What I Ate Where

Lily Eats

2012-01-15T10:01:00.000-08:00

The Morning After:

Dear Age,

One thing we know is the slam of bodies, an unassuming basement in an unreasonably large house on Saturday night. No heat except the damp smoldering of a crowd, an unfurnished bathroom, a fire pit seemingly left to tend itself outside. Culls of smokers and music-makers, nostrils being filled with the black dust kicked up by a crowd alternating--depending on the band--between rocking on their neglected heels, and full-on slamming. A duo rapping. A short man with a guitar that he plays with a drumstick and the high, clear voice of an adolescent shepherd calling out to any living creature on the mountain.

Or maybe we've forgotten. Have grown accustomed to our music on a stage, our parents out of the picture, surprised to find that upstairs the 11 o'clock news is playing and the homeowner is more than willing to give you a much-needed glass of water. And if the night ends abruptly with the ugly vibe of a man yelling in presumed agony at his ex-girlfriend while she tries to play her guitar, help rush him out the door, get him into the car, tell him there's a beast in all of us. It's all the more reason to come home and sit in solidarity watching Seinfeld quietly in a group. It is much like surviving a collapse in the mines.

So try this: Waking with a head like a lighthouse trying to burst through a seemingly unending fog, thoroughly permeated with the smell of campfire, the recollection of songs you feel grateful to have heard, the late-night goodbye to someone who rewrote the course of your evening by grabbing your hand when their friends were leaving and so they had to walk away from you. Whose palm is this? you thought, that it can still inspire such heat in me?

To all those ends and more, mince one clove of garlic. Tear the last of the kale into bite-sized pieces and rinse them in the sink while your roommate tells you the only thing that will make him feel better about doing dishes with a hangover is "if I start to hear the sizzle of breakfast." Finely cube a sweet potato, which at least one man you trust gave to his son as a cure for madness, in hopes that what grows in the ground will keep the eater close to it. Let the garlic and sweet potatoes cook in the pan in too much olive oil, salt, pepper, curry powder, before adding the kale and letting the whole thing wilt under an all-purpose lid for a few moments. Fire up the burner next to it, and fry an egg silkily, slowly, before dumping everything in a clay bowl that gives new feeling to anything contained within.

Cover it, if you're like me, in hot sauce, and eat it slowly, over a book that's so familiar that it's less like reading and more like visiting a companion with whom you've kept touch over the years in spite of the sparse conversation between you. Don't rush your stomach or evade the spiciness of the food or worry about squandering your day. It will be waiting for you when you've cleared the last of the plates suspended above your head.

Lily Eats

2011-12-03T09:59:00.001-08:00

What I've Been Eating

Kale sauteed with sesame oil and red pepper flakes, toast with olive taupenade and avocado, dal from a can when it’s last minute and I’ve been reading about Indian cooking all day in a novel. I am hungry for what the main character eats as he grieves for his father. Pad See Ew from a restaurant that—from the outside—looks too dark to be true. Shepherd’s pie with lentils instead of lamb, cooked in the long afternoon before a show in our apartment. I mashed the potatoes with a whisk and said, “You know, this is fitting, because wherever I’ve lived, I’ve made this for my favorite people.” I didn’t realize it until I said it but it’s true, it’s a total tribe food. One of the members of a band set to play that night quietly came up to me and told me it was a relief to eat something grounding, because they’d been on tour and one of the most disconcerting aspects was “eating garbage.” All my life I think this will be one of my favorite sights: people waking on futons and coming in from the cold and eating all at different times, standing around, something hot.

Polenta with butternut squash, fig compote, and caramelized onions with my father, talking about family or architecture or the divine coincidence that always seems to color his life. Lamb stew with him near the Inner Harbor, in a restaurant whose windows he once repaired. He got a Guinness which reminded me of Adrian referencing “the milkshake of beers,” which in turn, reminded me of the afternoon she, Sweeney, Lyndel and I split steaks and talked about what it means to be able to write a sentence. Drunk well before dark, practically able to watch the grass grow at Pratt, that spring was so lush.

Sal and I made “magic bars” one afternoon, modeled after the ones at a cafe down the street, layering coconut, smashed graham crackers, chocolate chips and evaporated milk. Talking about variations. Talking about food with unattractive names: Dump cake. Garbage soup. Later, I re-read parts of Dinners and Nightmares and cringed for the thousandth time at the name “menstrual pudding” applied to a tomato-potato dish. I ordered two raw oysters at the dark wooden bar where Dave tends bar and had my feelings about them confirmed—It’s not the taste of oysters I like, necessarily, with which I’m actually always somewhat repulsed. Rather, they give me a dizzy, elevated feeling in my stomach and my head. It’s like taking a big mouthful of the sea and falling in love at the same time and trying to hold it all in.

side note: What I Ate Where is now on tumblr! You can follow us at whatiatewhere.tumblr.com

Lily Eats

2011-11-25T13:50:00.000-08:00

The year that I walked in on my love with another woman and I didn't want to taste a bit of turkey. In my hysterics I started to cook egg-in-a-hole, one for each of my friends, and I didn't stop until I could be calm again. They played Twister and watched a movie about Sparta while I cooked in Morgan's big, wooden kitchen, the kind perfect for wearing socks. The year that I left Baltimore and came back and made twiced-baked potatoes for everyone in Sam's living room, took Polaroids of pretty girls with a glass of whiskey in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. The years I got motion sickness just from seeing my family. It was supposed to be a potluck, so Ben cut up tiny cross-sections of a Snickers bar, impaling each one on a toothpick. Allie was already a vegetarian but brought homemade pigs-in-a-blanket. The year that I got bronchitis and stayed vegan and stayed home and didn't want to celebrate anyone's holiday. I invited my father over and I pulled my bed out to the living room because I couldn't stand staying in my own space any longer. "I just wonder what people did before antibiotics," I told him, trying to justify several months of relying on herbal remedies and eschewing conventional medicine. "They died a lot," he said, and within the week I'd gone to a doctor, gotten a prescription, and cleared up the lungs that had been wet for two months. Still I felt I had proven something to myself, perhaps just by virtue of being alive at the end of it.

Lily Eats

2011-11-18T21:33:00.000-08:00

How To Eat Partly

"One of the saving graces of the less-monied people of the world has always been, theoretically, that they were forced to eat more unadulterated, less dishonest food than the rich-bitches."
--M.F.K. Fisher, How To Cook A Wolf

That is to say, what people have when they don't have money is friends, and what Adrian once referred to as "the tricks." That an onion can be baked and eaten alone, as a grit-restoring main course. That food assumes a kind of comrade's magic and lasts longer when shared. That you can subsist on certain things that would make anyone else feel malnourished and inhuman, and that you don't need nearly so much of those things other people require just to make it through the day.

For you it is nearly always a case of remembering that what you love (and have always loved) is real peasant food. The same lentil soup that's been on the stove your entire life, with whatever almost-rancid booze you happen to have thrown in for the last five minutes of cooking. The rice and beans with one onion split in half and cooked two drastically different ways. So that half of them are still as spicy as if they were raw, and the other half are nearly candy. Egg-in-a-hole, or egg-in-a-basket, the real pleasure of which is fried bread. You can smell the olive oil in your hair as you walk in the metered November wind to class. Spaghetti squash with hot peppers and the last tomatoes of the season. Vegetable stock with egg-drops and pasta, chickpeas and kale.

There are always more tricks. Visit your friend while he's tending bar on the night that you decide it's got to be red meat or starvation--he can't give you a free meal but he'll keep you in wine while you wait, and you'll be so bolstered that you'll decide it's worth the cost. Know when it has to be red meat, or has to be a raw oyster, or has to be a bowl of broccoli. Know when you can accept substitutes and when you must have what you're craving, or else your blood will stage a mutiny against you. Visit your friend at the farmer's market, and accept the excess produce her employers weigh her down with weekly: Brussel sprouts and apples and kale and fresh sage.

