Mr. Congeniality

I was walking around my apartment Wednesday morning, brushing my teeth and looking bemusedly yet uneasily out the window at the unholy mess falling from the sky/blowing around my building/overtaking the entire city with its arctic chaos. I’m a traveling tooth-brusher; I like to mosey as I brush. So it took me a few extra minutes to get to my phone to see the text from my coworker, informing me that the day’s training had been cancelled and that I could take the day off.

After a triumphant victory dance session to my very favorite cotton candy jams for about 10 minutes (AHEMjustinbieber), I stood, staring out the window, wondering what I was going to do with this Glorious Surprise Day Off. I could go straight back to bed! I could go outside and build a snow man! I could bake cookies! I could make soup! I could watch piles of Seinfeld DVDs! I could read one of the two food-geek books I had recently purchased, or one of the three gorgeous cookbooks I got for Christmas! I could clean my apartment! I could bury my dying houseplants in the rapidly-accumulating snow and give them a very strange and dramatic farewell!

Overwhelmed by the possibilities, I went with an old reflex: I called my mother.

Mom: So, what are you going to do today?

Me: There are about fifty things I could do, but I can’t decide what’s the best, or most important.

Mom: You could blag.

Me: I could what?

Mom: Blag!

Me: I’m sorry, what?

Mom: You know, write in your blag!

Blag. Like the first part of former Governor Blagojevich’s nickname. Blago. Blag. I’m a blagger.

God, I love Chicago.

Mom: Well, whatever you do, you should call Grandma. She’d love to hear from you.

What my mom might not realize as she reminds me to dutifully call my grandmother is that I have a really great time talking to Grandma Eleanor on the phone. Eleanor is a chatter. Eleanor likes to hash it ALL out. I can tell Grandma Eleanor stuff that would make anyone else yawn, roll their eyes, change the subject, claim they have a sock drawer to organize, or any combination thereof. I like to talk about the minutiae, and so does Grandma.

So I call Grandma and we chat. She talks about the neighbor who is supposed to visit her driveway with a recently-downgraded snowblower, and expresses doubt as to whether he and it will be able to get the job done. She suddenly interrupts herself, almost as if she’s had an epiphany that I might have had a more important reason to call on my newly-awarded ain’t-got-jack-to-do snow day than just to chat. She asks if I’m engaged yet. She’s started doing this lately, which is mostly funny, because although things are kind of headed in that direction, I have as vague an idea as she does. I tell her as much, and she continues her story as if nothing happened. I love this about her. We talk about the goings-on in Egypt and agree we are both relieved that my brother is escaping the fray and coming back to Chicago, safe and sound. We talk about the weather, this blizzard and blizzards of yore, and then circle it back to snow blowers. We both take that as a sign that we’ve covered every possible topic, and that we’ll talk again soon.

I watch about 4 consecutive Seinfeld episodes (season 2, when things get weird with Elaine & Jerry for a minute, but then everything is hunky-dory and mundane and wonderful again). I’m snuggled under a large blanket and about every 20 minutes or so, I burrow, contentedly, further underneath the blanket. I also sigh and grin a little with pure satisfaction.

I think about a conversation I had a few years ago with a friend in grad school. We were talking about the beautiful burden of synonyms in the English language; that there are about a thousand words for “pleasant,” each with its own different shade and connotation. We talked more specifically about the academic’s penchant for familiarizing himself with every last one of those synonyms, and his (our) pride in deploying them in just the right situation. His very favorite example of this is the proclamation of one professor who was hosting a visiting professor in his house: “The guest room is a bit small, but I think you’ll find it quite congenial.”

That was my day: congenial. Hunkered down (up) in my snug, wee apartment, with enough provisions to keep me fed for the day, a little smartphone to keep me connected, and all the books, blankets and tea I could ever want. This was congenial. This was livin’.

Later on, after the snow had stopped and the sun sort of came out, and I saw figures down on the street venturing back into the world, I began texting with a friend, Danielle, about meeting for a celebratory we-lived-through-the-Blizzard-of-2011 cocktail. We were both very much behind the idea, but realized that, much like our places of employ, not many places would be open on a day like this. So she checks around and LO: one of my very favorite places in the whole city is open.

Vincent. Have you been?

I looked at the clock, then looked outside, then called Danielle.

“It’s still daylight out there and it looks sort of magical. I kind of want to be out there like, righthisecond. How quickly can you be ready?”

We agreed we could meet in about 30 minutes at the corner of Bryn Mawr and Broadway, near where she lives, and walk over to Clark & Balmoral, where Vincent is tucked away in all of its cozy and chic and warm and delicious glory.

