Eat, Memory

2012-01-28T09:21:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted here in a while. Originally I thought to separate my original blog into two - one for food, one for literature - but after a while that got hard to maintain. It's all part of one life, after all, and I've been spending more time there instead. Then there are my Tumblrs, mostly here and occasionally here, which I started after photography became more and more a part of my life. I think I might combine them into one, too, to keep things simpler.

This is something I wrote and posted on the other blog and Tumblr; it seems fitting to also put it here, as it's a farewell to an old friend. Goodbye to all that.

In memory of Peter Cipra.

I met Peter Cipra when I was five and he was my kindergarten classmate Peter’s father. I knew, vaguely, that he had a restaurant; I wouldn’t understand what that meant until later. Meanwhile I sat in the bright kitchen of his home and made “spaghetti” out of blue Play-Doh with a garlic press (presumably not a garlic press used in his restaurant). His wife, Susan, made spaghetti and meatballs (not out of Play-Doh) for our lunch and told wild stories about Peter (senior) and his career as a chef. How he used to terrorize his cooks, and how once, in a fit of anger, he threw a butcher knife at someone who’d made a mistake (fortunately he missed). As a child, you come to know the mothers of your friends because they pick you up from school and cook you meals; fathers are tall, shadowy figures glimpsed on their way to and from work, around whom legends are spun and myths are made.

Years went by, and our paths did not meet again until Peter (junior) and I were once again classmates in middle school. It’s possible that my parents had been dining at Labuznik all these years without my knowledge, but I only remember the day in 6th grade when my old kindergarten friend Peter came up to me and said, gleefully, “Your dad didn’t finish his carrots last night!” I immediately went home and confronted my father at the dinner table. As a child who had to finish everything on my plate, it gave me a deeply subversive thrill to catch my own father out, and for years I was convinced I had found a chink in his armor, that he didn’t like carrots. (He does). I wouldn’t dine there myself until high school, in that narrow, high-ceilinged restaurant down on 1st Avenue, a few steps away from the Pike Place Market. I remember succulent lamb chops, tender spinach, and yes, those carrots that were my father’s downfall years before.

Labuznik, as I remember it, was formal but not stuffy, warmed by the good humor of Susan Cipra, who ran the dining room while her husband ruled the kitchen. You went there if you knew what you wanted, and if what you wanted was Peter Cipra’s uncompromising vision. He used to have this rule: no matter how many were dining at the table, you couldn’t choose more than four of the entrée options. That is to say, if there were six of you, and six entrée options, you couldn’t try all of them. It was maddening, but if you didn’t like his rules, you didn’t eat there. There isn’t anyone who runs a restaurant like that anymore, in these ME ME ME times. That era has passed. The closest successor might have been Lampreia, down the street, which in the nineties and noughties had that same uncompromising attitude, but without the warmth, which made for some interesting dining experiences. But all that is another story. We were talking about Labuznik, where Peter Cipra could do whatever the hell he wanted because he owned the damned building and didn’t have to answer to anyone.

The last time I had dinner at Labuznik was some six months before it closed, on the night of my 18th birthday. We had just returned from Prague, and my mind was full of the addictive pickled red cabbage that came with every meal. It came with our dinner at Labuznik, too, though only recently did a friend tell me that it was from a can. I had the Tournedos Rossini, and Peter explained to me that traditionally, Tournedos Rossini is topped with foie gras, but he made it with a slice of pâté atop each medallion of filet mignon, which would melt into a rich sauce as you ate it. This was followed by a berry Pavlova, which Susan brought to our table lit with a sparkling candle, reed-thin and twinkling with all the promise of the years ahead. I would be leaving for college soon; childhood was at an end. I’ll remember that dinner, though, and those stories, forever.

I was sorry to hear of Peter Cipra’s death last month, all too soon and terribly from cancer. He and his wife were a part of my culinary education, and therefore my life, from a very early age. Food was something beyond a bowl of cereal at breakfast, a PB&J sandwich in my lunchbox, the Chinese food I ate at home. It could be something creative, as creative as “blueberry spaghetti” made from Play-Doh or tender carrots spiced with something from a faraway land. It was part of a wider world that was and continues to be forever expanding, forever changing, and I hope it never ends. How lucky I was to have known him.

2011-03-22T19:44:00.000-07:00

back and forth.

I haven't been writing here, lately. It isn't that I haven't been eating out, which I have, or cooking, ditto, or thinking about food, which occupies most of my waking hours. There have been dinners with old friends and brunches with new ones. Over Chinese New Year my parents were in town, which meant endless meals with their friends. There were parties I spent talking so much my voice went hoarse and laughing so hard I could barely eat. Often there were smiling babies with their messy hair and fat starfish hands, and I found myself concentrating more on their giggles and sweet babble than what was on my plate. When I do write, my thoughts are turning more to literature, theatre, poetry; that other side of my life apart from food. These are the twin poles, food and literature, betwixt which the pendulum of my life swings back and forth.

The other night I was telling some friends that I don't really consider myself a "food blogger." There was a pause. "But you kind of are," D. said. I always forget that there are people in my life now who are aware of my blogs. When I started writing, five years ago, it was something of an open secret. I didn't mind if people read it - I still don't - but we never discussed it, and I liked it that way. The first few years, I wrote as though a fever was working its way through my body, every single day. I needed it, but I didn't need other people to read what I'd written. Even now, I'll rarely admit to even having a blog. ("Why don't you just leave it anonymous?" asked B. "Because I still have a little core of narcissism in me," I said).

I won't ever be the kind of food blogger who posts photographs and recipes, who attends blogger conferences and cares about things like SEOs (I'm still not clear what their purpose is) and maybe even aims for the ultimate goal: the book deal. That's not what I'm here for. I love food, and I think about it all the time. I love writing, but I love photography more, and I'm more comfortable about sharing it. I always have been more confident as a photographer than a writer. So I go back and forth. What I am doing here? I don't know. But I'll be back.

2011-01-07T23:25:00.000-08:00

Let them eat chicken.

Every now and then some food writer comes out with some new declaration involving chicken. They talk about how easy it is to roast a chicken for dinner on a weeknight even while holding down a full-time job. Or they talk about how mass-produced chicken is bad on every level and we should only eat free-range organic chickens that lived good lives during their short time on earth, purchased straight from the farmer or a butcher. The response is, of course, immediate, as food blogger after food blogger eagerly agrees or disagrees for whatever reason. But they are the wrong audience. The people reading articles about roasting a chicken on a Wednesday night or buying free-range organic birds from a local farmer are already the kind of people who do these things. They've already read Michael Pollan; you're only preaching to the choir.

A free-range, organic chicken from a local farm runs about $5-6 per pound at the farmer's market or at my neighborhood butcher. Therefore a chicken which weighs about four pounds and will feed me, a single person, for maybe six to eight meals in different incarnations (not including stock, made from the bones) will run about $20-$25. The free-range (but not organic) supermarket chicken will cost about half that much, and the "regular" supermarket chicken will cost probably half of the free-range chicken. Of course the so-called "free-range" chicken in its plastic shrink-wrap is still a mass-produced product, but that is an argument for another time. I have not bought a "regular" chicken, pumped full of antibiotics and raised, as Pollan et. al have informed us, under inhumane factory conditions, for over a decade. Although occasionally a package or two of chicken wings from the supermarket has made its way into my basket.

The issue is, what about people who can't afford the $25 chicken? For whom $25 is half the week's food budget? Or the entire week's food budget? For a family, not just a single woman like myself? Laurie Colwin's words have been burnt into my brain since I read them, years ago: Tell a working mother that she ought to find organic food for her child, and that mother's face will show you what desolation really means. There is simply no time and often not enough money. There is no right answer to the question, what do people mean when they say they have no time to cook? I dare you to tell someone who is working two jobs and raising three children, without help, that she doesn't have time to cook dinner because she doesn't make it a priority. Someone who has to worry more about rent and a lack of health insurance than the provenance of her pork chops and the terroir of her carrots is not going to give a damn what any food writer has to say about how she is feeding her family.

I have been thinking more and more about food lately. I remember the cafeteria lunches from my elementary school days, more than twenty years ago. They were not much different from Mrs. Q.'s. It wasn't that long ago - ok, it was fifteen years ago - that my cousins lived with us and I got to see first-hand how many chicken wings a teenage boy can consume. The answer is: a LOT. Thirteen-and-sixteen-year-old boys drink a gallon of milk a day and can consume up to two large pizzas - each - at a time. If there are ever teenage boys in my future, I can say right now that my locally-sourced, free-range-organic chicken wings ($3.99-$5.99/lb) will become an economically unfeasible, distant memory. I will hold some other words of Laurie Colwin's to my heart: Provision as much pure and organic food as you can and let the rest go by. Words to live by.

Colwin, Laurie. More Home Cooking. HarperPerennial, 1995. p86.

2010-12-29T13:32:00.001-08:00

This is just to say.
(for T.)
(with apologies to William Carlos Williams).
(Last week T. gifted me with a tall jar of homemade pickles, and I can't stop eating them).

this is just to say
i have eaten all the pickles
that filled a tall mason jar
that i had thought to save
for picnics at the beach
or on the living room floor
in a soft egg salad
or adorning a charcuterie platter
but i could not resist them
straight from the jar
they were so cold and crisp
and briny
and delicious.

2010-10-31T13:51:00.000-07:00

Wild Beast. Lark.

Some five or six years ago Lark started hosting what they called the "Whole Beast" dinner, a feast involving an endless series of dishes utilizing every part of an animal - pigs, lambs, and a goat or two - and I do mean every part of the animal. I went to my first one in the spring of 2008 (there were pigs' ears on the menu, and perfect lamb crépinettes). Last year, the dinner shifted its focus (and time - it happened in November) away from the usual pig/lamb/goat menagerie and turned to wild game, perfect for fall.

Last night I caught up with my friends - we met at my first Whole Beast dinner, and it's now become a tradition for us to sit together - at the door and we settled in at the same table as last year. We opened our bottles of wine - a Rioja and a Cabernet Sauvignon, both from 1998 - and nibbled away at a dish of almonds and olives. The menu looked thrilling, fourteen dishes broken up into four waves, plus a sorbet (more like a slushy) intermezzo and two desserts. We wondered aloud about the duck testicles and if the emu could be considered a large animal and tried the pheasant rilletes - they were fantastic - and checked out the costumes (all the servers and several other guests were in full Halloween getup).

Here are some dishes that stood out: Frogs legs, garlicky-sweet, the aforementioned rillettes, and the duck testicles, which were tiny chunks of deep-fried meat, with a texture somewhat like that of sweetbreads. There was a tiny cup of pheasant consommé with agnolotti, foie gras, and truffle (possibly my favorite dish of the night), and brown beans with thick chunks of wild boar bacon laced with the sweetness of leeks and maple syrup (which recall the Quebecois fèves au lard). I love the "little stewed birds" (quail) that are wrapped in bacon and scented with anise, and the skewered Bison hearts in some spicy sauce.

We drink our slushies - spiked with herbs and liqueurs it tastes curiously like Campari - and await the last wave, the wildest tasting of them all, with a saddle of Scottish blue hare that emphatically reminds you with every bite that you are eating wild game. Best of all are emu meatballs, with the croxetti pasta I love so much and the gentle perfume of matsutake mushrooms. We have been eating and talking for three hours. It feels good to catch up with my friends, which is hard to do at parties where there are too many people to say hello to, or farmer's markets where you are in a hurry to finish the week's shopping.

Dessert is a soft quince spice cake, which I like a lot, and a tiny cup of cocoa sorbet with white chocolate granite, which I love tremendously. I am unbearably full, a little drunk, and I can hardly wait until the next dinner. They are bringing back the Whole Beast dinner in the Spring. I'll be there.

2010-10-20T22:14:00.000-07:00

School lunch.

I have been reading and re-reading this post in reference to the current battle over school budget cuts in Great Britain and alternately weeping from rage and heartbreak.

I grew up in the south end of Seattle. We lived on a nice street, the highest in the neighborhood, with sweeping views of Lake Washington and the mountains beyond. But the local elementary school and high school were down in the valley below, in one of the city's poorer neighborhoods. I had tested into what was then called the Horizon program, which meant that our math and writing skills were one grade ahead of the average. Four grades - 1st through 4th - shared a vast space which contained three open classrooms, one central common area, and a small lab; we were in a newer wing of the building, separated from the rest of the school. Our paths rarely crossed those of other students, save for one day when an older boy tried to beat me up on my way home from school. I escaped with a scraped knee and was never allowed to walk home alone again.

It was an interesting time, the mid-to-late-80's. M. told me the other night that she had been bussed into our school district because of the Horizon program but also because of "forced integration." That part I don't remember. What I remember is that we spoke in hushed tones on the playground about the supposed drug house down the street and joked that classmates who wore red were "Bloods" and those who wore blue were "Crips" (rival gangs). I don't know if there were any actual gang wars going on but I remember used needles and condoms ("Eeeewwww!!" we said) on the playground and a drive-by shooting late one summer, before school started. Then I left for the manicured grounds of the city's most expensive private school, in fifth grade, and never looked back.

But this is all irrelevant, or perhaps it isn't. We were talking about school lunch. Our elementary school served breakfast and lunch, every day. I usually ate breakfast at home - whole wheat toast, English muffins, oatmeal, cold cereal, congee, or fruit and yogurt - but I also dimly remember school cafeteria pancakes, or perhaps it was French toast, with sausage, maybe some fruit, maybe orange juice in a plastic foil-sealed cup, like the ones they give you on airplanes. It was cheap, like the lunches, which I also occasionally ate (flabby pizzas, corn dogs, Salisbury steak), washed down with plain or chocolate milk (a rare treat). I think it cost a dollar. And for many kids, it was free or otherwise discounted. I wasn't really conscious of it at the time; I led a happy, sheltered, middle-class life that I later came to understand was incredibly privileged. I remember being shocked that some kids ate their lunches as if it were the best thing they'd ever tasted. I think about it now, and it breaks my heart.

I think that people - like Jamie Oliver, and others, like a friend, following his example - who are trying to change the way children eat are doing an amazing, incredible thing. In one sense, the system (as it stood 20 years ago) was doing one good thing: it made sure that children got fed, twice a day. In another sense, it wasn't: the food was crap, except for those for whom it was the best thing they had. It is part of a larger problem - where does the responsibility lie? On the school system which can't afford it, or on the parents who can't afford it? The more I think about it - and I say this as someone who is single and childless and doesn't see that changing anytime soon - the more it makes my heart ache. I don't have any understanding of what it must be like to have to send my child to school hungry. I hope I never do.

Twenty years have passed since I last ate in that elementary school cafeteria. I still remember the flimsy partitioned foil trays and the plastic sporks, the crates of half-pint milk cartons. We have to do better.

2010-10-05T22:14:00.000-07:00

the art of dining alone. Lark.

I haven't been to Lark in a while. I used to come here once a month, almost religiously. I'd go straight from work in fleece sweats or from home having changed into something slightly more respectable. My life is different now, made up of different circles of friends that nudge together in some places and overlap in others. There are cookbook clubs and Saturday brunches and jaunts up to Vancouver or over to Vashon or strawberry-picking in the Skagit Valley. When we go out to dinner I often find myself in West Seattle or Ballard or Queen Anne, and it feels good to explore different corners of my own city, to find my way in an unfamiliar place. But I miss my neighborhood, and I miss going to Lark, alone. It always feels like home.

L. has often remarked that she gets terrible service when she dines alone, which surprises me. She is very pretty and intimidatingly stylish and I would expect waitstaff to fall all over her, but apparently this is not the case. J., on the other hand, says she projects an aura of "I belong here, bitches." I don't remember those first few times of eating alone at Lark, but I am sure that I did not project that aura of "I belong here, bitches." I might have kept in mind Mary Cantwell's words about keeping my posture straight, my gaze confident while asking for a table for one. They must have been kind, for I kept going back. K., who is one of the owners, would always stop by for a word of greeting.

Anyway, I am here again. It is late when I walk in, and they are surprised (usually I come for dinner very early). I chat with my server, M., and collapse gratefully and ungracefully in the corner booth, order the foie gras and one of the night's specials, a poached duck egg. I eat far too much bread and butter (and what wonderful bread and butter it is) because lunch was ages ago and suddenly, I'm starving. My poached duck egg arrives, floating in broth on a raft of toast and a tangle of braised chard, covered in cheese shavings that melt slowly as I eat. The yolk is molten gold, and I am torn between eating it all quickly, before it gets cold, and savoring every last bite, slowly.

The foie gras, too, is perfect, seared and served on a crispy pig's trotter cake, with a few stray bits of crispy trotter (there are few phrases more delightful than "crispy pig trotter") sprinkled around. There is a pool of tangy-sweet peach puree, slices of pickled peaches that send shocks through the rich haze of the foie and trotter cake, and a few green curls of mizuna so you can pretend you had some vegetables. It is exactly what I wanted. No dessert tonight, no need for it. I am happy when I head up the hill towards home.

2010-10-02T16:47:00.000-07:00

Brunch. the gold standard.

Some friends and I gather together most Saturday mornings for brunch, trying different places around Seattle. While we sometimes have a bigger group, often there are just three of us, the original three who met at a diner early one morning when I was completely jet-lagged and uncharacteristically up early. (I can hardly believe it's been just about a year now). We've eaten at greasy-spoon diners and casual cafés and fancy restaurants. There have been hits and misses, and a few clear favorites, some dependable standbys. I am always late, rushing in with my hair still damp from the shower.

We had been meaning to try Harvest Vine since I first heard that they had started serving brunch. Some friends who have impeccable taste had gone, months ago, and raved about it. Finally, we made it there, after a quick trip to the farmer's market earlier in the morning. It was early, just after they opened; only a few tables were full. We ordered coffee and caracolillos (sweet rolls shaped like the snails they are named for), quickly, and debated over the rest of the menu. We all ordered eggs; I chose eggs scrambled with chanterelles and bacon. The caracolillos were perfect, spiraled rolls of soft dough that seemed like a cross between a croissant and brioche. They are a sign of good things to come.

Everything was perfect - M.'s baked eggs with tomato sauce and goodness knows what else, J.'s poached eggs and sausage, my scramble that is almost custard-like in its softness. The bacon is home-cured and the chanterelles are cooked just right, even if my revuelto looks, honestly, a little revolting. (There is no way to make eggs scrambled with mushrooms attractive). We mop up every bite with our toasts and mutter about what we might order next time, or if perhaps there is room in our stomachs for another dish. There isn't, of course. We'll have to come back, and soon. There have been few brunches as spot-on as this one. Watch out, Seattle. A new gold standard has been found.

2010-08-19T19:31:00.000-07:00

Plus ça change...Rover's.

I first ate at Rover's in 1996. I had just turned 16. Nothing will ever equal that first, unforgettable meal. My next dinner there was some four months later, a dinner I had arranged for 12 people in the restaurant's private room. There are two things I remember about that night. One is that the only dish I recall is a terrine of foie gras, pale and cold and not nearly as lovely as the hot seared foie gras from my first visit. Two is that the next night my father told me that he had cancer, and I was the last person to know. Everyone else who had been at dinner the night before had already heard the news, and in my mind I went over the evening's conversation again and again, wondering what I had missed.

That year, every milestone was celebrated with dinner at Rover's. My father's recovery from a several-hour surgery to remove a fist-sized tumor that had wrapped itself around his thymus gland. The night before his radiation therapy began. The end of said radiation therapy. The first anniversary of his surgery, repeated each fall thereafter. In between there were birthdays and wedding anniversaries, and soon I knew the restaurant's phone number by heart. I'd make and confirm reservations from my high school attendance secretary's office, the phone reserved for students calling parents for rides home from soccer practice.

Eventually, our visits there were fewer and farther between (although I still knew the phone number by heart), especially after my parents moved back to Taipei. I went for brunch with my father early last year, but I have not had dinner there for four or five years now. We went with some friends the other night, and I wondered, would it be the same? No, it wasn't, it couldn't be. The dining room is still quiet and elegant. The service is as polite and polished as ever. The bottled water is now Fiji instead of Evian, but it is still presented in a silver holder, with flourish. There are three menus now, instead of two, with four, five, or nine courses instead of five or ten, and each course can be ordered à la carte. I confess I miss the old ways, with fewer choices.

The dishes I loved best this time were black cod with summer herb pistou, and the extra course of foie gras I had ordered, which was as good as I remembered it. We drank a cool, white wine to start, with a pale, clear Burgundy to follow. Now the cooking is a little less classically French - at least it was this time - a sign of changing times. The nages are gone, as are the smoothly piped rounds of pommes de terre purée speared with a finely waffle-cut shard of crisply fried potato. Still, my rabbit was a little overdone, its accompanying couscous a bit wet, the olives overwhelming the sweet carrots. But I loved the espresso crême brulée, and the chocolate-cherry-almond mignardise at the end of the meal. I was happy to be here again, with my parents, with some of their dearest friends, eating foie gras and laughing until it hurt.

What I love most about Rover's, aside from an enduring consistency of cuisine and ambiance, is the sense of preserving a moment in my life. Like a fly in amber. No, like an oeuf en gelée. That first year I came here was a terrible year, a sad, frightening time. Dining in that quiet restaurant with its ever-changing menus and floral adornments brought a measure of peace from the anxieties of our everyday lives.

I'll keep the phone number memorized, for next time.

2010-06-26T20:42:00.000-07:00

Strawberry fields (forever).

My alarm went off at 6am. Somehow I stumbled out of bed and into the shower and got dressed, eyes still closed, and drove up to J.'s house. We got in her car and headed north, up to the Skagit Valley, stopping for coffee and donuts along the way (salted caramel for me, apple fritter for her). We got lost, thanks to my inability to follow directions. We made wrong turns and were sniffed at by suspicious dogs and finally I saw the unmistakable silver-thatched head of our leader across the road, near a beautiful farmhouse set amongst rolling fields. Strawberry fields.

There were maybe 60 of us, men and women and children and babies. We listened to our hosts talk about strawberry varieties and what it takes to run a family farm, generations in the making. Then we gathered our empty half-flats and trooped across the road to an untouched strawberry field. These are Shuksans, deep red to the core and pure in flavor; they are everything a strawberry should be. I am kneeling in the dirt, lifting up the dusty leaves in search of ripe berries hiding beneath. The ripest berries fall into my hand, gently. Every few minutes I eat another one. Quality control. I look over at my friends with their baby, I., who is enthusiastically diving into his first strawberry, his lips and even his nose stained bright red.

Little kids are running around, leaping over the strawberry plants, helping their parents fill their flats, popping the occasional ripe berry into their eager mouths. I hear the occasional shout of "Mommy! I gotta go potty!" and laugh to myself. I remember being a kid and coming up here to go strawberry or raspberry picking. I remember the heat, the sun beating down, and am grateful that today is cool and gray. We take our heaping half-flats back across the road, and gather to eat strawberry shortcake. The kids are all eagerly waiting for their share, a giant biscuit piled high with fresh strawberries (simply macerated with a little sugar, I think) and whipped cream. Jon solemnly asks each child if they are sure they can handle all that shortcake; each child eagerly nods yes.

Finally, I get my own serving of strawberry shortcake. I feel like a little kid again, tasting some forbidden fruit. That combination of strawberries and whipped cream, it always feels special, and every time I have it again I feel that same shock of excitement all over again.

Full and happy, we drive home, stopping at the Rexville Grocery for an egg scramble to counteract all the sugar bouncing around in our systems. It was a good day.

2010-06-14T16:55:00.000-07:00

The first dish. eggs scrambled with tomatoes.

Eggs scrambled with tomatoes is a classic Taiwanese home-cooked dish. I don't actually remember what the first dish I ever made was - steamed rice? Brownies from a mix? - but surely this is one of the first things I learned to cook on the stove. Sometimes I burned the scallions, undercooked the tomatoes so the whole dish was too watery, stirred the scrambling eggs so enthusiastically that everything broke apart into clumps, added too much salt or too little, both cardinal sins. Sometimes the scallions were too raw or the tomatoes too mushy. We would sit down to dinner, me folding my legs under me in the window seat, and my parents would (kindly, gently) point out what I had done wrong, and how I could do it better. Sometimes, though, they would be just right.

A while back, some coworkers and I had an intense, trilingual debate over the proper way to cook scrambled eggs and tomatoes. There is no single, canonical recipe. Some people scramble the eggs first, remove them onto a plate, then cook the tomatoes and scallions separately. I don't understand this, because then the tomatoes and eggs don't stick together at all. Other people add ketchup, or wait until the end to add the scallions (sliced into two-inch logs) so they remain crisp and fresh. I also don't understand this, because I don't like raw scallions unless they are very thinly sliced. My own method has evolved over some twenty years, and now I can do it without thinking.

I use Roma tomatoes, and slice them into chunks about 3/4 inch square, two tomatoes for three eggs. I slice a couple of scallions thinly on the bias, beat the eggs with a fork (if I were being properly Chinese, I'd use chopsticks for this), and heat a little oil in a frying pan. In go the scallions, and when they start sizzling, I add the tomatoes. I let the tomatoes cook until they soften, release their juices, then cook them a little longer until the juices are almost gone. Season with salt and pepper, pour in the beaten eggs. Fold the eggs over on themselves as they set, turn golden around the edges. Once in a while, I manage to get everything to hold together into a soft frittata; usually it falls apart in irregular wedges. It doesn't matter. It's always delicious.

2010-06-13T16:07:00.000-07:00

Four ingredients.

It was an impromptu potluck, with only one direction: you could only put four ingredients in your dish. (Not counting water, salt, pepper, or oil/butter). I agonized for hours. I consulted cookbooks. And then I took a deep breath, and made something of my own, or rather, two things: a cool salad of thinly sliced cantaloupe, mint, burrata, and roasted hazelnuts, tossed together haphazardly at the last moment, and another salad of Persian cucumbers in a soy, sesame oil, and vinegar dressing. The former was a sudden inspiration, the latter is something that I have been making since childhood, and I can do it in my sleep. Sometimes we add crushed garlic, or hot peppers, but I was restrained by my four ingredients.

Others rose to the challenge. There were toasts topped with marmalade, Gouda, and prosciutto. Carrots with butter and cumin and borage blossoms, as beautiful to look at as it was good to eat. A simple salad with fresh lettuces, translucent, ruby-rimmed slices of tiny radishes, radish sprouts, and a light vinaigrette. Spicy stir-fried cabbage with bacon. Barbecue-smoked ribs rubbed with brown sugar and chili powder and cumin. Everything was delicious; everything came together into a meal, something more than a hodgepodge of ingredients carelessly thrown together.

The truth is that the limitation of having only four ingredients is no limitation at all, but rather a new kind of freedom. It forces you to think about what you don't need, and concentrate on what you do. This is home cooking, the kind you do every night; short on ingredients and time to put it all together (with the exception of the ribs, which take a couple of hours on the barbecue, I think), and long on flavor. I didn't really need to think about it - mint goes well with cantaloupe, burrata tastes good with everything, and hazelnuts add a nice crunch. Those quick pickles are easy to put together, take no effort at all, and everyone loves them. At the end of the day, I don't want a million flavors and ingredients and garnishes battling it out on my palate, much as I prefer the clear melodies of Bach to Beethoven's symphonies. I want to taste my food, enjoy it, savor every last bite.

I ate five of the ribs. Everyone made fun of me.

2010-06-12T16:47:00.000-07:00

Lazy Saturday.

