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Food Palace

Food Palace

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For the last couple of years I’ve shopped for food at a discount grocery chain where prices are low and brands are simple: basically there’s one. This means there’s limited selection, and I like it this way. There’s no need to deliberate, so I save time and energy.

A couple days ago I found myself in the antithesis of this grocery store. I found myself in a Food Palace. There were a dozen types of pate, mushrooms so exotic I’d never heard of them and a bakery to die for. It was chaotic and amusing. I was often bewildered. But the mushrooms were delicious when sautéed in butter — and I tore into the chewy but tender Tuscan pane on the way home.

It was as if the food choices I’ve eschewed these last two years had gathered around and started taunting me. See what you’ve been missing, they said.  Look at this richness, this bounty.

I looked, I appreciated. But the very next day I went back to my discount grocer.

Hair of the Dog

Hair of the Dog

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A grocery store is a funny place to find one’s self on the day after Thanksgiving. There was a hair-of-the-dog quality to it.

On the other hand, it was a very good time to be food shopping. I had the place almost to myself.

I bought more eggs and bread and dinner fixings for tomorrow night (tonight will be leftovers) and some for the week to come. I avoided the Thanksgiving-themed napkins that were 75 percent off. Yes, they’re a good deal, but I won’t be able to find them next year.

In that way, emboldened, I enter the holiday shopping season.

(Alas, I did not shop at a picturesque farmer’s market this morning.)

Counting the Carbs

Counting the Carbs

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Planning the Thanksgiving menu is not rocket science. You basically make every carb under the sun to go along with the turkey. Every year I have fantasies of roasted root vegetables or braised leeks — and every year I fall back to what I know.

Which is not to say I haven’t tinkered a bit with my mother’s menu. My brother upped the ante years ago when he took over the Thanksgiving meal. His turkey was brined, his broccoli was capered, and his homemade cream of mushroom soup was to die for.  And I have my own spins on the seasonal classics: a cranberry salad with cream cheese dollops, and herbed stuffing with walnuts and (this year) dried cherries.

But somehow, no matter what I prepare, the meal always ends up being one big mess of carbs. Tis the season, I guess!

Warming the Pot

Warming the Pot

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It’s something I do without thinking, idly swirling hot water around my ceramic pot before brewing  my morning tea. I learned it long ago, when I first visited England and took on some Anglophile habits, such as drinking tea with milk.

Warming the pot, I was told, produces a better cup of tea. It prepares the cold surface for the rush of boiling water. The tea will be more fragrant and potent for this effort.

So all these years I’ve boiled the water, swished it around, poured it out — not unlike rinse and spit — and only then have I made the pot of tea. All of this even though I only use teabags — and an Irish brand, to boot.

This morning, for some reason, I wondered what would happen if I took the same time warming myself as I do warming this Brown Betty? What if I woke up gradually, reading in bed, then did some gentle stretches, some devotionals, some writing in my journal … and only then began the mad dash to wash up, make lunch, walk Copper and drive to Metro?

It’s a lovely fantasy — but only a fantasy, one I can dream about … while warming the pot.

Candy is Dandy

Candy is Dandy

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Some wild and wacky weather managed to put a dent in the crowd of tricker-or-treaters coming to the house, which meant — oh, too bad! — we are left with a goodly amount of candy.

This is not something that bothers me. In fact, it’s a perfect excuse to eat something I know is unhealthy. How unhealthy? Probably not very, when taken in moderation. 
Here’s the thing: I don’t drink much anymore because wine and beer give me headaches. I don’t even eat much red meat these days. It’s mostly veggies and fruit and grains — positively Puritanical! 
Which means I try not to feel guilty when I settle into an old episode of “Call the Midwife” with a bag of peanut M&Ms.

(I’ve been waiting two months to use this photo. I snapped it in a restaurant restroom in White Stone, Virginia.) 

True Foods?

True Foods?

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It happens reliably, when the first nip of fall is in the air. And it’s been happening reliably for decades, back to when I lived in Chicago and even in New York City. When the temperature drops, out come the recipe books, the cutting boards, and the pots and pans.

Salads, my go-to meal of choice, don’t appeal when the temperature plummets. This year, thanks to a recent meal at True Foods Kitchen, I’m looking for ways to recreate some of those scrumptious dishes: ancient grain bowls and roasted cauliflower with dates and pistachios.

Lately I feel like I’ve been suspended between the food of my youth, baked chicken and spaghetti and other plain fare, and some new cuisine in the making, some other way to eat, which is more plant- and grain-based, though not without the occasional bit of chicken or beef or fish.

I don’t have a lot of time for cooking, so that makes it difficult to prepare the sort of recipes I’ve just been reading. But maybe I’ll tackle a couple anyway. After all, the light is low and nights are dipping into the 30s.

It’s time.

Brahms to the Rescue

Brahms to the Rescue

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Brahms came to the rescue yesterday. He didn’t ride in on a white horse, but he was there with his complex melodies and lyricism, with his passion and playfulness.

He was there in the morning when I walked, he was there in the evening when I bounced on the trampoline. And he stayed with me as I sautéed squash and onions and mixed it with farfalle pasta, as I broiled and plated the chicken, as I remembered I had fresh basil to season it all.

What a utilitarian composer! Brahms is not just for bedtime or funerals or academic processions. If you give him a chance, he will stay with you all day long.

(Photo courtesy New York Public Library Digital Collection)

Ah, Nuts!

Ah, Nuts!

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Today I finished off the last few pistachios from a giant bag that’s been hanging around for weeks. I enjoyed every last morsel, and found myself thinking about the first time I ate one — and crunched into the whole thing, shell and all.

Pistachios were the expensive nut I could never afford with my allowance, you see. When someone bought them for me as a treat, I couldn’t believe my good luck. But having only admired them and never tried them … I didn’t know the shells weren’t edible.

The early confusion hasn’t stopped me from loving them, though. And they are instructive, an early lesson in how things aren’t always what they appear to be.

Feasts and Famine

Feasts and Famine

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It’s our last full day in Ireland, and there was much left to see: the Cong Cross and the bog people at the Archaeology Museum, reading from The Dubliners at Sweney’s Pharmacy, St. Patrick’s Cathedral … and … the famine museum.

The Jeanie Johnston is a replica of a ship by the same name, a ship that carried more than 2,000 Irish emigrants to the New World, 200 at a time, people who might otherwise have perished during the Great Hunger.

The people who traveled in the Jeanie Johnston were some of the lucky ones. More than a third of those who left their homeland in so-called “coffin ships” died at sea.  But the Jeanie Johnston has a staff doctor and required passengers to spend 30 minutes on deck a day (rather than 20 minutes every two weeks). None of its passengers died at sea.

Still, the voyage was no picnic. People crammed five to a bed, ate hardtack and tried to avoid dysentery and cholera. This after a year or two of existing on a starvation diet when a blight killed the potato crop.

It was a sobering reminder of the agonies they and so many (including my relatives) endured to reach the United States. And it made me appreciate all the more the lovely feasts we’ve had on this vacation.

Historical Aroma

Historical Aroma

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One of the fringe benefits of working at home is catching little household emergencies before they become big household emergencies.

I’m stretching the term “household emergencies.” Today, while pulling cereal out of the pantry closet, I was met with an aroma that was only slightly less putrid that a decaying animal. It was a rotten potato. This was not a problem last night, but it would have been an even larger problem by 6:30 p.m., which is when I usually roll back in here. Today, though, I could remove the offending vegetable and compost it before too much damage was done.

The point of this post is not to highlight my less-than-stellar housekeeping skills, but to ponder whether there is such a thing as an ancestral aroma sensitivity.

This potato smelled so noxious that I wondered if it had something to do with my Irish ancestry, with the fact that Mom’s relatives mostly came from the west of Ireland and were driven away by the potato famine.

Could I be especially sensitive to this because my great-great-grandparents smelled it all too often?  Putrid potato PTSD?  You never know.