If you buy your roommate a pack of cigarettes one night, have him pay you back in veggie burgers. Your survival lies, as it always has, with the people around you. Remember that wine can be a fine meal if you want to feed your nerves instead of your stomach. Remember that it feels good to be full and good to be hungry. Know when you've exhausted something seemingly virtuous, like oatmeal, and allow yourself as many eggs as you need in its stead. Remember that to cook when it's cold out is as warm as you can be.

Sit in traffic for one hour waiting to eat falafel with your mother in your childhood house. Curl up in her bed and watch Home For The Holidays. She'll laugh uncomfortably when you tell her that Robert Downey, Jr. listed black tar heroin as the main contributor to his relaxation while making the film. You accidentally remind her that you weren't speaking to one another at Christmastime last year. We all have ways of ringing in the holiday season. After you eat, you ask her to teach you how to blow-dry your hair. Mainly because you are twenty-two and don't know how, and worry that if your car breaks down on the way home your hair will freeze. It's supposed to get below thirty degrees tonight, she helps you dry it and you get frustrated with how little it seems like you. You tell her you feel like an entrant in a pageant. Once, in New York, Robby saw you wearing make-up and said, "You look fine. Just like any other woman running for President."

Everything is honest about this food. The falafel is cold and your mother hates hot sauce and the kale shrinks so much in the soup that you think you should have added twice as much. The smell of the oil stays with you all through a lecture on The Taming of The Shrew, like a man's cologne does after a hug. You think that after all, staying alive is nothing more than taming one seeming beast after another. Your mother shrugs when you say you hate your manicured hair, and sends you off with two pans of brownies for your roommates, as though she knows which battles are the ones worth fighting. When to give into your peasant mind, and mind your essentials.

Lily Eats

2011-11-12T05:36:00.000-08:00

What Adrian and I Ate Where

French crullers on the Brooklyn Bridge. We had taken my brother to Chinatown to catch his bus back to Baltimore and I was on the brink of something-missing-something so we decided to walk back to Pratt instead of taking the train. We talked about the writing program and our bi-coastal families with all the familiar roles--robbery, congenial fathers, drug addiction we could always understand but never possess. Apple cider donuts while we looked over hydroponic lettuces and dyed wool in the Union Square farmer's market. Gin martinis with lemon zest while Sweeney slept in the next room. A lobster roll in Red Hook, Brooklyn, not Red Hook, New York, with a view of the Statue of Liberty the tour buses never get. Onions baked in foil with goat cheese.

One summer she and Robert were in Oregon on a farm when Noah was living in his tent near Eugene, so I flew out and we all slept in the farm house for a week. When Noah had to leave again to go back to work, I started to cry and Adrian and I walked to get ice cream cones. That night we watched Twin Peaks and I was afraid to go to sleep, with all of open Oregon outside of the window. Green-bean casserole in New York when Sam and I were breaking up. Avocado smashed on melba toast with cumin while she read my tarot cards. Oatmeal with fried eggs on top in the Pratt dorm kitchens. Oh, I am the king of hot cereal! her boss, Rhadames, had told her when she asked for a good oats recipe working one afternoon at the natural-foods store. Once I moved back to Baltimore, I would write to her whenever I had a new oatmeal recipe or a new flame--try this with pumpkin, Adrian I think I'm in love again, try it with blackstrap molasses if you're feeling down, salt the oats but add blueberries to cook just a little at the end.

The night she put a hot pan of chicken straight into a wet sink from the oven and the glass shattered and so we had beer for dinner instead. We were arguing with Sweeney about Africa and Walter Benjamin and writing that lasts. Americanos at the Cafe Pick-Me-Up on the first night I felt I was starting to understand New York. We had already stayed at one coffee shop until it closed that night, we were in St. Mark's and had no intention yet of getting home. Vegan carrot cake our professor drunkenly insisted on buying for us at an end-of-term reading. Frittatas and baked apples and creole-seasoned chickpeas at potlucks in all kinds of cities.

A five-course raw-foods meal in New York when she got engaged--we both got dressed up in her clothes in front of her fiancee, who stayed home to eat fried chicken and drink juice out of the carton. The kind of meal that makes you say things you didn't even know you thought, things that you thought all along. You're the most beautiful woman in the world was one that came out just as I meant it, raw butternut squash soup with sage cream, a white wine from somewhere in Argentina. Our ultimate food date on the heels of her setting an ultimate kind of date with Sweeney: pink cheeks with the wine and the January weather and above all feeling fancy in a way not many people can, and no one can very often. A meal that clocked in at three hours but felt like it'd been incubating for four years.

Or meals that never counted as meals: Almond biscotti eaten on a hill in Fort Greene park while we wondered what in our lives could possibly stay together, and what was coming apart at its darling seams. Leftover salmon cakes. Bodega coffee that Adrian swore the clerk flavored perfectly, when what she really meant was very milky and very sweet. Cannoli that we made with my father in his old kitchen listening to Judy Collins, eaten later in the back of a bus back to New York. With Genoa salami, fontinella, olives cured in oil till they wrinkle, focaccia with dried tomatoes and rosemary baked into its face. We ate while the east coast (which could have been the world) was rushing by.

Lily Eats

2011-08-31T01:01:00.000-07:00

"Drink!" he cried out. "Drink, eat!" And he roared with joy.*

To live with seven people after living alone--You must remember how people eat together, that people eat together. Maybe it's this instinct that's been driving me to cook pot after pot of soup on the hottest days. Soup feeds people. Lentils monastery style--with carrots, diced tomatoes and onions, a splash of cheap red wine which Sal, Amanda and I drank the remainder of. Amanda emptied out her "food bag," and we ate a plate of hors d'oeuvre: cheese, tomatoes, green grapes, apple slices. The soup was eaten as people filtered in, in spite of the heat. Then vegetable soup in cumin-seasoned stock. Chili with cinnamon and coriander in addition to all the usual spices, chili that in spite of its ornate bite, takes only a half an hour to make, from start to finish. Egg-drop soup in "no-chicken" stock which Dave swore was standard-issue Campbell's--kale, pink beans, parmesan.

I keep trying to offer food to Adam but I've yet to make anything that doesn't have beans in it, which he says he just can't eat. Onions, too. He said, It's terrible, they're things that everyone cooks with, peels clementines, Brent nodded along and said, I know what you mean, that's how I feel about fruit. I squinted, looking for some food I don't like and the only thing I could come up with is raw onions. It's not just the taste, which reminds me of a body growing sickly in the sun. They give me a headache when I eat them, and no one believed me except (I think it was) Chelsea, who said, Certain foods do that to me. Milk, does.

Val brought her canvas bags of produce and we went to Justin's house and cooked bean soup with kale in home-jarred chicken stock. She let a ham hock fall off the bone in the center of it, I added a lot of oregano. We listened to the A-side of a Fats Domino record and were both too afraid we'd break Justin's fancy turntable if we tried to flip the record. So we waited for him to do it and the soup was delicious and it was too hot for any of us to eat so we drank gin instead.

Breakfast as always with Dave. In six or seven years of dating-cum-friendship, walks in the park, fine dining in our cheap clothes, free drinks, free rides, and now being roommates, we have always eaten breakfast. I've caught his obsession with eggs in the morning, though "morning" is a term that means something different to the two of us. Eggs, though, are a way of reclaiming power, I want to feel like I woke up running. Things have been good but hard; I want a lot of energy reserves and then I want to use them all. "Every time I've ever been really heartbroken," I told Val, "I've started running. It's happened three times." I remember Noah saying something about tiring oneself out as a method of self-preservation. Your weary body keeps your head intact.