We walk in, and we’re greeted by Mike, the bartender for the evening (and the server I’ve been lucky enough to have each time I’ve gone in). Not two seconds later, Joncarl pops out of the kitchen, and “HIIIIIIIIII!!”s and hugs are distributed. Danielle had been in there recently with her mother, and since both are ebullient and memorable, Joncarl also remembered her. (I think this is how he works – you go into his restaurant with your parents, and it’s like you’re cemented in his brain for life. Or maybe only if your parents are lovely. I need to research this more.)

The guys explain that they are a staff of three that evening, and that they look forward to another surprisingly busy night. Apparently they had quite a few people stumble in from the storm the night before, and that night, much like the one that brought us in, was one of almost giddy triumph in the face of the most ruthless and inclement weather.

Sure enough, signaled by a small cold gust as the front door opened, the face of each entering patron held an almost expectant, surprised glee – as if they had been tromping through snow drifts for hours solely on a mere rumor that, somewhere around here, there’s a lovely, warm little restaurant that will take you in and make you a nice cheese plate and a gin drink. “Wow!! It really is true! It’s all here!” their faces seemed to say.

Between congratulating ourselves and other guests on our victorious and safe arrivals at the bar, we ordered some drinks (both with marvelous Dutch gin), and some salads and frites. Danielle and I talk to each other, to our new friends, to Mike, to Joncarl… and suddenly, Danielle and I look at each other, eyebrows piqued, then we look around the room.

Something. Smells. GORGEOUS. What is that what is that what IS THAT?! Our eyes settle on Nick, the third musketeer on staff, swanning about the room holding a pan and smiling coyly.

“It’s just cinnamon,” he says. So apparently you warm it up in a pan and it gets supercalifragilistically fragrant.

Not that this is shocking. Danielle and I both comment that we actually feel kinda dumb for not having figured that one out on our own.

By this time we are pleasantly sated and a little sotted. The music is good, and playing at the level I like to think of as “fun loud.” Nick turns on a Florence and the Machine song (yes, That One. It’s the jam, and I won’t apologize.) There are about 9 patrons in the restaurant, and 7 of whom are in the front bar area, talking and laughing. I’m ogling the St. Germain and before I know it, I’ve been handed a champagne drink with a glug of St. Germain and some lemon peel. Joncarl comes out of the kitchen with two wee tiny forks, each with a small piece of steak on the end. He hands them ceremoniously to Danielle and me and we take them as he explains that flank steak really is one of his favorites. (Mine too!) Danielle orders a beer – her nightcap – and asks for a Hollandia. She is informed by a pleased Joncarl that it is, in fact, “a total Dutch dockworker’s beer” and that she is awesome for having ordered it.

So I’ve painted the scene. All of this happened. And all of it, despite the zillion more ways I could describe the evening, calls to mind only one word. Yes, it’s congenial.

God, I love Chicago, part 2: Its restaurants. Not all of them, of course. Because not all of them are congenial. Some are cozy, some are comfortable, some produce thoughtful but approachable food, some are priced for normal people, some have wonderful and warm staff. Very few of them, though, are all of those things.

On my way out, I try to explain to Joncarl why I love his restaurant so much. I like HB, too (his other restaurant, and a BYOB), and for many of the same reasons. However, I love to cozy up to the bar sometimes for dinner, and if that bar is mirrored, so much the better. I’m a sucker for an interesting cocktail list. And for gin. And for bartenders that hand you a plate of housemade pickles, even though you certainly did not order the pickled herring shot. But mostly it’s because I’m convinced each time I go that the food at Vincent is from someone’s very deepest, most earnest heart.

So I don’t know what I’m telling you. I’m telling you I got a snow day, and that I talked to my grandma, and rolled around my apartment watching old sitcoms and reading books, and that I went out later and had a rollicking wonderful time during which I was quite pleased to have survived such a gnarly storm. Yesterday almost felt like another New Year’s Day. (Except without the debilitating hangover and marathon episodes of Dog the Bounty Hunter.) So maybe happy New Year. Maybe congratulations to all of you for pulling through. Here’s a toast to congeniality, and to all of the things that, just one month in, still await us in 2011.

Reboiled, revisited, all the time.

So it's wintertime again, and that can only mean one thing.

(Well... it actually means a lot of things, like wool socks and extra comforters and, lately, matinees. But I know you know what I'm thinking...)

It means soup. And I feel like it's safe to say that the Official Soup of Winter 2010-2011 is ribollita.

