Second verse, same as the first. Here is the heel, for real.
February 13, 2004
Oh, my goodness. So many requests to see the shoes. You young people.
Well, okay. Here is one of the pictures Jen took of my shoes. You can see the nifty rubber sole, which makes me feel nice and safe as I walk on slick tile floors, and makes a satisfying sound to boot; no annoying little click-clacks on my feet, no sir!
What you can’t see is the heel. You will have to wait until I get home and download off my camera the other pictures we took. Until that time, though, rest assured, it is a boss heel, a black vinyl stiletto heel as fetishy as they come. My friend Michelle and I measured the heels one afternoon. They are 3 ½” inches high, which means that I am 5’5 ½” out of the shoes, but 5’9” in them. I cannot begin to encapsulate how fabulous this makes me feel.
By now, I’m sure you’re thinking one of two things: 1. “Yawn. Another woman with a shoe fetish.” 2. “What the hell is up with those shoes?”
First things first: I know that women are supposed to be all about the shoes, particularly New York City women, but trust me, I have never had a thing about shoes. In high school and college, I lived in Bass Weejuns. For years, I only had three pairs of shoes, including the sneakers I wore to work out. Once I decided I could use more than three pairs of shoes, I found a designer I liked – Kenneth Cole – and stuck to him. Used to be that the sexiest shoes I owned were a pair of brown Kenneth Cole loafers with a 2-inch platform heel. Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo leave me cold.
But much as every dog has its day, every rose has its thorn and every band has a Shonen Knife who loves them, for every woman there exists a pair of shoes that literally elevates her to another plane. I found mine at Designer Shoe Warehouse while outlet shopping with a gaggle of shoe-crazy femmes. I wandered off on my own, found a nice sensible pair of chocolate-brown oxfords to go with my sensible chocolate-brown sweater and trousers. I found a pair of duck boots to wear when the weather turned nasty. Then I saw a pink and black box labeled “dollhouse.” Sitting on top was this shoe.
It did not look like a shoe you would find at an outlet on Long Island. It looked mean. It looked like it would hurt you if you looked at it crosswise. It looked like a shoe that my more sensible friends would find absolutely insane. Hey, baby, it said to me.
I take a size 9. There were no 9’s, only 8’s and 10’s. I sighed, sucked it up, pulled the 10’s from the rack. This, I learned that day, is the secret of comfortable stiletto heels: go up a full size from your usual size, and they will not hurt or pinch you in any way. They fit like I was born to wear them. Michelle walked up to me as I was trying them on. She looked at the spat toes, the binding, the vicious, vicious heel. “Jen,” she said, “this is a whole new side of you.”
Damn right. I can’t tell you what happens to me when I wear these shoes at work. People who used to not look twice in my direction now look at the shoes and make comments like “yowza.” Straightlaced business guys look at me like they want me to beat them up. My office crush gives me the most bright and shiny looks, with speculative glances at my feet, when I have these on. One of the mailroom ladies calls them my “Cab Calloway shoes,” which I just love, particularly on days when I wear pinstripes. Ladies and gentlemen, I was a skeptic, but now I believe. I once was lost, but now am found, was bound, but now…I’m bound even further, by grey Velcro straps.
By all rights, it should be an awful night here at Chez ‘rina. Lloyd’s cold turned out to be a serious flu bug, featuring 102-degree fevers, night sweats and the kind of coughing I used to hear only in hospitals. (He’s getting better, but he’s still not well.) I have no fewer than three dear friends suffering trouble: trouble in love, trouble in money, more trouble in love, heartache beyond my comprehension. Dream Company finally told me that Dream Job came down to me and one other person, the other person being an internal candidate who has grown greatly in her current position, and this new position would be a giant leap forward for her. (This is yet another reason why Dream Company is my dream company; how can you begrudge a company who recognizes greatness in their employees and promotes from within? They did tell me to keep in touch with them, particularly after I mentioned I might have a *lot* of free time on my hands come July.) The preliminary note-taking for the egg project is going slowly, achingly slowly, cold molasses slowly. My inner gym rat has left the building, replaced by my inner manatee. The Brooklyn landmark restaurant Gage & Tollner, open for over 100 years, is closing on Saturday, yet another restaurant that never recovered its pre-9/11/01 business. Current events, never a picnic, especially in this city, continue to be filled with unhappy violent accidents and meannesses, and the stupid and venal continue to be rewarded while the brave and true are frequently put upon.
All this, and yet, it is not an awful night, for I have an exaltation of mood elevators about me.