After a breakfast of tea and a toasted croissant and the leftover landjäger from last night (which still reminds me of a fancy Slim Jim) I head down to Melrose Market. I buy chocolate mint and chives from Marigold & Mint (no flowers; I bought peonies and lupines and sweetpeas and a single, perfect rose a few days ago). I buy burrata and a baguette and a few odds-and-ends of cheese from Calf & Kid. I get some Duroc bacon from Rain Shadow Meats. I love the Melrose Market; I will love it even more when Homegrown opens and I can get sandwiches here.

I walk home thinking about the things I've bought, but also thinking about a dinner tonight. J. and B. are celebrating the completion of their respective books, and are throwing an impromptu potluck. There is one thing - we have to bring a dish that contains four ingredients, no more. No garnish. We are sad that M. can't be there, because he is the kind of cook who garnishes his garnishes. I had initially thought of making a pea-and-bacon salad in endive boats, or corn-and-pine-nuts (also in endive boats). But that would involve going to the supermarket in search of endives.

I make myself lunch, bacon and eggs and a hunk of baguette, and ideas turn themselves over in my head like stones caught in the waves at the beach. I think about a salad of thinly sliced melon and slivers of mint, roughly torn chunks of burrata, a sprinkling of sea salt (salt and pepper and oil do not count as one of our four ingredients), perhaps some toasted hazelnuts for crunch. Just in case, I make a back-up dish - quick pickles of Persian cucumbers, sliced into slim wedges and marinated in a soy-sesame vinaigrette. Usually I use soy sauce and rice wine vinegar, but as there is a slim possibility of a gluten-intolerant guest I make it with wheat-free tamari and Chardonnay vinegar. It tastes just as good this way, and I won't have to worry about making anyone sick. In the end, she doesn't make it to the party, but everyone else digs in with gusto.

2010-06-11T22:21:00.000-07:00

Friday Lark.

There are many new restaurants now, places I've been wanting to try. But first I head back to Lark. In the city where I grew up and where there are still restaurants who remember my parents but not me, Lark is the one place that is completely mine. I ate there several times with my parents, but after they moved to Taipei and I moved to the neighborhood, I started going alone, striking up conversations with one of the owners and all of the servers. I became a regular. One of these conversations led to the Whole Beast dinner one spring evening two years ago. That dinner led to more adventures beyond anything I could have imagined. My life as it is now began that night.

J. is late, stuck in traffic. The dining room is empty and quiet; white linens, dark wood, wineglasses gleam in the sunlight that streams through the front windows. I'm in one of the booths that run along the south wall of the restaurant, and as I wait for my friend I hear M. recite the specials. I hear the words "crispy trotter cakes" and my ears perk right up. J. arrives, and we order the crispy trotter cakes, along with several other dishes. We have a simple green salad, a plate of burrata with pine nuts, basil, fava beans, and the best croutons ever. I love burrata.

We have landjäger, a kind of cured sausage served with two kinds of mustards, and the main event, the crispy trotter cakes. The cakes have the perfect crunchy crust, all meltingly tender pork inside, with a luxurious foie gras sauce sprinkled with porcini mushrooms. I almost asked for more bread to mop up the sauce, but I am distracted by the rösti potatoes. I am glad J. is here with me. I would probably die if I tried to eat both trotter cakes by myself, and I only ever get burrata or rösti potatoes when I come here with other people. By now the dining room is full, and I am glad. The last year or two has been hard for the restaurant industry, and while new places seem to open every week so many other places have been struggling.

But for now, all the tables are occupied, and we are eating dessert. J. has Meyer lemon ice cream, and I have a rhubarb-rosé 'consommé' with coconut sorbet with pistachios and mint. It sounds improbable but turns out to be light and refreshing, and I love it.

2010-06-10T20:22:00.000-07:00

Let them eat cake.

The other night I was thinking about that offhand comment, made by a friend on Twitter, taken out of context, about how anyone can cook. Out of context, it sounded a little like "let them eat cake!" I know there is more to the story, but leaving that behind, I kept thinking more and more about why I cook. How I learned to cook. How I push myself, as R. put it, to "raise my game." I thought about standing on a chair, age 3, carefully washing a bowl of mushrooms, rubbing away every speck of dirt until each mushroom was a gleaming white. I thought about that miserable year, after college, when I felt lost, jobless, living at home and making dinner for my parents and I every night. How I kept up the cooking even after I started working, making quick stops at QFC on the way home or calling my dad and asking if he wouldn't mind picking up a few things.

I have always cooked. Tunnel-of-fudge cakes from a mix. A horrifying late-60's casserole involving chicken thighs, canned mushroom soup, Lipton's Onion Soup mix, and orange juice over rice. Lasagne. I moved away from special-occasion dishes that took hours and dirtied every surface of the kitchen - I was and still am an extremely messy cook - and into simple, everyday dishes like teriyaki chicken wings, scrambled eggs with tomatoes, and fried rice. While I am still terrible at things involving beaten egg whites and my cheesecakes rise and fall and crack like Krakatoa during a volcano eruption, cooking is something I do all the time. If not every night, then almost every other night. For the most part.

The hard part, as R. commented a few nights ago on an earlier post, is waste. As a single girl, I am always halving or quartering recipes so I don't wind up with more than three or four meals' worth of any one dish. More than wasting food, I hate boredom. I hate eating the same thing over and over again. This is especially hard with soups and stews, rich things like curries and borscht that I crave for days and then can no longer bear the thought of by the time I struggle my way through the last spoonfuls. A few weeks back I made myself an Indian-spiced curry with two medium-sized Yukon Gold potatoes and half an onion, and it lasted just long enough (three servings) to leave me wanting more, which is the ideal.

I have the luxury of time. I get off work early enough to head to the farmer's market on weekdays for vegetables and meats and a frothy, creamy cup of horchata from the taco stand that appeared all the markets this year. I can have an early dinner and spend the evening baking cheesecake for my coworker's birthday. I can walk to the new butcher down the hill for a slab of pork belly and buy tiny white turnips at the flower shop nearby to braise with said pork belly and everything will be ready by 6:30. And I love that I have all of this.

Another day I'll dig deeper into the archives . I don't quite remember what I ate when I had a different schedule and came home at 6 or 7. Maybe I ate later, stayed up later, woke up later. I still ate the same things I do now, I think. My life is different now. Food, as it has always been, is the only constant.

2010-06-08T20:50:00.000-07:00

Dinner for one.

I timed myself as I was cooking dinner tonight, starting with washing two cups of rice and putting it in the rice cooker. This is always the first step; it takes 45 minutes for the rice to cook, and it will taste better if you let it rest for an additional 10 minutes before you scoop it out. It was always my job to make the rice before dinner when I was growing up, after piano practice, before chopping vegetables and setting the table. I hated how cold my hands got unless I turned the water to lukewarm while rinsing the rice. Did you know that in Chinese, the word for uncooked rice (mi - 米) is not the same as the word for cooked rice (fan - 飯)? This has always confused me.

Once the rice is out of the way, the rest of my prep is easy. I have a few Shanghai bok choy left - unlike regular bok choy (large or baby), it has brighter green stems and leaves, instead of nearly white stems and dark green leaves - and I slice off the bottoms, detaching the thicker outer leaves and keeping the heart intact. I roll cut some Chinese eggplants - or maybe these are the Japanese ones, I can't remember - into smallish chunks so they'll cook faster. L. is the only one who has ever noticed that I roll-cut my vegetables, creating irregularly-shaped pieces that are, nonetheless, about the same size. Twenty-some years of cooking under the eagle eye of my mother means unbreakable habits.

Quickly, I slice some shiitake mushrooms to stir-fry with the bok choy, and finely mince several cloves of garlic for the eggplant. I check my timer. Half an hour has gone by. I clean up the kitchen - a little - and pull out blocks of cream cheese for the cheesecake I have to make later, so they can come to room temperature while I eat dinner. I know from experience that if I start the actual cooking when the rice is nearly done, then I can eat by the time the rice has rested long enough. I take a break, and come back to find 5 minutes left for the rice cooker.

To cut down on the number of pans I have to wash, I generally use one pan for two dishes, and don't bother washing the pan in between. This works for me because, to keep a balance of flavors in my meal, I usually cook one dish with soy sauce, and one without. Obviously, you cook the dish without soy sauce first, to avoid contaminating the second one. In no time at all, the bok choy with shiitake mushrooms is done. The eggplant takes a little longer; I add water to the pan to steam it soft, then stir-fry it until the soy sauce begins to caramelize around the edges of the eggplant. Finally, it's done. I check my timer. 54 minutes, 03 seconds. Time to eat.

2010-06-07T21:50:00.000-07:00

Roast chicken and other thoughts.

It started out on Twitter, the way so many things do these day. One famous food writer declared that roasting a chicken took no time at all, and anyone could do it, even on a weeknight. Another food writer declared that if she could cook three meals a day, plus baking in the afternoon, with a toddler, then other people could, too. It was one of those off-hand comments that hit a nerve. This second writer is someone I admire, love, respect, someone I consider a friend. And on the one side: anyone can learn to cook. And on the other side: first, they need the desire to learn, and the willingness to make mistakes. That is the hard part.

The beautiful part of Twitter, for me, is the tight-knit community of food-loving people that I have found in both my own city and across the globe. The bitter part of it is that what makes us so close can also, temporarily, blind us to what is outside: people who don't share that same passion. Who don't have certain luxuries that I, for one, take for granted: a childhood with parents who loved food and took me everywhere from roadside stands in Taipei to the Russian Tea Room in New York City, money to buy food and experiment with ingredients that may be expensive and/or hard to find, time to shop and cook, and the kitchen skills and confidence that allow me to turn out a meal for one person (when I am alone) in about half an hour, or three people (when my parents are in town) in about an hour.

I have a repertoire of dishes I can make with my eyes closed. I have a well-stocked (if not well-organized - where the hell did I put that bottle of Worcestershire?) pantry. If I lack a true professional chef's speed and skill - I am sure my friends who have actual training would wince if they saw me cook - I do know what I am doing, most of the time. I have a schedule that means I am home by 4pm. I am always thinking ahead - what can I prep tonight so I don't have to do it tomorrow? What leftovers can be stretched and reassembled into something different so I don't get bored? I do this because I love to eat, and because I care enough to take the time to think about what I eat, at least 90% of the time. (Except for nights like tonight, when I had one salami sandwich and one smoked-salmon-and-cream-cheese sandwich for dinner). I'll bake a cake because I see a recipe I want to try, just for the hell of it, and I am not usually intimidated by a mile-long list of ingredients or three pages of instructions, although I save complicated things for the weekend.

The conversation about mothers-who-work and mothers-who-stay-home and mothers-who-work-from-home is one that I am completely unqualified to participate in. I am single and childless. I am not responsible for the care and feeding of anyone besides myself, except for, occasionally, my parents (they spend about six weeks of the year in Seattle, with me). Laurie Colwin wrote movingly and clearly about her feelings about being a working mother who nevertheless was determined to make sure that her family ate well, nearly 20 years ago, and she put it better than anyone. (See the chapters "Real Food for Tots" and "Four Easy Pieces;" hell, see ALL the chapters in More Home Cooking, a collection of brilliant food essays collected just before her sudden death in 1992).

In college I would buy poussins at the slightly larger, fancier Wegman's supermarket over in Pittsford (a short drive from the University of Rochester, where I was a student). I'd spatchcock them with a pair of kitchen shears and roast them, seasoned simply with salt and pepper, in my toaster oven until the skin was golden and crispy and the meat was juicy. I'd make soup with the bones and have chicken noodle soup (with spinach and scallions and Chinese wheat noodles), sorry, poussin noodle soup, the next night. Why doesn't anyone talk about roasting poussins or Cornish game hens on a weeknight? Splitting the birds down the back and flattening them (the complicated way of saying "spatchcocking") enables you to cook them quickly, making them perfect for when you are short of time. It's roast chicken, with a little bit of fiddly work with a pair of scissors but minus the feeling of being in Spain when dinner isn't ready until 9pm. Unless you want to feel like you've gone to Spain.

2010-05-30T11:14:00.000-07:00

The week of eating meatlessly. day 8.

I should be truthful - on day 1, last Sunday, I had steak for lunch, left over from a fancy dinner a few nights before. Dinner was vegetarian, and every meal thereafter, until tonight, when I end my week with a cookbook club that meets once a month. I believe I heard that salmon and duck would be on the menu. Still, 21 vegetarian meals in a row (ok, some of those were breakfasts of fruit and tea and the occasional muffin) is nothing to sneeze at. It is the longest consecutive time I have ever gone without meat in some form or another. I feel good. I haven't lost any weight, or at least not more than a pound or two. But I have been thinking more about what goes on my plate, and it has been a good exercise in creativity, balance, and planning.

The hardest part of this whole exercise has been consciously avoiding meat. Craving fish, and remembering, "oh, not this week." Thinking about a roast chicken, and catching myself before I turn towards the butcher counter. The dried seasoned tofu I love so much isn't something I can pick up on the walk home from work, whereas I have a supermarket, a butcher, a cheese shop, and a flower shop that sells vegetables within walking distance. I have to plan a little bit ahead. But the meals during this week have been good, better than good, and I hope to incorporate more of them into my life in the future. A long trip followed by a week or two of continued gastrointestinal turbulence led to a recent laziness and apathy in the kitchen; this week has changed that.

Planning ahead, eating more vegetables, eating more fruit, eating less meat, are all things that I want to continue. Over the past few years, I have been buying more and more of my meat - and all food in general - from farmer's markets. It costs more - so I buy less of it - and tastes better - so I savor every bite of what I have. I won't go into how cheaply produced meat will cost us more in the long run; that is a conversation for another time. But I will think about eating vegetarian more often, perhaps a few days a week, if not more.

2010-05-30T00:55:00.000-07:00

The week of living meatlessly. day 7.

I went out to breakfast with my friends this morning. We often do this on Saturdays, a practice that began early one jet-lagged morning several months ago at a diner not far from my apartment, where my Southern friend averted her eyes from my (come to think of it, vegetarian and possibly vegan) desecration of biscuits and gravy. Aside from the occasional vegetarian biscuits and gravy, nearly every breakfast since has involved pork in some form, sometimes corned beef, but usually ham or bacon or sausage. Even if I order, say, pancakes or waffles or French toast, I will still get a side of meat. This time, though, I ordered the bananas Foster French toast. It was stuffed with creamy ricotta and topped with caramelized bananas, and while I like my French toast a bit more custard-soaked - the bread was a little dry - I didn't even notice the lack of bacon.

Lunchtime, and I still wasn't hungry. I had one of the Nutella blondies that L. gave me, all chewy caramel-y goodness swirled with the chocolate-hazelnut Nutella. She had used Demerara sugar, which tends to sink to the bottom when you use it for baking. It reminded me of a Laurie Colwin essay, where she talks about kitchen disasters and how, once, she made a batch of brownies with Demerara sugar and they baked up into a solid brick that was completely impenetrable by any kind of implement. Here, instead of an impenetrable brick, there was a subtly layered square of deliciousness.

For dinner, I turned to the leftover potato curry from Thursday night, again not hungry enough to cook up some side vegetables. I was cheating. I was being lazy. My plan of eating balanced, thoughtful meals of many colors had fallen by the wayside. Breakfast and "lunch" was laden with sugars and fats, and dinner only marginally better. (Potatoes and rice? As my friend mocked when I once almost ordered a side of hash brown with pancakes, "Have some carbs with your carbs, why don't you?"). What the hell, it's the weekend. Tomorrow is another day.

2010-05-28T23:28:00.000-07:00

The week of living meatlessly. day 6.

Today was a little less...structured. I had leftovers for lunch, the stir-fried tofu with mushrooms and carrots. As I chewed on the strips of tofu I felt almost like I was eating red-braised pork belly, and was concerned that the vegetarianism was causing me to hallucinate. Then I figured that the tofu had been flavored with 5-spice powder (and soy sauce), and the star anise was making me think of the red-braised pork belly seasonings. Phew.

Going into this week, I remembered how my mom was always hungry when she was a vegetarian. She ate triple chocolate Dove bars every day and gained five pounds. I was determined not to derail all the healthy food I had been eating by consuming cake and ice cream ("Cupcakes are vegetarian," joked a friend on Twitter). Instead, I'd snack on fruit or a few crackers or a small handful of nuts. I made sure I had a side vegetable - skillet-steamed broccoli or carrots - in addition to a main dish; I ate a little more rice than I usually do. Strangely, I rarely felt hungry during the past week.

I didn't even feel like dinner tonight, still full from my generous plate at lunch. I stir-fried crisp sugar snap peas from the farmer's market in a little oil, sprinkled them with salt, and ate them straight up, like French fries. They were sweet and still a little crunchy, and satisfying. Then I went to Bingo & Karaoke Night at the Greenwood Senior Center (long story), and was lured in by the tater tots. They were vegetarian. Our table mate proffered a bag of caramel corn, and I took a few. Also vegetarian.

While I ate my greasy, cooling tater tots, I thought about friends in high school and college, going through vegetarian phases and living on grilled cheese sandwiches, French fries, popcorn, hummus wraps and falafel from the cafeteria. Waffles are vegetarian, if you eat eggs and dairy, and when you are living away from home for the first time in your life there is a certain thrill to eating waffles for dinner. It isn't hard to eat vegetarian. It's hard to eat a healthy, balanced diet that happens to be vegetarian. Or rather, it isn't hard at all - you just have to think about what you are eating and why. But then again, we should all think about what we are eating and why, whether we are vegetarians or not.

2010-05-27T16:25:00.000-07:00

The week of living meatlessly day 5.

When I was in India last month, I ate potato curry every morning for breakfast, either in the form of puri bhaji, which was fried dough puffs served with potato curry, or pao bhaji, which was a brioche-like bread, fried in butter or ghee, and served with a similar potato curry (it contained peas whereas the other one did not, and I think the combination of spices was a little different). I was addicted. Still, some twenty straight meals of Indian food, with all its unfamiliar array of spices and flavors, took its toll on my gastrointestinal system and it was a while before I could entertain the thought of Indian food again.

Then I started thinking longingly of that potato curry, fragrant with cardamom and coriander and cumin, bright with turmeric and pepper. I bought the spices at PFI and a few potatoes and an onion, a bag of frozen peas, and set to work. Ground the spices by hand, with a mortar and pestle (actually, a stainless-steel espresso tamper and a small bowl), heated them in a pan until the air was scented with spices. Heated some oil, and added the onions. I cooked the onions slowly, until they were translucent and browning around the edges, then added the diced potatoes. Poured in some water, covered and let it all simmer.

It took longer than I thought; the potatoes had to cook through, then continue cooking until they started to melt a little around the edges. The wait was hard, but at last the curry was almost ready. I threw a handful - maybe two - of frozen peas, and stirred it all together until the peas were done. I scooped some rice into a bowl, added the curry. It smelled like India. It was cold and gray outside instead of sunny and burning hot, but I felt some of the warmth in my kitchen, standing at the stove over a pan of curry. Next time I'll grind the spices more finely, use more seasoning, but as an experiment it turned out very well.

2010-05-26T15:46:00.000-07:00

The week of living meatlessly. day 4.

The week is going by more easily than I had anticipated, in terms of craving meat. What has been a little more difficult is planning and prepping my meals - everything needs to be picked over and trimmed and washed and chopped, unlike, say, a steak which you just sling into a pan. I finally understand that there is a difference between feeling 'full' and merely feeling 'satisfied.' And I finally understand what people mean about 'mindful eating.' I am thinking about food all the time. I have fruit for breakfast instead of a cookie, and in the afternoon instead of another cookie. I cook myself two dishes, plus rice (which involves little more than washing 2 cups of rice and pressing 'start' on the rice cooker), for dinner instead of just one. My dinner plate looks like a balanced meal instead of a piece of leftover steak and a heap of rice. I've resisted falling back on macaroni and cheese or a bowl of cereal or a handful of crackers and a piece of chocolate, and it feels wonderful.

Tonight I stir-fry the softer kind of dried seasoned tofu with carrots - the leftovers from yesterday, sliced into slim irregular batons - and shimeji mushrooms, with scallions and a splash of soy sauce. I skillet-steam some broccoli and eat it all over a plate of rice, hunched over as usual at the coffee table in the living room. I'm in the groove now, the place where tofu and vegetables over rice is a deeply satisfying meal. The tofu and shimeji mushrooms are just browned around the edges; to call them "meaty" is a dishonor to their complementary flavors, but they are meaty against the sweetness carrots. This is the best meal I've had so far this week.

2010-05-25T20:17:00.000-07:00

The week of living meatlessly. day 3.

Today I headed to Uwajimaya, over at the edge of the International District. The couscous salad and spinach soufflé were both delicious, but I wanted to return to the kind of vegetarian cooking I was most familiar with, the foods of my childhood. I bought garlic and ginger and scallions, baby bok choy and green beans and eggplant, shiitake and shimeji mushrooms, spiced dried tofu - both kinds, one smaller and thinner and chewier, the other a little bigger and fatter and slightly softer - and plain soft tofu.

For dinner I sliced up the chewier of the dried tofus into batons, and stir-fried them with green beans and plenty of garlic, adding a splash of soy sauce with some water to steam the beans tender. There was rice, of course, and irregularly-shaped wedges of carrots that I had skillet-steamed and then stir-fried to caramelize the edges a little. I thought about Elizabeth Andoh's Japanese cookbook Washoku, where she talked about the philosophy of composing a meal by making sure you had different colors of food on your plate. I looked down at my plate, white and green and brown and orange. It was beautiful. Tasty, too.

2010-05-24T20:52:00.000-07:00

The week of living meatlessly. day 2.

I remember clearly the last time I ate a steak. I was maybe 19, or 20. We were in Portland, having dinner in the hotel restaurant, the kind of place that is all dark wood and forest-green carpet and dim lighting, clubby, with a hint of a bygone era still lingering like the smoke over a grill. I can still taste the slight char of the beef, the rich fat streaked through it all. I don't mean that I haven't eaten steak since then; I have, again and again. I mean that I haven't eaten an entire steak, as served in a restaurant, all 16 or 20 ounces of marbled beef lounging insouciantly on a heavy oval china plate next to the sautéed green beans and baked potato. I haven't finished a steak since. Maybe I'll eat half, or even a third, and take the rest home. Last Friday, I went out to dinner and ordered a Porterhouse the size of my face. I remembered how full I was, that time in Portland, that uncomfortable sensation of having eaten more than I should have.

Tonight I came home and rummaged around in the fridge for something to cook. Earlier, the idea of a spinach soufflé had been tumbling around in my mind. There was spinach from the farmer's market, and half an onion left from last week's carrot salad. I had milk and a small wedge of cheese. I didn't have a recipe; sometimes you just have to wing it. I browned the diced onions in butter and olive oil, added flour, milk, seasoned with salt and pepper and a few scrapes of nutmeg. In went the spinach, stirred until wilted and tender. I beat some egg whites until stiff, buttered and bread-crumbed an oval baking dish, grated the cheese. Folded the egg whites into the creamy spinach, poured it into the pan, sprinkled it generously with cheese, and slid everything into the toaster oven, crossed my fingers.

The soufflé rose gloriously, golden brown and crusty, and collapsed almost as soon as I took it out of the oven. It was perhaps a little damp and under-seasoned inside, but never mind. It was good, better than good enough.

2010-05-23T19:33:00.000-07:00

The week of living meatlessly. day 1.

Recently, L. mentioned on her blog that she would be going meat-free for a week at the end of May, and invited her readers to join her. All of us who know her laughed and laughed and laughed. Let me put it this way: the first time I heard about L., I was reading about a dish she had created for a party - "bacon-wrapped bacon" (bacon wrapped around red-braised pork belly and roasted until the bacon renders out its fat and becomes crispy). She writes recipes like a Taiwanese beef noodle soup that calls for 3 pounds of beef shank ("serves 2, with leftovers") and once cooked us a 10-course Chinese feast that involved some form of pork in nearly every dish. If L. could go meatless for a week, so could I. It was a challenge, a throwing down of a gauntlet. I like a challenge.

I thought I would start with cooking my way through the odds and ends cluttering up my fridge. I always buy vegetables, in a half-hearted attempt to eat a bit more healthily, and leave them until they wilt and shrivel into brittle shadows of their former selves. Now they were all I had. There was some asparagus and a few tomatoes; I would stir-fry the asparagus and use some of it in a couscous salad for lunch during the week, then eat the rest with rice and eggs scrambled with tomatoes. I would keep eggs and dairy in my diet, call on the dishes from my childhood, the ones I returned to again and again when my mom went vegetarian for a year. There would be tofu, but no tempeh or seitan. I would not be eating quinoa or lentils.

After I had my simple dinner of eggs scrambled with tomatoes - one of the first things I learned how to cook - and asparagus over rice, I turned to the couscous salad. Loosely based on a recipe from Falling Cloudberries, I skipped the roasted tomatoes and cucumber and kept the mint, scallions, and chèvre. It was light and Spring-like and would do for the next couple days for lunch. A promising start to the week.

2010-04-16T22:34:00.000-07:00

I think it’s a requirement for all Seattle Public Schools to go on a field trip to the Pike Place Market in 4th grade. I went with my 4th grade class twenty years ago, and a few weeks ago my friend accompanied her 4th grader to the market. The girls all got those spiral beaded thingies you twist around your hair so it looks like some fancy braid you got on the beach in Mexico. I’m pretty sure I had one twenty years ago, too.

All this talk about Jamie Oliver and his food revolution in schools has made me think about my own school lunches. Chicken fingers. Tater tots. Salisbury steak. I loved Salisbury steak. It came with mashed potatoes. I’m Chinese. We never ate things like that. I was in my teens before it occurred to me what made a grilled cheese sandwich extra tasty was frying it up in some butter instead of just sticking two pieces of bread and a slice of cheese in the toaster oven, and that white bread - which I never bought - was more delicious than wheat. And I always looked forward to chimichanga day. I kind of even liked the pizza.

School food has been terrible since there have been school cafeterias, with the exception of certain countries that prize food above economy (France comes to mind). I do remember an essay in Gourmet magazine called "In Praise of Boarding-School Fare" or something, but it was about life at Miss Porter's School in the 1950's and the standards that apply to an expensive girls' finishing/boarding school don't align with the public school system's. But somewhere along the way we lost the ability to feed ourselves.

It is easy to point fingers at the school system. But they are only part of a larger problem. When you come from an upper-middle-class household (as I did), the crap you eat in the school cafeteria (which was very foreign and exciting to someone who ate Chinese food 24/7; I was 24 before I owned a potato masher) is balanced out by the food you eat at home. I had parents who cared about food, and could afford to do so. What do you do if the best meal you have all day is the one you get at school? If your parents don’t care, or can’t afford, or don’t have time to cook at home? Teaching children is one thing - they are a captive audience, and you hope that at least something you throw at them will stick. But how do you educate people on how to feed their own kids? How do you teach them to care?

(Photo above taken at the Pike Place Market, Seattle, February 20, 2010).

2010-02-15T21:41:00.000-08:00

Eating is a small, good, thing.

Friday morning I was grumbling about having to make two kinds of cupcakes for a work lunch on Monday. Then I found out that a friend's father-in-law had passed away, after a brief, brutal struggle with cancer. She and her partner went down to be with family as soon as they heard, and L. suggested that we leave food at their home - M. had a key and would be housesitting - for when they returned. Then I remembered what cooking is all about, ultimately - it is about love. Then I would bake for my coworkers and friends, and I would do it happily, with love.

