Warning: The following post exemplifies everything that those who are inclined to hate blogs really, really hate. It is housecleaning at its sloppiest and most self-indulgent. All appropriate viewer discretion warnings apply here.
Dear friends,
Those of you who know me well, which, happily, is just about everyone who comes to visit, know that while I joke a lot about being a drama queen, I have a fear of actually being a drama queen. I have a bad habit of taking on more than I can chew, and I am loath to ask for help. I'm a dab hand at telling other people that they should get the help they need, and not struggle unnecessarily, but I am bafflingly, frustratingly incapable of following my own advice. Don't ask me why asking for help is smart and reasonable behavior in other people, but drama-queeny, attention-getting behavior in me. Those of you who spend a lot of time with me IRL -- you know who you are -- know that I am ever so slightly, just a tiny bit, nuts. If by now you are thinking that I should just get to the goddamn point already, you're right; I am protesting too much because it's important to me that you know that if I could just soldier on as always, like the Brave Little Toaster, I would.
In exactly 10 days, Lloyd and I leave for Scotland. Since I will be offline for the first two weeks of May, my plan was to call on all of those delightful folks who kept this space lively and fun while I was in Arkansas last summer, and invite them to resume guestblogging. I had also planned to open up the call for anyone else who was not part of last summer's raucous caucus, but would like to be part of this one; just let me know if you're interested, and I'll send you an invitation to guestblog from the good folks at TypePad. All this would take effect May 1, the day that Lloyd and I leave.
Dear friends, there is a lot going on at Chez PTMYB, but as I also have a fear of this space turning into what my pal Tristan calls a "Today I ate a burrito. I hate my job at the library" blog. (In my mind, I'm hearing a line from "New York Social Life" by Laurie Anderson, in which a friend describes a call-in radio show he's producing, all about why people in the city can't make emotional connections with each other: "But at the top of every show, we're going to say, 'Now, don't call in with your personal problems, because we don't want to hear them!'"
I will leave it at this: I am having terrible problems at work, problems that are bleeding over into my own life (although, thankfully, Lloyd is as sweet, stalwart and loving as he has been from the day I met him), which, unfortunately, includes my writing life. Call it writer's block, call it running out of steam, call it the end of a really good run, but I am out of words, just out of them. If it were just a matter of blog fatigue, I would be a bit more philosophical, but it's not just blog fatigue: I have PTMYB, I have the egg project (which, granted, is still in an information-gathering stage), I have three articles I'm writing on spec for various food publications, I have letters, long-owed, never sent, from people who want to know why I can't take a little time to talk to them. There is an intriguing new contest brewing over at Michael's, there is a brand-new foodie thread at Plastic. There is a veritable playground of words in which I desperately want to play, but I can't, I just can't. At one point, I even found myself with my finger hovered over the nuclear "delete PTMYB?" button -- and again, dear friends, I am embarrassed to admit this, because it sounds so, well, drama-queeny -- but in the back of my mind I know that eventually this whole miasma will pass. I just don't know how it will, or when, or if I will still have friends patient enough to wait for me.
So, dear friends, I am hereby throwing the field open, not waiting until I head to Scotland first. If you have guestblogging access and a burning desire to share something, please feel free to do so. If you would like guestblogging access, click on that nifty "e-mail me" link to the right and I will get you set up sharpish. (Note: that e-mail address links to an account I can't access from work, so if you don't hear from me till the end of the day, do not be alarmed.)
It occurs to me that once I hit "post" on this little whinge, the creative floodgates will break open, I'll be posting six times between now and Saturday, and I will be dead embarrassed at this naked, needy display of mine. You know that if that happens, I will throw myself upon your mercy and promise to never, ever, ever do that again. For now, though, the day in front of me is not rich with promise, and from the vantage point of my lumpy, uncomfortable chair, the odds of a miracle are so small as to require a particle accelerator to be seen.
