Hand To Mouth

iStockphoto via NPR

My sweet-natured mother sends me sheer tons (or tonnes, as B gets to say. Lucky duck) of articles via email. They generally fall into one or two categories I have chosen to call Look, The President is a Dangerous Moron and Look Who Has a Rhodes Scholarship! Not You.

Many of these come from npr.org, and since my mother haunts the website, I wasn’t surprised to see another article from it in my inbox last week. But this, dear readers, was different.

“Something Old, New, Pickled and Blue,” reads the title of Molly Wizenberg’s July 25 column. Some of you hoarier internetters may know Molly from her blog, Orangette, which I’ve always thought exudes a vintage kind of sweetness. I mean that wholly as a compliment: reading Molly’s thoughts on food, love, and life, not to mention seeing her photographs, makes me somehow wish that I was a wholesome soul who ate hoarhound candy and wiped my face with gingham handkerchiefs.

The article concerns Molly’s discovery of all things pickled and briny, and the person who helped her do so: her new husband, Brandon. There are recipes tacked to the story’s end, including one for pickled prunes with orange zest that I can’t wait to try. Each of the recipes is from a dish Molly and Brandon prepared themselves and served at their wedding—yowza.

Heartfelt congratulations to the both of them!

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The summer seems to have abandoned London completely at this point. While in other years, the city and the season have tried to make a go of it, keeping appearances up for the sake of the children - this year all pretenses seem to have been abandoned and the city sits in limbo. It’s humid, not hot, but not really cold either, with sunbursts and short downpours occurring about six or seven times a day. Or at least that’s what it feels like.

While N is (or was) baking in New York, nauseated by the thought of anything warm and hearty but rejoicing in the fresh and citrusy side of the culinary world, my own food appetite is confused and a bit bipolar. The humid coolness of the weather makes me long for something that will actually sit in my stomach and be felt, while the dank heat of the tube and the occasional sunshine makes me long for light, fresh food. In short, I think I’m looking for a hearty winter-summer hybrid that I’m not even sure actually exists.

So for my inspiration, I thought I would look to Scandinavia. Short, sunny, cool summers seemed conducive to my culinary mood, and I had long been eager to use an ingredient widely available but seemingly extremely under-used in English cuisine: the crayfish. Instead of using it as a cheap alternative to prawns (what I would do), the English seem simply to either slather it in mayonnaise in a sandwich or put it in star-gazy pie (a dish not for the uninitiated). It seems such a shame, and I welcome, dear readers, your favourite crayfish dishes.
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One of the benefits of teaching ESL in London to adults is being able to date the students  that it has put me in contact with a large community of interesting expatriates. My school has about 20-25 nationalities represented in its ranks, and most students are around my age, which has led to the occasional blurring of professional boundaries. However, I believe the English office drinking culture tends to blur professional boundaries almost everywhere, so I don’t think my workplace is much of an exception.

My students treat me really, really, well. For my last birthday I was given a whole platter of Brazilian coxinha, and I have a fantastic Korean student who regularly brings kimbab to class for my greedy little fingers to devour. I’ve been to Brazilian BBQs, and on their advice I’ve explored some of the outer-regions of London’s transport zones in order to find some of the best, cheapest and most authentic ethnic food London has to offer.

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Normally I’m not the fondest of black-and-white takes on anything, unless it’s penguins, or Tintin.

Via tintin.be

But I staunchly believe in alpha cooks and beta cooks. I am so, so sorry to say that I am an alpha. I really do try to trump it. I fight the daily fight against the obnoxious personality traits associated with the type. It gets very crowded on my shoulders, with the seraphim and the imps of darkness and the scuttling and the duality, bless my soul.

Mostly, I hope that sweetness and light are my guiding principles when I make food with others—yet some things bubble to the surface, filling me with despair. I squirm to list these habits: I have been known to stand behind friends, good cooks in their own right, and watch as they saute onions. My hand spasms when I watch someone ‘over-whisk’ a vinaigrette, stopping before I grab a wrist, before anyone even sees … anyone but GOD, that is. And the evil eye.

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The food worshiper in me felt a tad pious when I opened up Serious Eats to find this post.

Semifreddo a la Kartavirya Arjuna, except not villainous. What’s not to love?

Throughout our lives, we cook for so many different reasons. Usually, it’s because we are hungry. But I, like other foodies, cook for many more reasons than mere survival. I cook because I’m bored, because I want to create something, or because I want to eat something I can’t afford to buy in a restaurant.

This past week, my vacation in the North of Canada was cut short, as my family and I had to go to Toronto because my grandmother had had a stroke. As I threw clothes haphazardly into a suitcase for the plane, I felt helpless and awkward. I was happy to be going closer to my family, but I felt like I would be in the way; simply another body crowded next to the hospital bed, waiting to see what happened. When your grandmother has 6 children who all now have their own spouses and children — places get crowded very easily.