Eating is a small, good thing at a time like this, wrote Raymond Carver in one of his short stories. People who write about food always bring up this line when they talk about grief, followed by a recipe for something soothing and comforting, a soup, perhaps, or some sort of cookie with a childhood story behind them. The instinct, when it comes to baking, is to make something sweet. I would be doing all that, because I had to make cupcakes anyway, but I wanted something savory. I had bacon in the fridge (home-cured and smoked by my friend L.), a wedge of cheese. Savory biscuits, then, with bits of bacon and shredded cheese. But how was I going to do this all in one day?

I started by measuring out dry ingredients for everything on Saturday night. I scooped out flours, leavenings, salt, cocoa powder, sugar, sifted them into plastic boxes. I made the filling for the black-bottom cupcakes, whipping together cream cheese, sugar, egg, a handful of chopped bittersweet chocolate. I counted eggs and diced sticks of butter, stacked boxes of dry ingredients and washed up dirty dishes. I would be organized, which does not come easily to me. I stopped short of pouring out buttermilk and oil and measuring out teaspoonfuls of vanilla and vinegar (which I should have done - I forgot the vinegar in the red velvet cupcakes).

In the morning I blended butter and lard into the biscuit "mix" with my hands, until flakes of dough appeared. In went buttermilk, crumbled bacon, grated cheese. Too much cheese. Oops. I scooped out the dough with the ice cream scoop that turned out to be too big. Oops. I grabbed the smaller scoop and redid the biscuits, making nine instead of six. Into the oven, and I ran off to get dressed before work. The biscuits emerged, twenty minutes later, golden brown and speckled with bits of smoky bacon, gooey with cheese. I set aside the four prettiest ones for my friends and ate two, quickly, before heading out to work.

Much later I boxed up my cupcakes and biscuits and put them in a bag. Eating is a small, good thing, I thought. I hoped my offerings would give a small measure of comfort.

2010-02-14T22:49:00.000-08:00

Baking.

A few days ago, I was musing aloud about what to make for our Chinese New Year/Valentine's Day lunch on Monday. G. voted for her favorite black-bottom cupcakes. C. felt that a cupcake without frosting was not a cupcake, and voted for red velvet. G. shuddered at the thought of red food coloring. I began slamming my head against the wall. Actually, I yelled "FINE!" and decided to make both. I had to work on Sunday and go to dinner at a friend's house to celebrate the Chinese New Year, and somehow bake two kinds of cupcakes. This would require advance planning, which I always fail at, and I grumbled under my breath about ungrateful, picky eaters. On the other hand, it's a win-win situation for me, because I love both kinds.

I started Saturday night, measuring out flours and sugars and leavenings, making the cream-cheese filling for the black-bottom cupcakes. After work I come home and hit the ground baking. I've been thinking about this in my head all day - get the red velvet cakes in, and while they're baking mix together the black-bottom ones. I hit a stumbling block when I notice that the red velvet recipe makes 24 cupcakes. I thought it only made 12. Whoops. That's ok, moving on. I can clean up the kitchen while they bake. First tray goes in, comes out, second one goes in, I start making black-bottom cupcakes. The last bit of cream-cheese filling goes in just as the timer dings for the second tray of red velvet. I've found the groove, that moment when everything is coming together smoothly. I taste one of the first cupcakes, and it is soft and tender and moist, dusty rose-red (I used gel food coloring instead of liquid, and it hasn't quite turned out how I expected).

The black-bottom cupcakes look wonderful, deep-chocolate-y brown around a pale gold, chocolate-flecked cream cheese middle. I'm running short on time now, beating together cream cheese frosting for the red-velvet cupcakes, packing up some biscuits I'd made in the morning for friends, and spreading the frosting and putting everything together. It's time to go.

2010-01-24T20:12:00.000-08:00

Toothless in Seattle.

Friday, after years of putting it off, I had all four wisdom teeth removed, a process involving many, many drugs. I went home with a bottle of some Ensure-like product (theoretically vanilla-flavored) and instructions to eat soft foods, avoid carbonation, drinking through a straw, and smoking. That would be easy. The fridge was stocked with vanilla ice cream and sweet-potato congee. These, along with a bottle of strawberry milk, got me through the first evening, a haze of sweet milky drinks and blood-soaked gauze. My mother laughs at me, because I have no memory of paying for the surgery, or making the follow-up appointment.

Saturday passes in a stream of vanilla milkshakes. I get bored with plain vanilla, and, noticing the instructions to eat "healthy" foods chop up a banana and throw it into the blender. Better. I have a bowl of congee, thick with the starchy sweetness of sweet potatoes, and a bowl of soup made with pork broth and half-moon slices of Daikon radishes. By now I am desperately craving crisp-skinned fried chicken, potato chips, bacon cheeseburgers, all things crunchy and salty. It has only been a day and I am already longing for my sore mouth to heal, even as I remind myself that I am lucky that all I have is a slight soreness, not even worth taking a painkiller.

Sunday, I make myself a banana-chocolate-malt milkshake (delicious) and another bowl of congee. Even though it is all tasty, it begins to pall. I want to chew again. I want to wallow in self-pity. I feel ashamed of my boredom, more so when friends arrive, bearing gifts of soft, tender food. L. brings sopa de malanga, a creamy soup of taro root, its thick sweetness tempered with the bite of garlic. She brings a giant hunk of chocolate cake leftover from her birthday party the day before, so tender, moist, and light it barely qualifies as solid food. While I am spooning down the wonderful soup, the other L. arrives, with homemade butterscotch pudding. It is not too sweet, with the soft smokiness of real Scotch whiskey underscoring the lovely dark taste of brown sugar, and I can't stop eating it, either.

It is such a comforting feeling, warm and somehow humbling, to have people care for you, cook for you, make sure that you have tasty treats that can be eaten without chewing. I feel so grateful for my friends, and my mother, who made me change the date of my surgery so she could be here while I was recovering. I have been so accustomed to being alone and taking care of myself, that to have others stepping in feels like the lifting of a burden I didn't realize existed, and I am so thankful.

2009-12-27T20:51:00.000-08:00

Baking bread. focaccia.

I'm not sure when it started, a year ago, perhaps, but I began baking bread like someone possessed after reading about the phenomenon of no-knead bread. You mixed together flour, water, salt, and a tiny bit of yeast, left it to rise slowly, overnight, then baked it in a preheated cast-iron pot (or any covered casserole - Pyrex worked exceptionally well). It looked more or less like one of those crusty artisanal loaves that came in brown paper bags and tasted like heaven, especially when eaten warm, spread with sweet butter, perhaps a little jam. I tried variations, adding whole-wheat flour, which gave the bread a somewhat loofah-like texture, and walnuts, which stained my irregularly rounded loaf with purple streaks. Eventually, I got bored, and returned to buying my bread at the market.

A longing for fresh bread brought me back to the table, so to speak, and with it a couple of new books on bread baking. A chance mention of a quest for the focaccia on Twitter the other day gave me a new mission. It took no time at all to measure out ingredients, dump them all in the stand mixer, then walk away. From the next room I could hear a steady thwack-thwack-thwack; when the dough began to come together smoothly the sound became a rhythmic thunk-thunk-thunk. I tried kneading it with hands slick with olive oil; the dough still stuck wherever I touched it. I washed my hands, leaving them dripping with water, and tried again; this time the dough behaved as I lifted and folded it over again. Eventually I had a large ball of smooth, almost silky, soft dough. It was springy and cool beneath my fingers, and I put it away in the fridge with some regret. Morning would come soon enough.

In the morning I divided the dough into thirds, or rather, I took off a third of the dough and spread it in a Pyrex pie plate. The recipe suggests that you could use about 8 oz of dough in an 8-inch pan or 12 oz of dough in a 9-inch pan; what I had was a 9.5-inch pie plate. Good enough. I stretched the dough out with my fingertips, and left it to rise while I went out for a movie. By the time I got back, three hours later, the dough had become puffier, filling the pan, smoothing out the dimples my fingertips had left in the soft, white dough. I added more olive oil, sprinkled on sea salts flavored with Niçoise olives and rosemary and lavender. Slid it all into the screaming-hot (500˚) oven, resisted the urge to cross myself and pray.

As so often happens (my oven runs a little hot), the bread was done before the timer buzzed. Oh well. It was a bit too salty; I had been overly generous with the seasoning salt. Oh well. Here was good, fresh, hot bread - soft and fluffy, with an airy, light crumb, just enough chew to the crust, slicked with olive oil and fragrant with the herb salts. I ate one wedge, then another, then another; before I knew it, the entire loaf was gone. (In my defense, I hadn't eaten breakfast yet, nor lunch). I sat with my empty plate next to me, and reflected that homemade bread is always better than anything you can find in the store, or at least as good as anything you can buy, by virtue of its freshness, its warmth, the knowledge that you made it yourself.

2009-12-22T20:18:00.000-08:00

Pork and cabbage.

I was thinking aloud in the car, driving home from a party the other night, wondering what to do with extra ingredients rattling around in the fridge. I should have known that M. would know what to do with a pound of ground pork and a head of Napa cabbage. I had been thinking meatballs, ants-on-a-log, or noodles stir-fried with the pork and cabbage and perhaps some scallions, the day before when I wandered through the aisles of the supermarket. M. had another idea, a layered concoction of cabbage and sausage, baked in a covered dish, something from the Irish food writer Tamasin Day-Lewis. He sent me a link to the recipe, found on another blog. Called "Stuffed Cabbage in the Troo Style," it seemed promising, and I filed it away in my mind.

A few days passed. I ate leftovers as the Napa cabbage reproached me from the refrigerator shelves, like the skull of Hamlet's father. The pound of ground pork gleamed beneath tightly-stretched plastic wrap. I went back to the recipe, noted that there were two versions: the original, and the modified version. The recipe called for sausage; I had none, only plain ground pork. Modified, it called for fresh herbs; it was cold and gray out and I was too lazy to go to the tiny herb garden in my building's courtyard. (Efforts to grow herbs on my windowsill have all failed). I would turn to my Chinese upbringing, using the seasonings of my childhood and treating the dish like a giant dumpling filling.

The ground pork (Kurobota, from Uwajimaya) went into a bowl with a bunch of scallions (chopped finely), a couple glugs of soy sauce, grated ginger, some rice wine, freshly ground black pepper, 5-spice powder, and a dash of sesame oil. The cabbage was sliced up and tossed with Kosher salt, then left to drain in a colander, to draw out some of the moisture before cooking. (The original recipe calls for blanching the cabbage first, but it seemed unnecessary to me, and the blog writer agreed). I layered it in a small 1 3/4 quart Le Creuset pot, pressing firmly down on the layers of cabbage and seasoned pork (actually, it was kind of fun) to fit it all in. The tight-fitting, heavy lid made baking (parchment, I assume) paper superfluous, and the rich Kurobota pork eliminated the need for any extra butter.

After an hour in the oven, I could smell the seasoned pork and cabbage cooking slowly away. The shredded cabbage had melted into the pork, the entire thing shrinking slightly away from the edges of the pot. It looked like a huge meatball oozing with its own juices. I sliced off a big wedge and eased it onto a bed of rice, adding some of the sauce; it was soft and lush, comforting, savory, like a plate of dumpling filling without any dough wrappers getting in the way. I finished my serving, then another; wished I had someone to share it with. I'll make it again.

2009-11-05T17:22:00.002-08:00

The Chocolate Chip Cookie Conundrum.

I have been baking chocolate chip cookies since I was old enough to read the back of the Nestlé Chocolate Chip package, or at least old enough to don a pair of oven mitts and gingerly pull a hot tray of cookies out of the oven. As time passed I got better at measuring ingredients, beating butter with sugar until light and fluffy, forming neat balls of dough (ok, they were irregular blobs) with two spoons. Much later I switched to dark chocolate chips; later still, I started using bars of bittersweet chocolate, hacked into little chunks by hand. I learned that this was most easily accomplished with a serrated bread knife; I learned that you wanted the butter to be warmer than fridge-cold but not room-temperature-soft, that I liked a higher proportion of brown sugar to white.

My favorite chocolate chip cookie is the one I make all the time, now, from Jeffrey Steingarten's recipe. I make it with bittersweet chocolate chunks and measure the dough with an ice-cream scoop, and they come out (if I've scooped correctly and left enough space between the mounds of dough) nearly perfectly round. They are thin and chewy, caramelized around the edges, still soft in the very center. I bake them often, or sometimes just make a batch of dough to divide up and freeze, so I can have a few warm, freshly baked cookies whenever I want. They don't often last long. I am always seeing new recipes to try, recipes that call for browned butter or disks of chocolate or chilling the dough for 24 hours in the fridge, recipes that promise the perfect ratio of crisp-chewy-soft. Somehow I always come back to the same one, though, my thin, chewy golden cookie.

Then I have friends who spend days, weeks, perfecting their own recipes. They play with the balance of sugars, of leavenings, of flours. Baking times and mixing methods. They take time to note every subtle change, every difference, marked in terms of two tablespoons more or less of one thing or another. L. brings us two examples, one that resembles the kind I make myself, all crisp-chewiness and caramelized sugar, and one that is more perfect-looking, thicker and more evenly baked, round and smooth, the magazine-cover cookie. I prefer the other one. "But it's ugly!" my friend wails. "I don't care!" I yelp back. Ah, this is the crux of the matter. Ugly is good. Ugly says handmade, with love. It is childhood, small hands scooping dough with a pair of teaspoons, dropping bits on the floor and on the counter.

2009-11-02T20:18:00.003-08:00

The Rachel Dinner.

R. has a list of food she hates - beef tendon, pâté, tongue, and stinky cheese of any kind. Her friends decided to throw a dinner in her honor, with all those items on the menu. Isn't it wonderful to be loved? A menu evolved - red-braised Taiwanese beef noodle soup with soft tendon, beef-tongue tacos, and a blue-cheese cheesecake. There was fresh guacamole and sesame scallion bread, to provide backup in case R. couldn't actually manage to eat any of the food we had so lovingly prepared. I brought a frozen peanut-butter-and-bacon pie, because another friend, L., hates peanut butter the way vampires hate the sun. (The Bela Lugosi kind of vampire, not the Edward Cullen kind, although R. does sparkle, with her love of glittery things).

The party slowly pulls itself together as people arrive bearing food. R. clutches a box of Cheez-Its - her contribution, along with several bottles of wine - and perches nervously on a stool. L. arrives and unwraps two kinds of pâté and a beautifully packed cheese that has a piercing smell not unlike ammonia. I should probably admit that I grew up with a healthy fear of smelly cheese, with a deep loathing for blue cheese in particular. It was not until recently that I managed to appreciate, or perhaps I should say gained the ability to choke down, anything stronger than the semi-soft Port-Salut that my father always bought to eat with a hearty country loaf of bread, for breakfast, or perhaps a sharp, aged Cheddar. Even now, blue cheese is not something I leap for with anything resembling eagerness, but rather accept as something that insists on invading my frisée salad.

I try the chicken liver pâté, addictive when spread on those crunchy, golden, olive-oil slicked toasts. Then some of the coarser, more country-style pâté from the Swinery, before I venture towards the cheese (the lovely wooden container says "Le Grain d'Orge, Affiné au Calvados," whatever that means). The taste of the cheese is softer and mellower than you might expect from the biting stench, always a pleasant surprise. I have some of M.'s red-braised pig's ears, cooked slowly until soft - none of that cartilage crunch here - and almost gelatinous, sweet and delicately spiced. We eat taquitos, crisp tortilla rolls filled with beef tongue and garnished with all sorts of delicious things (neatly arranged in plastic boxes labeled with masking tape and a Sharpie; M. is either OCD or graduated from culinary school, or both).

The taquitos (christened "tongquitos" by our lovely hostess' equally lovely husband) are my favorite of the night, but then L. brings out her beef noodle soup. Red-braised, my favorite kind; it has a deeper, more complex flavor than the kind I throw together on a weekday afternoon, warm and spicy without being hot. It is like the beef noodle soup of my childhood, but better. Homemade is always better. Finally it is time for my nemesis, a blue cheese cheesecake. A cloud of pungency hangs over the cake pan, like the fog of stinky tofu in the streets of Jiu-Fen. Like the cheese we had earlier, it doesn't taste as strongly as it smells, which personally I find a fortunate occurrence.

Lastly, there is my frozen peanut-butter-and-bacon pie, rich and creamy, salty-and sweet, with the crunch of peanuts and the chewiness of caramelized bacon. I love it, but I wouldn't necessarily make it with bacon next time; it could stand alone, or perhaps with some bananas sliced in, a drizzle of chocolate on top. Next time.

2009-10-14T07:10:00.004-07:00

Taipei Diary. El Toro.

My parents have been talking about El Toro for a while now, a small Spanish restaurant in Taipei whose chef/owner is a Spaniard who married a Taiwanese woman and moved here. It seems silly to come to Taipei and eat Spanish food, but then good food is good food, no matter what. I have eaten amazing French and Italian food all over Asia, including a perfect spaghetti al pomodoro at an Italian/Lao-run ecolodge in Laos last fall. I had high hopes for El Toro. I heard my dad discussing "black rice with squid" on the phone.

We head to the restaurant, the three of us plus two of my dad's colleagues visiting from the States. It's a small place, hidden away on a back alley, with a room at street level that looks into the glass-fronted kitchen, and a slightly more spacious room downstairs, which is where we sit. My dad brings his own wine, an unopened bottle and a partly drunk bottle already decanted. The chef comes down to talk to my parents about the menu, and throws around suggestions. We settle on the aforementioned black rice, blood sausage, red prawns with rice, roast leg of suckling pig, and pigeon served two ways.

First up, though, is a little snack: a little chunk of chorizo served up in a spoon and a martini gelée, complete with green olive. The chorizo is pretty tasty, but I have never had a martini, so I have no idea what to make of the gelée. Then the blood sausage shows up, and I forget about everything else. This is not your traditional blood sausage, the kind I ate in a tapas bar in Santiago de Compostela on a chilly January day some four years ago. This blood sausage is light, airy, almost soufflé-like, fried crispy on one side to give it some heft. I eat two pieces. I have never met a blood sausage I didn't like, but this one is transcendent.

Next is the red prawn, a huge, bright red shrimp resting on a bed of rice like a loose risotto. I suck out the brains, which are soft and sweet, and eat the body, which perfectly cooked, and scrape up every bite of rice, which is awfully tasty. The black rice arrives, crusty on the bottom like a good paella, the squid firm to the bite without being chewy. It is delicious. Then the pigeon two ways comes to the table, the breast seared and served almost rare, the legs and thighs and wings cooked until it almost falls off the bones, in a dark, savory sauce, with purple potatoes on the side. The rare meat is shockingly flavorful, tender and smooth; the roasted meat is more intense.

Last to arrive is the roast suckling pig, the rear leg section (including the tail) of a very small pig - it couldn't have weighed more than 20 lbs, whole. The skin cracks apart in translucent sheets like a porcine praline, more fragile than the thicker skin of an older pig. The meat is incredibly juicy, the best I've ever tasted. There is some sauce on the side, more pure pork juices, but it doesn't really need anything. It is the best damn suckling pig I have ever eaten, and I try to eat suckling pig as often as I can. Which is not very often, unfortunately. Maybe I should come back to Taipei more often, as my mother's godfather tells me. Once a year is not really enough.

We finish with a few bites of dessert, a light lemon mousse anchored with a nutty crust, a pouf of whipped cream on top. I notice a shard of chocolate that fell off the top, and when I bite into it I am met with the shock of pepper, I think, and something that tastes like those sour-sweet-salty dried plums I ate as a child. Then I have a bite of chocolate cake, still warm, with nuts and dried currants, perhaps, and the softly tart perfume of lime.

I'll be back, yes. I hope.

2009-10-12T06:47:00.007-07:00

Taipei Diary. Do It True.

For dinner we head to an old restaurant, Do It True, which has been around since about 1945. It serves Northern-style (Beijing) Chinese cuisine and has pictures of the owners with George Bush (the elder) on the walls. We are having dinner with my mother's godparents, and they have been coming here for some forty years. I always try to see them when I'm here, as they are like my own grandparents. My maternal grandmother died over twenty years ago (my paternal grandparents being dead 13 and 25 years before I was even born); I only met her a few times as a small child and never really got to know her. I have been lucky for a few of my mother's old friends who have stood in her place.

We order, quickly, tons of food, too much food. There are whole-wheat shao bing, round sesame-encrusted biscuits, served hot, which you stuff with sliced braised pork butt (I think it's the butt) or boiled beef shank, like sandwiches. There is a spicy cold salad (spicy like horseradish spicy, not pepper spicy) of celery sticks and another of shredded cabbage and tofu and other unidentifiable things. We have fried pork dumplings that are like potstickers, if potstickers were the size of fat cigars, and sticky dark rounds of sliced red-braised intestines, salty-sweet. A plate of thin pancakes is passed around, to be filled with a chunk of fluffy plain omelet and stir-fried veggies, with a smear of plum sauce and a log of scallion. There is soup with little meatballs and translucent, jade-edged slices of cucumber, a plate of cold hacked chicken, the skin glazed with soy sauce, the meat falling-apart tender.

Soon, all of us are full, declining any dessert save for a plate of sliced yuzu (in other seasons it might be oranges, or apples, or pears). The food is good, but eating with my mother's godparents always makes me a little nervous, because she and her godmother always argue about something. It is hard to watch, but I understand; they're getting older, nearing or just past 90. They are alone in Taipei, their children scattered across the globe. In thirty years I will have the same worries, the same guilt and frustration and sense of duty and love intermingled. It is bittersweet to be with them, but for now, we are together, at the table.

2009-10-11T08:07:00.000-07:00

Taipei Diary. Road trip, day 2.

We have an early buffet breakfast (not-very-bitter bittermelon! green beans! Various kinds of pickled vegetables, none of which I can identify! Oh yes, and waffles and congee, plus soy milk) and then wander around some nearby greenhouses and garden nurseries. The town we are staying in - I never did figure out what the place was called - is a patchwork quilt of nurseries and fields growing flowers and plants that get shipped all over the island, to flower markets and florists shops and nurseries. We go to half a dozen or more nurseries, picking up a couple of (small) trees along the way, which have to be arranged somehow in the (very small) backseat of my mother's (very small) car.

By now, I want to go home. I don't like the humidity. My pants are sticking to my butt. Every step feels like I am wading through mud. I am tired of heaving myself out of the backseat (can you tell I am not used to sitting in the back of a two-door coupe) with the grace of a hippopotamus being reluctantly pulled from the swamp. I want to throw myself on the ground and kick and scream like a four-year-old, but I am twenty-five years too old for that. I understand, finally, somewhere around the seventh greenhouse, that my parents are taking me around Taiwan, not just to torture me or spend more time with me, but to show me where they are from, in the time we have left. I feel ashamed that I am not treasuring this experience more, but it is humid and my camera weighs heavy around my neck and I am out of sorts.

We head to a restaurant called "Grandma's Private Cuisine," or something like that. It is big and bustling, catering to the (mostly local - I have seen maybe two Caucasian faces this entire weekend; most visitors seem to come from Taichung, relatively close by, instead of Taipei, all the way up north) tourists. They come by bus or car, or park at a big central lot and rent those two-or-four person bicycle carts that have cute little roofs for shelter as you pedal around the fields. We have rice - which comes with little chunks of sweet potato - and red-braised pig's feet, a sort of omelette with scallions and bits of dried preserved radish, fresh and hot and nicely browned. There is soup with dried pickled cauliflower and daikon radish, and a slightly oily sautéed eggplant. I feel less cranky, but mostly because we are leaving after lunch.

Like the rest of the meals we've had, the cooking is simple and straightforward, fresh and quickly served, perhaps a little oily for our tastes, but overall excellent. Time to pile back in the car, and head home.

2009-10-10T08:23:00.000-07:00

Taipei Diary. Road trip.

At some ungodly hour on a weekend morning I am unearthed from my bed to pile in the car with an overnight bag and a bag of bottled water to sleep straight through a three-hour drive, waking in the parking lot of the B&B where we are to spend the night. We check in and then head to the town of Lukang, about forty minutes away. Lukang was an important shipping town, a harbor city in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As the sea receded the town became farther and farther inland, and therefore ceased to exist as a port city. Still, a core of old brick buildings remains, a maze of narrow alleyways and a few substantial temples at the heart of a modern city (although a small one).

Everywhere there are stalls selling snacks and souvenirs, ice cream and iced tea and a guy making wax molds of people's hands (my mom tells me I should get one of my hand - giving someone the finger). We keep going, and the snack stands give way to something more substantial - grilled sausages and then narrow sidewalk restaurants with live seafood and open kitchens, and dining rooms behind glass doors in the rear. We keep going, past stalls with all kinds of cakes and more snacks, the "cow-tongue" cakes (shaped like flat ovals), people calling to us to come try, come buy, sit and have lunch.

We have lunch at one of these restaurants, classic Taiwanese street food: scrambled eggs with oysters, doused in a thick, sweetish brown sauce. There are soft noodles with scallions and a clear soup with clams, and deep fried shrimp with a crackly thin shell. I swig a Vitamin C soda in the sweltering (to me) humidity and dream of cold Seattle fall days. We walk back towards one of the temple, one of the oldest in the area, and come back out again to buy a deep-fried rice cake, sliced into smaller cubes and doused in a sticky-sweet sauce much like the one on the scrambled-eggs-and-oysters from lunch. We continue wandering through the narrow, tourist-packed alleyways, my parents taking turns dispensing history as we go.

Eventually we run out of old alleyways and temples to explore, and pile back into the car to find some dinner. We wind up at a larger version of the lunchtime sidewalk restaurant, still with the open kitchen (and fishtanks) out front, glassed-in dining room in back. We order more noodles and fish soup and fish steamed with soy sauce, ginger, and scallions, and a whole steamed crab (smaller, sweeter, and fattier than the Dungeoness crabs I am used to), and some vegetable side dishes. It is all very simple and fresh, the best kind of seafood cooking.

2009-10-07T23:48:00.000-07:00

Taipei diary. Din Tai Fong.

It isn't a trip to Taipei without a meal at Din Tai Fong. Now they are a chain, with four restaurants in Taipei and several foreign outposts, but I've only ever eaten at the one near my uncle's Taipei apartment (another frequent dining place is Du Xiao Yue, just down the street, where we go for noodles with a savory minced pork gravy in broth; the sign says that it has been there since 1895). I wait all year - sometimes a few years, depending how much time passes between trips back to Taipei - for the chance to eat xiao lung bao.

Usually there is a long wait, the sidewalk outside choked with Japanese and Hong Kong tourists, led by umbrella-wielding tour guides. But today we are late, and my aunt has already snagged a table. We order xiao lung bao (of course!), pork-and-chive wontons, shrimp-and-pork wontons in a soy sauce instead of broth, sautéed spinach, and hot-and-sour soup, as well as a cold appetizer that seems to be composed of slivers of seaweed (the thick, slippery kind), dried pressed tofu, and bean-thread noodles. It is all slippery texture, a challenge for my chopsticks, but we always order it.

If I am particularly lucky and just come here with my mom, I get away with eating more than my fair share of xiao lung bao - they come ten to a basket - but tonight there are three of us. The service is incredibly fast, and before I finish the first cup of tea the bamboo steamer tray of xiao lung bao is set before me. The dumplings are loose and baggy, the skins almost translucent. For fear of tearing the fragile skin and losing the precious soup I peel it gently off the paper lining of the steamer tray. A dip in a saucer of black vineger, meanwhile gathering a few strands of ginger, then land the dumpling safely in my spoon. Gently I bite a hole in the wrapper, letting the rich soup spill out into my spoon, burning my tongue. I always burn my tongue on the first dumpling.