Dear friends, I can't tell you how embarrassed I am. I would not blame you if you threw your hands up and took your blogrolling business elsewhere. But I hope you don't.
If I know you the way I think I know you, dear friends, and of course I know you the way I think I know you, you have read the title of the post and two thoughts have sprung to mine. Permit me to set your minds at ease -- or permit me to serve you a heaping plate of crushing disappointment. If you're wondering if I have turned my back on the Way of the Oven and embraced raw foodism, I have not. Call me reactionary -- go ahead, do it -- but when I want raw food, I'll eat salad, or fruit, or fruit salad. I really don't want to eat faux lasagne made out of thinly-sliced daikon. Yes, yes, yes, I know that even Charlie Trotter has paid homage to raw, and if he offered me a multicourse raw meal from his kitchen, I wouldn't turn it down, but I'm still a bit wary of much of the verbiage coming from the raw food movement. When someone refers to a perfect braise of beef and carrots, or a creamy souffle, or a snapping-fresh bunch of asparagus, rolled in olive oil and salt and roasted in a 500-degree oven, as "angry food," my back goes up. In short, I'm not a good candidate for a raw regime.
If you're thinking the other thought that would spring to mind when you read the title, well, I'm sorry, but it's not about that, either. Mom, it's safe to uncover your eyes. Um...Mom?...Mom?
Having rabbitted on about what it's not, let's proceed directly to what it is. What it is is a sort of culinary brainteaser, a question posed to me by a Particular Dear Friend of mine last week: Are there any foods that can be eaten both raw and cooked, that are most commonly eaten cooked, but are as good, if not better, if eaten raw? I am only a bit sheepish to admit that all of my time not spent slinging hash at the box factory, having occasional conversations with my pals and my family and my Lloyd, or pursuing frivolous pursuits like sleep, has been spent contemplating this question. At first, it seems tricky to come up with a list. There are plenty of foods that can be eaten both raw and cooked, but our associations and preferences tend to remain firmly in a single camp. I think of dark leafy greens like kale and chard, which can be eaten raw if they are chopped or sliced finely, but which acquire whole new levels of textural beauty when they are cooked. Conversely, strawberries can be cooked, boiled with sugar for jam and compote, or baked into a pie, but in general strawberries show off their best side, their bright sweetness, when they are eaten raw, either by themselves or macerated with a little sugar. Particular Dear Friend suggested that broccoli was a good example, that he preferred broccoli raw to cooked. There are plenty of people who share his point of view -- witness the ubiquity of raw broccoli on crudite trays -- but of course I have to be a contrarian here. Actually, it's not even that I'm a contrarian; rather, I am a bug for broccoli cooked just the way I like it. The way I like it is more tender than tender-crisp, but less tender than overdone. When I bite into a broccoli floret, I want that floret to give under my teeth; I don't want it to spring back. But until my teeth cut through it, I want it to maintain its structural integrity. If it falls apart on the fork, we're in trouble here. If it has been cooked more than seven minutes, I don't want to play. But raw? I'll leave those to hardier people than myself.
Asparagus, on the other hand, I have eaten raw. I've only eaten the slender ones, the ones about half the size of a #2 pencil, with tips the size of a fingernail. They are wonderful, grassy and sweet and a pure hit of chlorophyll. I have also eaten sugar snap peas, height-of-summer peas, pod and all. They are terrific sauteed and dressed in a little orange-flavored butter, but at the height of summer, when you get the peas that have been out of the ground for mere hours, there is no pleasure quite like topping and tailing a raw pod and then biting into it, the whole thing, pod and all, drawing the water out of the pod with your teeth, snapping down on the peas suddenly set free in your mouth. I have sat in front of the tv, watching some blood-running-down-the-sides-of-the-bucket movie with Lloyd, munching my way through a bag of sugar snaps during the scary parts. I have also performed the Mindless Movie-Snacking Automaton routine with sorrel, which is a fixture in soups and sauces in British cookery, but which I have always loved raw. Sorrel is a tart green, so tart that it makes your mouth pucker at first bite. Several years ago, the New York Times food section ran an article (I think by Amanda Hesser) called "Gooseberries and Sorrel," all about the tartness and succor of these two plants, and even now, my mouth begins to water. (I have since read, though, that sorrel is high in oxalic acid, which can be toxic if consumed in large quantities; please, dear friends, do not follow my sorry and possibly dangerous example. Do not eat sorrel as if it were a bottomless bag of Route 10 Dill Pickle-Flavored Potato Chips.)
