Great Minds...

The title of this post is far too self-congratulatory, but one of my favorite gourmands, Mark Bittman, and I appear to be reading the same book: My Life in France by Julia Child. I will not say that the fact that there is a movie soon to be released on the topic of the pioneering and beloved (and visually and sonorifically awkward) culinary instructor had nothing to do with both of us picking up the memoir, but I will say that I bought it well over a year ago and only recently rediscovered it as I packed up my Harlem apartment en route to my new Brooklyn abode (more on that later). Anyway, Bittman's blog entry is great, and I encourage everyone to seek out Child's book, which I am devouring with the same rapacity she exhibited on many a sole meuniere.

8. I have consumed thousands of bottles of wine, but not one of them has been an Amarone, and I intend to rectify that soon.

People think I know a lot about wine because I grew up on a vineyard. It's true; I know how to make wine, generally speaking. I know that grapes need to be in excess of 20 percent sugar when they are harvested to achieve 12 to 15 percent alcohol in the final product. I know that red wines are red because of the amount of time they spend fermenting on the skins. I know how to get a cork into a bottle. I don't really know the proper yeast ratios or what SO2 does, but I do know a thing or two about winemaking.

I also am put in tough positions whenever wine is being purchased, my friends looking to me to tell them what is good because of my viticultural background. But really, my expertise in telling a good wine from a bad wine when looking at a wine list or standing in a liquor store is just as nuanced as anyone else’s. I have a general idea about what grape variety and/or region of wine would be nice with certain foods, and I know what my price range is. I know what I like, not what label is best. My parent’s grew grapes, not labels. (That being said, I do take more than a little pleasure when my companions pass me the wine list. The fact that I might drink more than most people also might give me a leg up on selection practice.)

My cousin, Dr. Marc, arranged for wine classes as a Christmas present last year. It was a great way to spend time together and indulge in mild excesses.

I learned what is generally known: that people love to over-think wine. That was not one of the course’s intended lessons, I am sure. The instructor had devoted his entire professional life to winemaking in regions around the world, and while I don’t mean to belittle his life’s work, it just seems that the whole industry is in need of a good humbling. The difference between a Barolo and a Barbaresco: opposite sides of a river in the Piedmont. A matter of yards, arguably.

But the mystique of wine is steeped in traditions and rituals: place, vine, heredity, technique, and savoir-faire. The two European wine powerhouses, Italy and France, take two different approaches to wine, in general. The quality of a wine largely is credited to three factors: the technique used to make it, the weather conditions of a given growing season, and terroir (the idea that a specific place, by virtue of the vines growing the grapes and the soil that grows the vines, has equally specific bearing on the quality of the finished product). The French consider a great wine the product of birthright, only certain vineyards being of the caliber to produce in the highest ranks of wine hierarchy. On the other hand, the Italians are much more focused on how a wine is made. For that reason, there is no Italian equivalent to the brand names of Lafitte or Neuf du Pape or Clicquot-Ponsardin; it doesn’t matter which vineyard produced it, but rather how it was produced.

With their heightened sense of process, it is no surprise that Italians have produced some amazing things in experimenting therewith. For instance, in the mountains outside of Verona, the Italians created a wine that is pressed from grapes that have been dried in the open air and sunshine for up to 4 months. Half the water evaporates to concentrate the sugars, and when fermented, what is pressed becomes a full, spicy and dry red wine. It’s called Amarone.

I’ve never had it, but I will change that soon.

1. I cannot stop eating until it all has been eaten. I call it Goldfish Syndrome.

It’s one of those crazy characteristics of the animal kingdom—like camels can go X days without water, and ants can lift X times their weight—that goldfish will eat anything and everything they find edible up to and including the point where their tiny stomachs rupture.

I am like that. I don’t know if I developed the habit out of compulsion or out of some parental nudging throughout childhood: “You know, children are starving in Ethiopia,” or “that little broccoli gave up his LIFE for you, and you aren’t going to eat him? He will have lived for nothing! He will have died in vain!”