If you are trapped in a conspiracy of bad juju, you could not ask for a better mood elevator than to have the world-famous nakedjen come to your town; meet you at your office; take a picture of you in your favorite shoes, the ones that make you feel like a heady combination of rock star, vampire slayer, venture capitalist and sex kitten; and then whisk you off to dinner. Trust me, I know. Further mood elevation will take place if you and Jen go to the world’s smallest Venezuelan restaurant and chow down on arepas (sandwiches made from a masa harina-based griddle cake) and snacky little appetizers and glass after glass of papelon con limon, a drink made of water, loaf sugar (a type of molasses-rich unrefined sugar) and lime juice—oh, god, but it’s a gorgeous thing to drink, and I will marry the person who can teach me how to make it. And long after Jen finds her way back to sunny California, she will keep your spirits high by way of the chocolates she was kind enough to bring you, specifically Donnelley chocolates, 1.5 oz bars that look like gold ingots from the outside, dark chocolate left alone in its plain gorgeousness, or flavored with five-spice powder or cardamom. The wrappers are handmade, and they are breathtaking, almost as breathtaking as the chocolate inside.
Now, Jen alone would provide enough sunshine to get a body through the rest of a long week, but thanks to the kindness of friends and some well-timed retail therapy, I have found myself to be even more cheerful. (Yes, I know how un-Buddhist of me it is to find so much pleasure in material stuff, and I know how shallow I am to mention said material stuff and my loving friends all in one breath. My loving friends I hope will understand. All others may bite me. *grin*) Between King Arthur Flour and Penzeys, I am now the proud owner of a dozen vanilla beans, a set of flexible silicone mise en place cups, a nifty 1-cup swirl mixer with an instruction sheet straight out of the 1950’s (what exactly is Harvard vinegar sauce?), a bottle of boiled cider, two pounds of Merckens milk chocolate and 40 pounds of flour (25 pounds all-purpose, 10 pounds pastry, 5 pounds pumpernickel). Five pounds of Wilbur Buds, my favorite choccies in the world, are on their way to my office. When I came home tonight, I made a pilaf for dinner, using the last of the pecan rice I bought at Kalustyan’s and the last of Sunday’s roast chicken, flavored and fragranced with dried cranberries, butter, onions, bay leaves, a cinnamon stick, half a dozen cardamom pods and a piece of star anise. It was warm, savory and luscious, it made me feel calm and happy on the inside, and it made the apartment smell just amazing. Lloyd is getting better on an hourly basis, and sounds like he may have turned the corner on this flu at last. Tomorrow is the start of a three-day weekend, and I have the feeling that great things are in store for it. I have the kindest friends in the world, friends who respond to my postal delinquency with no recriminations, nothing but kindness and happiness that we are back in touch. And I am lucky enough to have in my life someone who writes the best love letters in the world. You know who you are. 
February 09, 2004
A tough night here at PTMYB, as my darling boy has picked up a cold all his very own, as well as a high fever. I am filling him full of soup, veggie-tibbles and twenty-hour apples, but every time I feel his forehead, he feels even hotter. He hasn’t caught a cold in at least five years, so it is kind of unsettling to see him feeling so poorly. Sigh.
How could I call myself a Terry Gilliam fan and still let almost 13 years go by having never seen The Fisher King? Thanks to Lloyd, we have our own copy now on DVD. My heart officially melted watching Robin Williams follow Amanda Plummer around the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal as commuters waltz around them and sunlight streams through those enormous windows. Beautiful, so beautiful.
As our lovely Alicia pointed out last week, tonight marks the start of Chocolate Obsession Week on the Food Network. I look forward to hearing what my boy Alton has to say about chocolate, but in the meantime I will start my own chocolate obsession week in two ways:
1. I will emulate one of my food history heroes, Anne Mendelson, by excising from all spoken and written conversation any reference to chocolate as “wicked,” “sinful” or “decadent.” About three years ago, back when Gourmet experimented with publishing food essays and opinion pieces on their back page, Anne Mendelson wrote an impassioned essay arguing that referring to food in such morally loaded terms did a disservice to both the food and the force of language. Back in the 1960’s, she argued, sexually explicit books and movies were described, simperingly, as “wicked” and “naughty” and “sinful,” but such name-calling did not make sex sexier; on the contrary, it made it more banal, and redolent of adolescent sniggering. By the same token, referring to chocolate as “decadent” or a rich multi-course dinner as “sinful” does not make the food more enjoyable, or compelling; all it does is blunt the force of the adjectives, until we forget that once upon a time “decadent” meant “corrupted, decaying or suppurating” and not “fattening.” Mendelson encouraged the reader to eschew the overloaded adjectives and replace them with honest appreciation: “This tastes really good, and I love it.” Thus let it be said. Chocolate tastes really good, and I love it.