Ribollita is peasant food. Ribollita translates to "reboiled" in Italian, because you first boil the beans (traditionally), then boil the whole shebang again later. Ribollita is beans and cabbage and whatever soupish vegetables you've got lying around (because wintertime also means buying 5-pound bags of onions and carrots and working your way through them, only sometimes creatively). Ribollita is cheap as hell and gets better as it sits. Ribollita is versatile - the original recipe I used, by Mario Batali, called for leeks and potatoes, in addition to a silly bundle of fresh herbs that one is to remove before serving. Over the course of the last four batches, I forgot the leeks and potatoes once, then ditched the leeks indefinitely because I don't know any peasants, Italian or otherwise, who can find a halfway decent leek in the middle of a Chicago winter, and honestly they didn't really add much to the finished product. I did pick the potatoes back up, and that ridiculous bouquet garni (again, what peasant does a bouquet garni???) has been traded for stripping the herbs off their stems, whole, and left in the soup to simmer into oblivion. So there.

(Don't Get Me Wrong: Or, a note about Mario Batali: I do actually like Mario Batali very much. I like that he makes simple Italian food taste amazing and look really sexy but honest [like me!] [heh], but I think sometimes when you're a Really Big Deal your common sense abandons you while you're picking out new orange Crocs.)

The first time I made this soup, it was for Break & Enter Monday a few months back, when Danny was sick and I was off work for the day and craving a long, relaxed afternoon in a kitchen. I had some pantry veg and an idea to make something very hearty and well-making, and kind of new. I followed Batali's recipe exactly, down to the garlic toasts and a few shaves of parmigiano. Since then, this soup has been made for special occasions, like a New Year's Eve potluck dinner party, served with a fat, lofty Italian loaf and some hard sheep's cheese. It's also been a weekday workhorse that, even after eating it for lunch 4 times in a week, is hard to stay mad at. It's been made using water and using vegetable stock. It's been made in a 10-quart stockpot (OH HAY best Christmas gift ever), a 5-quart pot originally belonging to my grandfather's stepmother, and a bazillion-quart beast of a pot with about a 3-foot handle originally belonging to my grandfather's birth mother. It's been made with bits of spicy Italian sausage, and it's been made with zero meat and double kale. I've made it almost every other week for the last two months.

This sort of consistency and dependability is nice, because 2011 is already getting off to a bustling, sometimes wonky, start. As I write this, I'm searching for bed & breakfasts in southern Michigan for a weekend getaway in February, making an appointment for a much-needed haircut, cleaning a colony of Weird Glasses Schmear off of my new (AWESOME) glasses, and slipping into the living room for 15 minutes at a time to watch Rachel Zoe on Bravo. (What.) I'm not at my apartment, I'm at Danny's. I'm not on my computer, I'm on Danny's. My laptop bit the dust just before Christmas and it's unclear as yet whether it can be resurrected or if I need to let 'er go and pony for a new one. I move into this very apartment in three months and underneath the logistical pains in the tuchus - cleaning out my closet and confronting years of questionable shoe/bag/clothing choices, leaving my beloved neighborhood and all of its surrounding streets and haunts, figuring out what to do with a veritable Noah's Ark of housewares and furniture once the households combine - is this weird bubble of excitement and calm and happiness. Excited to finally do this, calm in no small part because two households and two parts of town and two everyday lives will just, finally, be under one roof, and happy that it all feels so steady and sure and welcome.

But in the meantime my resolution stands. It's a modest one, but my goal for now is to start blogging again, once a month. The blog will be the same as it's always been; it will be about food and about the kinds of everydayness that bring me into the kitchen (whether it's mine or Danny's). There will be photos again once I have a halfway decent technology setup (i.e. not now; i.e. once I get a laptop up & running), but for now we're going back to the old school. 'Cause I'm a old fool. Who is, of course, so cool.

You'll just have to trust that it looks - and tastes - as good as it sounds.

And in the meantime, I suggest you give yourself over to the making and eating of the Best, Most Comforting Winter Treat I've encountered in a long time. Get out a long wooden spoon, pin back your hair, turn on the album of Italian accordion tunes your grandmother gave you. It's very rewarding, I promise.

Ingredients:
(a quick note: all of these ingredients are completely flexible. If you've got 4 carrots that are on their last legs, throw all of them in. If your onion is mutantly large, it's okay. If you insist on putting leeks in every last thing you eat, regardless of season, size, or quality, I certainly won't fault you for it. Put 'em in, coach.)