My only solution was to throw food at the problem. I appointed myself head kitchen replacement, cooking not only for the random bodies that appeared each night for dinner, but preparing frozen meals for my grandfather to consume after we had left.

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It was cold yesterday—delightfully, autumnally windy and crisp.

So I made soup after all!

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“Lens” is allegedly Latin for lentil or bean, a fact I didn’t know until I began my usual pre-post* Googling. It makes sense, when you look at the shape of a typical glass lens, like those in the more owlish kind of spectacles. Beat up a dweeb today and find out for yourself, ladies and gentlemen! That’s science.

*Pre-post. Ha.

So, food! I bought a welter of Roman beans at the market the other week, and they are beautiful—gloriously spotted and streaked, as though there are messages in Morse code tracing their way across the surface of each bean.

I soaked them overnight, and then I realized that I had no clue how best to use their flavors. The predominant Google yields for Roman beans, recipe-wise, seemed to be soups. Many of said soups were fragrant with sauerkraut, which one can smell through the Internet, no foolin’!

It wasn’t what I wanted. It’s unbearably hot these days. I wanted something light, or at least as light as beans can manage.

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I hate summer. I hate its heat, its dankness, its sticky horrors. I grew up in Atlanta, and my parents are from one of the world’s hottest cities, which I visit against my will frequently in their company. This is all just a long way of saying that summer and I have had our seven minutes in the closet. I’ll pass on a second round.

Of course, living in New York, it’s not my call. I hate what summer does to this city. I hate the steaming subway platforms, and the heightened smell of excrement, and how all my favorite parks foam with mosquitoes. I hate pressing my face into a neighboring armpit on an overcrowded bus. Sure, there are things that leaven it—ice cream, afternoon thundershowers, barbeques, tomato season, half-frozen beers pulled from the cooler, and the beach—but they don’t bridge the gap.

What I hate in particular is how hard summer makes it for me to cook in my apartment. Every meal involving the stove or oven is an ordeal. A boiling cloud of heat rolls through the air, and no amount of fans suffice. Even with the unit set to polar capacities, the air will not condition. Guests sweat, and sigh, and don’t come back next week for dinner.

But I have triumphed. For at least one evening every few days, I have a dish that passes muster. A dish that doesn’t take too long to make, and is refreshing when served chilled or hot from the pot. The ingredients and methodology of its making are, respectively, hilariously cheap and wondrously fuss-free. Even its name is a feat of linguistic economy (as words for food around the world often are).

Presenting avgolemono, the eponymous Greek soup. Avgo, meaning ‘egg,’ and lemono, meaning ‘pineapple.’ [Oh, how I tease]. The egg-lemon tincture is a marvelous emulsion, rich with sunny yellow colour from the yolks, and buoyant with soft, peaky whites. Tasting it, you find four layers: chicken, if your stock is of any pedigree; silk, from the rice or orzo simmered in the stock; the luxe taste of barely cooked eggs; a lovely sharpened spike of lemon.

In making this recipe, I have to credit the person whom I first watched make it; Mrs. K., the mother of my friend E. Having grown up in Istanbul, she calls it terbiye, but it’s the same idea. Avgolemono is a generous enough umbrella.

I liked it best the day after its making, plucked from the fridge, with a salad of roasted asparagus, baby lettuce, and pine nuts, a cold-brewed iced coffee, and a functioning air conditioner.

The recipe follows after the jump.

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Finger snaps to N’s golf clap welcome!

While I’ll normally be posting from London on all things affordably delicious, after my recent visit with N I returned not to rainy London-town, but to an unnamed rural region of my homeland – Canada. For my first post, I thought it appropriate to explore that most affordable of affordable wilderness meals: the Shore Lunch.

A proper Northern Canadian shore lunch goes way beyond a meal eaten in a specified geographical location. It is (not to get too manly on you here) any lunch that is the product of your labour, skill, guile or domination as a predator in the wild. It is simple, rustic, and in my case usually flavoured with stray pieces of lichen. Since I knew my time in Canada was limited, an afternoon in the canoe fishing and a reacquaintance with my camp stove were high on my list of priorities.

We set out looking for pickerel, a whitefish perfect for eating, in a lake about 45 minutes outside of town. However, we knew we were more likely to catch pike - a fish less desirable due to its y-shaped rib bones (pike have an extra set of bones not present in all fish). Northern Canadians are spoiled in their choice of fish, and we often throw back 7 or 8 pikes per 1 pickerel hooked, despite the fact that the tastes of both fish are comparable. We just don’t like little bones! However, we were bound and determined to eat whatever we caught.

Although the fishing was far from idyllic and stress-free (imagine 4 hungry people jammed in a canoe, no fish biting and lots of line tangles), we finally succeeded in hooking a decent sized pike (thanks to my brother’s superior fishing skills) and paddled directly to shore to whack the creature to death, clean, fillet and devour him in primitive outdoor shore-lunch tradition.
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