As soon as the first cold night of any year nestles itself between two hot days, I get sick. This time, I eat pad thai and drink coconut-tofu soup, fishing out huge chunks of broccoli with my fingers. My father insists that I cannot eat at home, he wants to buy me dinner since I just started classes today. I joke that it's my tenth year of college, and he says, "That doesn't matter," and can't help but tell the man at the Thai carry-out that it's his daughter's first day of school. We sit in the park by the Washington Monument and I think about how Donna's restaurant burned down and once I got hot chocolate there and watched them light the monument at Christmas and I tell my father that it's everyone's responsibility, their own heartbreak. "To hell with that," he says. "I'll break his legs." We walk back slowly, he gives me half a bottle of wine, I go home and don't drink it but instead make twig tea and fall asleep while it's still mostly too hot to drink. I reheat it on the stove at three AM and Dave walks into the kitchen, offers me some whiskey in much the same way my father offered to break a man's legs. I remember reading Stacie's "Cures for Love," and think, cures for a cold are not so different. Think, everyone has their remedies, everyone is fixed somehow, thank god for cold nights and for colds. They give people a chance to care for each other, pause, say, I really hope you aren't getting sick, would you like some, get some sleep.

*from M.F.K. Fisher's Serve it Forth.

Lily Eats

2011-08-27T10:35:00.000-07:00

A hurricane is always a lady but that doesn't mean we can't be

Dear Adrian,

The real question is not--Should we be hunkering down?--but rather, What does hunkering down mean to us? I like to think that any disaster (personal or global) can be navigated the way M.F.K. Fisher would have dealt with it. Which is to say, grimly but beautifully.

What I have purchased: A bar of Newman's dark chocolate, a can of dal (the same kind sold at the Karrot), two small bottles of water, a larger bottle of wine, organic cotton tampons, banana chips--I agonized over a jar of artichoke hearts and ultimately decided against them not because they were unnecessary, but because I don't have any good bread to eat with them. The man at the liquor store let me charge the wine even though there's usually a minimum limit for credit cards. Everyone is feeling unusual.

I also filled two pitchers with tap water, got some bubble-wrap to stuff below my window where it doesn't-quite-close, boiled six eggs--and called again upon Mary Frances Kennedy for guidance (this time at the stove, where she's probably more comfortable being consulted): Bring eggs and water all to a boil at once, then immediately remove from heat and let the eggs cool completely in the water. Let everything rise and fall together, as everything will do outside whether we are prepared or frightened or arrogant or not. Better to be arrogant then, but cook the eggs anyhow. Hunter S. Thompson said, "Call on God, but row away from the rocks."

Lily Eats

2011-04-03T12:56:00.000-07:00

Breakfasts, in memoriam: Starting with school--Cheerios. Cream of wheat intentionally neglected to breed lumps. Blueberry danish till the boys pointed out on the bus they turned my teeth blue. Sour cream donuts. Bacon, egg, and smoked mozzarella sandwiches on crusted Italian bread. Almond croissants with hot chocolate in a wooden booth at the Pratt dining hall--early, too early for anyone else to be awake. Whole-wheat everything bagels with jalapeno cream cheese. Tamales from the woman with no permit who sold them out of a blue cooler on Myrtle Avenue. Pecan swirls six to a plastic tray split with my father. Eggs for the entire summer with Dave. White fish and wild mushrooms and tamari-roasted broccoli tucked back at Sam's parents. Chocolate cake with applesauce and Alix. Noah used to drink green juice in the morning to counteract the previous night's whiskey, I just ate toast. Cinnamon sugar donuts with sheets of crystallized cinnamon from a bakery in Linthicum, by Molly's where the vines took over the house until the neighbors stopped complaining. Her plants were taller than her self. Oatmeal with bananas or pumpkin or blackstrap molasses that fall I read that molasses was good for junkies AND anemics because it bolsters your blood and makes you sturdier. I felt happy, but it was too sweet. Granola, vanilla soymilk, and frozen wild blueberries when we decided we would all quit soon and should eat as much for free as possible. Things Adrian and I cooked together, always barefoot, always two steps to the side of each other, Sherry's raw muesli at the smooth wooden table, giggling, ready to jump on her bike. The time Sweeney and I talked and I didn't disagree with him necessarily and we both put hot sauce over everything. Things I ate because Hunter S. Thompson did and I had no idea how to be sixteen. Lazy-man pancakes the morning after parties in high school, which was basically pancake batter with apples or chocolate chips scrambled in a pan. It was delicious, and it fed all of us, and we had no desires yet to exceed that.

James Joyce Eats

2010-12-28T17:58:00.000-08:00

"Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod's roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him feel a bit peckish.

The coals were reddening.

Another slice of bread ad butter: three, four: right. She didn't like her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off he hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat, its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high."

Lily Eats

2010-11-11T04:40:00.000-08:00

If we needed it

“The novelty has worn off,” she says, trying to tiptoe around the subject because the subject is related to me. She’s cutting up cauliflower for soup and we talk about what makes a person eat more in winter, what makes a woman moan more eating than a man, what constitutes hibernation and what constitutes love.

The novelty wore off for me years ago, I think. What’s left is adoration of something we both saw like staring into the sun. What she thought was clever I thought was a joke and what she thought was lovely is lovely. And will always be, for all of us, for anyone who’s chosen to eat with my brother, which means my family, which means our hands, volatile, like burning potatoes or men, hot in each others’. Circling the meal, lifted to the heavens or the ceiling, depending on which is closing in on us that day, and a chorus of the word “Amen!” rings out among us, because we are hearty people even without God.

I think that no one can love a person without understanding what peril they grew up in, which is another way of saying their family. Whether they ate with their eyes clenched counting in the corner, or never ate for all of the fighting, or ate slowly, thinking of how to tell their mother who it was they loved. Whether they can tell anything about olives from oil to oil, whether their mothers were reluctant bigots in response, whether they ate with one hand while clubbing their father over the head with the other for being so thickly kind as to marry, so wretched. The first winter I starved was over my lover and I didn’t eat but he didn’t sleep and we both emerged that spring, groggy and accidentally nourished. And alone, from trying to give each other what we thought we needed, forgetting that people are well-versed in orchestrating their own survival. Alone from the necessity that glowed above our every meal, the last lightbulb we stripped from his apartment before lying down lastly in its mealy darkness.

If we roamed each other it was like feral animals in a countryside, stealing from fields whenever the moon sat a night out. Thievery is a harvest all its own. Bounty is not what one has, but the knowledge of what one could acquire at a moments’ notice, if they found it was desperately needed. “I could come up with five hundred dollars in a day if I needed to,” my brother bragged to me once. Then, before I could say he was bragging, “Anyone could.”

Lily Eats

2010-10-27T07:43:00.001-07:00

Following "How to eat Poorly." What I have and will always have

Taking inventory of my cabinets: Two falafel veggie burgers, two cans of wild salmon, or maybe one of tuna, a tin of baby corn--some coconut milk, some matcha powder, an entire spice cabinet and still no mustard seed, all the ingredients except cooking sherry for the soup my father used to make. I used red wine in Oregon and it was just as well except for indisputably savoring of a substitute. Roommate's stocked seven types of rice and I have wheatberries. There's a struggle to remember what Age told me to eat to ease cramps, except I know she said NO SOY, you're enough of a woman already. Lemon pepper my father bought for me because he uses it on everything in spite of my protests that if I wanted lemon and pepper I'd settle both those issues separately. I want applesauce. Bagels I feel bloated after eating but can't throw out at work night after night. Buckwheat groats I soaked and dried to make the world's blandest cereal which really only means you've got to jazz up the milk. Which is made of almonds--and almond butter, and raw almonds, and roasted, and I remember my babysitter telling me on videotape she wanted me to eat so many teddy-o's I'd turn into one. But I just watched Noah carefully and threw down my spoon when he was finished, figuring what was good enough for him was more than enough for me.