• 1 medium white/yellow onion
• 3 cloves of garlic, or more if you're into it. (You'll need one of these to rub across the toasts.) (That's what she said.)
• 2 carrots
• 2 ribs of celery
• 2 waxy potatoes/ (Yukon Golds work fine for this, but if you've got other varieties available, go for it.)
• 1-2 bunches Tuscan/lacinato/dinosaur/black kale. (For God's sake WHY does this kale - my favorite of all the leafies - have 67,000 names???) (I say 1-2 bunches because I adore kale and especially if you're making this soup vegan/vegetarian, you're well-advised to bulk it up with the good stuff.)
• 1/2 head white cabbage. (Don't worry, the other half will keep for a week or two in the fridge - just in time for your next batch. If you see spots on the outer leaf, just peel that bitch off and chop up the rest.)
• 2 cans cannellini beans - NOT drained!
• 1 sprig rosemary
• 3 sprigs thyme
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 shitload vegetable broth (ideal) or water (not ideal, but perfectly serviceable). I avoid exact measurement here because it sort of depends on how brothy you want your soup and how big your pot is. If you want more of a thick stew to serve over toast, use less liquid. If you want something more brothy, use more. I like a consistency somewhere in between. Especially if you're using broth, the soup is so flavorful that the brothy part is just as enjoyable as the chunks.
• Your trusty bottle of olive oil
• Salt & pepper to taste
• Optional: a few energetic shakes of red pepper flakes.
• Optional: 1 pound mild or spicy Italian sausage, casings removed. If I'm using sausage in this I usually do 1/2 pound of each. You can also totally use Italian turkey or chicken sausage if you like.
• Optional: 1 big-ass Parmigiano rind, for simmering.
• Optional: 1 hunk of Parmigiano-Reggiano, or a hard Pecorino (not Romano) for grating.
• Optional: a few slices of crusty bread.

In terms of hardware beyond a knife and cutting board, you'll need the following:

• An enormous pot. Aim for an 8-quart daddy, if you can.
• A long spoon that will reach the bottom of that pot while still affording you some decent leverage - you'll need this when you add the kale & cabbage.

So now do this:

• Chop everything but the garlic. Mince that, except for one clove, which you should just cut in half.
• If you're using sausage, brown that in the bottom of the pot you're using. Once it's cooked, put it in a bowl and set aside.
• Saute the onions and garlic in a swish of oil for about 10 minutes at medium heat - until the onions are translucent and tasty-looking.
• Add the carrots, garlic, potatoes and herbs, and cook for another 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.
• Add the kale and cabbage. This is where your long spoon and your elbow really get called into service. These will wilt down as they heat, and you'll help this along by getting them closer to the heat source (i.e. the bottom of the pot). With your spoon, shimmy the other vegetables from the bottom to the top, and let the kale & cabbage tumble to the bottom. Let this cook down for another 10 minutes or so.
• Add the beans AND their bean-water-stuff, and the broth or water, crank the heat to high, and bring the whole thing to a boil. Once you do that, simmer that bad boy for 45 minutes or so.
• In the meantime! And if you're making those garlic toasts!: heat your oven to 300. Rub the halved garlic clove across each slice of bread, then throw them into the oven. Let the bread toast for a while, the time depending on the heat of your oven and the staleness/freshness of your bread. I like it to get nicely dried out so that it's still got some texture when I pour the soup over it, and for me this generally means 20 minutes in the low oven. You can also just put the bread in the toaster - the only difference is that it just won't get dried all the way through.
• When the soup is done simmering, fish out the bay leaf, or leave it in and invent a game in which the person who gets the bay leaf in his or her soup is the winner of a tour of dishwashing duty. Or a cocktail. Or both.
• Serve the soup over the toasts, or alone. Grate some cheese over it if you like. I also like a few grinds of black pepper over top of everything, as well as a bit of red pepper flake if I didn't put it in the soup.

See you next month. Or maybe sooner. In any case, hopefully with something that's not soup. (I've been getting way into bean salads lately, if that's any indication...)

Hold the brains.

Yesterday was one of those days that went from okay to great to amusingly weird to annoying and back to okay again.

Okay, I suppose lots of days can be like that.

I was teaching my usual Tuesday orientation at work, kicking serious ass and touching serious nerves in my brief history of American farming from 1945 to the present when... the lights went out at work.

Now, I work in a big place. It's like a spaceship. We have more employees than some small towns. And yet, amid placid murmurings in the hallway of brownouts and backup generators, the power stayed out. For two hours.