You could always try spinach, which is a cousin of sorrel, and which also contains oxalic acid, but not in the same quantity as sorrel. Spinach is one of those rare beauties that can be really wonderful either raw or cooked. In an otherwise useless diet book I owned as a teenager, I read some pretty good advice on how to learn to love spinach: start by eating it raw, in salads; then graduate to gently-wilted salads, cold salads dressed with hot cooked dressing; then, finally, try it braised, or sauteed, or stir-fried with a little garlic and oyster sauce, or sauteed and dressed with a rice vinegar dressing and sesame seeds. Once you get used to the shock of seeing your big bag of greens cook down into a cluster the size of a digestive biscuit, you will find a dozen different ways to love your spinach -- or you can just wash it to remove the sand, spin it dry, and make yourself a big crunchy salad out of it. This same silly diet book also gave the same sensible advice about mushrooms, only in reverse: start with cooked mushrooms, then work backward to raw.
Even as I know that I love all of these foods, the asparagus and the spinach and the peas and the strawberries, I still wondered if there were other answers out there, something that really stood up as well raw as it did cooked, and vice versa. It should not have been a surprise that I found it in one of my favorite sources of food writing, the journal Petits Propos Culinaires (a/k/a PPC), or rather, the anthology of collected works from PPC, The Wilder Shores of Gastronomy. Included in this delightful book is a reminiscence originally published in 1979 in PPC #2, "Kibbeh Nayyeh" by Suad Aljure:
When I was a little child I knew it was Sunday when my mother took over the kitchen. Sunday was kibbeh day and no hands were allowed to touch the kibbeh except Mama's (which, now that I think about it, must have been rather humiliating for our cook). That was my father's rule; only Mama's touch was right for kneading the kibbeh, and he claimed he could tell when strange hands had prepared the mixture.
Ms. Aljure's essay is a little gem, filled with nostalgia, keen observation (her description of how carefully her mother trimmed all fat and membrane from the lamb should be required reading in culinary schools everywhere), gentle sibling rivalry (as witnessed by her tart observations of her sister's fondness for mint leaves) and tactile sensation (one can almost feel the nubbly texture of soaked burghul against one's palms). I read, enraptured, from the first word to the last, when I realized I hadn't seen any cooking instructions. No, I thought, that couldn't be. I had had kibbeh in restaurants. I had bought take-out kibbeh meatballs from Sahadi in Brooklyn. I know that what I had eaten had definitely been fried, not raw. I read again. Trim the meat, check. Put the meat, onions and mint into the mortar, check. Pound, pound, pound, pound, pound. Add the burghul, squeezed dry, in handfuls. Pound, pound, pound, pound, pound. Repeat for an hour. Taste for seasoning. Pound, pound, pound. Form into mound on platter, flatten it out, smooth it out with palm, mark it with wells for the collection of drizzles of olive oil. Nothing about frying. Nothing about baking.
Of course it was not that my memory was faulty; it was that my horizons were not all that broad. Kibbeh is indeed served raw, or baked, or fried. The scholar of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cookery Paula Wolfert has identified 50 different varieties of kibbeh. My initial shock has turns to curiosity, then to contemplation, then to the engagement of brain and palate. Can I find a restaurant that will make this for me? Possibly, not easily. Can I make this on my own? I'll need to get myself a mortar and pestle. Do I really want to spend an hour pounding lamb and onions and burghul together? I close my eyes and think of Suad Aljure's story of kibbeh nayyeh, kibbeh tartare, meat and vegetables and wheat pounded to utter smoothness, urging me on; wouldn't I like a nice wedge of warm pita, a slick of olive oil, a bit of kibbeh to put between them? Yes, yes I would. I have eaten it fried; I will eat it baked; but I absolutely, positively cannot wait to eat it raw.