2. I will indulge in shameless huckstering by encouraging you to go directly to the bookseller of your choice and pick up a copy of Trish Deseine’s I Want Chocolate!, originally published in French as Je veux de chocolat! I have a lot of chocolate books, and they’re all pretty wonderful, but Trish’s stands head and shoulders over the rest. Trish Deseine is the author of several French cookbooks. She is Irish by birth, married to a Frenchman and living in Paris. Her husband’s company supplies equipment to restaurants, patisseries and hotel kitchens. Believing that home bakers should have access to the same high-quality equipment available to their professional counterparts, she started her own business. She is a beauty, a wit, a pixie, and as far as her chocolate palate is concerned, she is a genius. I Want Chocolate! has recipes for grand, large party cakes and little nibbles like mendiants. The names of the dishes are not only descriptive, but they will make you want to dive right into them: Rice Pudding with a Melted Chocolate Heart. Little Chocolate Creams Like My Mother Used to Make. Chocolate, Lime and Passion Fruit Pavlova. (My three favorite flavors, all in one dessert! Oh, oh, oh.) There is a gorgeous flourless chocolate cake in here, one I’ve made over and over, with milk chocolate, almonds, brown sugar and medjool dates. I can smell it just thinking about it, and I can feel it wrapped up tightly in foil, getting softer and deeper and more chocolaty with a good night’s rest. But please don’t take my word for it. Pick up this book, and look at the picture on page 35 of those shiny chocolate tuiles, or the one on page 31 of the chocolate tart shell filled with pureed raspberries so bright and luscious that you could almost stick your finger into the page and lick those raspberries off, and then see if you can fight the urge to bake your way through this book.
February 08, 2004
Now it can be told, or rather, retold, because it’s been told before, but I now have an answer to all of those people who asked if my Egg Board Fellowship project would be about “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Har de har har. Well, guess what, smarties: it was the egg. I know this because today I did something I should have done weeks ago: I went to McGee. That would be Harold McGee, author of 1984’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, the book that no culinary school graduate worth his/her salt can do without. Here is just a fraction of what he has to say about eggs:
The first eggs were released, fertilized, and hatched in the oceans, and the protective membrane could be relatively simple because the egg’s environment was the same mild salt solution as its parent’s.
As animal life developed and diversified, it made important adaptations to new environments. The amphibians could move and breathe on land, but had to return to the water in order to reproduce; their eggs would dry up in the open air. Some time during the Carboniferous period, around 250 million years ago, the earliest fully land-dwelling animals, the reptiles, developed a self-containing egg with a tough, leathery skin that prevented fatal water loss. The eggs of birds, animals that arose some 100 million years later, are a refined version of this reproductive adaptation to life on land. (Mammals, including humans, make use of an alternative strategy; the embryo is retained inside the mother’s body until its development is largely complete and it can breathe air on its own.)
Eggs, then, are millions of years older than birds. Gallus domesticus, the chicken more or less as we know it, is only a scant 4 or 5 thousand years old, a latecomer even among the domesticated animals (sheep and goats go back twice as far). Its background is, however, more exotic than most. The chicken’s immediate ancestors were several types of jungle fowl native to Southeast Asia or India, where it was first bred.
Maybe it is just because I am a silly people at heart, but I am positively captivated by the idea of tree-dwelling jungle chickens. I wonder if the Egg Board folks will let me branch out a bit. So to speak.
Kitchen News: I have received so many e-mails about the Twenty Hour Apples that I decided to go ahead and make a batch. They went into the oven about half an hour ago, and should be ready for consumption tomorrow night. I am embarrassed to admit how much I’m looking forward to them. I also managed to revive my sourdough starters, which I thought I had killed by leaving them out without feeding them. Usually if I know that my schedule precludes a regular 12-hour feeding schedule, I’ll pop them back in the fridge, but this week I managed to forget both their feeding schedule and their newly out-of-fridge status. I am a bad Sourdough Mom. But today I fed them, fed them well, begged for their forgiveness and promised to pay for their psychotherapy if only they promised not to blame all of their problems on me. Not that I have a sourdough disorder or anything like that. Heaven forfend.
The Return of Pop Music Love: VH1 Classic is showing the video for “Inside Out” by the Mighty Lemon Drops, from the World Without End album. Back in 1988, I loved that song so much that I wore out the cassette. I had a job on the newspaper in my little redneck mountain town, where I’d returned after college, and I spent a lot of time on the road, driving from township supervisors’ meetings to county commissioners’ meetings to zoning board meetings, all staggeringly exciting stuff for a 20-year-old woman, you bet. I would emerge from these meetings around 10 o’clock every night, bored stupid, facing a long drive home and the prospect of trying to write something interesting about all this foofaraw in the morning. I’d get in the car, pop World Without End into the stereo and let “Inside Out” propel me home, through dark woods and under starry skies, singing and smiling.