Those thoughts sneak back into my head at very diet-busting moments, like at summer barbecues (when there is only one cheeseburger left at the end of lunch…never mind that I have had two already, as well as a couple hot dogs and probably a pound of potato chips) or after making a batch of cookies and having wrapped up most of them to be shared with colleagues and friends (There isn’t room in the Tupperware for these three, I’d say to myself).

I make conscious efforts to contain myself whenever I must and try to put my fork down at least three times per course when dining out. But it is just delaying the inevitable. I never leave a morsel unless the food is bad…and I mean BAD.

As can be expected, I eat and will try just about anything. I love the tripe at Babbo, am undeterred by liver dishes, will eat any pepper no matter how spicy, salivate at the thought of buttered snails, and will not shy away from any vegetable. I like it boiled, broiled, braised, baked, roasted, grilled, seared, sautéed, stewed, juiced, fricasseed, blow-torched, marinated, macerated, pickled, pulled, poached, smoked, salted, cured, churned, en croute, and cru.

However, I do not eat sardines or anchovies. Aside from not liking them and being somehow revolted by the thought of eating their tiny briny bones, as a sufferer of Goldfish Syndrome, eating them would seem rather cannibalistic.

A Cookie Is Worth a Million Words

If cyberspace were our pantry, we all would die of scurvy. In our cultural propensity toward junk food, I know I am not alone in saying that I have spent entire days living off of spam alone in Virtual World, and for the most part, I certainly am not the better for it. If anything, I am a little lazier, slower, fatter, and further behind because of it.

My friend, Lisa, stumbled on a wonderful way to spin these e-lemons into e-lemonade, therefore, when she suggested that a small group of us begin a collective blog, dedicated to the simple things that we find wholesome. Being generally food-oriented people—I will call us “discriminating consumers”—we have encapsulated the theme of this new blog into the notion of cookies, which for us signify understated, milk-dunkable, soul-soothing, slightly decadent, homemade goodness.

Check out The Cookie Monsters every Friday for a new post. And if you feel so inclined, feel free to pen your own and make a contribution. Lisa’s first entry tells you how to join us.

Hopefully our reflections will only sweeten your Internet snacking.

In which I am thankful for LaGuardia Airport

LaGuardia airport is just gross. Everything about it is gross. And worse than gross, LaGuardia is undependable. I once sat on the tarmac on a flight to Maine in the middle of July for three hours because there was a warning of rain. On another occasion, I almost missed a flight because the security line was so long that it stretched out of the building and onto the curb. So in preparation for a flight to Palm Beach this Thanksgiving, I gave myself ample time to account for any undependability and ended up sitting in the gross terminal bar for five hours before my delayed flight boarded.

As I made John Wayne faces while swilling martinis with too much vermouth, I was planted in front of a wall of television screens of varying sizes. Even though there were about 20 monitors behind the bar, they were each tuned to one of three channels: CNN, Headline News, or ESPN. It just so happened that terrorists had wrought havoc on Mumbai earlier that afternoon, so about 16 of these monitors were showing the burning Taj hotel while the others featured an obscure soccer match.

There is very little to do in an airport but drink, especially in LaGuardia, where everything one sees has that dingy, unsanitary look of something that could make you one of the first casualties in an international flu pandemic. For some reason, that day I had decided to wear a bowtie (I think I was excited for Palm Beach), making me unusually aware of my appearance. So I tried to read the latest issue of the New Yorker, in which the luminary historian Dr. Henry Louis “Skip” Gates had written an article about his family’s history, living as light-skinned blacks in Maryland.

But my reading was continuously interrupted by breaks in the story out of Mumbai, where a hundred people were thought dead, and by travelers occupying and vacating the bar stools next to me. I was annoyed and jealous that these people were whispering to their companions and laughing and smiling, and galloping off to their on-time flights, hand-in-hand. I couldn’t help but wonder if their private, cooing conversations, included giggles about that nerd at the bar by himself with a bowtie.