They are as good as ever, fine dumpling skin, neat pleats, round ball of sweet, tender pork, steaming broth, chased with the dark bite and sharp heat of vinegar and ginger. I eat four. Our wontons arrive, fat with chunks of shrimp, lightly slicked with soy sauce. The hot-and-sour soup is neither hot (in the spicy sense) nor sour, but I don't care. I got what I came for, xiao lung bao, enough of a taste to leave me wanting more. Much more.

2009-10-05T14:25:00.000-07:00

How Twitter changed everything.

I am not by nature a hugger. No one in my family is. There has always been warmth, and love, but no hugs. I was fine with that, but then I joined Twitter, and was swept up into a whirl of people who greet complete strangers (although we are not complete strangers, having Tweeted back and forth for weeks or perhaps days) with a sweeping, bosomy embrace, usually accompanied by the tantalizing perfume of baked goods or barbecued chicken wings. Twitter stripped away the last of my shyness, enabling me to show up to parties knowing only one other person there, enabling me to strike up conversations with everyone and anyone, talking and drinking and eating until my voice dwindled away into a hoarse whisper.

It became clear to me, some time ago, that the circle - or rather many overlapping circles - of people in Seattle who love food is incredibly connected on all levels. We are a small town, and it seems it is no accident that a high population of computer geeks overlaps rather significantly with a high population of people who love food. There are lots of local food blogs, and everyone comments on everyone else's blog. People meet at restaurants and at farmer's markets and food blogger conferences. Twitter takes this all to another level entirely. Only connect, said E.M. Forster in the epigraph to Howards End, a century ago. The extent to which people carry that idea in their hearts would blow his mind, as it has done mine.

There are a lot of people - people who aren't on Twitter - who criticize or make fun of it. Some of it is true - no one cares what I ate for lunch. On the other hand, people do care. They want to know what you had for breakfast/lunch/dinner, what you cooked/ordered at the latest diner/pizzeria/tapas bar, which market purveyor has the best bacon/cheese/tomatoes/peaches/fresh raw milk/still has eggs. They are eager to tell you - you need only to ask - where to have a meal in a strange city or what to do with a pig's head. Someone once referred to Twitter as "one giant circle jerk." There is a certain amount of public masturbation going on, to be sure, but then I consider how much better - or if not better, then certainly different - my life is now.

The trick, as with all things, is to take the absolute best thing about something, and run with it. The absolute best thing about Twitter is that someone will mention an idea, then someone will answer to it, and the next thing you know a haze of booze is hanging over your living room and sixteen people are sitting around eating several different desserts that are all basically booze in solid form. Or a week later what was supposed to be just you and one of your new friends making bacon rice krispie treats turns into eight people at your dining table consuming bacon-and-chanterelle soup, bacon-dressed salad, bacon-and-corn salad, bacon cupcakes, and yes, bacon rice krispie treats, and later falling asleep on the sofa surrounded by stuffed animals while watching My Neighbor Totoro. You head out for an impromptu pizza dinner at the new place everyone is raving about and wind up watching Top Chef at the home of a (no longer) complete stranger with one of the stars of the aforementioned Top Chef sitting at your knee. Yes, Seattle is a small town, and never has it been more clear to me than in the past few months.

The absolute best thing about Twitter is that you will ask a question and five people will answer in about sixty seconds, that you will discover a wonderful group of people, the kind of people who greet and take their farewells with a round of hugs, hugs all around.

2009-10-04T05:22:00.004-07:00

Taipei Diary. Sunday with the cousins.

We have lunch with my father's family, his two widowed sisters-in-law, and six of my cousins. There are a couple of husbands and sons in the mix, and lately any meal with them usually involves a hotel restaurant with a private room and a very large table. I am the youngest; the oldest cousin is in her early fifties. The next generation of three cousins spans a gap of eight years - another cousin lives in Hong Kong, the only girl - but here they are brothers, the way cousins who grow up together become as close as siblings. It is a precious kind of relationship, one I miss by living an ocean away.

The food moves by in a blur, and what I remember is a selection of sliced meats - kidneys, intestines, gizzards, steamed chicken. There is a whole, giant steamed fish with scallions and ginger and soy sauce, probably rice wine, pure and simple, the classic combination I will have again and again on this trip. Platters of small steamed crabs are passed around, rich and fatty. There are wide, flat, rice noodles stir-fried with beef, scallions, and bean sprouts, rich but not oily like those found in American Chinese restaurants, and a smooth, light spinach soup swirled with a creamy chicken puree. There is more, but this is all can I remember.

For dinner we meet up with my mother's family, my uncle and his two sons, who I grew up with when they lived with us through the rocky pre-teen and teenage years. They are like my brothers. We go someplace simple, a narrow shoebox of a restaurant with three or four floors connected by a steep staircase or a tiny elevator. We start with a soup thick with fat bean-thread (more like bean-rope; I've never seen these thick ones before) noodles. There are cold oysters in some vinegary marinade, a little sweet, a little tart, and quickly boiled shrimp. We each get one whole steamed fish (like the miniature version of the one we had at lunch), one whole fried fish (I like the fried one better; who wouldn't?). Then there is steamed crab (not quite as tasty as the one from lunch), and deep-fried fish balls.

The food is served and eaten quickly, the conversation interrupted by the crunch of shrimp peels and crackle of crab shells. Soon we are finished, saying our good-byes outside in the rain. It might be another year before we are together again.

2009-10-03T05:00:00.000-07:00

Taipei Diary, day 2.

Calvin Trillin once spoke disparagingly of the so-called "Continental Cuisine" so popular in the middle of the last century, describing the style as La Maison de la Casa House, a mishmash of generic European cuisine served with much fanfare and little imagination. I missed that kind of cooking by at least a couple of generations (except for on cruise ships of the 1980's), but after I ate an excellently prepared but unexciting meal at a nice-ish restaurant in Taipei I found Trillin's words coming back to me again.

We found ourselves sitting at the sushi counter of a restaurant that is either Japanese or Chinese. Perhaps it is both, but I can't tell. We order the set menu - personally, I like set menus, because my Chinese is terrible and I don't like making choices, but sometimes it can backfire - and sit back. There is a Western-style salad, with crunchy lettuces, slices of apple, and sweet kernels of corn. The Chinese like to put corn on everything, including pizza. This makes me sad, but the salad is tasty, so I suck it up. Next comes a fat blob of uni on a totally unnecessary bed of grated mountain potato. The icky mountain potato (seriously - it is simultaneously crunchy AND oozy, and that is just wrong) is resting on a thin slice of lime, which goes well with the sweet uni.

Then we have sashimi, with sweet spot shrimp, fatty salmon, oily, sharp mackerel, and mild tuna. It is excellent, at least as good as anything I can get in Seattle. Later my mom tells us that the sashimi was all presliced, and the "sushi" chefs behind the counter were merely arranging the presliced fish on platters before sending it out. This is wrong, but it was still all very tasty. There is steamed fish, simply cooked with scallions and ginger and soy sauce, and a small bowl of noodles in an oily shallot-spiked broth. We end with fried crab, hot with peppers, and yellow-skinned chicken, hacked into pieces, Chinese-style. To finish, there is fruit, and the dreaded red bean soup.

It is one of those meals that begin with a Western-style salad, continue on with a Japanese-ish starter course (why did it have to be mountain potato? WHY!?) and sashimi, and then a succession of standard Chinese dishes. You see it all the time, in this sort of restaurant - clean, modern-looking, decently priced, with a wide variety of set menus to choose from, each more elaborate and expensive than the last. Each restaurant interchangeable with the next; they could be in a hotel, or at a busy intersection of some main street. The Eastern version of "Continental" cuisine, Trillin's Cuisine La Maison de la Casa House.

2009-09-30T19:14:00.002-07:00

Matsutake dreams.

The other day I ran to Uwajimaya and bought some matsutake mushrooms. It is still earlyish in the season, and they cost $50 a pound (a few ounces is all you need), but I am about to go on vacation for three weeks. Who knows if I'll be able to find any good matsutakes when I return. I rush home with my precious mushrooms and dig out the pot of golden chicken broth I made the other day, from the roasted carcass of a chicken I had carefully deboned under the expert guidance of a chef-friend. There was plenty of fat in the broth, which would make the rice taste good, so I heated it all up, washed the rice, then added broth instead of water, arranging the slices of matsutake mushrooms on top.

The rice was perfect, pale gold and confetti-ed with the matsutakes, which infused the rice with their perfume. I had some mushrooms and broth left, which I froze for future meals, but I thought that would be it for the year. Then I head to Lark for one last quick meal before leaving for Taipei, and one of the evening's specials is lobster agnolotti with matsutake mushrooms. It is fate. I sit at the bar, in my red lipstick and little black dress (I am on my way to a birthday party, and the staff at Lark, unused to seeing me wearing anything more formal than jeans and a t-shirt all say, "hey! You look nice tonight!") and have some bread and butter and chat with the servers while other diners trickle into the dining room behind me.

The agnolotti arrive, fat chunks of lobster meat wrapped in pasta dough, served in a pool of clear broth. Finely shaved slices of matsutake mushrooms curl around the agnolotti, the raw mushrooms absorbing the hot broth and infusing it with their piney fragrance. There is something minimalist about it, just lobster meat, noodles, mushrooms, a sprinkling of chives. Perhaps butter. As I eat my dinner the raw mushrooms become cooked, like the beef in a hot bowl of pho, but they are so delicious I finish them all before they have the chance to overcook, before my soup even becomes cold. I want to order another bowl, but it is time to leave.

I run next door to Licorous to find my friends, and then we head over to Tavern Law down the street for the party. The birthday girl is all glammed up in a vintage dress and the biggest hair I have ever seen west of the Mississippi, and there are hugs and kisses and camera flashes all around for the next few hours. I have a bourbon sour, foamy with egg white and heady with bourbon, and take sips of countless others. A pastry chef friend arrives with boxes of the most amazing buttery, caramelized cookies, like a cross between a palmier and a croissant, only better, and his homemade version of a sno-ball, or whatever those marshmallow-y balls with chocolate centers are called. I have one of each. More birthday well-wishers arrive, people I have only met briefly, or only know on Twitter. It's good to see them.

I walk back to my car in my heels, wrapped in a light trench coat against the cool air. Fall is here. Tomorrow, or is it the day after, I'll be in Taipei. I'll take the memory of those matsutake mushrooms, and conversations with new friends, with me.

2009-09-07T08:27:00.004-07:00

San Francisco, day 3. Nopa.

When my mom planned this short jaunt down to San Francisco, two of the three nights were already spoken for, but the last night would just be us, and she left it up to me to decide where to go. N. threw around a couple of places she liked, but Nopa was the one that caught my attention. Then R. mentioned that she, too, had gone there and enjoyed it. I called them up and amazingly - apparently they are quite popular and hard to book, impossible to get into without a reservation - they had an open table for the next night. Labor Day night. Definitely a good sign. There is nothing that makes me happier than getting a reservation for a supposedly difficult-to-reserve restaurant.

The cab has trouble finding the restaurant, with its nearly blank wall facing Divisadero and almost invisible sign. But we get there, slip into the tiny waiting area, stand near the high communal table while our table is readied. It is a generous, open space, a long bar running back towards the open kitchen, with a big rotisserie full of chickens - everyone seems to be ordering either the roast chicken or the burger, and I almost regret not ordering either - lots of dark, polished wood and bright murals. We are led upstairs to a balcony table, with a perfect bird's-eye-view of all the action down below, the bartenders pouring drinks, the chefs plating dishes, the booths and tables full of happy diners.

We order soft goat cheese with a beet salad, which comes tangled with frisée and a heaping pile of freshly made crostini, the post-millennial answer to the Melba toasts of the last century. Next come crisp-skinned fresh sardines with roasted cherry tomatoes and oily - in the best possible way - croutons. Our main courses arrive, a roasted pork chop with peaches and escarole, and duck legs with beans, figs, and some dark leafy green that is probably kale. The pork is delicious, rosily brined and just cooked through, marbled with fat around the edges. The duck legs are tender, slipping from the bone. Everything is thoughtfully put together, the flavors clear and balanced. It is the best kind of cooking, simple, with only the barest flourish of caramelized cherry tomatoes that need nothing except heat to bring out their sweetness or figs as sweet as candy.

I shouldn't order dessert; we're full. But who knows when I will be back again, to try the burger or the roast chicken or all the things I didn't have? We ask our server, who suggests the warm cookies with 'milk,' fresh chocolate chocolate chunk cookies hot from the oven, with a cool glass of almond milk on the side. They are like molten lava cakes in cookie form. We take some of the cookies home, for breakfast; I drink the last of the milk, and plot how soon I can return. Oh, very soon, I hope.

2009-09-06T07:36:00.003-07:00

San Francisco, day 2. Kuleto's.

We spend the day at Golden Gate Park, wandering through the de Young and the Academy of Sciences, now facing each other across an intricately plotted quadrangle of trees, statues, benches, fountains. For some reason I remember them being elsewhere in the park, which could be true. What I do know - the evidence is staring me in the face - that both museums underwent protracted and extensive redesigns, by the great architecture firms Herzog and de Meuron (de Young) and Renzo Piano (Academy of Sciences). The former is now sheathed in a skin of weathered mesh, with an angular tower whose viewing platform offers sweeping vistas (in the morning, everything was swathed in fog) in all directions; the latter is all light and air topped with an undulating "living roof" that contains some 1.7 million native plants (I checked the website for that number).

Lunch is a forgettable (though pretty decent) meal snatched in a crowded museum cafeteria, so I am eager for dinner. We head to Kuleto's, near Union Square, meeting up with some of my mom's friends, two of whom we'd seen the night before. Another friend I've never met before joins us, bringing with her the director of a local museum, who I had met during his time in Seattle. We order a few appetizers - pork pâté, coarse and hearty, scallops with mushrooms on potato slices, a Caesar salad, and calamari - and nibble on breadsticks and warm foccaccia. C. and I agree to share our mains - duck breast for me, linguine with clams for her.

Here I should admit the single reason I chose the duck breast is because it is accompanied by a Frog Hollow peach. I have been hearing about these damn peaches ALL SUMMER, so it seems, and here is my chance to taste one. A taste is all I get, because there is only half of one, which I have to share with C., and my mom, but a taste is enough. The peach is soaked in grappa and roasted, and it is the sweetest, juiciest, most fragrant, flavorful morsel of peach I have ever eaten. I want to weep from the pleasure of it, and then I want to leap up and demand that our server bring me another one. A few bites of the white polenta - rich and creamy - and the sliced duck - perfectly cooked - and then the excellent linguine with clams, makes me abandon that idea. But that one bite of grappa-roasted peach is the best thing I eat all night.

We order a few desserts, affogato of housemade vanilla gelato doused in espresso, tiramisu, and a warm almond cake with peaches. They are all good, but none of them overcome the memory of that one Frog Hollow peach. Summer is over; I will have to wait another year for more. They will be worth it.

2009-09-05T07:35:00.003-07:00

San Francisco, day 1. Lalime's.

We arrive in San Francisco in the afternoon, making our way to the hotel with just enough time to settle in before taking the BART up to Berkeley for dinner. The train is crowded with football fans, getting off a few stops before ours in a flood of purple sweatshirts and caps that say "CAL" in swirly writing. Then we are at our destination, and C. is waiting for us. C. teaches Chinese at Berkeley and used to make beautiful pottery; now arthritis makes it hard to throw pots and build sculptures. We drive to our destination - a restaurant called Lalime's - and wait for the rest of our party. In all, there are eight women, including my mother and myself.

We agree to share appetizers and main courses - none of the others are big eaters - and chatter away, catching up as people do when they live in different cities and different countries and only meet once in a while. Our appetizers arrive - Caesar salad and another mixed salad, pizza with housemade sausage, mussels in a delicious, tomato-y broth, which we mop up with bread. It is simple, good food; the menu prides itself on locally, seasonally sourced ingredients. I wonder if Alice Waters knew how Chez Panisse would change the world, or at least the American culinary landscape, if we could have the kind of food we have now without her. Then our main courses arrive, and I can only think about food.

We pass plates around, Chinese-style, sea bass and an eggplant dish, slightly less successful than the lobster pasta, in a light tomato sauce. The best dishes are the smoked Duroc pork chop and the New York strip steak, the meat wonderfully marbled and rich-tasting, perhaps cooked a little more than I would choose (others at the table are not fans of rare, or even medium-rare meat), but still excellently done. Actually, it is just the right amount of food, and while usually I think sharing dishes muddles the mind and confuses the palate, I am grateful for the chance to try as much as possible at a restaurant I may never visit again.

There is just room for dessert; we order four, and my favorites are the strawberry mousse cake (Why does no one ever serve strawberry mousse? It is delightful), and the Berliner, a custard-filled doughnut served with a chocolate cup filled with coffee mousse on the side. I eat more than my fair share, hoping no one notices. But they are too polite to comment, even if they see me sneaking a few last spoonfuls of cream. I wish I could come back, soon.

2009-08-23T00:40:00.001-07:00

The bar crawl. Tavern Law/Licorous/Café Presse.

I never really got into drinking cocktails. There were daiquiris in Mexico on a school trip and piña coladas in college, but I grew up with a father who drank beer and red wine, and I did, too. Well, not beer, which I thought was disgusting. Later I studied Russian with people who would get together and knock back shots of icy-cold vodka and eat bowls of pelmeni (meat dumplings) with sour cream. Much later, living alone and reading Bukowski in the bathtub I learned to drink single-malt scotch, or chilled rosé on hot summer evenings before the sun went down and with it, the temperature.

Mixed drinks were something else, a foreign country. That changed when I discovered the pleasures of Campari with ginger ale, and the one time when I was early to dinner at Poppy and the bartender handed me something with the coolly floral sweetness of St. Germain and Framboise. It was time to do more than just dip a toe into mixed drinks. I heard about slick new cocktail lounges popping up around Seattle - or maybe they'd always been there, I just hadn't noticed - but never actually went to any. Then I heard about Tavern Law. The owners had a bar in Belltown, but I don't ever go to Belltown. But Tavern Law would be in that crucial triangle between work and home, and boy was I gonna head there the minute it opened.

N. was just as eager as I was to check it out, so the second night it was open I just about ran down the hill, grabbing one of the few remaining tables for the three of us. We excitedly flipped through the menu, scanning the glamorously named drinks (each description labeled with a provenance and year of creation). We each chose a drink and bounced a little in our seats with anticipation. At least I did. This is not my usual kind of place - I think it's a little, maybe a lot, too cool for me - but it's fun, all dark wood and leather-covered books. Soon, the bar is packed, people waiting by the door, craning their necks to get a glance at the action.

I start with a Morning Glory Fizz. With a hint of anise (it contains absinthe), weighted with scotch and lightened with a creamy froth of egg whites, it is pure pleasure in a glass. We pass our drinks around, counter-clockwise; I try some of the Earl Grey Fizz, a sip of The Gun Club. All are excellent. We order a second round: mine is the Dead Before Sunrise, sweet with maraschino cherry, but not too much so; the first sip develops into a beautiful complexity. I try the North Sea Smash, clean and grapefruit-y, and something else that seems to be mostly mint. We order food, fried oysters, a perfect foie gras terrine (with a tart Angostura bitter gelée on top), hot Padrón chiles grilled, with a smear of tangy cheese, a small block of pork belly on caraway-scented sauerkraut.

When we leave, after a few hours of drinking and nibbling at snacks, I still want something more. N. and I head down to Licorous, where her friend has just gotten off shift (he is a bartender) and is eating his dinner. He hands me a taste of his food - a spoonful of tomato soup, with the surprise crunch of diced cucumber, a lamb riblet, sticky and rich and sweet. I order a creamy foie gras bon bon with crunchy bread crumbs outside, the sweetness of peaches within, and a pretzel dot, a perfect little sandwich of what is most likely housemade sausage on a tiny pretzel ball. I want something sweet, but by now Lark is closed, so we head over to Café Presse. We chat with the bartender while N. has a nightcap and I savor a perfect, ripe peach, sliced and doused with cream.

2009-08-04T21:07:00.000-07:00

Mangalitsa x4, part 2 (plus a soup).

...continued.

The third night I slice the remainder of the pork into chunks and braise them in soy sauce and rice wine, with several translucent shards of ginger and logs of scallions for good measure. I add fried tofu puffs, which absorb the sauces as they cook. It is good, better than good, rich and fatty, salty and sweet, with the intense pork flavor which holds its own against the aromatics and sauces of Chinese cooking. I still like the stir-fried pork the best, if I had to pick just one, but each preparation has its own virtues, I think.

The fourth night I still have a few scraps of pork left, along with a few chunks of the braised pork (my mother ate all the tofu; she always does). I chop the pork into little bits, slice squares of dried seasoned tofu into a fine dice, reduce the yard-long (or so it seems) beans into a giant pile of dark jade beads. The pork is sautéed briefly until it browns and renders out its fat, then scraped into a bowl and set aside. Then I stir-fry (as much as you can stir-fry on an electric coil stove with one tilting burner - of course the largest one is the one that tilts) the tofu and long beans, adding water and soy sauce and covering it all so the beans will cook through. When the beans are tender I stir-fry them a bit more, adding in the pork bits, checking for seasoning.

Meanwhile I've made soup from those precious Mangalitsa bones, soaked in cold water, roasted in a 400˙ oven until darkly browned around the edges, simmered for hours until the remaining meat clinging to the bones became meltingly soft. I added a slice or two of ginger, a translucent limb of daikon radish cleaved into rough circles and half-circles. This is one of my favorite soups, with its pure, sweet, clean flavors, made more intense by the flavor of Mangalitsa pork. My mom likes this a lot, picking the tender meat from the bones, drinking every last drop of the broth.

From a little over two pounds of meat and a little under two pounds of bones I have eaten very well (with, of course, the help of various vegetables and aromatics and the omnipresent soy sauce and rice wine) of a wide variety of dishes. A little pork goes a long way; a little is all I need, to be fed, to be satisfied, to feel happy.

2009-08-03T21:15:00.000-07:00

Mangalitsa x4, part 1.

My father and I headed down to the farmer's market the other day, where we bought a couple of pounds of Mangalitsa pork jowls. (We also got some soup bones). The jowl is not from purebred Mangalitsa, but from an F1 mixed-breed (half Mangalitsa, half Berkshire, I think). It is not as fatty as the purebred pig, but has a lot of the flavor, and the deep-red meat. I leave the bones to soak in cold water while I contemplate the massive hunk of meat in front of me. Hmm. What should I do with it all?

For the first meal, I sliced some of the pork into thin slices about as long and a little wider than a finger. I marinated the pork with a little soy sauce and a splash of rice wine, then sliced some scallions into bias-cut strips. The pork and scallions were stir-fried together until browned and just cooked through, and were very well received at the dinner table. (That is, my father and I ate every last bite). The jowl meat had a good chew to it, and was full of flavor, the Mangalitsa holding its own against the salty-sweet scallion-infused soy sauce.

The second night I sliced off a good hunk of the pork and boiled it in ginger-infused water spiked with rice wine and served it, sliced, with garlicky soy sauce on the side for dipping. Again, the meat was chewy, but in a good way, and full of flavor, the way beef onglet is incredibly tasty, perhaps more so because you have to fight it a little with every bite. You had to use your teeth with the meat, striped and streaked with tasty fat, the flavor emphasized with the sweet sting of garlic, the nuanced saltiness of soy sauce. I began dreaming of borrowing someone's meat-slicer and using the Mangalitsa pork for Chinese hot pot when winter comes and it is cold outside, and nothing sounds better than a steaming hot pot.

...to be continued.

2009-08-01T21:27:00.000-07:00

Dinners with my father.

Growing up, I rarely spent time alone with my father, aside from whenever he picked me up from school events and one trip to the East Coast when I was eleven; we flew out to Boston together and he dropped me off at the home of a family friend to spend the week while he was at a conference. It was more likely that my mother and I would be together at home during his rare business trips out of town, or when we left for Taiwan during the summer for a few weeks before he was able to join us. First we were three, then five during the years my cousins lived with us.

When I was in college and my mother began traveling more it was more likely that it would just be my father and I, whenever I was home on break. The tight Venn diagram of our three lives creaked and stretched apart. Slowly we, that is, my father and I, learned how to eat together without my mother. It happened more frequently when my parents moved back to Taiwan six years ago, and their visits back to Seattle overlapped but did not match exactly. There would be days when I lived on soups and vegetables and tofu dishes (mother), and days when I would bring out the meaty repertoire that my father and I have developed.

We usually start with a roast chicken. Sometimes I brine it with herbs and other aromatics; other times I simply salt it and leave it in the fridge overnight. Then there is often steak, bought at the supermarket or from a fancy butcher, thick-cut and well marbled. Frequently we buy a rack of lamb and rub it with rosemary, salt, pepper, a splash of lemon juice (I have set the lamb or steak on fire many, many times) before roasting or broiling it until the fat crisps and turns golden. We go out for sushi or pizza or both, broil salmon steaks or collars in an herby crust. Vegetables become a pale afterthought. Mom's not here; tofu disappears into the far reaches of memory. It's just my father and I, for now.

2009-07-25T19:17:00.001-07:00

Nishino.

One of our rituals, my father's and mine, is to head down to Nishino when he is here. We time our meal early and sit at the sushi bar; he orders a beer or cold saké and shares a little with me. We order slowly, two at a time: Amaebi, hamachi. Escolar, bonito. Uni, and toro. Our non-sushi items arrive: Little smelts in a piercing vinaigrette, grilled hamachi collars, rich and fatty. And one last pair of nigiri: Spanish mackerel, and unagi. The fish is fresh and clean; with the immediacy of eating at a sushi bar I notice for the first time that the rice is slightly warm, and barely holds itself together as you convey each piece of sushi from the plate to your waiting mouth. We pay cash - my mom often looks at the credit card bills after one of my father's trips and exclaims in horror - and drive home in the evening light, full, happy.

2009-07-15T20:17:00.001-07:00

Wednesday Lark.

It was a bit of a shock to realize more than two months had passed since I had dinner at Lark. I'd been busy. Warm weather meant more cooking at home; two theater subscriptions meant more nights out (and less money to spend on food). Still, I missed the warmth of that open dining room with its banquettes on one side, booths on the other, floating curtains drifting down the middle of the room. I changed into slightly less disreputable clothes and ran down the hill for my dinner. K. was busy with two customers - they appeared to be arranging some special occasion, tasting champagnes and discussing table arrangements - so it was J., the chef and one of the owners, who seated me.

It is a warm day, so I order the chilled tomato soup and the steak tartare, and to round out my meal I add one of the specials of the day, soft-shelled crab. Far too hot outside for pasta with truffle-butter; I'll leave that for the fall, or winter. I eavesdrop on the table nearby; they are planning a wedding. Lucky them, to have their wedding dinner here. I turn back to my bread, and the raisin-nut-bread is a bit too squishy and sweet, so I turn my attention to the clean white crusty loaf, spread with butter. The soup arrives, pure tomato, cold, clear, almost floral, with a ribbon of some crisp cookie-cracker, salty-sweet. As always there is just enough, not quite enough, a taste that leaves you wanting more.