Sherry's vegetable soup and her box of zucchini and tough lettuce and apples that are either good or mealy depending (I'm convinced) on whether or not it's raining. One frozen banana. Teas, all kinds of tea, honeybush, Earl Grey, rooibos, loose and bagged mate, chai, double chai, twig, Mendocino Farmer's Market BLend with whole red clover blossoms, teas with silly names like "Evening in Missoula" when it's really just Chamomile & friends.

Precocious butternut and acorn squash. Ziploc baggies of chopped spinach and diced tomatoes I bought from a farm in Woodbine and froze for the winter. I skipped class to go there after I got so angry I ripped the handle off my car door, and for once Noah was more nervous than me about breaking a rule while I kept telling him it was okay to eat apples as he picked. Standing in piles of rotted mash that smelled like cider and I thought of a book I read as a kid. Emily feeds the rotten apples to the pigs and they've fermented and the pigs get drunk and we picked so many apples I was sure I'd make a pie or apple butter. But we just ate them out of the fridge, all three of us all week and at first it seemed gradual but really it was fast, and they were gone. The fall's been that way, till it got hot for three days and ruined things out on the counter and the fruit flies came back.

Each bag has a cup of tomatoes though, I told Sherry, so now we'll have local tomatoes all winter. The spinach is just as much as I could cram in.

Three garlic bulbs with cloves at various stages of decay. Half a bosc pear in a tupperware with no lid. A knot of ginger with suspiciously clear skin and a drawer full of onions onions carrots, in case the guinea pigs ever find their way to the fridge and must move in there. Everyone must survive anywhere, sometimes.

Since Sherry moved

2010-10-26T10:24:00.001-07:00

It's been a lot of mornings of mixed ingredients, and incredulity. Look at what we have doubles of, I say. Nutritional yeast, vital wheat gluten? Who else? A note to tell me to eat the sushi she wrapped in toasted nori and left in tupperware. Makeshift muesli we both eat, pushing our glasses up, with raw oats and hazelnuts and cinnamon and (what we call) milk I make in the blender with almond butter when we're out of raw almonds. A friend drunkenly sleeps in his boots on our living room floor while I spill reconstituted goji berries and buckwheat groats in the kitchen. A mother who can't get going and a father who won't quit. Noah is abruptly living with us, so scarce, barely taking up half a shelf in our hall closet. Eating raw cauliflower for breakfast and bowls of brussel sprouts for dinner. A kind of vegetable-rich squatting, all three of us drinking coffee late into the night and sleeping like shaking or devastated or excited toddlers. We eat like we're anticipating something, all of a sudden three people curled into the table I used alone for so many months. We buy coconut oil with his leftover food stamps and I use it to cook or to keep my face from drying out and think of how Tita uses almond oil on her lips in Like Water for Chocolate. Bismarck and Liliana the guineas hide under their pink igloo when I walk through Sherry's bedroom. A giant bale of hay arrives in the mail, and she says, "Gotta feed the piggums," but it seems to me like the rest of us, they half-eat their food and half-inhabit it.

Adrian Eats

2010-07-09T06:41:00.000-07:00

Don't Look a Gift Lunch in the Mouth

The last of the Harrisburg meals varied from poor British Isle fare, like Welsh Rare'bit and baked roots, to Feudal lord-sized lamb burgers from a small farm in Lane County. By that point, we were broke and dinner came down to whatever remained. On the final day of our stay, we were scraping ingredients from the corners of cabinets, half-cans of beans, sprouting potatoes, picking the scanty produce our garden yielded, including raspberries for pancakes, looking for eggs in the hen house and getting brutalized by Stew, the rooster. I woke up one morning and he was a man: innocently, I brought them out a plate of compost, and the minute I pulled back the chicken wire, Stew was lunging at me, talons first. My hair caught on the gate, and I was stuck screaming, switching him with a stick to assert my dominance. By the time Robert came to the back door, I was fleeing across the lawn, trailed by a rooster with murder in his eye. "Kick him," Robert said. "Kick him so he knows who's boss!" So I turned, the rooster at my shin, and kicked him. He fell back on his tail feathers for a moment only to jettison toward me ten-fold -- and now I'd kicked a rooster.

I got back to Brooklyn a week ago, early in the morning, and then slept for three hours. When I got up, it appeared the auto-drip had broken in my absence, so a house guest made some cowboy coffee in a sauce pan. When she poured it into mugs, the grounds floated at the top for a second but she assured me they would sink, and at worst, I'd strain a little through my teeth. We sat on my fire escape, drinking a great, deep, smooth cup of dark Italian coffee, smoking a cigarette, and I couldn't have been happier to be anywhere else. For those first few days, almost all of my friends were gathered in 260 Gates, between three apartments, and returning to Brooklyn is like returning to my wildest dreams only no dreaming. Gab and I met Matthew on the sand in Brighton Beach, where he lives now, and swam, and afterward picked out things from a Russian deli -- they're so good at boiling and stuffing! Beef and carrot dumpling, the bottom of which is soft, white chicken, cabbage rolls -- including tarragon soda, and then had a sheet picnic on the beach. It was July 2nd, but there were four firework displays going on along the bay, one right there on Coney Island.

Then I started working full time, running the little health food store I've worked at since I moved to Brooklyn, just for a week while my boss visited his family in the Dominican Republic. Early one morning, grabbing my coffee next door, I met a spry, sharp elderly Israeli man wearing Nike Dunks, a cowboy hat, and using his iPhone. He asked me if I was from Virginia, said I looked like I came from an intellectual family, that I must have known growing up that I was loved. He asked if he could bring me lunch while I worked. At noon he came in, poised but dragging his leg slightly. He set a warm paper bag on the counter and took out two sandwiches: a garlic bagel full of lamb kabob. "I get this every day," he said. "The bagel from the coffee shop, and the lamb from the Arab place. They make my favorite salad," an item that he also produced from the bag, one for each of us: tabbouleh, tomatoes, onion, green cabbage, purple cabbage, lettuce, parsley, onion, a good pickle. "Whatever you don't get from the tomato," he said, "you get from the onion. The calcium and all of that." At the end, a golden brown filo dough pastry that looked like a delicate ball of fishing wire, filled with dates, honey, and walnuts. He told me about New York real estate, about kibbutz in Israel, about Turkish coffee and his boyhood. He brought me this lunch for four days.

Lily Eats

2010-07-05T13:51:00.000-07:00

Hot Flashbacks, early July

Age--It's February 19th--so in less than ten days, Noah will fly to San Francisco to begin his walk. So last night, we ate. In an "industrial-chic" restaurant hidden in an affluent block (just past the overpass, all of a sudden, we're wealthy). Val works there.

We started with a pint-box of different breads. A sesame white loaf, a wheat sliced a 1/2 inch thick with an almost black crust. Good, talking butter. Noah got the oyster stew--sweet oysters, leeks, and cream. No potatoes, no anxious seasoning. I ate one huge oyster from his bowl. And I with my sweet potato soup--with sage butter and cornbread croutons. We ordered our meals and our waiter had to come back and say, I'm so sorry sir, we're out of the scallops. So Noah changed his order, and by way of an apology, our waiter had someone bring us the cherry glen (is that a place, you think?) oven ricotta. A ramekin with an apple-golden raisin-onion compote, flavored with rosemary, and a browned cut of ricotta cheese on top, served with nut crisps.