Dear friends,
My darling boy and I are on my way to Philadelphia to spend the weekend with my folks. It was my intention to take advantage of what would have been a quiet afternoon in the office to share my Tales of Pop Music Love with you, for last night, I went to see Erasure at Irving Plaza. I danced, I sang, I screamed like a cheerleader when Andy Bell sang "Blue Savannah" while wearing nothing but blue-sequinned briefs and brandishing giant pink maribou fans, and I thought I'd died and gone to heaven when Vince Clarke did the "Fab Five Freddy said everything's fly" rap on their cover of "Rapture." I sang along to "Victim of Love" and "A Little Respect" and "Ship of Fools" and "Stop!" and their cover of "Solsbury Hill" and "Oh, L'Amour" and the show closer, "Sometimes," for which they turned on the gold stagelights and flooded us all with honey-colored light.
I am trying to remember as much as I can of how this made me feel, because today my fellow LuthorCorp peoples and I learned that the vice-president of our group, the man who recruited me into the company, who was my sales rep when I worked in purchasing at Big Cosmetics Co., who I've known longer than anyone else in this industry, and who is, bar none, the best person I have or ever will worked for, has resigned. His last day is Monday. I don't even want to think of what the office will be like when he is not here.
It is an odd note on which to say happy weekend, dear friends, but...happy weekend, dear friends. See you Sunday.
Dear friends, it's been a hectic week at Chez PTMYB, what with the out-of-office day trips, and the in-office LuthorCorp-based hilarity, and the upcoming trip to Scotland, and the sooner-but-less-dramatic trip to Philadelphia this weekend to visit the 'rents, and a night out tomorrow to see these fine young men. Regular food-based hilarity will continue soon -- trust me, good things are being cooked up, in all senses of the phrase -- but in the meantime, I've been recharging my batteries by reading. Here, for your unending edification and amusement -- you may stop laughing hysterically now. No, really. Guys. -- are excerpts from five things I've read or reread this week: two are from novels, two are from essay collections, one is from a play, but all of them curl my toes, dilate my pupils, just make me wriggle with pure pleasure. Run, don't walk, to your bookstore, or, if you are strapped for cash and/or space, run (don't walk) to your library.
Lightning sought our mother out, when she was a young girl in Brown County, Indiana. Licked her body up and down, so she said, with a long scratchy cat tongue. She smelled the ozone, which she described as indescribable. "Not a smell at all, really, but a new and horrible sensation of the nose." We used to beg her to elaborate. She said it didn't smell like animal, vegetable or mineral, or anything else in the world. Then how did you know? we asked. "It had," she tried again, "a tactile pungency. Every hair on my body stood out straight and vibrated. I wanted to drop flat on the ground but I couldn't move. It licked me like a big cat! Girls, I was an idea in the mind of a charged cloud!"
Then the lightning dismissed her, and demolished a dying elm across the street. "You always look so disappointed," she'd tell us, when she came to the end of the story. "You wouldn't be here, you know, if it hadn't let me go." But both of us truly were a little sorry she wasn't struck. It reflected badly on our mother, that she was tasted and found wanting. Fate had jilted her. "Where would we be?" Abigail always asked, and Mother would answer, variously, In heaven, In deep space, Nowhere, Who knows? A twinkle in your father's eye. When I was twelve, one of the last times we talked about it, I said, "Maybe we'd be an idea in the mind of a charged cloud." Mother was terribly pleased.
As it turns out, I have never been an idea in the mind of a charged cloud. I have never, with the one grotesque exception, been an idea in the mind of anybody at all. I'm earthbound, of course, but not grounded. My sister is the family lightning rod.