Paris Hilton’s Stars are Blind came over the radio while I was ordering my third martini, an action that elicited a couple of raised eyebrows from the bartender. I shrugged it off with an ego-stroking thought about how she works in an airport bar, and then felt guilty for my elitism and decided I would order the turkey club, which I had heard was the second best thing on the menu, after a foul-looking quesadilla that had been delivered to some now-departed barstool neighbors an hour earlier.

The turkey club was prepared atrociously, but in a fashion not uncommon to airport eateries: they had reheated a pre-made sandwich with the lettuce and tomato intact. Warm lettuce is grosser than LaGuardia. But I took a bite anyway, and found it to be as expected: gross. My second bite reminded me of a Thanksgiving eve three years prior.

My family’s tradition has been to spend Thanksgiving with my paternal grandmother in Phoenix. Three years ago, I was the first to arrive in Phoenix, having taken a morning flight from New York and arriving at Grandma’s at about noon. I was famished and wanted nothing in the world more than a good Southwestern burrito. Grandma said she knew just the place, and she drove me in her huge Cadillac past what seemed like a thousand corner burrito shops to a place called the Five-and-Diner, which was across the street from a perfectly yummy-looking Del Taco.

The Five-and Diner did not offer burritos on their menu, and when asked if they could make one especially for me, they said that they did not even have wraps. Devastated with disappointment and seething with incredulity, I ordered a turkey club, to which my grandmother remarked that I was foolish to order a turkey sandwich the day before Thanksgiving. She went further to admonish me for not getting enough fiber in my diet, citing the digestive tract’s need for the “weight” of fiber. My diet being sufficiently ridiculed, she turned to my spending habits and wondered why I was not responsible enough to live in New York City solely off of my $28,000 salary from the Whitney Museum. Finally, when I had eaten a quarter of my sandwich, she asked for a to-go box and had half of it wrapped “for later,” saying that I didn’t need to eat the whole thing just then. When my parents arrived later that afternoon, I told them that I never, ever wanted to be left alone with her again.

This Thanksgiving, the family congregated in Palm Beach, as two of my cousins had babies in the last eight months and were not traveling with their infants to Phoenix. Grandma didn’t make the trip, for among the many things that just aren’t done in her opinion, 88 is far too old for a lady to travel by air. I held her great-grandson, Lawson, and marveled at the next generation, while her great-granddaughter, Taylor, giggled in my sister’s arms nearby. While that night’s meal did not contain a lot of fiber, it did feature a 1999 Dom Perignon and a 2001 Saint-Emilion. My cousins and aunt had been in the kitchen for hours, making every Martha Stewart recipe they could get their hands on, and the meal they presented was out of this world. Deep fried turkey is as moist as they say. I finished the evening with a single-malt scotch and watched my cousins fight their progeny to bed.

And wow am I fortunate! It is so easy to feel self-conscious and put-out (especially in LaGuardia), but looking at the reactionary smiles of my new cousins, one can’t help but consider the world they inherit and the place we have in it. Taking my airport delay as a microcosm, I have the following for which to be thankful:

• That those closest to me are safe and not abroad and under attack by terrorists;


• That my small cousins will grow up in a time when they will not see the discrimination that Skip Gates’s family did;


• That, like the couples who came and went during my sojourn at the terminal bar, I have people whom I love and who love me in return;


• That I have the luxury of knowing that warm lettuce is gross, as is LaGuardia;


• That my education and other opportunities I have been afforded allow me to work in places unlike airport bars;
  
• That the clothes I wear to mortification are made of cashmere and silk;


• That my grandmother, for all the battiness and preaching that she has assumed with age, is in good health and still playing golf; and


• Burritos.