Mushroom-Leek Mosaic (this is what I mean by "chic"--a meal isn't a meal, it's a mosaic)--a bit of sweet potato puree with brussels leaves, raw clover, faro, kale, garlic, and of course tender, meaty mushrooms. It wasn't MFK-style, because the vegetables weren't treated as vegetables--they were treated better than most people. And Noah's replacement meal. The oven blackened sea bass, it came to us smiling, it was like the Roald Dahl description of the perfect hunks of white fish he ate poached in Norway. Only I thought that wasn't real, thought it was like Turkish delight, and when you find out what it really tastes like, you wish you only read about it. But this. Fingerling potatoes in some tangy white sauce, pea shoots, and olives. The whole fish and his backbone, gutted and stuffed with mint sprigs and lemon wedges. He ate the whole thing, complimented the jaw meat because he'd heard it was supposed to be very good. Ate the crisp skin but left most of the skeleton organized as the day it was born.

After, I ordered a macchiato (Starbucks bastardized the word but you've been to countries that are real. Espresso with a tiny bit of steamed milk and a drop of foam on top, no bigger than a double espresso, and mine came with a heart poured into its dainty face. A dish of coarse amber sugar which of course I didn't use.) Noah got a plain espresso, which was perhaps the best I've had, in that wonderful and rare way where an espresso is unabashed, doesn't mind tasting like espresso and not sharp coffee. If you don't like it...well, you've got very little wild animal, you know? If you can't take the heat, order hot water.

No, I'm just being a prick now.

We ordered the honeyed pear for dessert (whole, stem intact, skin creased with poached sugar) which came on a bed of milk chocolate mousse, bergamot syrup and pine-nut granola. The restaurant was slowing down, and Val (who expedites the kitchen) had time to come and talk, one dish in each hand, a chocolate wafer like a flag sticking out of both. "That's right," she said. "You didn't order ice cream and I wasn't okay with that, because we have the best ice cream in the world." She explained that one was malt ice cream, or, in her words, "improved vanilla," and the other was cocoa sorbet--which Noah and I decided is easily one of the more unique things we've ever eaten. It was dark, so dark you almost couldn't follow it where it was going, icy where it could have been creamy, with an orange flavor that matched the chocolate in strength. It tasted like eating an orange and baker's chocolate in a blizzard.

So a peasants' breakfast then:

Chop some basil and scoop a little butter and throw it into a cup of water with 1/2 cup quinoa. Reduce heat once it's boiling, when it's cooked almost all the way, throw in a 1/2 cup of chickpeas. When quinoa's done, add the juice from 1/4 lemon, 1/4 or so of an avocado chopped, and a teaspoon of capers (who'da thunk? I happened to have them lying around.)

The next morning, Noah told me, "The thought of that meal will sustain me when I've run out of quinoa, and I'm eating bricks of 2300-calorie emergency rations." I gave him The Old Man and the Sea to take on his travels, a copy I actually gave him a few years ago when I used to call him "the marlin," but took it back from him when I decided to release him into the water one time or another. How good to see things floating that we thought would end up on our plates. Smiling, and not stuffed with mint.

Adrian Eats

2010-06-26T09:39:00.000-07:00

The Lone Ranger

For almost two months I've been on a farm in rural Oregon. The night before I left Brooklyn, several friends jimmied a Bon Voyage feast, which included removing the top from my kitchen table and placing it on a smaller one in the living room, for more sitting room, cross legged. The meal in full is listed below, but does not include the detail that Lina bicycled home from Morton's Steak House at midnight with Oysters Rockafellar on a bed of rock salt, a slice of carrot cake, and a tall beer with an old man on the front.

Roasted black Brussels sprouts & turnips (broiled to a tender crisp by moi et Lily.)
Mashed potatoes w/ raw red onion and raw garlic (Robby)
Wheat penne w/ stir-fried beets, red peppers, & coconut meat (Matthew)
Sesame rolls w/ broiled tomato & mozzarella (Matthew)
Bits of duck (Jen)
Wine & whiskey

For our first week on the Harrisburg farm, Robert and I had a stove but no burners, so we cooked all of our meals on a grill outside our house. If anyone had been there to witness us, we may have looked trashy, cooking eggs in our underwear, but when a tree falls in the woods, is anyone there to point and laugh? There was also a pipe missing under the sink, so all of our water went into a bucket sitting below, and there was no shower so we washed our hair with an old wok. We bought a heap of Session Black (the cheapest of the good dark beers, and by Hood River's Full Sail) and would drink two or three at the end of the day aruond our smoldering coals. Finally, thanks to Lonnie Sexton, we got elements for the stove, and have cooked a number of reputable feasts out there in grass seed country. Below are some notable meals, which have more or less been repeated to some varying degree, denoted by GRILL or STOVE.

GRILL:

Salmon cakes w/ dill & yellow onion
Homemade guacamole

Salmon cakes on biscuits
Scrambled eggs

Pork burritos
Grilled toast

Spinach & garlic on biscuits
Roasted potatoes & yellow squash scrambled w/ eggs

STOVE:

Roasted potatoes, herbed & olive oiled
Roasted yellow squash
Leeks from the garden

Roasted garlic & olive oil w/ bread
Baked polenta w/ cayenne & cream
Roasted potatoes w/ dill
Sourdough rolls
Tangelos

Salmon cakes w/ green onions
Mango salsa & chips
Spinach salad w/ apples & walnuts, lemon, salt, pepper

White fish w/ toasted bread crumbs & lemon & garlic
Sautéed asparagus
Rogue Valley Mocha Porter

A heap of broccoli & chicken thighs

Homemade biscuits & butter
Jam

Chicken thighs smeared w/ ground mustard, dill, wine, olive oil & vinegar
Roasted potatoes w/ herbs de Provence

Pan o' nachos, w/ refried beans, black beans, onion, garlic, Irish cheddar, salsa
Bok choy salad

Hot Flashes

2010-06-23T20:03:00.000-07:00

1. Brooklyn

"It's barbaric to put just soy sauce on something," Dave explained. He had driven to Baltimore to make the trip back up to New York with me--everyone was leaving and we begged off of me taking a bus. "I have this idea that I can cook, when really I just put soy sauce and whatever vegetable I have and tofu in a container and stir it all." He said you have to balance the soy sauce with something to make it a decent thing to eat, and that's what he had done, and I can't remember what he used anymore. We leaned back into our seats, at a rest stop somewhere along the turnpike, and agreed about broccoli rabe. His car reminded me of one my father used to drive, and by the time we got to Bed Stuy, we were exhausted but not tired.

2. No Shit Bonnaroo

In Tennessee I ate things I couldn't digest, which is a certain breed of strategy. Lots of peanut butter on lots of bread and Jesse told me to eat with my face to the plate if it was too messy with my hand. "Here," he demonstrated, "I mean, it's not the same as eating with one hand and wiping your ass with the other." Fifteen of us stopped to eat together, still hours from Manchester, and ordered of Canadian bacon and our waitress's name was Susie Q. Dustin leaned in quietly and told Alix and I, "Until we get back to Baltimore--no one's Jewish and no one's gay."

Susie Q. No joke. We all squeezed each others' legs under the table but looked straight from the waist up, and drove through Chattanooga side-swiping the air as it grew hotter.

3. Beyond Eugene

Noah had a third a jar of peanut butter left, so he figured he better not buy anymore. For my first meal in Oregon, we stopped at The Rodeo in Junction City, ate sandwiches made indisputably, almost obscenely, of meat, threw our peanut shells gleefully to the ground. We caught a ride to Harrisburg just by asking someone directions. "Harley like the motorcycle," he introduced himself, talked about the eleven hours he'd been driving alone and the skate park nearby and how they don't even bother with a school field trip to the Shakesepare festival in his hometown, because everyone goes during the summer, anyway. What makes a small town tick.