Next is the soft-shell crab, which spills its juices into a bed of candy-sweet corn with every stab of my fork, the sweet corn spiked with bacon. It is so good I eat every last kernel of corn, every bit of lardon (and honestly I thought there was a little too much bacon), and every scrap of crab shell, finally wiping the plate with my last piece of bread. Then comes the steak tartare, a tiny quail yolk floating on top of the steak, waiting to be stirred in, spread on fragile onion crackers, with a little curly frisée in one corner. There is not much to say about steak tartare, except it fills some yearning quite nicely.

Finally I order dessert, an ice-cream sandwich as a nod to the summer heat. Two chocolate-chunk cookies sandwich a slab of mint chocolate chunk ice cream, with a little cup of chocolate soda on the side. I love the cookies, but I love the chocolate soda more. I wish I had a tall glass of it, cold and sweaty in my hand. But better to have just a little, enough to leave me wanting more.

2009-07-12T15:24:00.000-07:00

Don't be shy.

It was a constant refrain of my childhood. Stand up straight. Comb your hair. Don't be shy. Still, I remained someone who slouched in my chair and wore my hair in a messy ponytail scrunched up at the back of my head. Most of all, I remained shy, blushing when strangers spoke to me, hiding behind potted plants at parties, dry-heaving in the bathroom before class presentations. I elected to study electronic music so I wouldn't have to be in the choir and stagecraft so I wouldn't have to take drama. I was the girl who never raised her hand, who hid behind a curtain of hair, wearing all black, trying to be invisible. I still hate the sound of my own voice, saying my own name aloud.

The year I turned twenty-five changed everything. My parents and I went to Italy; despite my stammers and protestations I was the one dispatched for directions, to order sandwiches and buy mineral water. (Don't be shy, they said, again and again). Somehow I managed to find hotels and navigate menus. Several months later I found myself in Portugal, conversing in French (which, by the way, I don't speak) with a beautiful kind woman at a crossroads and chatting (in Portuguese, which I understand even less than French) with an old man on the flight home, who had recognized me from the flight to Lisbon two weeks before. I came home and starting going to restaurants alone, talking to people at the next table, talking to the servers who went out of their way to make me feel at home.

A lot more changed in the next few years when I started dining at Lark, alone. One night I told K., one of the owners, about the time Thierry Rautereau served us lamb testicles; she suggested that I try their Whole Beast dinner in the spring. I was nervous about dining with strangers - none of my friends wanted to come along - but there was no need; I sat with nine other people, and they were all warm and friendly, sharing wine and stories. I talked all night, until my voice was nearly gone, and it left me wanting more. Months later I was back, for a cookbook dinner for David Tanis (A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes), and this time it was easier, both because I was seated next to a couple I had met at the earlier dinner, and because I was becoming more at ease with the idea of talking to strangers.

When you have a love for something - in my case, food - you find it opens all kinds of doors. I began shopping at farmer's markets, talking to people who were producing all the wonderful things spread before me. People will make time for you, if they sense you are truly interested in what they have to offer. They will welcome you, into their restaurants and homes and lives. They will answer your questions, and encourage you to do things like learn how to butcher a pig or make rillettes or chocolate coconut curry ice cream and apple crisp and suggest that you buy something called a refractometer (in this case, a device that measures the amount of sugar in fruit). Wonderful things can happen. Don't be shy.

2009-07-05T21:37:00.000-07:00

We All Scream for Ice Cream (experimentation edition).

A week or two ago I mentioned on Twitter a chocolate bar I had liked, made by Theo Chocolate under their Phinney 3400 label. It combines milk chocolate, coconut milk, and curry powder, three ingredients (well, the latter two are spectacular together, as any fan of Southeast Asian food will know) that you wouldn't expect to see together. It is warm and spicy and not too sweet, and instantly addictive. Another person Tweeted back at me, demanding a recipe. It's a chocolate bar, I answered, but...ooh! It could work as an ice cream. I agreed to try something, then forget about it. There were other ice creams I wanted to try first, and this would involve making up something as I went along, which often ends badly.

Then T. invited me to a barbecue. T. is a Food Person. The barbecue would involve lots of Food People, none of whom I had met before, and I worried for an entire day about what the hell I could possibly bring. Ice cream would be easy, I thought, but I wondered aloud (that is, on Twitter) about whether I should really experiment on people I never met before. However, the response (on Twitter) was loud and immediate. (BRING. IT. ON). This meant spending a full five minutes in the Asian food section of my supermarket shaking cans of coconut milk and trying to find the least sloshy one, wondering if my curry powder was still edible or if I should buy a new jar, and frantically flipping through the amazing David Lebovitz's seminal ice cream bible, The Perfect Scoop, looking for recipes that I could cannibalize into what I wanted.*

I toasted coconut and steeped it in hot cream, straining it all through a mesh sieve. The result was fragrant, but I thought it would be overwhelmed by the chocolate, and substituted the rest of the cream with the coconut milk. This mixture was heated with cocoa powder until just hot enough to melt a pile of chopped bittersweet chocolate (next time will go with all 56% instead of mix of 56% and 71%, which is all I had on hand), then set aside while I made the custard. I threw in a few peppercorns, some hot red pepper flakes; thinking of R., I toss in a bay leaf. I add curry powder to the chocolate-coconut mixture, and taste. When the custard is done I stir it into the chocolate-coconut-curry, which mellows the flavors, rounds it out into something smooth and warm with just a bit of spice to it. It tastes like the chocolate bar I remember.

In the morning I taste it again, when it has frozen properly, and the flavors have really come together. I feel relieved, but I worry there won't be enough, because I kept...tasting...and the end volume of ice cream was somewhat less than I expected. So I make another ice cream, a sherbet really, from David Lebovitz's website, a chocolate sherbet. Only I will do something different - infuse the hot milk-and-chocolate mixture with lime zest, and use vodka instead of Kahlua so as not to confuse the flavors. It turns into a dark, intense (71% chocolate) vat of chocolate with just a hint of cool lime, something unexpected. It is exactly what I hoped for.

*Ultimately, what worked was David Lebovitz's Chocolate Ice Cream, with thick coconut milk (look for something that does *not* include water in its list of ingredients) replacing most of the heavy cream, then adding curry powder to taste. Next time I will skip the steeping toasted coconut flakes in cream, and just use coconut milk instead of cream, and see if that is just as good. Simpler is usually better.

2009-07-01T21:28:00.001-07:00

Things I learned from Encyclopedia Brown.

I was probably in third grade when my mother bought me a copy of Encyclopedia Brown Takes the Cake! by Donald J. Sobol. I had read the earlier books (boy genius solves mysteries, for 25¢ a day, plus expenses) and was totally hooked, but this one was different. All the mysteries had to do with food (starting with a missing birthday cake and a loaf of garlic bread). To celebrate the successful conclusion of each mystery (for when did Encyclopedia ever fail to catch the culprit?), Encyclopedia and his friends would get together and throw a party, cooking up a feast to match the case. There was a Mexican fiesta (stolen piñata), spaghetti with meatballs to commemorate Christopher Columbus Day (a kidnapped and brutally murdered duck named...Christopher Columbus Day) and french fries (a purloined potato autographed by Yankees pitchers). Best of all, there were recipes and helpful hints after every chapter.

By this time, of course, I had been Chief Vegetable Washer in my mother's kitchen (since the age of three). I had numerous pans of Tunnel of Fudge cakes and Duncan Hines brownies under my belt. But Encyclopedia Brown Takes the Cake! taught me so much more. Practical things, common-sense things like how to use potholders, asking grownups for help, turning the handle of a pan away from the edge of the stove so you couldn't knock it over. It taught me words like dice, chop, mince. I learned to first slice a thin piece off a round vegetable so it wouldn't roll around when I tried to cut it, to curl my fingers under so I wouldn't stab myself, that a sharp knife was easier and safer to work with than a dull one.

Above all, I learned to chop an onion, and every time I reach for one now (some twenty years later) I think about Encyclopedia Brown and his friends, and what I learned from them. I learned that cooking was fun, that cooking with your friends could be fun, and some years later my middle school slumber parties would involve more than just takeout pizza and soda (although those still made occasional appearances). We would have crêpe parties that covered the kitchen in a light veil of flour (honestly, that still happens whenever I bake today) and make lasagnes that left dribbles of béchamel all over the stove (my poor mother sighed whenever she looked at the state of the kitchen the next morning. We got better at cleaning up after ourselves. Eventually). This continued on in college, and dorm life, when my Hong-Kong-born roomates and I would make fried rice and teriyaki chicken wings, steam bok choy and bake cookies. Cooking continued to be fun, alone, or even more, with friends. It still is.

In middle school I discovered Gourmet Magazine, and Laurie Colwin, who remains one of my greatest influences. Later came the gently acerbic guidance of Elizabeth David, and then Jeffrey Steingarten, who made me laugh until I cried, and Anthony Bourdain, and countless others, too many to name. That is a story for another time. But it all started with Encyclopedia Brown, and the proper way to chop an onion.

2009-06-18T19:23:00.000-07:00

Eating on the run. Marination Mobile.

I don't know much about tacos, or taco trucks, but I love Korean food. It brings back childhood memories of grilling marinated beef short ribs over tabletop grills, bowls of spicy kimchee and tangy marinated bean sprouts and potato salad (man, I loved that potato salad), rice sprinkled with sesame seeds. I was addicted to the sweet-salty taste of marinated beef, intensely caramelized at the charred edges of every bite; I even loved the smoky smell that clung to your hair, your skin, your clothes, hours after you had eaten your fill and headed home. That you could find all this tasty goodness wrapped in a tortilla seemed to good to be true.

Back in the Spring I had read about a Korean-Hawaiian taco truck that was about to set up shop in Seattle. Even better, they would be stopping in my neighborhood two or three nights a week, just about halfway between work and home (a dangerous location). I could hardly wait. Weeks went by. I tracked their progress on Twitter. Soon, they promised. Soon. Finally, someone else Tweeted pictures from some super-secret pre-opening party, with photos of ginger-miso chicken and spicy shredded pork tacos in paper boats. The anticipation was unbearable. Two days went by. I left work, ran some errands, had an iced tea and read The Soul of a Chef, and waited for the taco truck to open for business.

I could see various people getting ready from across the street, climbing in and out and walking around a shiny new silver truck (not a cool bubble Airstream like Skillet Street Food, or a Modernist pig on wheels like the Maximus/Minimus truck, which sells barbecue sandwiches). I gave up on pretending to read and walked over. I could see cooks moving around inside and smell delicious things, but they weren't quite ready. The opening hour was moved back half an hour. I was devastated. I walked around the block to Molly Moon and consoled myself with a small scoop of raspberry-mint sorbet (tasty, except I wish they had strained out the seeds) and killed another half an hour. Then I headed back to find a television crew interviewing one of the owners, and a line beginning to form. Any minute now! they tell me, and I stand there hoping that I will not wind up on tv.

Meanwhile the awnings go up, the counters flip down, and a side panel is raised to reveal an ice-tray filled with cold drinks. The menu is simple, the prices are reasonable, if not downright cheap, and I quickly make up my mind: three tacos, one beef, one chicken, one pork. I am the very first customer to place an order, the very first customer on Capitol Hill (the first day of business was the day before, in Fremont, and there were lines down the block), and sooner than I thought possible a paper boat is handed over, filled with tacos heaped with coleslaw, with sliced peppers and lime wedges on the side. I hold my precious cargo with both hands and run home, like a three-year-old with a butterfly caught in cupped hands. While waiting at stoplights I picked out a few bites of beef, which only left me wanting more. Before I knew it I was home and scarfing down my tacos.

They are perfect. The miso-ginger chicken is good, but it is not as interesting as the spicy pork shoulder (although apparently it is not spicy enough for most people, people who were not raised in the same hot-food-free environment as I was). Best of all is the kalbi beef, which is exactly like the barbecued beef I remember. All are wrapped in warm corn tortillas, with a smear of some creamy orange sauce, and a pile of crunchy fresh cabbage and carrots (I think, but I am too busy eating to really pay attention). I can't wait until next week, so I can try the other things on the menu.

2009-06-01T20:29:00.000-07:00

Weekend Baking.

On Saturday I woke in a panic. I had a potluck dinner that night, and I had no idea what to make. I had promised dessert, and now I had to deliver. Frantically I turned to Italian Too Easy, by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers, the owners of the River Café in London. I found a chocolate-almond cake that seemed simple enough, but I would substitute hazelnuts for the almonds. The recipe was clear and straightforward, although I still wonder why they specify "organic eggs." Of course they are preferable to ordinary ones, but what if you did not make it out to the farm where the corgis bark madly from the kennels or over to the farmer's market to buy eggs from the stand that carries all those delicious-looking jams?

Butter and chocolate melted in a bowl over simmer water, hazelnuts were chucked into the food processor - we are like *this* now, my food processor and I, although the bowl is made of a lighter plastic than I would like - and pulsed until finely ground. Actually I get distracted by Twitter and the hazelnuts are a bit sticky, but they will be fine once scraped into the cake batter. Eggs - yes, organic - are cracked, some left whole, others divided, the yolks and whole eggs stirred into the cooled, melted chocolate-butter mixture, the whites whipped until they hold firm peaks. I hold my breath as I fold the chocolate-hazelnut mixture into the egg whites - I don't have a good history with egg whites - and pray as I slide the pan into the oven. Miraculously, the cake rises, slips out easily from the pan after it cools. I place it on a gold cardboard round and stick the cake into a pink cardboard box, tie it all with string, and walk downtown to A.'s apartment with my cake and a pint of homemade salted caramel ice cream.

The cake is a success, the ice cream more so, because for some reason homemade ice cream trumps all else, even cakes made with organic eggs. But then it is Sunday and I have another project before me: chocolate cookies with lime zest and cocoa nibs. K. emailed me the recipe, and whenever she emails me a recipe it is an indication that she would like me to make it for her. As soon as possible. I have good cocoa powder, Droste, and limes, two small instead of the one large that the recipe calls for, and cocoa nibs provided by K. The dough fills the kitchen with its fragrance as I stir it together and when I take a taste I am blown away by how good it is. Soon I am eating a small dab of cookie dough with every scoop I place on a parchment-paper lined baking sheet.

I eat a cookie straight from the baking sheet, as soon as it is cool enough to touch. It is soft and warm and intensely chocolatey, with the subtle zing of lime zest and the slightly astringent crunch of cocoa nibs. It is the best cookie I have ever eaten. I eat three in rapid succession, all still warm from the oven, and later, once they have all cooled and I am packing them up for K., I eat another one. You know. Just to make the numbers even. There is more dough in the freezer, waiting for another day.

2009-05-30T23:27:00.001-07:00

The potluck group.

Last month J. invited me to a potluck dinner at her house, one of the rare ones I have attended instead of my parents. I was late - my car was trying to convince me it had a flat tire, which it did not - and all evening the guests (all in their sixties or older) talked about grandchildren and teeth, and how in their day, once you emigrated to the West, ten, twenty, thirty years would pass before you went home again. Not like my generation, who fly back and forth across the Pacific ocean for every vacation. But when they asked me to join the next party, I agreed. The food is always good, and the conversation is always entertaining, even when they start talking about teeth. I volunteered to make dessert, and then forgot about it until the morning of the dinner when I woke in a panic. (More on that later).

I make a ridiculously easy chocolate-hazelnut cake, then pace around my apartment trying to decide if I could just bring the cake, or if it needed something else. A drift of whipped cream, barely sweetened. Should I buy some fruit, bring some chocolate-covered honey pecans? Then I remember, there is a pint of salted caramel ice cream in the freezer. This is an older crowd, uninterested in sweets, conscious of their dessert intake. It would be enough. I slide my cake on a gold-foil-covered cardboard round, dust it with cocoa powder, carefully place it in a pink paperboard box. It looks impressively professional, so much so no one believes I made it myself. I find a ball of twine in a drawer, tie up my box for easy carrying, and head downtown to A.'s home. People stare. I worry that someone will mug me for the cake.

A. is, as usual, bustling around when I arrive. There are peonies on the table, along with plates and cutlery. Pots are in the oven, on the stove, wine is waiting to be opened. This is, in theory, a potluck, but A. has contributed four dishes, instead of the usual one or two. (I am a "kid," so I can get away with just one. Husbands without their wives are also allowed to bring just one). I show off my beautiful cake ("I don't believe you made that yourself!") and revel in the fact that a dusting of cocoa powder or powdered sugar makes anything instantly more professional-looking. As does a gold cardboard round and a pink paperboard box. (I should have placed a doily under the cake, but you can't remember everything).

Other guests trickle in, and we get ready to eat, transferring dishes from boxes and pots and bowls into narrow, rectangular platters that fit better on the buffet table. There is so much food I can't even sample everything on my first try, so I take several tastes of things and sit down to try them all before heading back for more. There is beef curry made with Malaysian curry powder, more intense than what I am used to, not sweet like Japanese curry. A dish of fine-cut tofu noodles, slivered ham, vegetables, cool and refreshing, like a Chinese macaroni salad. There is another cool salad of translucent wide noodles tossed with more vegetables, strands of omelet, bound together with a slightly spicy dressing fragrant with sesame paste. There is smoked salmon, and homemade pita bread, rolls of tofu skin filled with ground pork, braised with Napa cabbage. I come back for the hard-boiled eggs cooked with caramelized shallots and soy sauce and finely minced pork belly, a touch of five-spice powder, and am so seduced by the savory gravy of pork belly and shallots, I go back for thirds (as if I haven't eaten enough fatty pork this week).

We eat and eat, getting up for seconds, thirds, fourths. The conversation flows back and forth, three or four conversations at a table of twelve, my mind confused by multiple threads, two languages. Y. tells a story about J., when she worried over whether or not to marry her (second) younger husband. He doesn't even have any gray hair yet! she lamented. Don't worry, riposted Y., if he marries you, he WILL. (Twenty-odd years on, he does). Then it is time for dessert. There is a Chinese dessert of cubed almond-flavored jelly with canned fruit, the fruit juices forming a slightly sweet soup, instantly cooling and maddeningly addictive. And there is my dense hazelnut-and-chocolate cake, with a scoop of salted caramel ice cream melting on top. It is dark and intensely chocolatey, a perfect foil for the darkly caramelized ice cream I made a few weeks ago.

After dessert, several of the guests get up and start dancing, at one point pushing the table back to make more room. It was a sight I never thought I'd see, my mother's sixty-plus friends twirling around, hips swiveling, arms swinging, doing their interpretation of the Electric Slide.

2009-05-30T09:16:00.000-07:00

Small pleasures.

After the three-day marathon of cooking with Mangalitsa last weekend I was left with a long, angled plank of bone, with some meat still attached. I seasoned it with a generous sprinkling of salt and roasted it at high heat until the meat had browned around the edges, the fat rendered crisp. Then I put it into my largest pot, covered it with water, and left it to simmer slowly until I had a pale gold broth. Then I put it into the fridge and forgot about it, to the extent that you can forget about a giant red Le Creuset pot that takes up most of the bottom shelf of your fridge and practically yells "HEY THERE!" every time you open the door.

Days passed. I made lasagne with some extra mushrooms and spicy sausage and tomato sauce and béchamel, I made fried rice with some leftover Mangalitsa belly found lurking in the middle shelf of the fridge, I went out to dinner with a friend. Before I knew it Friday had come around and at midnight I was in bed with a copy of Takashi's Noodles, drooling over the pictures. I didn't have the patience - or the ingredients - to whip up any of the recipes, but I fell asleep with visions of udon noodles in my head.

Eight hours later, I woke to brilliant sunshine peeking around the edges of my so-called blackout shades. Blackout shades, my ass. Still, that means more time to enjoy the day, and that pot of Mangalitsa broth is calling my name. I scoop the fat floating on the top of the broth out before bringing it to a simmer, add a couple slices of ginger, boil a pot of water for the noodles. Rooting around in the fridge I find that all the scallions are gone (went into the fried rice, I think) but there is a bundle of spinach wilting away. Perfect. I grab the spinach and an egg and turn my attention to the boiling water, into which I throw a small handful of noodles. (Who am I kidding? I weigh my noodles, to ensure I get the right portion size, or in this case, half-portion).

In the last four minutes I add the egg into the boiling noodles to poach, then in the last two minutes I add the spinach, which gratifyingly shrinks in the pan and turns a deep jade. I drain the noodles, spinach, and egg in a mesh strainer (I have three, and use them for everything from sifting dry ingredients for baking to draining noodles and anything boiled or straining custards, and still I wish I had more. Like rubber spatulas, you can never have too many) and dump them in a bowl. In goes a generous ladle of broth, a sprinkle of salt.

It is a small pleasure, or perhaps even a great one, to sit down to a bowl of hot noodles, the faintly metallic bite of spinach, the soft tenderness of poached egg (I should have poached it less, as it is a bit firmer than it should have been - fine for eggs Benedict, overdone for soup noodles), the slippery noodles just on the right side of chewy, all against the light, savory broth. The strong flavor of Mangalitsa pork is mellowed in a soup, rounded out by the warmth of ginger, but it is still there.

2009-05-25T22:20:00.000-07:00

Kitchen adventures: Mangalitsa three ways.

It started when K. found a giant slab of Mangalitsa pork in the chest freezer. Since I am generally acknowledged (God help me) as the expert in these matters (long story) it became my job, nay, my solemn duty to work up a dinner party featuring this fearsome slab of meat (fourteen pounds, frozen). I managed to put it off for a while, but finally a date was fixed, and there was no escape. For days I tried to bounce ideas off other people, only to be met with "You're the expert. You decide." I knew I could use a couple pounds of the meat to make rillettes, but what the hell was I going to do with the rest of it?

The rillettes took me most of Saturday afternoon. I had done this before, and it was simple work to chop up the pork and let it simmer away with herbs and onions in a mixture of lard and wine. I could leave it on low heat and walk away. When the meat was tender, beginning to fall apart, I drained it and gently pulsed it in the food processor until it came together like a rough pâté, but stopped before it turned into mush. I seasoned it generously - a little too generously, it turned out - with salt and pepper and packed into a long terrine, scooping leftovers into small tubs and jars, covering each container with a thin layer of melted fat.

Sunday was occupied with lasagne, but after I came home from a dinner of fried chicken I carved up the remainder of the pork, seasoning thick slabs of meat with kosher salt and coarsely ground pepper and torn sprigs of thyme. It rested overnight, and the next morning I put the pork into a pot that was just big enough to fit the pieces in one layer, then poured in apple cider. I brought it all to a boil, then turned it down low, and then thought about what to do with the last few pounds of meat. I know! I thought. I'll make potstickers! At this point I completely lost my mind (I was probably delirious from all the cooking I had been doing), and thought it was perfectly reasonable to grind my own meat and roll out my own potsticker dough.

Not having a meat grinder, I momentarily contemplated chopping the meat by hand. A few feeble attempts convinced me to reach for the food processor. The main concern with chopping meat in the food processor, as with many things, seems to be chopping it without turning it all into mush. But by now I had become one with the "pulse" button, and by dividing the pork into a few smaller batches I had enough control over the process to make it come out, if not perfect, at least acceptable. It was a bit more irregular than meat put through the grinder, but it was good enough for me. I threw a few scallions and a bunch of bok choy that had been wilting in my fridge and chopped those up, too, and grated a fat knob of ginger. The vegetables and grated ginger went into the bowl of ground pork with a sprinkle of salt, a few sloshes of soy sauce, a few grinds of black pepper. I should have used white, but never mind. Then in with the hands, thoroughly blending all the ingredients together.

The hardest part was making the potsticker wrappers. The dough was soft and sticky and seemed to attach itself to everything - my hands, the wooden board I was using as a work surface, the filling, the plate I used to arrange the finished dumplings - and by the time I made it to A. and B.'s house I had about two dozen recognizable dumpling (ugly, but recognizable) and a lumpy, amorphous mass of filling and dough. The latter I sliced into roughly dumpling-sized blobs and fried in a thin film of lard (achieved by searing the rim of fat running down each hunk of braised pork until some of the fat melted away), and amazingly enough, they held together. The pork was incredibly good, the strong flavor of Mangalitsa pork balanced by the soy sauce and ginger, a touch of scallion, the slight crunch of fresh bok choy. I have to work on my wrapping skills, but the filling was perfect.

While all that messing around with sticky dumpling dough was happening the rest of the pork had been braising away quietly in thyme-scented apple cider. I took it out when I thought it was tender enough and reduced the braising liquid into a brothy sauce, then packed everything in a wide assortment of jars and boxes. Later, just before dinner, I held the fat side of the meat against a hot pan until the surface browned and some of the fat melted into the pan (which I used to fry the potstickers - no waste here). R. sliced it all, arranged it in a deep dish, and let it sit in the warming oven. Before serving, we poured the warmed sauce over the meat, and everyone dug in. It was good, the meat rich and intense, sweet with apples, scented with thyme, the fat surprisingly light to taste.

I am still not sure what part of the pig I was working with - I suspect it came from the shoulder, but honestly, I have no idea. In any case, it was delicious.

2009-05-24T19:39:00.000-07:00

Lasagne x 3.

E. does not like to cook. She is a beloved patron of a bakery near her home which provides her with blue cheese macaroni and cheese and Southwestern-inspired casseroles, and cakes and tortes and tarts dense with chocolate or fluffy with coconut or layered with marzipan or filled with custard and fresh berries. But she does not cook, so once a year she asks me to make her my signature lasagnes, one layered with wild mushrooms and béchamel, another with spicy Italian sausage in tomato sauce and ricotta swirled with fresh basil. (I could make them in my sleep).

The mushroom lasagne is one I regret introducing to a wide audience, because it is a pain in the ass to make. There is just so much chopping. (The first time I made this I had to finely chop two pounds of mushrooms by hand, and by the time I was done I was ready to kill myself. The second time I made this I borrowed someone's food processor). So when K. caught wind of my plans and asked me to make her another mushroom lasagne I thought, oh shit. But I cook out of love, out of a need to give pleasure that is both my strength and my weakness, and so I say yes.

Actually, chopping the zucchini is a pain in the ass, too. The recipe specifies a 1/4-inch dice, and how you are supposed to dice a practically cylindrical object is beyond me. What I come up with is mostly 1/4-inch triangles with the occasional accidental cube. I soak dried mushrooms (a medley of wild mushrooms, when I had meant to get porcinis...whoops) in boiling water, drain and chop them. The mushroom liquid is reduced into a dark syrup, while I quarter two pounds of mushrooms (creminis, white buttons, Portabellos) and pulse them in my food processor. The pulse button and I become quite intimate over the weekend.

Doubling a recipe isn't just as easy as making a single batch. It's twice as hard. It isn't two pounds of mushrooms, but rather, four. Instead of cooking the mushrooms in three batches, there are six. There is a battalion of bowls and pots marching up and down my kitchen, shreds of onion skins and sprigs of thyme on my floor, and a light dusting of flour all over everything, including me. But I press on, and very soon I have the first mushroom lasagne in the oven while I put together the spicy sausage one. This recipe comes from Cook's Illustrated and is meant to be whipped up in no time at all on a weeknight, so it comes together very quickly.

Sooner than I thought possible I have two steaming, bubbling pans of lasagne ready to take to E.'s house. I drive over carefully with my precious cargo, and am greeted joyfully at the door. E.'s house is warm and cozy, and she offers me a drink and a snack. But I have another dinner party tomorrow, and I must prepare.

2009-05-12T21:33:00.000-07:00

Tuesday happiness.