Lucky Me

S and I have been dating for almost 4.5 years, and we have yet to spend Thanksgiving together. So I thought it was so sweet of him to suggest that on my trip to California this weekend, we throw ourselves a decadent little meal and call it our own Thanksgiving. S is Americano through and through, especially when it comes to food. His taste is a hybrid of down-home meat and potatoes, bearing the brand of his Chicagoan patriarchs, and creamy and fried goodness that is the hallmark of his Carolinian matriarchal line. For international flare, throw in a noodle, a truffle, or some Dijon, but variation is unnecessary to make him as happy as a clam.

Naturally, when S suggested that we have Thanksgiving, I started planning a turkey feast and turned to Ina Garten’s recipe for the perfect roast turkey. I really trust Ina (a.k.a. The Barefoot Contessa), and I have made many of her back-to-basics meals that are at once elegant, simple, and delicious. After having compiled the shopping list, S realized that we didn’t have a few of the necessary items with which to make the meal, thanks to our Santa Monica kitchen that reflects my residing in New York, S’s demanding work schedule, and our reticence to furnish it in anticipation of a major renovation. While oftentimes I have had to bite the bullet in order to get some necessities to make the kitchen functional at all (I am calling cookie sheets, strainers, and ramekins “necessities”), purchasing a roaster just for this meal seemed a little over the top.

So it was back to the drawing board, and then I remembered that my parents had given us a crock pot last year for Christmas. An odd gift to be sure, but I think they won it at a corporate party and, already having one themselves, were looking for someone on whom to unload it. And I am so glad they picked us, for last night’s meal was divine and easier than most things I ever have made.

Braised Beef Short Ribs
(serves 4)

Ingredients

• 4 short ribs of beef
• 8 peeled baby carrots, 4 roughly chopped, 4 whole
• 8 crimini mushrooms, quartered
• 1 yellow onion, very roughly chopped
• 4 celery stalks, roughly chopped
• 2 cups of beef cooking stock
• One bottle of good red wine (syrah, cabernet sauvignon, or other “big” wine)
• 8 robust stalks of fresh thyme
• 5 fresh sage leaves
• Salt
• Pepper

Directions
Liberally salt and pepper all sides of the short ribs. In a hot frying pan, sear all sides of the short ribs until they are golden brown, starting with the fat side (to render some moisture into the pan). Add the short ribs to a slow cooker, placing them in the center of the basin. Add all of the vegetables around and between the short ribs, filling in the spaces so that the ingredients are evenly distributed throughout. Tie the sage and thyme together into a bundle with kitchen twine and add them to the slow cooker. Add the liquids to the slow cooker proportionally so that all ingredients are just submerged. Give the mixture a generous sprinkling of salt and pepper. Cook on low for 8 hours. Remove bundle of herbs, and serve.

12:30 P.M.

8:30 P.M.

The above recipe is very similar to a dish that my dear chef friend (and culinary partner in crime) served to 10 of her closest friends last fall, after we had spent the day at the Bronx Zoo. I mention that now because she certainly was the inspiration for our “Thanksgiving” menu, and after I had turned on the crock pot, I checked my BlackBerry to discover that she had become engaged the evening before! Coincidence? I think not. Mazel tov, sweetie!

So S and I took the rest of the day and did some shopping and saw the new James Bond movie. It was very entertaining, but A.O. Scott’s review had it right in pointing out that it lacked some of the classic Bond-ness. Most notably, the gadgets have all but disappeared, along with one of the greatest characters of the movie franchise, Q. The elegant side of Bond was not at all present, and for the majority of the film, his escapades were carried out in blood-stained suits and tuxedos (and that poor Aston Martin!). A must-see in theaters, to be sure, but not the Bond of yore, or even of Casino Royale.

When S and I got home, the house smelled incredible, thanks to the woodsy stew in the kitchen. We had a couple scotches and whipped up a variation of Tyler Florence’s mashed potatoes, opened a good Chianti, and paused to think about how lucky we are.

I passed out on the floor of the living room before dessert.