Priorities shifted. I had to cut short my rhapsodizing on cover crops and horticultural light oils, to say nothing of the store tour, to say absolutely nothing of the post-tour cookies. I barked a mandatory OSHA presentation to my group on the noisy mezzanine, where there was daylight, at least, with the limited battery power left on my laptop. It was like Dilbert at the Apocalypse.

Some minutes after my group left in pitch blackness, armed at least with aprons and schedules (but lacking entirely in knowledge of mop sinks and confined spaces), the power returned. I retreated to my office and did whatever simple busywork remained, too addled to do anything of consequence.

I'm not sure if you can tell, but I am highly uncomfortable when things do not go according to my (obviously perfect, infallible) plans.

So I finished my work and went downstairs in search of comfort (food). Though order had been restored to my life, I was utterly without patience. Dinner last night = veggie tacos.

Before any of the cilantro and onion and lime and red pepper and avocado, however - in fact, right as I grabbed a basket - I saw a basket of fava beans in their shells. I knew that I had had fava beans before, but not only had I failed to remember what they tasted like, the only thing I could associate with them at that moment was Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lechter talking about fava beans and Chianti and brains and being super gross.

And yet. Cannibalism aside: I desired them.

I selected six firmish pods and went in search of cilantro. I didn't know what I'd do with the fava beans, and by the time I had found my El Milagro corn tortillas, I had pretty much forgotten about them altogether. The sensation of grocery-store-impulse-amnesia was remarkable; it was the same feeling you get when you've picked out some kind of ice cream novelty item or something out of desperate haste for a lovely treat you've decided you deserve. Except my ice cream novelty was... beans.

But no matter. Today came around, and after a solid 8 hours of active, weird, mostly wonderful dreaming and my favorite workday breakfast, it was an active, weird, and mostly wonderful day at work. Throughout the day, I bounced the fava beans around in my head, but since I couldn't remember their taste (only brains and Chianti), I had to call in reinforcements.

I searched "fava beans" on Epicurious. The third recipe down looked lovely, and comforting, and like it could involve a respectable pat of butter in a saute pan. (I've reunited with butter on certain occasions, inspired, mostly, by my recent acquisition of the most delightful book about cooking and gardening ever. Jamie Oliver enjoys excellent produce and cooking it simply. Often, this means sauteing in butter. Excellent.)

However, the recipe was also trying to tell me that it was appropriate to be making homemade ricotta gnocchi on a Wednesday night. This was asking entirely too much. (There is also a mention of boiling your leek, which I simply won't abide.)

No no. My methods would be simple. My ingredient list would be simple.

Chanting: "Leek, sage, gnocchi, ricotta. Leek, sage, gnocchi, ricotta."



My mantra and I went downstairs and sailed through the store. I rode home in the almost-storm and made it inside before the fat drops began to fall. I took off my shoes and my jeans (summer policy in my apartment dictates pantslessness for a full 10 minutes before any further activity and/or re-clothing can occur) and turned on a Dr. John album.

The music reminded me of the vacation to New Orleans that Danny and I have one or two times idly imagined. The rain, viewed among neighbor buildings and surprisingly calm clouds through my big window from my just-slightly-wider-than-a-galley kitchen, reminded me of all the times I used to mock, or celebrate, the weather and the rest of the world by cooking something cool and then writing about it.

It's obvious that things are different now. The food blog of yore was my rabbit hole - a way to be the person I wanted to be, and actually kind of was, in spite of a work life and non-work life I felt hesitant to let define me. It kept me off the streets, out of bars, away from work, away from bad dates and toxic people - and in the kitchen, either alone or with good people. It defined me quite tidily, and I liked it.

Now, I have a work life I'm proud of and excited about. I have a non-work life that's positive, that I love and find worthy of focused cultivation. This life also involves a lot of kebob-grilling and taco-esque concocting with a lovely, funny, caring dude - somewhat repetitious (but no less delicious, of course) cooking done in the context of a relationship I still believe should stay relatively protected and private. I still care about good food, but I care less about proving to myself and everyone else that I can make it and live to tell the tale. Now I have a few things that define me, not just one, and I'm still - after the handful of months of blog-delinquency - pleasantly surprised at how much I actually kinda like it.

So I have a conversation at Pork of July (no seriously) with Danny's friend about this blog. He enjoyed the writing and the stories. He encourages me to pick it back up. I explain my dilemma. He understands. I tell him to fix it for me. He tells me he can't find my voice for me. Hmph. I know this, and I know this is the actual challenge.