In the week prior to our visit alone, the only two bars in Harrisburg went out of business. "It says something when the bars shut down," Adrian said ominously. She read my tarot cards on one of the first nights of my visit, and Noah's cards one of the last. His reading was sandwiched between two feasts: Age's dinner was salmon cooked with dill, onions baked with cheese and butter, asparagus to a T, a salad I assembled and a dressing Noah obsessed over. Our breakfast was easy-bake biscuits that I worried would stick together, and Noah manning three burners like a navy captain. Cursing, the bacon too long for the pan, peppers-and-onions done long before the starchy potatoes softened, eggs with cheddar and tomatoes, everything done at roughly the same time . "It's like the rest of my life," Noah said of his tarot. "Either you'll crash and burn into absolute oblivion--or everything will go really well."

Lily Eats

2010-06-02T09:39:00.001-07:00

What's nearby and what's not far away

"Living in New York made you a better driver," Noah said.

"I didn't have a car in New York."

"I know," he said. "But you're more aggressive now."

If that's true, it's an aggression borne of making much more frequent mistakes, with much more dire consequences, and having to live with the results. So now it's a year and a half later, I've got no feeling left in the tip of my right ring finger, I'm arguably an even better driver, and without a doubt, a much-improved cook. It could be that all of this originates in my Brooklyn-bred ability to Man Up, or, as Adrian once referred to the required grit, "Go be Diane di Prima."

Di Prima slept in public parks, made love to junkies and fifteen-year-olds, fathers and sons, took her clothes for the day out of a dry cleaner's, one ticket at a time. I was never quite ready to be her, but we have a shared enthusiasm for feeding ourselves, whatever that means.

Say that it means relying on a food processor that I know in my heart is too small to complete the task for which I mean to use it. Raw carob cookies, which need some form of sugar, and since I can't boil water to soak the dates (because I've arbitrarily decided, in spite of the cheeseburger with french fries I ate last night, I'm going to honor the rawness of this process) I have to soak them for thirty minutes in room-temperature water. The trouble is, I bought these dates around the same time I signed the lease on this apartment. (Which incidentally, is up in August, and it's maybe the same ballsy New York influence that saves me from panicking at having no concept of where I intend to live come September.) The dates are still rock-hard after almost an hour of soaking, but I dump them with the allotted amount of water into the food processor. When I flip the switch, I get a real-life reenactment of the trickle-down theory, and date-water (much like benefits to taxpayers) spews out of any seam or crack it can find. I notice this when a stream of it hits me in the stomach, and after two more tries, I conclude that I never trusted Reagan anyway, and just use the syrup from the bottom of the pitcher, setting the date chunks to the side.

This is significantly less liquid than I am supposed to be using. I add the cocoa powder (because, even though I'm honoring the rawness of this recipe, I've arbitrarily decided to use cooked cocoa powder instead of raw carob) and almond butter, and what I've got is essentially a mass of date juice and almond chunks in an otherwise Sahara-like desert of cocoa. I directly forsake keeping the recipe raw, and take inventory of all moistening agents present in my kitchen. I add almond milk and stir. And add more. And it's about the right consistency now, I assume, but I take a taste and am immediately confronted with the absence of enough date-mash. It tastes a little bit like Baker's chocolate. So I add agave, lots of agave, till it tastes like something I'd want to eat, and not something I endure because (son of a bitch) I cooked this.

It's at this point that I notice the French Press. I check the remaining coffee--I used the pot three days ago, and I've grown very accustomed to peering in and finding patches of blue mold sprouting on the surface--but it doesn't seem to be contaminated yet. I pour most of it into the bowl, and stir, splashing more coffee and chocolate and coconut flakes, right, I added coconut flakes, around my kitchen. My feet are now sticking to the floor, and I've got dustings of brown powder on my gut, since I decided, in observance of my 91-degree apartment, to assemble these cookies in a bra and shorts.

Of course I don't even want the cookies. I've finished making them--rolled them up into little balls, which I then doused in more coconut, and ceremoniously garnished with a single almond each. Put them in the refrigerator because the author who says you can eat them at room temperature is from Northern Canada, for Christ's sake, and doesn't have to confront heat as not only a comfort issue, but an alterer of all alterable matter.

I leave them in my father's apartment in a tupperware container. After one day, he asks me to take them away and leave him just a few.

"Give some to your buddies," he says, my father being the kind of man who sees anyone as a potential "buddy," and certainly someone to share with. "I ate three of them yesterday, which I don't need to do." With a kind of routine cuteness, my father finishes every meal with "something sweet," which he searches his kitchen for absently, as though this is the first time in his life that the notion of dessert has ever occurred to him.

For lunch I assemble a salad of white beans, radishes, romaine, and balsamic vinegar. Then the avocado on Wasa crackers with cumin. And a Roma tomato, cut into wedges with olive oil and sea salt. I think of my father, how he didn't "need" three cookies, and eating my tomato, consider how easily I could eat three more just like it. Consider that two years ago I wouldn't have trusted my own attentiveness to know what it was I wanted to eat. (My ring finger was stitched up, but there was permanent nerve damage.) Maybe I wouldn't have even trusted my hand to be light enough with the olive oil.

Lily Eats

2010-04-18T09:20:00.000-07:00

Letter to Adrian

Make no mistake--I'm still eating. Last night, I cooked for the girl I'm going around with and a girl who I'm such friends' friends with. Delicata squash stuffed with cinnamon-baked apples. Raw kale salad with garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, and brown rice miso. Polenta simmered shapeless in vegetable stock and baby bellas. And then antipastis Alix and I picked out, preciously, too excited to stop: Green fat olives, sundried tomatoes, organic mozzarella, pesto-asiago bread. Val is a health-head who can't be in the land of our cigarette smoke without commenting, and Alix was wild-eyed, just having woken up from a two-hour nap that should have been eight. The cat, Domino, was the only creature totally comfortable, and when she became curious about my plate, I shredded some squash and left it low for her to pick at.

It's the first meal coming back into this groove. For a while, we forgot how to cook in Baltimore--for the slow, sharp winter months we only knew that we couldn't be home for long, and we couldn't stand outside. So we established ourselves as regulars at a cafe humming with colors and a tight-knit staff who tell us what's what. When I craved something outside of myself, I ordered taco salad, and Jill just shook her head in refusal. "No, you don't want that," she told me.

But now it's getting warmer, though if spring in Baltimore gets any more maudlin they may as well stick a feather in its cap and call it January all over again. It's getting warmer and, uprooting ourselves from thawed ground, we realize we have hands again. We realize that when we eat we're the ones eating and so we may as well make something of it. We've been using up refrigerator leftovers--Alix and I ate leftover bagels from my job with vegan cream cheese and California veggie burgers. "Something," I said. "Something tastes ever so slightly of garbage."

But there are moments of our old triumph. Sleep has become sporadic, a habit, kind of like flossing. In some twenty year olds there is a terror that if you go to sleep, you will miss something. So we've been catching it where we can, and in the silence following a nap, Alix came to the side of the bed and woke me saying, "Lily. There's chocolate cake, Lily," and I came to the kitchen thunder-headed and still dropping with sleep, to a triangle of plain chocolate cake and a glass of water, and I'm learning (for these moments) how to say Salud in as many languages as I can find.

Adrian Eats

2010-03-24T09:48:00.000-07:00

The Lobster Roll

Fine food is not exactly a virtue on the East Coast. They've got more pressing things to deal with, which is to say big coats, long nights, and generally making the world spin. Usually the quality is bad but the heart is good, and there is little more to ask for. You cannot think about food here, you must imagine it. There is no point to comparing the coasts. The bottom line is that there are things which are thrilling to taste and touch in New York, and they are usually filmy, fatty, and full of cornstarch. According to location, fantasies appropriate, shape-shift, and sometimes you are struck with visions of the perfect lobster roll.

Even the sound of it is surreal. The pliability of a doughy roll and the red armor of that wild crustacean, together on a bed of coleslaw. Lily came to visit last week for a couple of days. It was grey, and the air was heavy, wet, but not very cold. She wore a hat because she shaved her head again, but I went without stockings. We walked from Bed-Stuy to Red Hook, and then all around the south leg of Brooklyn. I told her I'd been thinking about lobster rolls again, though I'd never had one -- that creamy meat on a creepy shore seemed just right. She said she'd give up being vegan for a weekend just to dine with me. As we entered Red Hook it began to rain, and we walked slowly. We smoked about one cigarette an hour until we reached the waterfront where the old trolleys are parked and rusting. The ocean was chalky and flat. I bought a lobster roll from the counter at Fairway and we sat in the protected plastic awning, side by side. From our bench we could see the Statue of Liberty, the soft rain, Hoboken. Lily's perfectly culled digestive tract about to give up everything for a moment of charity and sisterhood with me.

It was no more than a Wonderbread hotdog bun. A pile of pink lobster meat mixed with paprika, mayo, who knows what. Underneath it was thick, crunchy cole slaw, a whole heap, and with lots of fennel. Then potato chips. Our feet were damp. We traded off, one bite at a time. It was delicious, the best thing. The meat was so creamy and sweet, and the cabbage was real -- scooped up with the dark orange chips. We both kept looking at each other with shared gastronomical peace. Outside it could've been the Oregon Coast, except for Lady Liberty, who was closer to us there than any other point in the five boroughs.

There are only two ways to get to Red Hook: in on Van Brunt St, and out on Smith. The BQE really made a world out of it when Robert Moses engineered that last leg of the expressway which snips off the neighborhood perfectly. Trying to find our way out later, we ducked into a sandwich shop and asked directions of two cops standing in line.

The cop looked at me blankly. "Oh, I don't know. We're not from around here -- we're from Brooklyn."

"Wait, no, I mean, we're in Brooklyn," the second cop said. "But we're from the other part of Brooklyn, you know?"

"You got dat right," said another man with a phlegmy, gravelly laugh. "It's a different universe ova' heah!"

Everyone laughed except for the cops.

Chanelle Eats

2010-03-11T09:32:00.000-08:00

We are pleased to present guest-writer, Chanelle Bergeron. Chanelle is is a poet and retired competitive swimmer. She is nebulous, as is her poetic wont. Her verse has been said to be a nebulizer, in that it delivers a fine and delirious mist inhaled as a relief for asthmatic constitutions. She frequently conspires with other officials of The Corresponding Society, has participated in a meadow of related happenings, and her work is featured in Correspondence No. 1, 2 and 3. For some considerable time she did reside in a teepee. She is an autodidactic student of botany. (Bio from The Corresponding Society).

Springy

This afternoon, outside my window, there is the bluest sky & only a wisp of cloud, cashew-shaped, rushing nowhere. Barefoot, I trot to the mailbox in my winey sweater & the slip I slept in, leg exposing & breezy. How many birds are singing today, "The sun! The sun! How long have you been sleeping for? You are washing all over me & boy, am I warm..."? Oh, & the drooping snowdrops I mistake for little white crocus heads peeking through the soggy earth & lacey remains of snow. Walking through mud like molasses all over my boots & the paws of Nicola's dogs. I had to take my scarf off. Some thing is hovering around us all, some thing unassuming & cleansing. It is Spring. We are coming upon a transition from the short shivering days into a time of thawing & growing, a "springing of the leaf".

As the ground is beginning to wake from the inside out, we find this happening to ourselves also. Can you feel your roots uncurling & your stems spiraling towards the warming, mother sun? We have been blanket bundled for months. I have been wearing three dresses, an oversized flannel, at least one sweater, thermal leggings, high woolen socks, lined boots, several scarves & a hat that at one time belonged to my neighbor, all at once & since Novemeber.

The air is beckoning us, "Be as light & free as you can see in me!" I desired fruits all day, the soft juice of them & their uplifting energy. We walked for an hour, the woods were full of little walkers & Nicola keeps reminding me that we do not live too far from the beach. The turn of the earth, the return to lengthy days, the sun taking the place of all our artificial blankets, that mud the flower heads have to poke through! Rainage is bursting at the seams. My sister is flitting around like a fairy becoming more & more in love with that boy. That constant laughing I hear on the wind. Joanna Newsom's new album.

Rejoice in the rejuvenation! Get yourself to some woodlands, or the scents of them at least: juniper or pine or cedar or cardamom. Get citric with the grapefruits & limes & mandarins. Whirl around in calendula & neroli. The hyacinth girl fresh out of the rain. Dandelion tonic, roots & all, good for wishes & detoxifying the liver after those nights made long with wiskey & heavy foods. How many layers have you been buried beneath this past winter season? Finish off the dregs of your hibernation, the first day of a new season is in a few weeks, my friends. Soon will be the bustle of blossoms & brooming for Spring Cleaning.

In the midst of all this reverberation, there is a lurking. Remember that April showers bring May flowers. Along with the temperatures fluctuating, we are just waking up & susceptible to all the elements, "... true spring fever occurs when a cool spell is followed by sudden warmth & our bodies are slow to catch up". We must wear our rainboots even when dancing in daffodils. So, if you are feeling a little under the weather, take this potion from my medicine cabinet to keep the spring fever at bay, full of warmers (ginger & cinnamon) & immunity stimulators (ginseng) & godly nectars (pear!). So delicious you won't need that spoonful of sugar.

Umbrella & Wellies Elixir

(makes 1 quart)

2 ripe Anjou pears, peeled, seeded & cored

3 cups apple juice concentrate, unsweetened (100% juice), or juice some yrselves!

3 teaspoons fresh grated ginger

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1/8 teaspoon nutmeg

20 drops Siberian ginseng (Eleutherococcus senticosus) tincture

Cut pears into quarters & combine with apple juice, ginger, cinnamon, & nutmeg in a blender. Blend until smooth; chill. Pour into glass, add 20 drops of Siberian ginseng tincture, stir. Drink 3 times daily. *This type of ginseng is a good, but slow worker. If you are ailing, take this in your drink for 3 weeks, rest for 1 week, then repeat if necessary.*

Ps/ If you gave up Siberian ginseng for Lent & need that special stimulation, I suggest adding some moonly nectars (wiskey!) to taste.

Lily Eats

2010-03-11T08:04:00.000-08:00

Confessions about Turmeric

When Adrian and I started cooking together, we were eighteen, and I realized the very first day I must have never eaten breakfast before. Every memory was an empty, extending space, and I was pleased, that being a time in which I very much wanted to follow her lead. So we made oats with fried eggs on top, which I had never had, even if it turns out I had sat down to breakfast before. While we cooked, she told me things about food, things I may have found out either way, but who's counting. She told me. Showed me flaxseed, kept her spices in a cloth-bound box under the sink, used turmeric all the time, and to this day I've never told her I think it's the blandest spice. I don't think I thought of it till I moved back to Baltimore.

Even now, after a year's worth of ardent, solitary cooking, I watch for cues. When I visited her in Brooklyn, she had gotten a mortar and pestle, so I thought of the thousand reasons I needed one. This is a good reason, the kind that comes after you've grown accustomed (read: weary) to the custard of winter, breakfasts of pumpkin and bananas:

Spice Cabinet Oats-and-Eggs

-1/2 cup rolled oats
-1-2 tbsp ground flaxseed
-1 cup unsweetened hemp milk
-1-2 tbsp almond butter (to taste)
-Dash each ground nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, and cloves
-1 cardamom pod

Cook the oats in hemp milk on medium heat with all spices except cardamom. Remove from heat when finished.
Stir in almond butter and flaxseed.
Grind cardamom pod and stir into oats. Add more hemp milk if necessary

Serve with eggs on top--any kind of eggs will do, but it's nice if they're cold and the oatmeal's hot, or you have an orange to eat with everything. It's best of all if they're part of a leftover omelet, and the man who brought it to you at the restaurant slipped you his phone number. Not because you're going to call, but because (Adrian told me one day two springs ago, a bad day for her & so I left flowers on her bed) "It's so nice, being seen."

Adrian Eats

2010-03-08T08:24:00.000-08:00

The Sabbath

All winter long we took westbound busses downtown to play folk songs on freezing street corners. We were The Messengers: Austin, Peter, Ezra and I. It started when they showed up in front of the office building I worked in at the time. They were wearing matching dark glasses, harp racks, guitars. They stood on the sidewalk outside my window singing “Gloria” until my boss told me to make them stop. Running to the door, I bumped into a table of merchandise and a large bruise spread instantly across my thigh. When I reached the sidewalk, I lifted my hand to silence them, but Peter instead handed me a tambourine. It was a sunny November afternoon, and the whirring cars on Division Street drowned out my pleas for them to stop. I was laughing, my arms gone limp. My boss watched from the window. I suddenly didn’t care. I could do this until dark. Austin and Peter played louder, dancing in circles, but they had changed the lyrics: A-D-R-I-A-N, Aaaadrian.

I hit the tambourine against my leg and started dancing. They asked me if I wanted to go out and play with them that night. The bruise from the merchandise table grew and deepened. It happened to lie in the exact spot where the tambourine hit for the next few months, and thus never fully healed.

We played for quarters and dollar bills until midnight, picked up transient back-up singers, saw players, Coke-bottle tubas. We gathered crowds, crud, displaced street kids who told us we were taking their spanging spot. It was freezing all winter. We’d play until we couldn’t feel our fingers: “Sister Ray,” “House of the Rising Sun,” everything by Brian Jonestown Massacre. At midnight we’d stop by Voodoo Doughnuts under the Burnside Bridge, and pay for a five dollar, ten-gallon utility bucket of day-olds: grape flavored, maple and bacon, Butterfinger. We’d take the bucket to a twenty-four-hour coffee shop, purchase coffees all around, and take a seat by the window that faced the train station. We’d continue digging through the bucket: butter horn, blueberry, Fruit Loops stuck to the frosting. Austin and I sat on the overstuffed couch and talked until three, happy to let the conversation go on forever. The nights felt endless, the talking never lost its pleasure as long as we didn’t move from our spot. There was a feeling of holiness, of being in exactly the right place, our teeth sunk into cake. The coffee shop was in Portland's Chinatown, where all the methadone clinics are, and we'd hand out doughnuts to the homeless people waiting in the bus mall. We’d catch the night-owl busses home, and one of us always ended up stuck with the empty bucket.

We were The Messengers. Ezra’s family was Jewish. Every second Friday that winter his mother would serve a Sabbath meal after we got home from busking. She would wait for us, sometimes until eleven. We’d come through the door clanging, a case full of cash, and then join them in the dining room: The Messengers and Ezra’s family. His mother cooked four-course meals: stuffed grape leaves, homemade yogurt, empanadas, winter greens, challah, olive tapanade, vegan white cake with black coffee. The meal would last two, three hours, and we, The Messengers, would make doe eyes at each other from our seats wondering if we’d ever been so happy.

At a later date, on the couch in the coffee shop, I said to Austin, “You never know when you’re in the thick of something."

You have a few great nights with a group of people, and the following few months you spend together are in pursuit of those nights. Often, and thankfully, they are usually the only ones you remember. Sometimes you stay together just because of those two or three nights, waiting for a new event to deliver the old feeling. New isn't always bad, but we often miss it being so fixated on one previous moment. We miss it, possibly forgoing a great thing that could have been. Or maybe that was it, and it never happens again.

The last time we played together, it was just beginning to get warm. All winter long, we had thought, if winter can be so sweet, just wait until summertime! It turned out that the prospect of sun was deceptive. As winter receded, so did our attention spans, and so did the buckets of doughnuts and The Sabbath and the holiness and the homemade challah. It was late May. I was seventeen-years-old. We played for a couple of sleepy hours on the bank of a vintage clothing store in a nice neighborhood. We made three dollars, and then wandered around a chain supermarket and spent the money on pink-frosted sugar cookies, hot jojos, deep-fried jalapenos stuffed with cream cheese from the deli counter. After eating all of it around a picnic table at a neighboring park, we felt sick. Austin jumped around the table shaking a maraca, trying to get us excited, though it only darkened the mood when no one stirred. We ran into a friend, and he tagged along, using Austin’s guitar to play Bob Dylan songs, but half-heartedly. We were bored of those songs. They weren’t even the ones we liked to play.

Lily Eats

2010-02-16T08:09:00.000-08:00

Empire

We ran into Ray Ray at the farmer's market. He was overseeing four or five trash cans, filling rapidly with compost that people brought from home--in five-gallon buckets, tupperware, whatever they had. Eggshells, banana peels, all the concealed textures of winter. Ray handed Adrian and I each a "Buddha Box" that played chants at different pitches, and we marveled at how if you put one in your back pocket, you could think it was coming from far away. "Lina thought she was hearing singing from a mosque," Adrian told him, "until she realized the noise was following her up the stairs with you."

So we wandered around the stalls at Ft. Greene. Heated tents filled with kimchi, oysters sold off of a wood-slatted table, hydroponic lettuce that Adrian jumped at. I got kale--"though, A, I'm not sure it'll work, it's not the right kind"--a carrot big as two of my fists, Yukon golds, we said goodbye to Ray Ray by the food scraps.

Adrian had to get to work at the Karrot, so Lina and I went to lunch at Zaytoon's. We tried to avoid it ("It's what we always do," she said, and I though, I've been to New York only three times in the last year) by going to Maggie Brown's instead, but the wait was an hour long. So we sat over our friendly neighborhood lentil soup, with dark cumin and squeeze-your-own lemon wedges, and it was halfway through the basket of hot pita that we realized neither of us would have room for the sandwiches we'd ordered. They came out and we felt lame or unnecessary or foolish or still hungry even if we weren't hungry--so we took a few token bites, and Lina biked to work, and I set back to their apartment with the spare keys Adrian had given me.

The lentils weren't what I was used to. They were red, and I wondered if the discolorations were normal, before telling myself, it's probably like tempeh. It's fine. I boiled potatoes in two small pots, worried that they'd overflow if I tried to cook them all together. Chopped vegetables on a white cutting board stained with avocado Adrian and I had eaten earlier with melba toast--onions, carrot, a cucumber because Adrian had no zucchini. And half the food drained, the other cracking on the stove, two or three tablespoons of tomato paste, a quick run into Adrian's bedroom, to jump on her bed, throw my torso out the window, and pick thyme from the herb garden on her fire-escape.

When the boys arrived, the oven was preheating. There were some sharp pounds at the door, I opened it to four men I haven't seen in at least as many months. Who I knew would be coming, and still I was so surprised to see, I just said, "Adrian's not here." (As though, what? I wasn't going to let them in?) "That's fine," they said, and charged in, immediately took over the living room. Sweeney grabbed a book off the shelf and someone said something about how the apartment smelled nice. I thanked them and retreated to the kithen, half-mashing undercooked potatoes with a fork, till they all announced they were going out as quickly as they came, to the hat store.

Greg stayed behind--I guess he already has a hat--and asked me two or three times if he could help with anything. Something about not knowing any measurements, or the distance between anything in Adrian and Lina's kitchen, kept me from accepting. