden, I’d burrow into my booth, look at the red flocked wallpaper, the Chinese Zodiac placemats (I was born in the year of the Tiger but my brother was born in the year of the Rat, which was an unending source of pleasure to me, HA, my brother’s a rodent) and Chinese lanterns, and think, damn, I love me some Jewish holidays.

That Giada, She's Onto Something

In another life, I would make soup all the time, because it just seems so wholesome. I feel you can trust a person who makes their own soup. They may be smug, they may be self-righteous, but I bet you they wouldn't stab you in an alley. One notable exception, clearly, would be Al Yeganeh, the original Soup Nazi.

When I am capable of thinking clearly, I make this soup on a Sunday and then serve it on a Monday. I maintain the perhaps faulty belief that it's good for soups and stews to chill for a day because it intensifies their flavor. Or, more likely, I've simply lost the will to live.

The recipe comes from Giada DeLaurentiis. I am suspicious of her because she weighs three pounds, but sister knows how to cook. Plus, her grandfather is Dino DeLaurentiis, who produced countless entertaining movies, including Conan the Barbarian. For the record, at least three times I day, I channel James Earl Jones and mutter, "Contemplate this on the tree of woe." Yup, I am a soup-making Thulsa Doom.

Giada DeLaurentiis's Tuscan White Bean and Garlic Soup

Ingredients

• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 2 shallots, chopped
• 1 sage leaf
• 2 (15-ounce) cans cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
• 4 cups low-sodium chicken broth
• 4 cloves garlic, cut in 1/2
• 1/2 cup cream
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 6 slices ciabatta bread
• Extra-virgin olive oil, for drizzling

Directions

Place a medium, heavy soup pot over medium heat. Add the butter, olive oil, and shallot. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the shallots are softened, about 5 minutes. Add the sage and beans and stir to combine. Add the stock and bring the mixture to a simmer. Add the garlic and simmer until the garlic is softened, about 10 minutes. Pour the soup into a large bowl. Carefully ladle 1/3 to 1/2 of the soup into a blender and puree until smooth. Be careful to hold the top of the blender tightly, as hot liquids expand when they are blended. Pour the blended soup back into the soup pan. Puree the remaining soup. Once all the soup is blended and back in the soup pan, add the cream and the pepper Keep warm, covered, over very low heat.

Place a grill pan over medium-high heat. Drizzle the slices of ciabatta bread with extra-virgin olive oil. Grill the bread until warm and golden grill marks appear, about 3 minutes a side. Serve the soup in bowls with the grilled bread alongside.


If I were a better person, I would serve this with a salad, but I am not so good with salads so BACK OFF. And yes, the Sicilian Twist Bread (from the bakery at Wegmans) might be a tad charred but damn it, my husband likes burned toast so you shut your pie hole, you.