-- from Winner of the National Book Award by Jincy Willett (Picador, 2003).
Following her capture, Tiffany was put in juvenile detention and then sent away to a school my mother had heard about on one of the afternoon talk shows. Punishment consisted of lying bellydown on the floor while a counselor putted golf balls into your open mouth. "Tough love" this was called. Basically the place just restrained you until you were eighteen and allowed to run away legally.
After her release Tiffany became interested in baking. She attended a culinary institute in Boston and worked for many years in the sort of restaurant that thought it amusing to flavor brownies with tarragon and black pepper. It was cooking for people who read rather than ate, but it paid well and there were benefits. From midnight to dawn, Tiffany stood in the kitchen, sifting flour and listening to AM talk radio, which is either funny or spooky, depending on your ability to distance yourself from the callers. Tommy from Revere, Carol from Fall River: they are lonely and crazy. You are not. But the line blurs at four A.M. and disappears completely when you find yourself alone in a tall paper hat, adding fresh chives to buttercream icing.
-- from "Put a Lid on It," Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris (Little, Brown, 2004).
Mirabell: Oh, you should hate with prudence.
Mrs. Fainall: Yes, for I have loved with indiscretion.
Mirabell: You should have just so much disgust for your husband as may be sufficient to make you relish your lover.
Mrs. Fainall: You have been the cause that I have loved without bounds, and would you set limits to the aversion of which you have been the occasion? Why did you make me marry this man?
Mirabell: Why do we daily commit disagreeable and dangerous actions? To save that idol, reputation. If the familiarities of our loves had produced that consequence of which you were apprehensive, where could you have fixed a father's name with credit, but on a husband? I knew Fainall to be a man lavish of his morals, an interested and professing friend, a false and designing lover; yet one whose wit and outward fair behaviour have gained a reputation with the town enough to make that woman stand excused who has suffered herself to be won by his addresses. A better man ought not to have been sacrificed to the occasion; a worse had not answered to the purpose. When you are weary of him, you know your remedy.
-- from The Way of the World by William Congreve, 1700.
I'd met her about a year before, over the phone, through her sister, an old friend of mine. Barb was a sort of matchmaker, who recognized kindred souls in me and Sue, believers who loved to laugh. Barb had known me when I walked my friend Pammy through her last year of life. Call me crazy, but I did not immediately want to be friends with another dying blonde babe just then. But I felt God's ahnd in this, or at any rate, God's fingers on the Rolodex, flipping through names to find a last-ditch, funny, left-wing Christian friend for Sue.
It was March 2001. The wildflowers weren't in bloom yet; the bulbs hadn't opened. A month before she called me for the first time, Sue had been told that tumors had developed in her liver and lungs. She had been in a deep depression for a while, but she finally followed Barb's advice to call me after various people at her church kept saying that she could be happy -- she was going home to be with Jesus. This is the type of thing that gives Christians a bad name. This, and the Inquisition. Sue wanted to open fire on them all. I think I encouraged this.
-- from "Falling Better," Plan B by Anne Lamott (Riverhead Books, 2005).
She ate her lunch wearing only her slip. These slips endeared her ferociously to Lincoln. They were old-fashioned full slips made of cotton. Their soberness and the setting Lincoln saw them in were so poignant a combination that he often felt a little silly with love and found himself grinding his teeth. Now Polly sat at his table, her hair mussed, looking like the model in the studio, the girl who came to have her portrait painted and then fell madly in love with the painter. They sat quietly. Lincoln was very happy to smoke a cigar and sketch Polly as she sat drinking her coffee contentedly.
It was surely not right to feel this happy, but it was also undeniable. The air outside was smoky with spring rain. The street was gray. The warehouses across the street were wet. Polly put down her cup. The pure feelings one had in adult life were complicated and mitigated, and they were dearly paid for, but worth everything they cost.
-- from Family Happiness by Laurie Colwin (Harper Perennial, 1982).