A few days ago I found myself with two fat stems of rhubarb and no idea what to do with them. Fortunately, another food blog saved me with a recipe for poached rhubarb; it would be terrific, she wrote, over rice pudding or cottage cheese or yogurt. Best of all, it called for rosé, which I conveniently had in my fridge. M. and I had opened it for movie night last week, and had left it unfinished. I would fiddle with the proportions - more wine, less water, a touch more sugar - and chop the rhubarb more finely, and whoops, inadvertently cook it too long. Oh well. The rhubarb was sweet and tart, soft and melting, infused with the sparkle of rosé and the warmth of cinnamon and vanilla. The recipe had called for half a vanilla bean, but all I had was some vanilla sugar lurking in the back of a cupboard; when I poured the sugar into a cup a few shards of vanilla bean fell out, which was just what I needed.

The rhubarb made a divine breakfast with a scoop of whole-milk yogurt, two mornings in a row, with or without a sprinkle of raw sugar to smooth out the tartness of plain yogurt. I wanted more, but it was all gone. Then I took the reduced syrup, still heady with rosé and spices, poured it over ice with fizzy water. It was sweet, but complex enough to make up for the sweetness. I turned to some lemons rolling around in the vegetable compartment. Voilá! Rhubarb-rosé lemonade! I drank some over ice last night, then with fizzy club soda tonight. It was cool and refreshing, and I am itching to buy more rhubarb, more rosé, more lemons, and start all over again.

Earlier in the afternoon I left work and headed to the park. I wanted a hot dog, but the hot-dog vendor was nowhere to be seen. Alas. I went instead to Molly Moon, which was reasonably empty - no lines! - and smelled of freshly made waffle cones. I think heaven would smell like freshly made waffle cones. I ordered a scoop of balsamic strawberry, and walked back across to the park to find a bench, licking my ice cream as I walked. The balsamic is thick and syrupy, and drips on my hand as I make my way past the playfield, along the fountain to an empty bench. The sun is shining, it's a beautiful day, made even more so by the ice cream in my hand. And stomach.

2009-05-10T16:50:00.000-07:00

Weekend markets.

I went to the U-District market yesterday; I needed sausage, and vegetables for Mother's day dinner. I got some spicy Italian sausage from H., and tangled bundles of asparagus for D., as well as purple-skinned potatoes (and a bag of Yukon Golds). I bought bags of salad greens and bouquets of spinach and bok choy, some leafy chard tied into a fat log. Then I bought flowers, a dozen purple irises, a dozen red-and-yellow tulips, a bunch of lilac stems. The irises and tulips made a madly colorful arrangement on my dining room table, and the lilacs sent out a heavenly fragrance in the living room and next to my bed. I ate leftovers for dinner and thought about how to spend my Sunday.

Today brought the opening day of the Broadway farmer's market, a bit less than a mile away. It was mostly flat; I could manage the walk, so long as I didn't buy any more potatoes. The sun was out, the perfect day, and the market was full of people with their dogs. The stalls where I buy potatoes and meat and vegetables at other markets have spots here; excellent. But all I need today are some scallions, three dollars for two fat bunches, and some lunch. I stop at a stand for a cheeseburger made with local organic grass-fed beef, on a hunk of organic baguette from the place where I often buy bread. It takes a little while, since everything is cooked to order, but it is a nice day to stand around and watch the people walk by.

I take my cheeseburger to the nearby park and sit next to the fountain to eat, as small children go running up and down through the water, splashing me as they go. I suppose it is my own fault for intruding on their impromptu water-park. After my lunch I head home, passing more children splashing away, people with their dogs, a white guy doing t'ai ch'i very seriously. I want ice cream. Amazingly, there is no line outside Molly Moon, and in practically no time at all I am walking home with a waffle cone of maple walnut ice cream, which is absolutely fantastic.

2009-05-08T20:13:00.000-07:00

Friday night. Palace Kitchen.

I have been thinking about cheeseburgers for a while now, debating over and over in my head whether I should make them, or go out to eat. Should I try the Hunt Club, tucked in the Sorrento Hotel, just down the street? Head over to Quinns, which I have not visited since last fall? Firmly fixed in the back of my mind was Palace Kitchen. I wish I ate there more often, but the neighborhood is hard to find parking, and I have never gone there alone. But it is Friday, and C. and I are out and about, and I persuade her to head over there. There is no street parking, with all the construction going on, not to mention the fact that it is Friday night, and there is a long line of people outside the Cinerama theater, waiting to see the new Star Trek movie. Finally we find the last spot in a pay lot and walk into the restaurant, where there is just one table for two in the main room.

I don't really need the menu - I have been thinking about cheeseburgers for weeks, and it would totally disrupt my plans should I order anything else now - so we order our food, and drinks, sangria for C. and a Red Pearl for me. Some bread arrives with our drinks, with a little dish of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. The bread comes from Dahlia Bakery, a few blocks away; all but one of Tom Douglas' restaurants are within a three block radius of the flagship that contains the bakery, Serious pie., and the Dahlia Lounge. Across the street is the Palace Ballroom, where you can have a wedding or some other grand event. But right now I am only thinking about food, and my drink, which is a glass of Prosecco with a deep red pearl of Negroni syrup at its heart.

Our burgers arrive, medium-rare and juicy, with some Beecher's cheddar on top of the patty and a soft bun enclosing it. I ignore the lettuce, the slices of onion, the green tomatoes. The fries are skinny and crisp, and there are little pots of ketchup and some sort of garlicky mayonnaise. It, like my cocktail, is just what I needed after a long week at work. But then it is time for dessert, a simple scoop of vanilla ice cream for C., a banana cream pie for me. The pie is a small individual one, all buttery, flaky pastry, containing slices of banana, chocolate ganache, custard, and whipped cream. Mostly it seems to be whipped cream. I feel as though I have never been so full, or so happy.

2009-05-07T20:57:00.001-07:00

Soup and bread.

Some odds-and-ends have been knocking around in my fridge for several days now. Three broccoli stems, their leafy florets long gone. Four or five leeks, some fat, others spindly, their leaves yellowing and wrinkled at the ends. Half an onion, peeled and wrapped in plastic. One red potato. One Yukon Gold potato. A pot of chicken broth from last week's roast chicken. (I ate the wings and drumsticks, then the thighs and other bits of dark meat, then some of the breast, then froze the rest of the breast for...something else). Time for potage aux legumes. Also known as clean-out-the-vegetable-drawer soup. But first I have to get the bread going.

The bread dough has been rising away since last night; when I stick a spatula in the dough it pulls away in stringy threads. After some folding and stretching and sprinkling with flour, it forms a round ball, which I dust with more flour and dump into a bowl. On to the soup. I chop the onion and leeks, and peel and slice the broccoli stems and potatoes. The broth simmers away; I take out the bones, ladle out about a quart of broth to freeze for later. The chopped leeks and onions are caramelizing in a little butter, and when they are ready I slide them into the broth with the potatoes and broccoli. I scrape the bread dough into a preheated Pyrex pot, and it hisses as it settles into the hot pot. It goes into the oven, and the soup continues to simmer away. In an effort to turn over a new leaf, I start cleaning up the kitchen now, instead of...tomorrow night. Hunger overtakes me, and I break for a handful of almonds, a few potato chips.

While the bread finishes baking I puree the soup in my food processor. It takes no time at all, and soon I have a thick, creamy soup, which I eat while watching The Enchanted April, a movie I have not seen for many years but is as lovely as I remember it. The bread is not quite ready as I eat my soup, but finally it has cooled enough for me to slice open (really it should cool for a couple of hours, but I don't have that kind of time). This time I used a two-quart covered Pyrex dish, much smaller than what is recommended, so the dough filled the entire pot, pushing against the lid, taking on the perfect round shape of the dish. The bread had a fluffy, slightly moist crumb; still warm, it didn't even need the butter, but I ate it with butter anyway. It was delicious.

2009-05-05T19:10:00.000-07:00

Experiments with Mangalitsa.

The two-pound block of Mangalitsa pork belly has been staring at me reproachfully from the freezer for several weeks now, falling off the shelf every I reach past for the frozen peas, every time I move it to make room for the ice cream. I had to do something, with the belly and with the four pounds of back fat that still needed to be rendered down into lard. (The lard I took care of on Saturday, and it left me with a couple of pints of clear fat that solidified into hard white cakes, one in the freezer, one in the fridge). I left the belly in the fridge to thaw, then forgot about it until I came home from work today without any idea of what to make for dinner.

Last time I tried to make dongpo ro I did it incorrectly, with pre-cubed pork belly, and without blanching it first. This time I blanched the neat square of belly briefly, then pulled it out and sliced off about half an inch from one end, so it would fit into my smallest Le Creuset pot, about 1 3/4 quarts. The big square went into the pot with chunks of spring onions, a few pieces of star anise, and a couple of sloshes of soy sauce and rice wine. I would simmer it slowly, then eat it another night. Tonight needed something different.

I sliced the leftover piece of belly into somewhat irregular lardons (I would probably get kicked out of culinary school in about two days), then tossed them with a little soy sauce and a sprinkle of raw sugar (which is what I use in my tea, and when I don't have any yellow rock sugar on hand. A real Chinese chef would throw a cleaver at my head, but I don't have any real Chinese chefs standing around in my kitchen). I scrambled some eggs (a gift from my boss, not the eggs we bought this past weekend, but from the last time she was down there, a few weeks ago) in a small pool of lard, and scraped them out of the pot when they were partly set, partly still liquid. In went a little more lard, and then the chunks of belly. They caramelized a little around the edges, began to melt, and I threw in the defrosted peas (I nearly always have frozen peas in my freezer) and a big handful of chopped scallions.

When the peas were done, I added the cold leftover rice, smushing it down with my spatula, tossing it with the pork and vegetables. When every grain had separated from its fridge-cold clumps, in went the eggs, salt, pepper. It was perfect, the pork salty-sweet and chewy, the taste of Mangalitsa coming through the dark flavors of soy and caramelized sugar, the rich fat light on the tongue. I may never use bacon in my fried rice again, except as a last resort.

2009-05-03T21:40:00.000-07:00

Weekend musings.

Yesterday morning, I put together some no-knead bread dough. It bubbled away quietly, silently, on the dining room table. Then, late in the afternoon, I was surfing around the internet and feeling the pangs of hunger again, when I stumbled upon a recipe for English muffins. Almost before I knew it I had a bowl of yeasty soft dough in my hands, scooping it into a hot non-stick frying pan (to take the place of the griddle I do not own, nor have the space for), leaving it to brown and cook through. Quickly I split one of the fresh muffins with a fork (as directed) and toasted it, lavishing it with butter when it was done. It was strangely tasteless. I thought about it, and realized that in my haste, I had forgotten to add salt. Whoops. Next time. I made a bacon sandwich with another English muffin, and lay back, content.

Sunday morning, and I had to work. But what to do about the rising bread dough? It was a teeming, bubbling, damp mess. I scraped it out onto a floured counter, added more flour until it was still amoeba-like but not a wet puddle. Dumped it all into a floured plastic container, and then shoved it into the fridge. It could wait. I had work to do, a wedding to go to, and it could just sit there until I came home that night. I made myself a cup of tea, and a fried egg sandwich on one of the failed English muffins, and headed out.

We were almost to Tacoma when K. had the bright idea of going to the chicken farm where she has bought eggs, several dozen at a time, twice now. But none of us had any money on us, so what were we going to do? R. called her brother, told him to lend us forty bucks. That would cover plenty of eggs. We were in business. Sooner than I thought possible I found myself driving through winding roads until we wound up at the first farm, where a small refrigerator held cartons of eggs (you paid according to an honor system) - both duck and chicken. We took all the duck eggs that were left, two dozen, and headed over to the second farm, which besides chickens had a kennel of corgis, a goat, and a baby calf. The corgi danced excitedly around me as I stood in the yard, in my favorite little black dress and heels that cost, well, lets just say many dozens of eggs. Goodness knows what the owner of the farm thought of the three of us, dressed for a wedding.

Later, we drive over to A.'s house for a simple dinner of rice, soy-sauce chicken, broccoli, and fried eggs, from the same farm where we just bought ten dozen eggs. They are eggs, bright orange yolks, which taste nothing like the ones you find at the supermarket. They are the best eggs I have ever eaten, and they are worth driving for miles and miles on a sunny Sunday afternoon in your favorite dress and best heels.

2009-05-01T21:19:00.000-07:00

Friday happiness.

The nice thing about coming into work early is that usually it means I can leave mid-afternoon, and today is no exception. All day long sunlight has been pouring into the atrium (which is the only natural light we have, except for a little that filters in through the blind that covers the front door). When we leave at 3:30 it is still a glorious spring day, and we head down to Molly Moon for ice cream. The line snakes out the door, and we attach ourselves to the end of it. It moves slowly, and we debate over flavors for what seems like hours (it is about thirty minutes) until at last, it is our turn. I taste the salted caramel, choose the Birthday Cake, one scoop in a waffle cone. It is creamy white with specks of yellow and pink, and it tastes like frosting, the birthday-cake frosting of my childhood.

I love frosting, whether it comes in a can or from my own kitchen, and I love this ice cream. We take our cones across the street to the park, and find a bench near the pools. There are children and people with dogs, and guys who do not understand that while the sun is shining, it is not really hot enough to justify taking off their shirts. But still, it is a beautiful afternoon, and I have the weekend ahead of me, and ice cream in a freshly-made waffle cone. We see people that had been waiting in line with us at the ice cream shop, and other people who eye our treats enviously.

Later I curl up with a book on the sofa and think about dinner. I could make a frittata, or I could make pasta. I turn to the leftover roast chicken, and make myself a plate of chicken fettucine Alfredo, which is creamy and cheesy and just the right thing to end the week. Happy Friday.

2009-04-30T19:48:00.000-07:00

Dining Out For Life. Lark.

Once a year three or four thousand restaurants in nearly sixty cities across the United States and Canada hold an event called Dining Out For Life. The day's proceeds are donated to a local AIDS group; Seattle has dozens of restaurants and cafés participating, and I am dizzy with choices. Finally, I settle on Lark, but first I head to Caffé Vita for a latté (which I rarely drink) and two pastries (which I seldom buy). I can eat one of the pastries tomorrow. Cost so far: $9. Donation: $2.70. It's a start.

By dinner time I am starving, and head down the hill towards Lark. I haven't been here in a while, over a month, and it feels like a welcoming hug. The room is nearly empty, but by the time I leave nearly every table is occupied. There are chic girls-about-town and couples of all ages, and one large party (as usual) at the far end of the room. From my seat I can see everyone. It is my favorite seat, the last one of the long line of banquettes that run beneath the windows against the north wall. (This table and the one at the other end are good for parties of five, because the bench wraps around, creating a fifth seat at the end of the table). I order a salad of tuna belly confit, and the special, a veal crépinette.

While I am waiting for my salad, I eat bread - a walnut baguette and a plain crusty white - and butter, wish I had thought to order wine. When my salad arrives I ask for a glass of rosé, which is cool and gentle, but more interesting than white wine, and it casts a pink glow across my table when the light catches at my glass. The salad has slices of soft tuna belly - all tender and white - tangled with slices of something that is a bit like the tuna version of prosciutto, and tossed with tiny leaves and herbs and knobby chunks of potato. I think I need to stretch out my meal a bit, and order soup, leek and potato, which seems more like a thick cream flavored with leek and potato.

I finish my soup in about four spoonfuls, and then my crépinette arrives. I had first had this, a lamb version, at the Whole Beast dinner last year, and have been waiting ever since for it to reappear on the menu. This is a flattish round sausage of well-seasoned veal wrapped in caul fat, which makes it juicy and flavorful, on a bed of what I overhear being described as Russian kale. Or something like that. On the side is a pool of mustard-scented aïoli. The chef seems to like aïoli, lucky me. (I could eat his saffron aïoli with a spoon).

When the dessert menu arrives, I dither until D. nudges me towards the rhubarb cobbler. While I have never really loved fruit cobblers, I do like rhubarb and ginger. It is very gently fragrant with the ginger, and served hot under a dollop of cool crême fraîche, just a bit tart against the sweet crunch of the crust. By the time I am finished the dining room is full, and K. is making her rounds. It's time to go home, though, and the walk uphill seems strangely short. Which is good. Cost, after tax: $52. Donation: $15.60. Perhaps I should have ordered another course.

2009-04-27T18:43:00.000-07:00

Cupcake heaven.

For L.'s bridal shower tomorrow I volunteered to bake dessert. I know she likes chocolate; cupcakes or cake, I asked. Either, she replied, as long as it's chocolate...the richer the better. I could do that Chocolate Overdose cake I made a few weeks back, or I could do cupcakes with a chocolate frosting. Cupcakes, I thought. All the better to have an excuse to buy pretty cupcake liners, bring out my cupcake stand made from curls of silver wire. I knew what I would use for the cake part - Amanda Hesser's Chocolate Dump-It cake, from Cooking For Mr. Latte. Her recipes are clear and concise, and have never let me down. But I was not happy with how the chocolate-sour-cream frosting worked with a cupcake, and needed to find something else. For K. I had made Ina Garten's cream cheese buttercream, but L. was all about the chocolate.

For days I searched the internet, first looking at buttercreams, then ganaches, and going back and forth. It kept me awake at nights. It weighed on my thoughts as I bought hot-pink striped cupcake paper liners and little pink sugar flowers with which to decorate my frosting, whichever one I chose. I bought corn syrup and cream of tartar and extra eggs, went over and over the different recipes, comparing steps and ingredients and finally went for the chocolate ganache frosting, with only five ingredients and a minimum of fussing. The night before I measured out my dry ingredients, chopped up enough chocolate to satisfy even the most rabid chocoholic, and went to bed.

The cupcakes were the easy part, melting butter and sugar and chocolate in a pan with some water, stirring in milk and eggs, sifting in flour and leavenings. A number-16 scoop neatly deposited (ok, so I dripped a little here and there) just the right amount of batter in each paper cup, and thirteen minutes of baking yielded perfectly moist little cakes. They humped up a little in the middle, but a bit of frosting would disguise that. This is where things got messy. I have no piping skills. My rosettes and swirls of ganache look quite - how shall I say this? - deranged. Hopefully no one will notice, or care, or at least not comment too pointedly. I placed little pink sugar flowers in the middle of each cake, and the result was too adorable for words. Then I ate one. And it was too incredible for words, each bite knocking me back with the intensity of the chocolate.

I hope L. will be pleased.

2009-04-26T19:40:00.000-07:00

Sunday happiness.

I woke up to pale sunlight and a breakfast of cold sliced steak and toast made from the olive bread bought yesterday. I made tea, English Breakfast from Mariage Fréres, and sat back to eat my breakfast and watch the Food Network. Then I remembered that it was the last day of an exhibition at the Asian Art Museum, at the north end of Capitol Hill. It was a beautiful day; I could walk. But first, some ice cream at Molly Moon, which opened to, apparently, a line that wrapped around the block yesterday. This could be dangerous, having a Molly Moon a mere four or five blocks from my apartment. I headed down, and arrived too early. The door was open, but I was greeted with a frown and a "we don't open until noon." Whoops. I come back ten minutes later, and at last am admitted into the airy, wood-lined space.

I taste the baby beet sorbet, cool and sweet, and order a scoop of honey lavender, in a waffle cone. It makes me think of A., who thinks lavender-flavored things taste like soap, and it is delicious. I head past the playfield, towards the museum, over a mile away. The neighborhood is a spring wonderland of beautiful old houses and blooming gardens; I walk beneath cascades of cherry blossoms that line the streets, eating my ice cream, and in what seems like no time at all I find myself at Volunteer Park, which contains the Seattle Asian Art Museum, crammed with people anxious to catch the exhibition before it closes tonight. The paintings, gouache on paper, are intricate and delicate, curiously flat and extraordinarily detailed.

Heading back, I have things to pick up at Trader Joe's, frozen appetizers and baking chocolate. The cashier raises an eyebrow at my two gigantic bars (500 grams each) of chocolate and asks what the heck am I planning to do with them? Cupcakes, I tell him. I stagger home after my three-mile loop, and collapse in the living room. I have dinner to think about, though, and drag myself up to clean up the kitchen a bit so I actually have space to debone chicken thighs and slice up a head or two of broccoli. But first some brown rice goes in the cooker to steam before I get to all that. Very quickly, dinner is ready, and I sit down with my full plate and A Room With a View, which has the distinction of being both my favorite book and my favorite movie. The perfect end to a beautiful day.

2009-04-25T19:23:00.000-07:00

Saturday Steak.

After yesterday's weird green dinner, I feel a sudden craving for beef. I head out to pick up various necessities for Tuesday's cupcakes - pink cupcake liners, sugar flowers - and find that the Whole Foods parking lot is unusually uncrowded for a Saturday afternoon. I buy scallions and potatoes and apples, a few oranges, steak and chicken and bacon, two bunches of irises. Very soon I am staggering into the elevator at home with my four heavy bags as an impossibly gorgeous, glamorous (and tall) couple sweeps past me, with my hair every which way, scruffy jeans, flip-flops. Never mind. Dinner is ahead, and I have to get started.

The steak is seasoned with salt and pepper and left out on a plate for an hour or so. I cook it in gently foaming, browning butter as instructed by Jeffrey Steingarten, and it is soon crusty and brown without, rosy and medium-rare within. I heat up last night's creamed spinach in the toaster oven until it is bubbling and browning around the edges, and dinner is ready, with a few slices of a crusty olive loaf from Macrina on the side. And a Shirley Temple. I am addicted to Shirley Temples. It is all extremely satisfying, the perfect Saturday night dinner.

Then I make a milkshake with the Thin Mint ice cream still lurking in my freezer. It was an experiment, one of those rare creations that comes out exactly as I was hoping it would, and I can't wait to make it again. After I finish this batch.

2009-04-24T21:05:00.000-07:00

Friday night.

All week the bundle of asparagus I bought at the market last Sunday has reproachfully waved deep-jade tips at me from its perch, firmly wedged in between the milk and a bottle of Sauternes, each time I open the refrigerator door. Tomorrow, I say, and then before I know it Friday is here, the end of a week full of hastily thrown-together dinners cobbled from odds and ends lingering about. It happens when I don't plan my week, when things like last-minute invitations and leftovers pressed on me by generous hosts throw a wrench in the vague plans I have in my mind. At the end of a week like that I find myself with a bundle of asparagus and two onions. R. brings me eggs that she and K. got from some farm the other day, and I almost gasp out loud when I open the carton and see how beautiful they are, jumbo eggs, blue and pink and brown, and one glorious, speckled one. But somehow I don't feel like eggs tonight.

At some point in the day I found myself hit with a sudden craving for creamed spinach. I don't know why - maybe it was the chocolate chip cookies from Safeway or the two small slices of chocolate cream pie from Costco that I ate absentmindedly for breakfast and various snacks before and after lunch. I come home and find an onion rolling around in the fridge, a bag of spinach in the freezer. But first, the reproachful asparagus - I trim the stalks, wash and dry them, and toss them with a little olive oil and sea salt before spreading them out in a roasting pan, then shoving it all in the oven. While the asparagus roasts, I chop half an onion, slip it into foaming butter balanced with a slug of olive oil. When the onions are translucent but not caramelized, I sprinkle in some flour, let it cook, realize I should have used up some of the leeks as well. Whoops. Next goes in milk and half-and-half. Usually I just use milk, but the half-and-half was leftover from a recipe, and I don't drink the stuff, so in it goes.

Now I can smell the asparagus. I take it out, stir it around a bit, and put it back for a little bit. The milk is bubbling on the stove; I add the thawed and drained (basically using a towel and a colander) spinach, stir it in, let it cook away. The nutmeg grater is hiding; while I search for it I pause just long enough to take out the asparagus and sprinkle on a little more sea salt. I eat a stalk - it is wonderful, tender and slightly caramelized, salty-sweet, the tips just a bit crunchy. The spinach is almost done, and I throw in some grated Parmesan, salt, a few grinds of pepper and nutmeg. It is a weird dinner, all green, like a steakhouse meal without the steak and potato. The benefits of living alone, a plate on your lap, Doris Day in the dvd player.

I eat the cupcake I saved from yesterday, moist dark chocolate cake, vanilla buttercream frosting. The cake has a moist, fine crumb, but the frosting is too sweet. Addictive, though. Already I am thinking about how to recreate it.

2009-04-23T19:23:00.001-07:00

Variation on a theme.

By my calculations, I have made about 200 pots of fried rice in the past fifteen years. I could do it with my eyes closed. Sometimes I add the seasonings without looking. This does not always work out well. Tonight's variation: brown rice, caramelized leeks, sliced baby bok choy, scallions, bacon, and of course scrambled eggs.

2009-04-21T21:54:00.000-07:00

Improvisation no. 2.

Actually the improvisation began the night before, or perhaps the day before that. I was at the farmer's market on Sunday, thinking about what I could make to accompany the leftover oven-fried chicken lurking in my refrigerator. It is Spring now, too warm for mashed potatoes, so I buy red-skinned potatoes for a potato salad. Then I spend the rest of the day wondering what else I could put in the potato salad, as I didn't want to bother going to the grocery store for celery or herbs or anything else. As I baked cupcakes and whipped up frosting (bittersweet-chocolate-and-sour cream, and cream-cheese) and made a mess of my kitchen and dining room table I thought about whether to use onions or scallions in my salad, or if I should just run to the supermarket for a little fresh dill.

Last night I came home and threw together a simple pasta for myself, and then thought about potato salad some more. As I ate my dinner I put the potatoes and eggs on to boil, removing the eggs after eight minutes, leaving the potatoes in until the skins split and a knife pierced the flesh easily. I have never been any good at judging the doneness of potatoes, perhaps because we rarely ate them when I was a child, except for in curry or Julia Child's potato gratin that appeared every Thanksgiving. The boiled potatoes were cut into reasonably tidy cubes, splashed with a little white wine vinegar, tossed with a sprinkle of salt, scallions sliced as finely as I know how. In went the mayonnaise with a plop, everything tossed together. I taste it, add some freshly ground black pepper. It needs something more - what? A spoonful of pickle relish. It is still too warm to taste properly; I will just leave it in the fridge and walk away.

All day I am thinking about that leftover oven-fried chicken (marinated in buttermilk with all sorts of seasonings, baked in a cast-iron skillet until crunchy all over) and that potato salad, even as I am sitting on a bench eating balsamic strawberry ice cream from Molly Moon. I come home just before dinnertime, and take a bite of potato salad, straight from the plastic tub. It is perfect. I wish I had not eaten that ice cream, but not really.

2009-04-20T21:27:00.000-07:00

Improvisation. (Dinner for one).

Last night K. pressed leftovers upon leftovers in my hands as we cleaned up the aftermath of her party. I packed myself a sensible lunch - slices of salami, soy-sauce eggs, ginger shrimp, carefully arranging it in a plastic box. (In plastic bags I gathered the leftover vegetables, orange slices, bagel halves). I thought that I had put the remaining shrimp back in the fridge, but when I leaned into the refrigerator at work to get my lunch I noticed there were two boxes: my beautifully arranged sampler of tasty goodness, and a box full of ginger shrimp. Whoops. Now I would have to do something about all those shrimp.

I had errands to run after work, and in the car I thought about what I should do for dinner. Should I make potato salad to eat with my cold oven-fried chicken? Should I dice up the shrimp and make a pasta salad? Traffic moved along slowly, and I was alone with my thoughts, and Modest Mouse. Pasta, I thought. There were leeks from the market and farfalle in an unopened box - if I were being good, I would finish the fettuccine first, but I am a grown-up now, and I can do whatever I want - and even some leftover white wine from last night's party. I pull into the garage, tidy up the car, put things away while my mind is concentrated solely on one object: dinner.

As always, as you are probably bored of hearing by now, I think of Edouard de Pomiane, and first put a pot of water on to boil. Two slim leeks are split open and washed clean, sliced into fine slivers. I heat a little butter and olive oil in a pan, slide the leeks in, pull the tails off all the shrimp. Throw the pasta in the water, after first shaking in a healthy amount of kosher salt. The leeks are soft now, just beginning to caramelize. I add white wine, and after a moment, the shrimp. The wine cooks down, and I pour in a little cream, leftover from last week's birthday cake experiment. I add frozen peas to the pasta; when they are done, the pasta will be too. I drain them together, tip them into the pan, stir it all together.

It is not perfect - I added the shrimp too soon; they are overcooked - but I have only myself to please, and I am pleased.

2009-04-14T19:50:00.000-07:00

Cake and other stories.

I made two desserts for the April birthday lunch, rum-raisin croissant bread pudding, for M., who always loves it, and a chocolate cake for C., who does not like bread pudding. It is her birthday, too, after all, so for her I pull out all the stops. When I say chocolate cake, I mean a layered creation that has a brownie base layer, a chocolate mousse middle, a cake top layer, and a generous coating of chocolate ganache. I have been dying to try this cake since I first saw it on someone's blog, and now was my chance. The recipe read like a novel, or at least a short story, and I spent days trying to figure out how I could manage this and the bread pudding on a Monday night before a party.

Emails flew back and forth between the author of the recipe (she was thoughtful enough to give me an estimated time frame and other advice) and myself, before I finally figured out that the brownie and cake layers could be baked the night before, greatly reducing the amount of work the night before our lunch. Two things I learned this time: Non-stick sprays are not for me (next time I will use my old standby, softened butter smeared on with either a paper towel or my bare hands), and if I am going to bake two layers in two different pans, I should use pans that are the same size. Also, I should invest in precut parchment circles, because tracing and cutting is beyond me now that I am no longer in kindergarten. Still, by the time I went to bed on Sunday night I had two cooled cake layers wrapped in plastic on my dining room table, one a fudgy-chewy thin layer of brownie, one of rich chocolate cake.

Monday night my kitchen was a battlefield of chocolate smears and rum-soaked raisins. The cake layers were trimmed - more or less - and set aside as I put together the chocolate mousse filling, basically whipped cream and melted chocolate. The mousse was spread over the brownie layer, and then the cake layer was placed on top, and the whole thing chilled. I had not done a thorough job of trimming, and somehow the cake was significantly higher on one side. There was some quick fudging with leftover bits of brownie that had escaped being eaten, and soon the entire thing was reasonably level. I would cover it with ganache, as I had with my cataclysmically cracked cheesecake at the previous birthday party, and no one would know the difference.

An hour and a pint or so of ganache later it was done, my beautiful, dark chocolate cake. At lunch the ganache would prove to be impenetrable by birthday candles, and we stuck the candles in the bread pudding instead. Oh well. Next time.

2009-04-14T18:58:00.000-07:00

Dinner for one.

I come home early and pull the steak out from its chilly drawer, find some abandoned herbs in their plastic box, a bulb of garlic tucked in a corner. The steak goes in a bag with several smashed cloves of garlic, some sprigs of thyme from a forgotten project, a splash of olive oil, another of soy sauce. I leave it on a plate and walk away. Hours pass.

Dinner time. I am hungry, and walk into the kitchen. The grill pan goes on the stove, heats while I trim and halve and quarter a handful of Brussels sprouts. I scrape off the smashed garlic, the twiggy springs of thyme, grind some pepper and sprinkle on a scattering of salt. The meat hisses and settles in the pan, and I set a timer. When it dings I flip the steak, pause to admire the neat black stripes left by the grill.

When the steak is done I remove it to a plate, dump the sprouts on the pan. Why bother washing two pans when one will do? They blacken around the edges, steam slightly when I splash in some water and cover them with a lid. When they are done, it is time to eat. The steak is crusty brown outside, pink inside with just a thin ribbon of red running through the middle; perfect against the slight bitterness, the crunch of the sprouts. Dinner for one.

2009-03-24T19:35:00.000-07:00

Cake.

I have been trying to bake more this year, cupcakes and cake cakes and cookies galore, expanding my repertoire. The March birthday party was today, and I thought I would try cheesecake. Chocolate cheesecake. For days I looked at recipes, trying to find one that looked easy, that would taste good. I walked up and down the aisles of the grocery store, grabbing the ingredients I thought I would need, cream cheese and eggs and chocolate wafers. For some reason Whole Foods did not carry chocolate wafers, so I bought a bag of Chocolate Teddy Grahams. They would have to do.

Finally I turned to Ina Garten, whose recipes have never failed me. The chocolate espresso cheesecake would be easy, even if I needed to swing by the supermarket for espresso powder and sour cream. I ground the innocent-looking Teddy bears into fine crumbs, added melted butter, spread them in the bottom of a springform pan. It went into the oven while I melted chocolate, beat together eggs and cream cheese and vanilla and almond extracts. Cut back the sugar a little, as always. The crust cooled, I poured in the custard, licked the bowl. It was delicious, a promise of things to come. Slid the cake in, crossed my fingers. It emerged cracked, deep fissures in the smooth brown surface of the cheesecake. Whoops.

In a bowl set over simmering water - a makeshift double boiler, although I actually have one - I melted together more chocolate, heavy cream. Stirred together it became a ganache. The picture that accompanied the recipe showed a smooth mocha-colored cheesecake spattered Pollock-like with dark ganache, but I would do something different. I poured the ganache into the center of the cake, tilted the pan so it formed a neat circle, like a dark pond, hiding the disfiguring cracks below. Perfect. Few things in life cannot be patched over with a smooth coat of ganache.

After lunch the next day, the cake is adorned with lighted candles, sliced and handed around. Murmers of approval rise amongst those who have not given up sweets for Lent. F. gets up from his seat, walks around to put his hands on my shoulders. You are a god, he says. I think I have a new cake for my repertoire.

2009-03-20T20:02:00.000-07:00

Friday Lark.

I order seared foie gras, which comes with cabbage stuffed with some sort of pureed root vegetable, and scattered with mustard seeds in a sauce that seems to be nothing more than a little wine, the juices of the cabbage, and whatever fat comes out of the foie gras. I tell K. that it is the best version of foie gras I have had at their restaurant, and wipe up every last drop of sauce with scraps of caraway-studded bread.

The John Dory (which always reminds me of that Agatha Christie story about the thumb-mark of St. Peter) comes on a bed of cipollini onions tossed with sweet mussels, in a buttery, wine-scented sauce speckled with garlic and chopped parsley. Again I clean my plate with pieces of bread - we are in a Depression, no sense in wasting butter - and lean happily against the wall, turning to watch the room behind me fill with diners.

My dessert is a dense tart of coconut wrapped in caramel and dark chocolate, on a crumbly-crisp chocolate crust, with a scoop of coconut sorbet floating on a cloud of shredded coconut alongside. It is a bit like one of those Fran's chocolate bars, only bigger. And therefore better. I turn in my seat and find that the foie gras protesters are here, waving their signs and fists at us. Most people ignore them. As I get up to leave I realize I will actually have to walk past all these shouting and waving people, and M. asks if I want her to walk me to the street. I should be fine, I tell her, and open the door.

I walk outside and the wave of sound hits me like a slap. The protestors are all ages, both sexes, including a smallish person of indeterminate gender dressed in a duck costume, who skips and jumps along the sidewalk. One man politely hands me a flyer and asks that I tell the chef to stop serving foie gras. Aside from being rather loud, they seem a decent bunch of people, so I refrain from telling them that not an hour before, I had enjoyed a small portion of foie gras, one of about forty servings of foie gras I have eaten (some less happily than others) in the years since 1994, the year I encountered it at the Hunt Club as a freshman in high school.

2009-03-17T19:36:00.000-07:00

Out of the past. red-braised beef noodle soup.

When I was growing up, we often went to Green Village restaurant in the International District for red-braised beef noodle soup. (Red-braised refers to the use of soy sauce in the cooking). After the original restaurant burned down, two new ones emerged from the ashes, a regular restaurant with cozy wood booths and live seafood, and a more casual fast-food-type joint that offered takeout and a selection of cold dishes packed in clear plastic boxes.

I found beef shank at the supermarket, grabbed bundles of spinach and scallions. Came home and immediately set to work, bringing the beef stock I had taken from the freezer a few days ago to a rolling bowl, adding soy sauce and a few stars of anise pods. J. comes over to pick up his cupcakes and lingers over a few glasses of wine and Tagore. The broth is intense, lightly fragranced with anise and heavy with beef. A few more hours pass, and the meat begins to slide from its knob of bone; time to bring some water to a boil and toss in a handful of thick wheat noodles.

It is not quite what I remember, and at the same time it is better.

2009-02-27T20:59:00.000-08:00

Friday Lark.

C. and I head down to Lark for dinner. It has been a long week, so we order wine along with our dinner. I order for us, no meat because it is Friday and C. is observing Lent. (Which also, alas, means no dessert). We drink our wine - mine is a Côte du Rhone, selected at random - and eat bread-and-butter, and a salad of golden beets tossed with slices of Cara Cara (the name is like a song) oranges and lumps of blue cheese. I am curious as to who first thought of pairing cheese with beets, and how it spread from restaurant to restaurant like a red-and-white rash. The turbot is wonderful, heaped with shavings of fennel and just lightly touched with the heady, oily weight of white truffle oil. C. has the Spanish mackerel over pasta with chorizo and escarole; it being Friday she picks out all the chorizo, and I wonder what the kitchen makes of it. I give into a craving for steak tartare, which comes with onion crackers and a little tangle of something curly, like baby frisée. Like my glass of wine, it is exactly what I needed tonight.

The foie gras protesters are late, and have not gathered outside by the time we leave. Perhaps next time.

2009-02-21T18:17:00.000-08:00

Late afternoon. Café Presse.

It has been months since I went to Café Presse. The menu is limited and the service is unpredictable. But sometimes you just want a bowl of soup, or a croque monsieur. So I head out after work - I am unusually early - and find a seat at one of those strangely olive-colored tables. I order onion soup and grapefruit juice, and settle in with a book. J. did not answer his phone, so the odds of him showing up are extremely slim. His loss. The soup is as good as I remember, sweet (the way caramelized onions are sweet) and savory (with cheese and broth) and intense, with an excellent ration of cheese-to-toast-to-soup. I finish my soup and juice and order hot chocolate. A hot chocolate, or a chaud? asks the waiter. (He is very cute). I order a chaud, which is very thick and chocolatey and comes with a separate saucer of whipped cream, and it rounds out my afternoon snack/early dinner very nicely.

Usually I see a familiar face here, people I often see around the neighborhood (once I saw two rather well-known tv actors and the frontman of a local band), and today I see K. (one of the owners of Lark) at the bar with M. (who is one of the owners of Licorous, next door), deep in discussion.

2009-02-13T22:09:00.000-08:00

Friday Lark.

Ordinarily I head to Lark on weekends, but today I think I will head down a day early, even though the foie gras protesters have postponed their sign-waving verbal assault until tomorrow. So I sit at the bar and chat with the servers as they stop to mix drinks and pour wine. As always I order a few specials, and sit back to wait for my dinner. There is crispy-skinned fish (fluke, or something), curiously like the black cod some weeks before. Then lamb tongue, served on skewers. (Who doesn't like a little tongue, cracks J., when I tell her I love tongue and always order it when it is available). I finish with mango sorbet layered with slices of blood orange and grapefruit, with little lemongrass-infused marshmallows scattered here and there, and fluffy bits of shaved coconut. It is cool and sweet and just a little tart.

2009-02-06T21:28:00.000-08:00

Dinner for three. Barrio.

My neighborhood has changed since I started working here nearly six years ago, and even more since I moved in three years afterwards. The eight or so blocks between my apartment and the lab is now a minefield of restaurants (in addition to the old pubs and clubs that stand steadfastedly against the yuppie tide), from an inexpensive Japanese(-American) noodle joint to a fancy gastropub, with Lark a few blocks out of the direct path. A new condo development has sprung from the shell of an old building, housing an organic pizza place and a Northwest-inflected Mexican restaurant, Barrio.

On K.'s suggestion we head to Barrio for dinner. I walk by this place almost every day, with its dark wood tables set for dinner even at seven in the morning. We are flummoxed by the towering wall of dark-metal-studded wooden doors, the main door handle somehow invisible to the naked eye. Oh. There's only one door. (Hint: it's on the left side, closest to the sidewalk). We are led to a table by the window, seated at what feels like a rather high table (we are short), on chairs that are heavy and uncomfortable. (They have deep cushions, but there is nothing to grip, so it is hard to move your chair unless you stand up). Through the window I can see K. sashaying down the street, and stand in front of the door, as we had, trying to figure out how to get inside. Nearly every other diner who comes in that night has that same problem.

We order tuna crudo and seared scallops to share, and a pork cheek tamale, the tortitas, and the tacos. Actually, we wind up sharing everything, from the crudo served with jicama chips to the tacos heaped with grilled steak, shredded barbecued pork shoulder, and bbq prawns. I rather like the tortitas, which are soft buns filled with that same pork shoulder, ancho chile chicken, and chorizo with a quail egg. It is all very tasty, and I wish I had ordered more. Another time. We finish with churros served with a thick chocolate sauce, crispy and light and rich. Definitely there will be another time.

On our way home my mother and I walk towards Lark, where the foie gras protestors are out in force. They are waving signs and yelling - they hadn't told me about the yelling - and making so much noise we can hear them halfway across the Seattle University campus as we head back up the hill. You have to admire their passion, even if you don't agree with their beliefs.

2009-02-03T20:31:00.001-08:00

Tuesday Lark.

My father leaves tonight, and as a parting meal he chooses Lark. As always, they are surprised to see me on a weekday, surprised to see me with other people. It is a running joke now. We sit at one of the booths, and I order whatever catches my eye as my mother complains about the dearth of vegetarian options. (She eats meat, just not a lot of it). A salad of endive and beets with blue cheese. Onion soup, with Gruyere toasts. Ricotta gnudi with escarole, a broth. Fat little sardines over assorted vegetables. A soupy risotto made with black rice, bits of chorizo. Sunchokes, also known as Jerusalem artichokes. Mussels. For once, we each order one dessert. I have sticky toffee pudding with dates and pecans or walnuts, I can't remember which. I steal some hazelnut chocolate mousse from my mother, and my father eats his tarte tatin without interruption.

It will be July before we are all together again.

2009-01-28T22:20:00.000-08:00

The soul of a pig, day 3.

Today is about breaking up the pig carcass into recognizable parts. This is the fun part. Also the scariest, as I realize that we are casually sticking knives into thousands of dollars worth of pork. That belong to a restaurant that has invested a great deal of time and care, not to mention money, in these pigs. While we are in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Later I look through the hundreds of pictures I took over the past three days, and there are several shots of K., the executive chef, hovering nervously near the edge of the frame as various people hack away at the precious halves of pork.

But first C. has to demonstrate, and it is like watching a sculptor create a head out of a shapeless block of marble as mountains of fat and muscle and bone fall into loins and ribs and layered sheets of belly. This kind of pork is almost equal amounts meat and fat (or perhaps rather more fat than meat), and the meat is richly marbled and a deeper red than ordinary pink-white pork. Definitely not "the other white meat." He moves quickly and assuredly with his knives and a weird plastic contraption that uses a loop at one end to remove the rib bones, instead of slicing off the rib section as you would with a regular pig. My photographs are blurs of movement as he trims away errant flaps of meat, separates muscles along the seams where they join together. Very little is wasted, which is important when you have such an expensive animal lying on your counter.

Unwilling to individually be held responsible for half a pig, D. and I work together. I am nervous, until I stick the knife between the ribs and pull it towards me, and I have to sink or swim. We follow the natural lines of the meat, trimming away as little as possible, tidying up as we go, stripping away ribs, turning the belly into a neat rectangle. I feel braver than I did a few days ago. I also feel like I will never scrub this layer of pork fat off my hands. I don't know if I will ever have a whole side of a pig to myself, and certainly it is doubtful I will remember everything I learned here, but as a life skill it might turn out to be a useful one.

Later, we have a simple dinner together. More roast pork - I have probably eaten at least ten pounds of roast pork in the last four days (including all that roast pork belly on Chinese New Year's eve) - more salad, some of the headcheese and blood sausage we made yesterday. M. whips what I believe is rendered and chilled fat into a smooth, airy paste, serving some plain and some infused with herbs, spread on toasts. It gleams like rich frosting, or very expensive face cream, and it is incredible. Everyone is excited about everything they have learned, excited to be part of this group. They talk about doing it again next year, in New Jersey and in Michigan, looking ahead. But this is the first workshop of its kind, and it has been such a privilege to be a part of it. We exchange email addresses and phone numbers, and I promise various people the photographs of these three days, having already downloaded them to my laptop and shown them to anyone who would sit down and take a look.

2009-01-27T22:53:00.000-08:00

The soul of a pig, day 2.

We meet in the kitchen of the restaurant that is hosting this three-day event, and who actually owns the six or seven pigs we slaughtered yesterday. There are urns of coffee and lots of snacks, but today we are focusing on something a bit more important: the organs. Soon the kitchen is in chaos, tubs of pigs' heads and hearts and livers, kidneys and slabs of lard. I find myself cleaning hearts, slicing them open, removing the large ventricles and any clots of blood, then moving on to kidneys with their translucent membranes that have to be carefully peeled away. Other people are carving the cheeks out of the heads and trimming livers.

The heads go into a pot to be boiled until all the meat slides off, and later I find myself picking through the steaming bones, stripping away every bit of meat and skin, discarding the eyeballs and any stray bits of bone. It's disgusting, particularly when I have to dig around for errant eyeballs to make sure that they won't wind up in the sausages. Can't have that in a high-class joint like this one. The meat is ground up for headcheese, which along with a gruesome (yet tasty) mixture of blood and various seasonings, grain, and for some sausages, chunks of tongue, is stuffed into plastic casings and lowered into sous-vide baths that look remarkably like the water baths we use in the lab for keeping reagents at the proper temperature. I feel like I am covered in a thin film of pig fat, although I wash my hands so often I probably won't have any skin left on them by the end of the day.

Lunch is an assortment of organ meats cooked in various ways, in two different soups and sautéed with onions and made into canapés served on bits of toast fried in olive oil. There are roasted ribs, impossibly slender and with barely any meat on them, but incredibly rich-tasting. There are salads and more cookies, and a taste of a prosciutto made in-house and aged for thirteen months. It is incredible. Everything is incredible. I have never eaten in this restaurant before, and unless I win the lottery, I probably won't ever again. But their attention to detail and their clear passion for what they do is unbelievable, from the owners to the head chef to every last member of the staff, and I feel very lucky to witness it.

It is an interesting group of people here, mostly professionals, and I am at once humbled and exhilarated to be amongst them. This is not some feel-good entertainment for yuppie foodies who smugly shop at farmer's markets and are hoping to find some spiritual salvation in watching a pig slaughter. These people are here to learn. There are the owners and chefs of the restaurant we are working in, of course, and various other chefs and owners of other restaurants around Washington state. There is a private chef from New Jersey who is planning on raising the pigs for the New York market, as well as a farmer who raises naturally pastured chickens and goats in Michigan (and soon these pigs as well), and a couple from the Bay Area who plan to start their own farm. They are focused, intense, and eager to try anything.

2009-01-26T21:29:00.000-08:00

The soul of a pig, day 1.

H. asked me, later in the day, at which point the pigs we were slaughtering ceased being animals and became, in my eyes, food. When I saw them rooting around in their pen this morning, I tell him. He looked slightly alarmed. It worried me that I could be this callous. This is an idea I have been working towards for the better part of a year, the idea that if I was going to continue to eat meat, I would have to accept that it starts with a living, breathing animal that ran around outdoors before it came to its timely demise. And was not merely a clean, plastic wrapped cut of meat in a styrofoam tray in the cold aseptic shelves of the supermarket. It is not something new - one of my earliest memories is of playing with a lively, bright-eyed pigeon that very shortly afterwards became our luncheon soup - but I had never been in at the death, so to speak. When the opportunity to watch (and perhaps participate in) a pig slaughter came along, I leapt at the chance.

So there I was on a freezing Monday morning late in January, wearing fur-lined rubber boots and layers of fleece and long underwear. (To keep us warm there is hot coffee and, at one point, bourbon drunk in a toast to the soul of the first pig). I had gotten lost, and when I finally arrived at the farm the first pig had been killed and cleaned, a small young pig destined to be our dinner that night. (This is the prologue). It went into a pit dug in the ground, wrapped in what appear to be banana leaves, layered with dirt and bricks, and then covered with coals, which K. proceeds to set on fire using a propane torch longer than his arm. I sign a waiver releasing the restaurant hosting the event from any responsibility should I manage to injure myself during the next three days. The group - some fifteen or twenty people, several of whom work at this restaurant, which shall remain nameless - and others who have flown in from places like Michigan and the Bay Area (later someone from New Jersey shows up). These are professionals, serious people - farmers and chefs - and the other lone amateur is the sort of person who cures his own salami at home. I feel like an imposter, and I am way out of my league.

Our instructors in the art of pig-killing are an Austrian couple who own a farm where they raise rare breeds of different animals - pigs, goats, and chickens, I think - and they are here to teach us how to slaughter and butcher a rare breed of pig that has started to make waves on the American food scene. They demonstrate, walking us through every step, and then various members of our group take turns, with their guidance. It all starts with a wicked-looking tool called a captive bolt gun. I pick it up later, and it weighs a ton. I will spare the reader the precise details, but it happens very quickly. In no time of all the pig is stunned, bled, and dragged into an empty tub (basically, a bathtub someone found on Craigslist) and washed with bucketfuls of boiling water. A powder made from powdered pine pitch is sprinkled over the pig's coarse, curly dark hair, and more water is poured over. The powdered-and-dampened hair sticks together in clumps, which you scrape off with a weird metal cone-shaped tool. Any errant hairs that stubbornly refuse to budge are singed off with a fearsome butane torch, the bigger the better.

Finally, the pig is completely bald, now pink-white and smooth all over, except for the black hooves. It gets hoisted up and tied to a backhoe, then raised until the pig's head is several inches off the ground, belly facing outwards. C. begins cutting away, opening up the body, removing the organs, gesturing with his knife to emphasize various points, his wife, I., explaining when his English falters. Soon the carcass is hanging in two halves, and each half is carried some distance away to hang from the roof of a shed, out of the way. Time for the next pig. Wash, rinse, repeat. Soon people (not including me - I spent the day watching the action from a safe distance, taking pictures until my battery dies, and eating cookies) are getting the hang of things, from the initial stunning of the pig to sawing the cleaned carcass in half along the spine. Hours pass. As the sun begins to slip away and the sky darkens, we clean up and get ready to head back to the restaurant, five minutes away.

At dinner we sit down to roast pig(let), finished in a wood-burning oven and served with a tangy tomato-based barbecue sauce infused with herbs. The pork is tender, the skin crisp (but, alas, not crunchy) and slightly smoky-tasting. There is a bean salad and a green salad and all sorts of little snacks, and pig's brains sautéed with caramelized onions, with eggs and without. Alone the brains are like softly scrambled eggs, more extraordinarly, delicately flavored than the ones with eggs.

I take a cookie for the road.

2009-01-25T21:43:00.000-08:00

Chinese New Year.

My father is in town for a brief visit (he is here for Chinese New Year, and my mother is in Shanghai with her father for the holiday), and we are trying to cram in all his usual food desires in the short time he is here, beginning with teriyaki chicken wings the night he arrived and a steak dinner the next night. But tonight it is Chinese New Year's Eve, and we are off to A. and B.'s house, to celebrate the new year a day early. (B. is scheduled for surgery tomorrow, and the family wants to have this dinner before he goes into the hospital. But of course his procedure is delayed, because his surgeon has some emergency and has to reschedule. Such is life). It feels strange to drive down those twisting, winding roads to our friends' house with my father; usually I am alone, or with K. We have known them a long time. When my parents moved to Taiwan I became absorbed into this family; I have spent nearly all my holidays with them for some years now. While I was growing up, and my family was intact and not spread halfway around the world, I rarely saw these friends. Now their rituals have become mine. I don't mind the prime rib in addition to roast turkey on Thanksgiving, but their traditional Chinese New Year dishes are a long ways away from our usual hot-pot dinner, which I have not had since my parents moved away. I miss our own traditions.

Still, there are compensations, like the slices of roast pork belly, all layers of chewy meat and melting fat capped with a crunchy layer of skin, salty-sweet and incredibly addictive. There are all kinds of smoked meats too, duck and two kinds of sausage and more pork belly, darker and chewier and more intensely flavored. I prefer the roast pork belly, which I keep eating as if they were potato chips. There are bowls heaped with steamed broccoli and some intricate dish involving various items I can't identify and copious amounts of something known in English as "hair vegetable" (it really does look like strands of curly black hair, and I avoid it as assiduously as possible), and a giant braised pork shoulder that falls apart when you poke it with a pair of chopsticks. There is steamed rice, in a giant cooker that holds up to sixty cups of rice (or several small children), and soup made with conch, and for dessert there are round dumplings made of rice flour, stuffed with black sesame paste, floating in a broth made hot and spicy with lots of ginger and sweet with sticks of hard brown sugar.

We head home, stuffed full - in my case mostly with pork belly - and hoping for a good year ahead. I call my grandfather, in Shanghai with my mother (she is spending the new year with her father, as I am with mine, the symmetry of a far-flung family at holiday time), to wish him happy new year. It takes a little time to get through - half the Chinese population of the world is trying to reach the other half - but then his voice comes through, that familiar grumble of my childhood, the usual brief conversation that ends with him hanging up in the middle of my goodbye. This is how it always is, always will be, and I love him all the more for it.

2009-01-17T19:55:00.000-08:00

Saturday Lark.

I am later than usual, well after six, and when I walk into Lark the booths along one wall and banquettes lining the other are all full. Loath to occupy one of the four-tops in the middle of the room, I opt for a stool at the tiny bar at the far end of the dining room. I have never sat here before, I tell K. (I have been seated at just about every other table in the room). F. greets me from behind the bar, as he pours me a glass of water and heads off to other tables with goblets of wine. From the bar I can see into the kitchen, and for the first time I realize that the podium-like station where J. (the chef/owner) stands all night is kind of a last stop for every dish that leaves the kitchen, where he can examine each plate, wiping the rim, scattering a little more salt, giving a last ok before it is floated out and served to the waiting diners.

I order my dinner quickly - two of the night's specials, because that's how I roll - and settle in to chat with whoever happens to be behind the bar. Different servers come in and out, to pour water and wine and mix drinks for the diners that are filling the room. (When I look back over my shoulder, I see that all the tables are full; by the time I leave people are waiting on the couch over by the front door). They begin telling me about the animal rights protesters that set up shop the night before, waving signs and showing movies about how foie gras is produced. The story comes to me in pieces, like parts of a puzzle, each teller giving a new detail, the next person expanding on it. One person tells me about the guy dressed as a duck, another tells me how one of the protesters tried to stop another server from coming in to work. D. tells me that they sold more foie gras that night than they ever have on a single night. I wish I had been there to see all the action, but then my dinner arrives.

First comes the black cod, crisp-skinned fish over a bed of diced beets, some creamy vinaigrette and a salad of curly something-or-other tangled with translucent slices of fennel, an explosion of textures and flavors. The vinaigrette is a little bit like tartar sauce, only better, and I love tartar sauce. It is addictive. Then come the pork cheeks, so tender there is no need for the steak knife, over a puree of root vegetables intensified with a touch of - could it be? - truffle oil. I see the guy who has joined me at the bar is chowing down on the pork belly - apparently a gift from the kitchen, as he used to work here - and am momentarily envious, but I can have pork belly any time. Inspired by the previous night's events I order the seared foie gras instead of dessert. It is served with caramelized slices of pear and slices of pain d'epices, a sort of sweet, dark, cake-like bread, like a spice cake, and a little salad.

But then I find myself wanting a little sweet something (or perhaps I just want to stay a little longer), despite my foie gras 'dessert,' so I order the pomegranate sorbet, which comes in a little Staub soup plate, sprinkled with slivered almonds and pomegranate seeds, and it is so good I want more. The guy next to me - it turns out he now works at Spinasse - is eating the lemon parfait, cool layers of tangy mousse capped with whipped cream and a feathery tuile. But I have eaten those before, and I prefer to save them for summer nights, and that is months away.

2009-01-16T20:35:00.000-08:00

(Not) the same old thing.

For months, maybe even years now, I've been making the same pasta dish, chard or escarole chopped and braised with caramelized onions and sausage or bacon and perhaps a handful of mushrooms, minced parsley and grated Parmeggiano-Reggiano if I happen to think of it. Often there is orrecchiette in my cupboard; sometimes there are twists of trofie in the freezer. I have made it with bacon or with sausage, spicy or mild, chicken or pork. A few days ago I made it with spicy Italian goat sausage. M. thought it didn't taste particularly like goat, but that may be due to the Lagavulin 16-year old scotch I was pouring with a generous hand. (The goat sausage, an impulse buy at the farmer's market, was very good - spicy and just a little gamey, but not too much so). I have fed it to my parents and to my boss and to various friends, most often C., who shows no sign of being bored yet. But that day will probably come.

The nice thing about pasta is that once you have a workable formula, you can throw something together with whatever you find in your pantry, your fridge, your freezer. On impulse I invite C. for dinner. But I had pasta-with-chard-and-sausage on Tuesday, and spicy-sausage lasagne on Wednesday, and now I want something different. Not the same old thing. I find Brussels sprouts and onions and some bacon; there are chicken thighs and trofie in the freezer. Brussels sprouts in pasta? Why not? Brussels sprouts and bacon are a classic combination. I shred the sprouts finely, slice the bacon into lardons, chop the onion into a reasonably tidy dice. It is a moment's work to debone the chicken thighs, season them with coarse flakes of sea salt and freshly ground pepper, slide them under the toaster oven broiler. The bacon is fried crisp, the onions and sprouts sautéed until they begin to caramelize around the edges.

This week's trofie are made with chestnut flour, which gives a more interesting flavor that goes well with the sprouts and bacon. If I had had any I would have added chopped chestnuts, lightly toasted, with the pasta, to intensify the flavor. Maybe next time. For now I have a new dish to add to my repertoire. For dessert, I have a bowl of yogurt with blueberries and a swirl of honey, while C. plumps for Thin Mints unearthed from the freezer. The perfect, impromptu, weeknight dinner.

2009-01-11T19:26:00.001-08:00

Dinner for one. Spinasse.

I am called in to work again. I tell them I will be late, because I have to go to the market, where I buy bundles of greens and carrots, eggs that promise to be organic and free-range and Grade A ("or better"), potatoes and chestnut trofie pasta, and two tins of Mariage Frères tea, one an Earl Grey tangled with tiny blue flowers (for C.) and the other English Breakfast (for me). I buy a loaf of sourdough bread, and some Naughty Nellie cheese from the same farm that produces the Silly Billy I saw at Lark last week. They tell me the chef buys their cheese every week, and hand me samples of everything to try. And then I head into work, knowing that at the end of the day I could reward myself with dinner. Perhaps I would go to Spinasse. It's been a while.

At Spinasse there is only one seat left at the bar, and I have to dislodge the poor guy sitting to my right so I can wiggle ungracefully onto my stool, elbowing the chap on my left as I do so. (Apparently I continue elbowing him all throughout my dinner, because he finally says "I'll just give you some space here," and moves his seat, rather pointedly, three inches closer to his own dining companion). My server says to me, "You look familiar. Do I know you?" and I point out that I have eaten here several times before. The chef/owner waves at me from the kitchen. He is not yet at the point in the evening where his hair is sticking up in all directions, but he will be. I order the ravioli, decline a glass of wine, and wiggle into a slightly less uncomfortable (it is never really comfortable here, when you are wedged between two complete strangers at a tiny bar that rather unwillingly seats six or seven) position.

As usual, two crostini arrive, one spread with fresh ricotta, draped with a single anchovy, and dusted with fennel pollen. I feel either my palate is insufficiently sensitive, or the anchovy overwhelms the pollen, because I can't taste anything but anchovy. The other crostini is spread with a pâté of black trumpet mushrooms and chanterelles, which I prefer. Then my pasta arrives. Tonight's ravioli is filled with a purée of Jerusalem artichokes, which I always feel taste a bit like a cross between an artichoke heart and a potato, two of my favorite things. The ravioli are simply sauced with a little (ok, rather a lot of) butter with a scattering of toasted pine nuts, grated cheese, and fried sage leaves, still crisp. I eat my ravioli and watch the action in the kitchen - there seems to be more people in there every time I come in - as well as the locomotion in the dining room at my back, as people come in and out in a flutter of coats and kisses.

I refuse dessert and chat with my server about Claudio Corallo, whose chocolates I have been hoarding. He likes the orange-infused chocolate, but I prefer the one with the big sugar crystals that crunch with every bite. It's time to go home, but first I have to dismount awkwardly from my stool, pushing it out from under the slim metal railing that separates the bar from the rest of the room and then contorting myself under the railing before putting the stool back and collecting my bag and coat from the floor where I dropped them. The elderly couple dining in relative comfort at one of the communal tables looks on in amazement at my lack of grace, and I smile and say goodnight before heading out the door.

2009-01-01T21:37:00.000-08:00

New Year. (before and after).

Last night we headed to A.'s house, down a twisting, winding road, a steep, narrow driveway that curled like the ribbon torn from a Christmas present, to the house set like a wedding cake against the darkness of the lake beyond. The kitchen - acres of dark marble and wood, even bigger than my dining and living room combined - was curiously empty, until people started arriving and it became the usual bustle of activity. B. directed me to the pantry, where I found boxes of frozen mini quiches from the gleaming fridge, emptied them onto the gleaming expanse of dark granite countertops and lined the little quiches up in neat rows on baking sheets, slid them into the smaller oven (the giant commercial-style stove has two ovens and six burners, each one igniting with a roar like a jet engine's). Spring rolls are being fried in a deep wok, and I steal one as they begin to pile up like so many Lincoln logs on a paper-lined tray. R. arrives laden with salad fixings, and I rinse lettuces and (ineptly) spin them dry, tasting her dressing as she mixes away, suggesting lemon and orange zests to brighten the citrusy blend.

Dinners here revolve around a giant prime rib, roasted slowly with sliced onions and cracked pepper and served with a gravy boat of au jus on the side, a green salad, and a salad made of, among other things, fruit cocktail and Cool Whip. I mean Miracle Whip. I can never remember which is which. It is always the same meal (with occasional variations), the same people, a big family related by blood and marriage and love, the usual suspects. We meet again for New Year's day, as we did for Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, Mother's Day and Father's Day and Labor Day, every other holiday and birthday in between. Sometimes we are at this sprawling wedding-cake of a house lined in marble, other times we are at D.'s house, smaller and cosier and with much less marble.

D.'s house is where we gather tonight, for New Year's day. The guests are much the same as the night before, with few exceptions. There are platters of shrimp cocktail, and dishes of lasagne, bubbling hot and spicy with Italian sausage, steamed broccoli and green salad and garlic bread on the side. A simple dinner. The lasagne has a brown crust on top, the way I love it most, and I keep eating more (alternating with broccoli, to alleviate the guilt) until I am so full I want to go lie down in the living room. But the living room is full of the click-clack of mah-jong players shuffling their tiles, and my ride is heading home, being one of those early-t0-bed-early-to-risers who gets up at five am to go swimming. We drive home discussing our route, and laugh over the peculiarity of Seattleites who spend all car journeys discussing the other possible ways of getting somewhere. It is a good way to begin a new year.

2008-12-27T19:08:00.000-08:00

Saturday Lark.

For the first time since it began snowing the streets are nearly clear, and I drive down to work, tired of walking, tired of my rubber boots with the fake-fur lining, tired of the snow and ice and slip-sliding my way to work. I have dinner at Lark to look forward to, and I walk in, shedding jacket and vest and scarf and a sweater, take my seat at one of the benches that line one wall. The dining room is quiet, partly because of the early hour, partly because of the current economic gloom that seems to be everywhere these days. But the staff are as welcoming as always, telling me about the night's specials, commiserating on the week of snow and how we are just ready for it to go away. (I lived in St. Louis until I was five, and in Rochester, NY for four years of college; my first memory is of snow, and I should not be such a weenie. Seattle weather has made me soft).

I order two specials, the branzino, and the braised pork cheeks. I had been leaning towards pork belly, but could not resist the thought of softly braised cheeks over pasta. This is always my dilemma. The bread and butter arrives, and I tear into it, shedding crumbs in every direction. Then my fish arrives, the branzino all crispy-skinned over a bed of curly kale, some sort of salad, all against a blob of some unidentifable creamy puree. I think about A.'s earlier criticism, that Lark is a difficult place to go to with a large group. While the idea of small plates is rather seductive it doesn't quite work; sharing is so messy for anything more than two or three people, and they only take reservations for groups of six. For more than four people, you have to order two of everything, and then the bill mounts up alarmingly.

Leaving aside these philosophical musings I turn my attention to the braised pork cheeks, tonight replacing the lamb shoulder that is on the menu. The cheeks have a hint of orange peel, more kale - now my most frequently eaten vegetable - and sweet-tart cipollini onions, and flat round disks of croxetti, all topped with the crunch of breadcrumbs. I think they are breadcrumbs. I hope they are breadcrumbs. I mop up every drop of sauce - delicious sauce - with bread, counting on the single diner's cloak of invisibility to mask my poor table manners. It was either that or hold up my napkin so I could lick my plate. More tables have filled, but the restaurant is not completely full, and I worry about the future. (A recent anniversary party for Lark was so packed with fans and friends that it was hard to get around the room, so perhaps I should not worry yet). Then I order dessert.

Tonight I bypass the tarte tatin, the persimmon cake, the chocolate madeleines. I have, instead, the chocolate bread pudding. It is dense and rich, but not too sweet, made with what tastes like rye bread, with caraway seeds adding an unexpected crunch of flavor. I eat it slowly and eavsdrop on the conversations going on around me. A man at the table next to me - I can tell they are going to be the fun table tonight - looks at my emptying plate with an envious gleam in his eye, even as he plans his own meal (beginning with a selection of cheese, including the Silly Billy which almost everyone in the room, except for me, has ordered tonight. I think everyone just likes to say "Silly Billy"). All too soon I am done, and head home to lie down, and think about my next Saturday Lark.

2008-12-25T17:57:00.000-08:00

Christmas lunch.

A. emailed me a few days ago. Come to lunch, she wrote. I didn't think I would be able to drive to D.'s house, my usual Christmas destination, so I was more than happy to say yes. Christmas morning I woke to a white landscape, more snow falling, even though the main roads were clear. A white Christmas. I hum a little to myself as I head to work for a few hours. Then it's time for lunch, and I walk the long, slippery blocks downtown through empty streets piled with slushy snow. Once I am downtown the sidewalks are clear, and I arrive, slightly out of breath, with my hair every which way beneath my hat and my boots dripping with melted snow, the first to arrive. Everyone is delayed by the snow.

I have in my backpack chocolate-chunk cookies, thin and crispy around the edges, carefully stacked in plastic containers, which A. accepts graciously. It is bringing coals to Newcastle, but my upbringing makes it impossible to show up empty-handed. A.'s daughter and her husband arrive, with their daughter, who at sixteen months is at the stage where she takes off at a run as soon as her feet touch the floor. (Later I take many pictures of her, and in several she is actually running straight at the camera, running into me mere seconds after the shutter clicks). A. (jr.) hands me a bag of cookies, explaining that she only made two kinds this year, because she was too busy to do more. I try not to respond that for me, making even one kind of cookie is an effort, usually one that results in an explosion of flour and sugar and chocolate all over the countertops and floors. (Later, I look in the bag that A. (sr.) handed me, and find five different kinds of cookies. Sheesh).

The last guests arrive, and lunch begins with bread and butter and some cream cheese, smoked scallops and mussels and salmon, cold peppers, bowls of sliced cucumbers and radishes, all arranged casually on the buffet table. This is just the beginning. Next comes some white fish - Petrale sole, I think - served with what is essentially a mirepoix. Then there is braised lamb with tomatoes, a brothy sauce that goes well with the pappardelle, simply tossed with finely sliced red onions and freshly chopped herbs. There are roast poussins (or perhaps they are Cornish game hens) and some concoction involving mashed potatoes and turnips made thick with cream cheese. Afterwards there are cookies and cheeses and crackers, more sliced baguettes, soft, slurpy pears, sweet mandarin oranges in their baggy peels. We nibble away and watch the snow fall.

2008-12-19T23:05:00.000-08:00

Snow day. steak frites.

Yesterday I woke to find that snow had blanketed the world outside, and my heart sank to the very toes of my fake-fur-lined rubber boots. I pulled my boots on over layers of socks and long underwear and fleece and cashmere, wrapped a scarf around my neck and a hat over my untidy head, hefted my plastic carrier stacked with cupcakes, and headed to work. Four of us made it in: two early birds who got here before the snow really piled up, and A., who like me lives within walking distance and therefore has no excuse to miss work because of a few inches of snow. All morning long we watched the white flakes falling thick and fast into the atrium, occasionally dashing outside to measure the accumulation. In between, we ate my red-velvet cupcakes, bright crimson cake topped with a drift of cream cheese frosting, as high as the snow piling up outside.

By the end of the day - a very long day - we are ready for dinner, and we head to the pub on the corner. While we wait for our meal we make our plans for the next day. J. will spend the night in my guest bedroom, K. will bunk down at the lab, and tomorrow we will go through it all over again, a skeleton crew hunkered down at work while our less fortunate - or perhaps more fortunate - co-workers stay home watching tv or building snowmen with their kids. I feel a sense of bitter injustice, but then, it was my choice to move within walking distance of work. For now I have a beer to console me. I order a pumpkin ale and the steak frites, and shed a few layers of clothing. The beer is good, with hints of spices that make me feel like I am drinking the love-child of amber ale and a pumpkin pie, and it warms my tired body like a soft blanket.

Our food arrives, burgers and fries for two of us, steak frites for the other two of us. Here, the steak frites is grilled flank steak served over a pile of fries, all topped with a creamy blue cheese sauce. The meat is a little chewy, as flank steak tends to be, but flavorful (again, as flank steak tends to be), and the fries are especially tasty when dipped in the sauce. After a long day, it is just the thing, and when we head back into the snow for the slippery, cold walk home, I feel happy again. There are cupcakes at home.

2008-12-18T22:16:00.000-08:00

Cupcakes. (red velvet).

I am not sure when or where I first ate red velvet cake, but it filled me with wonder (and red dye) and remains (mainly for the cream cheese frosting) one of my favorite cakes. I have never made it, since I am not very good with cake, but I came across a recipe for red velvet cupcakes a few weeks ago, and vowed to make it my next project. My recent jaunts into baking - the black bottom cupcakes, that bourbon-chocolate bundt cake - had given me a new confidence. And I had found these adorable dinosaur-printed cupcake liners in a small bakeware shop in Ballard. I really wanted to use them, as well as my new muffin pans. Not to mention my latest toy, a nifty two-level cupcake carrier, complete with plastic cover and a handle, which would protect each and every cupcake, preventing them from getting squashed in transit.

After work yesterday I ran down the street to the supermarket a few blocks from my apartment, list of ingredients in hand. I had butter, eggs, flour, sugar; I needed cream cheese, cocoa, red food coloring. Soon I was home, and ready to bake. This time I would use the standing mixer - making the chocolate-bourbon cake had been hell on my wrist, holding the hand mixer - and cream the butter longer. But first, I got everything else ready - the dry ingredients sifted into a bowl, the cream cheese and butter for the frosting coming to room temperature on the counter. It was hypnotic, watching the white paddle of the mixer beating away at the butter, the pale yellow getting lighter and fluffier by the minute, rising up the sides of the bowls. When it was nearly white, I poured in the sugar, and it became a fluffy cloud. In went cocoa power, vanilla, the red food dye that was shockingly blood-like. In went buttermilk, and the flour mixture, and soon I had a bright red batter ready to be scooped into the paper liners.

The scoop I use for batter is smaller than the one recommended by the author of the blog where I found the recipe, and instead of twenty-four cupcakes, I had thirty. Oops. More for me. I had to adjust the baking time for the smaller cakes, and pray that they wouldn't be overbaked. They weren't, and I did a silent dance of victory around my kitchen as the second tray of cupcakes went in the oven. But first, the frosting. A. likes frosting. So do I. I would be generous, using my smaller ice cream scoop to measure out the cream cheese frosting, but after the first two cupcakes, I realized I would need more. Time to run to the store again, three blocks away. As I dash out the front door I drop off the first two cupcakes to the doormen, calling over my shoulder that I had made too many, and needed more frosting. Ten minutes later, I was back, and the cupcakes were gone, which I felt boded well for the rest of the cupcakes. And I had only missed five minutes of Pushing Daisies.

I felt that the cakes could have been moister; I could have baked them just a minute or two less, perhaps not mixed the batter quite as long. But they were delicious all the same, soft cake, creamy frosting, not too sweet. I frosted my cupcakes while watching tv, packed them carefully in the trays of the carrier, left them by my door so I wouldn't forget them. Then I woke to snow as thick and white as cream cheese frosting, and wondered how on earth I was going to get all my cupcakes to work. Or if there would be anyone there to eat them. I got a lot of strange looks, bundled up as I was, holding a cupcake carrier while tiptoeing cautiously through the snow as various cars slipped and slid down the street. But it was worth it.

2008-12-13T20:21:00.000-08:00

Cold night, hot soup.

Today I get out of work early, home by four in the afternoon, too early for dinner. Too early to laze around on the sofa until bedtime. And I need chocolate. From Claudio Corallo. I drive to Ballard (which means getting lost and driving around Fremont before I find my way back, in the most circuitous of routes) and find the shop open. A. remembers me from last time, introduces me to K., who used to (or perhaps still does) produce espresso equipment and who is the business partner and main distributor of Claudio Corallo chocolate, which has an earthy smoothness, no, smoothness is the wrong word for it, because it has too much texture for that. It is intense, the unsweetened chocolate so complex I can still taste it hours later, but without a trace of bitterness. This time I buy the chocolate with nibs, the chocolate with sugar crystals that crunch as you eat it, and the chocolate with crystallized ginger.

Tonight is the Art Walk, and there will be hot chocolates and snacks later on, they tell me. I say that I'll go for a walk, and then come back, but when I head outside the cold air numbs my face and hands, and I think perhaps I should eat a little dinner before I freeze to death. I pass the Hi-Life, which serves comfort food in an old, renovated fire station. But there is no menu posted in the window, and besides, I have one thought in my head: Pho. Thanh Brothers is just down the street. I walk another block or two, shivering, and walk inside the restaurant filled with diners slurping away. Someone waves me towards a table by the window, and comes over to take my order. I hurriedly pick something - Pho Bo, beef soup with rice noodles, the version with just about every kind of beef they offer - and sit back with a book. A glass of water arrives, along with a plate heaped with cilantro and bean sprouts and lime wedges and weirdly, a cream puff, which I will save for dessert.

Soon, a steaming bowl of noodles arrives, crammed with slices of beef brisket, flank steak, eye-round steak, soft tendon, and tripe. Oh, and noodles. The hot soup warms me from inside out, all the way to the tips of my fingers to my toes. As I slurp away I wonder how anyone could eat something so warming in the steamy heat of Vietnam and other parts of Southeast Asia. All across Laos and in Hanoi we saw people eating pho for breakfast, sitting on low stools at sidewalk noodles stands, bent over equally low tables with their jars of condiments, their plates of sprouts and cilantro and lime wedges. It seems very far away, on a cold December night with the snow beginning to fall. I pay my bill - it is only $4.75, with tax, for a "small" bowl of noodles, a custard puff of a dessert included, the cheapest meal in town save for the $1.50 hot-dog-and-soda combo at Costco - and head back outside, no longer feeling the cold. I buy cupcake liners printed with dinosaurs at a tiny shop that is wall-to-wall cookie cutters and decorating kits and all sorts of baking accoutrements, and knee-high leather boots at a shoe store that I had never noticed before. And then I head back up the street for more chocolate.

At Claudio Corallo there is hot chocolate, made with their unsweetened chocolate and milk and sugar, stirred gently in a pot resting on one of those unnerving induction burners. L. has made snacks: some sort of chewy concoction involving dried cherries, coconut, and chocolate, caramel corn dipped in chocolate, and cacao-bean brittle. The first and last of those are tasty, if a little strange; the chocolate caramel corn is instantly addictive. Then there are two hot chocolates to try, one made with chocolate and sugar and milk, the other with chocolate and cream and a hint of chili pepper. It makes me think of the movie Chocolat, and it is so good I want more and more, but I am too full, too dizzy with good chocolate, the best chocolate I have ever had. And I have those bars of chocolate in my bag, and three truffles that are for my boss, K., and it is enough for now.

2008-12-12T18:49:00.000-08:00

Let them eat cake.

Yesterday I woke to an email from K., my boss. She had forwarded me a recipe for Chocolate Bourbon cake, found somewhere on the internet. K. does not cook, but she is full of ideas, usually for other people to execute, usually for her own pleasure. I don't mind, except when she dislikes the results, as with the lemon cake made with Meyer lemons brought back from San Francisco. (Too dense, too pebbly). There was that avocado ice cream, not quite successful, which still languishes in the freezer, furred over with ice crystals, and a cake made with yellow cake mix, chopped walnuts, and an unholy amount of rum, which failed to rescue it from disaster. There have been successes, of course, those brownies and chocolate chip cookies that have become a staple, but we (and by we, I mean she) are always looking for something new to try. And I am not good at cake. I need practice.

I rush home to find all the ingredients at hand: cocoa powder, cake flour, eggs, and, of course, bourbon. I remember another co-worker's advice regarding butter - beat the shit out of it - and remember to keep creaming the butter and sugar together until it becomes pale and fluffy, nearly white. The bourbon is whisked with the cocoa powder and instant coffee and hot water, and then added slowly to the butter, sugar, and eggs, alternating with flour, baking soda, salt, all those necessary things that go into a cake. The smell of coffee and chocolate and bourbon fills the kitchen, spreads to every corner of my apartment, like a fog. I drink some of the bourbon, and it is good stuff, warming my throat and my belly as I slide the cake into the oven, in its fancy bundt pan found at Williams Sonoma, on sale, months ago, and left to gather dust atop a bookcase.

The smells become warmer, more intense, as the cake bakes away and I lean back on the sofa with a small snifter (actually, a teacup bought for a dollar at Pier One Imports when I was a college student) of bourbon and I try to imagine how the cake will turn out, how it will go over with the crowd at work. If it will fall cleanly from the pan, or if I have failed yet again to properly butter and flour the cake pan. I vow to buy that stuff in a spray can for next time. And then the timer buzzes, and all those doubts and thoughts go away. There is only the cake, perfect, deep brown, rising to fill its curved dome carved with a sharply incised fleur de lis pattern that I admired in the store but cursed as I tried to rub softened butter into every crevice. It falls onto the rack with a gentle thump. I brush it with more bourbon, as directed, and let it cool. Later I will sprinkle it with powdered sugar, wrap it carefully in plastic, resist taking a first slice.

The next day, I take the cake to work. It looks beautiful, dark brown, with the sharp white of powdered sugar highlighting the carved design around the sides. K. is offered the first slice. She approves, and I let out a sigh of relief, take a slice for myself. It is good cake. I will make another one, just as soon as I buy another bottle of bourbon.

2008-12-11T21:10:00.000-08:00

Leftovers, re-imagined.

Last night, too depressed to cook dinner for myself after reading Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, I called up C. and we headed down to the Honeyhole for cheeseburgers. This is probably not what the editor of that book had in mind when she pulled together a collection of essays about cooking and dining alone, but for every writer who reveled in the pleasures of cooking for one, or dining out alone, without fear or a book to hide behind, there seemed to be another writer who took pleasure in cooking for others, but not for themselves, or had no interest in cooking at all, for themselves or anyone else. (In a beautiful gesture, the book begins with the Laurie Colwin essay whose title gives the book its own title, and ends with an essay by Colwin's daughter, some fifteen years after the writer's untimely death, and it is an almost unbearable pleasure to see that this child whom I have always thought of as "on the cusp of seven" has grown into a writer herself).

Actually, cooking for one is really just cooking for two, with leftovers. And I am someone who gets nervous in cooking for other people. I prefer cooking for myself. I don't have to take anyone else's tastes into consideration, and I am almost never disappointed. There is no pressure, no impatience, no nervousness, which is when mistakes happen, when the knife slips and slices into your thumb, when the meat is overdone and the vegetables undercooked. And I live alone, with two thousand books and lots of stuffed animals. Most of the time there is just myself to cook for. Sometimes I plan my meals even before I leave for the grocery store, and other times dinner is an improvisation based on whatever I find in the fridge. To prevent boredom, I have to transform last night's dinner into something else, adding in new ingredients to change the dish the way you might twist a scarf around your neck or pin on a brooch to change your look.

I have a couple of onions in the fridge; this is always a good way to begin. I slice half of one thinly, slip it in some olive oil that is heating in a skillet on the stove. While the onions turn translucent and then begin to brown around the edges, I slice a small piece of steak left over from earlier in the week, thin slices made easier by the cold meat. Next, I stir the steak into the golden onions, pour in a good slosh of red wine I found in the fridge. A whoosh of steam rises from the pan. Meanwhile, the french fries left over from last night's cheeseburger are warming gently in the toaster oven. The wine reduces to a glaze; it's ready, and so are the fries, newly crisp and golden. I remember that there is still a bouquet of flat-leaf parsley in a glass on my counter. The leaves are beginning to yellow around the edges. It only takes a minute to wash a sprig or two, chop the leaves and sprinkle them over the steak and onions, grind some black pepper on top.

It is steak frites re-imagined, a streamlined Beef Stroganoff of sorts, minus the mushrooms and sour cream and dill. It is better than I could have dreamed of, better than the sad little steak I ate several nights ago (it was a rib-eye, and unfortunately cooked in a manner better suited to a thick New York steak), better than the cheeseburger with fries I had for dinner last night. (The cheeseburger was good, but this was extraordinary). I will probably never make it again. This sort of improvisation is just that, a jazz riff that remains unwritten, belonging to a moment that passes. When I have cold steak in my fridge again, it will become something else; when I have cold leftover fries, I will eat them, reheated, plain or perhaps with ketchup. Just the memory will be enough, will inspire the next improvisation.