And I have a conversation last night with Kristy about the same thing. And about the guilt I feel, and about the distinct creative desire to write, and about the vague motivation that only sometimes stirs me somewhere. She tells me it will come back, and I announce I will let it rest. Which is a big deal for me.

So tonight. Dr. John. Fava beans. I peel down the soft spine on the side of the shell to crack it all open, and to my surprise, find these little beans couched in a gauzy inner coat. The beans themselves look like big, pretty, pale lima beans. I drop them into some boiling water for a couple of minutes, then into an ice bath. I pop them out of their shells into a pan, already sizzling softly with leeks, sage, white pepper, olive oil, and yes, butter. The gnocchi go into the pot, cook for another couple of minutes, and join the beans & leeks & sage in the pan.

It's all tossed. It's all sprinkled with more white pepper and some salt. It's crowned with ricotta.



It is... really delicious. The leeks have been thoroughly caramelized, and the fava beans taste, well, a bit like lima beans in their soft starchiness, but the flavor is much nicer - sweeter. And it's all really beautiful. (I love a well-edited food color scheme.) It's completely something that I would make for a kinda-special occasion. Or, for a super special occasion, I would make the gnocchi and the ricotta myself (but NOT ricotta gnocchi, thankyouverymuch. I like to taste my cheese).

So it's a successful night. Dinner was glorious, and this post somehow managed to just kind of write itself. It feels like what it used to feel like. I don't know what this means (hopefully, obviously, it means that the flow is back and this will be happening more often), but I hope you enjoyed it. I've missed doing this, and I've missed knowing that at least a couple of people read it and maybe kinda like it. See you soon.

Salad for Breakfast, and Other Newfangled Ideas

Whoa. It hath been a long time, guys. In the last four days, the tree outside my window has gone from bare to puffy with little leaf buds. In the last four weeks, my new job has gone from making me feel excited but kind of useless to excited and halfway capable.

"Things are happening now."

Fabulous, no? But let's be real here: In the last four months, I've posted... pretty much jack-shit. So I stink. And I'm sorry.

Because my schedule for many months was both erratic and irregular, it was not only near impossible for me to plan a day or two of writing, but also impossible for me to come up with very many cool things to cook after closing down the cheese cave and rolling into my kitchen at 10:30pm, sometimes with a 5:30 wakeup the next morning to go play Big Sister Grammar Coach at a small university in the suburbs. For a while it was a lot of breakfast-for-dinner (shock of shocks) and a lot of cooking with... well, the new boyfriend.

Who, I suppose, is maybe not quite so new anymore. It's been 6 months, and though he did play a starring role in some recent posts, I also didn't feel totally comfortable about chronicling our cooking together on this here blog. The relationship was too new for me to feel okay about saying, "Hey, is it alright if I compose, then post for the whole world to see, an amusing but probably a little bit personal vignette about tonight's Bachelor Tacos?" I'm sure he would have been lovely about it, but cooking with someone you want to learn a lot about, to me, deserves undivided attention.

So here we are now. My schedule: Infinitely more humane and supportive of a cooking (not to mention social) life. My job: Still working for a company and an enterprise that I believe in, and getting closer to helping people think in ways that foster a happy, thoughtful existence. I also get paid to read articles on food, farming, healthy eating, and why people choose the foods they do. Rock & roll.

In this meantime of the last few months, and the last few weeks in particular, I've started to think about meals differently. What makes dinner dinner? What foods, in our minds, constitute breakfast's breakfastiness? (Why am I secretly really excited that Heidegger just got dragged out?) Can someone have soup? - or salad? - for breakfast, if its nutrition & flavor profiles happen to be what that person's body craves at the beginning of a day? When did dessert become a legitimate food group to put in our bodies first thing in the morning? Or, really, when did it become okay for us to not think beyond conventional food standards, and more importantly, how can we start to think beyond them now?

So this is the kind of stuff I'm thinking about now. I mean, I'm also thinking about massive spring salads. And hand-rolled whole-wheat pasta. And homemade mustard. These things won't end. But I'm thinking the blog will also, hopefully, be a place where I (we) can discuss some of the bigger ideas that drive us to eat and cook and make the things we do.

Yes?

It's soup again!

But this time, you can have some.

Come to the Hideout this Wednesday, February 24 for Soup & Bread. Learning from last year's capacity issues (read: two too-smallish pots), I've now got my mother's Big Red Stockpot on loan and I'm finna make a towering vat of steaming goodness.

Crockpots get fired up at 5:30, and I'd suggest getting there around that time or shortly thereafter to ensure you get a decent tasting of what looks like the 6 soups to be served that evening. Proceeds go to First Slice.

See you there!

Come on-a my house.

It was a harried holiday season, you guys. Lovely and festive and there was music and dancing and silliness and cookies and layers and layers of blankets. But good gawd, it was exhausting. I'm just now coming out of the aftershocks and realizing, like I do every year, that I might prefer the smaller treasures of the ordinary to the joyous, exuberant excesses of the extraordinary. (Might.)

In recent months, with a work schedule that changes every week and often precludes me from joining cronies for weekend brunches, I've gotten really good at luring friends to my apartment of a Wednesday morning for what often turns out to be some form of Peasant Breakfast.

I was also gifted this past hurliday season with two pounds of coffee from a lil' joint in Michigan called Biggby Coffee. And - nicest gift ever from folks I've still sort of technically never met (to be remedied in early February)- a coffee grinder. So I casually add to my prospective guests that there will be freshly ground, French-pressed coffee.

And LO! A social life/cottage breakfast industry is born.

So a couple of weeks ago, after waking up one day and realizing that my time, once again, belonged solely to me and my doings, I reached out to a handful of friends. "I miss your radiant face." "You. Me. Burritos." "It's been at least a thousand years. Let's drink, honey." "I have a dozen eggs and a cast-iron skillet with our names on them."

I announced something like this last bit to my girl Cara, who responded favorably. We made plans for breakfast and coffee and music and food-talk for an approaching weekday morning. The day came, and she asked what I needed her to bring. I informed her I was still in possession of the eggs and skillet, as well as the abovementioned coffee, "umm, a fresh multigrain loaf, some buttery French triple creme, some kale, and some spicy Italian chicken sausage. No casing." She informed me she would fly to me in the company of a shallot.

Cara arrived, I pressed the coffee, and we sipped and talked. After about 30 minutes, we wandered into the kitchen to get breakfast started. I was, however, hesitant to suggest outright the (admittedly obvious) potential for Peasant Breakfast.

Because I make it All. The. Time.

I mean, it's not that I have no other ideas. (In fact, I've got lots, and the collection of thoughts for new breakfast delicacies and cravings is expanding rapidly these days. Post on "rethinking breakfast" forthcoming, and soon.) It's just that Peasant Breakfast is so flippin' delicious. And easy. And versatile. [Starch + creamy thing + green(s) (+ optional meat) + soft-fried egg with cooked white and runny yolk] ^ stacked = peasant breakfast. Baguette-goat cheese-spinach-egg. Polenta-ricotta-escarole-sausage-egg. Latke-farmer cheese-kale-egg. Sourdough-brie-arugula-pulled pork-egg.

See?

So you'll imagine my relief when, looking at the collection of breakfasty treasures on my counter, Cara said, "Ummm, could we just make, you know, like, a good old Peasant Breakfast with this stuff?"

GOD YES.

So we did. Toasted a couple thick slices of the billion-grain loaf. Shmeared some St. Andre on top once the toasts cooled (after coming to the happy mutual conclusion that we disliked when warm bread melted thick, creamy, gooey cheese. "I want texture," we chorused). Threw the chicken sausage in a pan with thinly sliced shallots and olive oil. Tore up the kale and cooked it down in the pan with the sausage & shallots. Fried up a couple of eggs.

Stacked it.



Replicable? Totally. Like, weekly? Sure. Formulaic? You bet.

BUT: Comforting? Oh yes. Easy? Yep. Kickass? YES, YES, A THOUSAND TIMES YES.

Here's to working with what you've got, calling a spade a spade, and honoring favorites in 2010.

Cheap Chic: Return of the Lobster Carcass

You guys remember this.

Summer of Terror, 2009: Death and Lobster Rolls.

Welp after a six-month deep freeze, I'm hauling out the variety bucket of lobster-carcass-parts and, um, dead lobster juice. I mean, that is, the - theoretically very tasty - water in which we cooked the lobsters. And I'm making lobster stock.

Because, buddies, I am le broke. (Idea for 2010: Make a little bit more money while maintaining my distance from things that stifle this little light of mine. I'm working on it.) So while a little know-how can alchemize for me a little kitchen gold out of something I helped to do months ago, what it can't do is magically spirit me some sweet, sweet claw meat without bumping some chedda from my checking.

SO: what do you make with lobster stock when you don't have any lobster? (And you're STILL obsessed with soup?)

Enter cioppino. My mother was a raving fan of the stuff until she heard the theory at Glenn's Diner (where everything, from the cioppino to the service - to the lobster rolls, come to think of it - is mind-blowing) that cioppino was actually born in the Bay Area, where fishermen & fishing families would get together and "chip in" to make big pots of seafood soup from the bits and pieces they had sitting around. The rest, allegedly, is just catchy Italian phonetics. I'm not sure how much credence I give to this, but it sure is hilarious to see my mom's sweeping disavowal of something when she learns it originated in California. (You'll have to get her thoughts on the matter sometime; all I can tell you is that the magnitude of her reverence for rules and order is nearly eclipsed by her staunchness in insisting that California is a state that functions on neither.

One thing I do know is that cioppino, regardless of its origins, is one of those blessedly flexible soups that only asks for Kinds of Things, as opposed to These Things And No Others. Cioppino, in my experience and (very recent, very limited) research calls for a seafood stock, whatever sea creatures you've got lying around, and maybe some vegetables and herbs. Beyond that, it's your game.

Which is good. Because I've got dead, meatless lobster (aka seafood stock), and a couple of other things...

• A handful of wee bay scallops (also socked away in my freezer for a rainy day). (Because my rainy days entail the consumption of semi-luxurious seafood items, apparently.)
• Some, um, mature celery ribs
• A head of garlic
• Tomato paste
  

Like, literally. That's it. Okay, that's maybe 4 out of the 7 viable/edible items I currently have in my possession. I respect and completely believe in the "chip in" philosophy (very similar to Shit From My Fridge, no?), but I keep finding it difficult to believe that La Bonne Maman Four Fruits preserves will complement seafood.

What I did not have until quite recently was:

• Some shrimp. ("Chreemps.")
• A very neat-looking mahi mahi fillet (it was on sale; any firm-fleshed fishy will do. In fact, any fish will do.)
  
• About four little squid fillets
  
• A bulb of fennel
• A big, fat yellow onion
• Two potatoes
• Three carrots
  

So I came home and lined up my modest battalion. Not bad, really. Everything I need to make a huge pot of something that will feed me for a week, maybe more. (Okay, lunch & dinner, at least. Breakfast, as you know, goes a little something like this. Yes, still.)

I get to work on the stock. And by now, you know the drill. Put dead creature parts in pot, cover with water, add whatever herbs/peppercorns/root vegetables you're willing to part with (AND A BAY LEAF. God, this is totally another post for another time, but if there is one thing I've learned about making soup - okay, two - it's that you can't make a good soup without good stock and a damn bay leaf. It MAKES it. You'll see), and simmer until you've watched 4 episodes of 30 Rock and called your mother. Or something. Drain to remove bones and other detritus.



In that same pot, once I've drained the stock into a large bowl for the time being, I cook down the celery, onion, carrots, garlic, and fennel. There's butter and olive oil in the pot, and lots of salt and pepper.

Then, in my balla-baby 5-quart saute pan, I sear the little pieces of mahi mahi that I've cut up. This takes about 5 minutes, after turning them a few times and making sure I've got some good texture going. Then I add the scallops, shrimp, and squid (which I've cut into little rings). I cook this - gently, gently - until the shrimp are certainly white, but definitely not pink yet. I'll cook the whole mess in the big pot at the end, and while I do want everything to be cooked safely, I am also easily saddened by overcooked seafood. So I add some of the stock to pull up the fishy bits from the pan, and wait a minute or two. Once this is simmering gently, I dump it all into the big pot with the vegetables, add the rest of the stock, a hefty squirt of tomato paste, and the potatoes, which I've cut into small but hearty chunks. I bring all of this up to a quiet simmer, work it for about 10 minutes - really just until the potatoes are done - and consider my work done.



(This is at my desk. Which is now by the window. For ease of writing and flow of creativity. There's a very old Polaroid of my brother and me in matching sweaters in March of 1985. We may have been in Ithaca, NY. There's also one of the original pedals belonging to Janice, my bike. Though Janice is a Schwinn, the pedal claims to have been made in France and it's probably the queen of the janky, weird objets that decorate my apartment.)

The soup will be good now, but I know it'll be even better tomorrow. And even better the next day. And folks, it turns out that the lobster stock - the cheapest ingredient of them all (this time around, at least) - was totally the MVP. It makes the soup velvety and complex and, strangely, not that... fishy. It's a little sweet, very savory, and very deep. I would maybe not do the squid again (maybe another fish instead? Or mussels?), but overall it's a soup that I'm really kinda proud of. It's not easy to be a food geek on the cheap. The things that I find save me again and again are my freezer, a bay leaf, and, really, any idea that my mother dismisses.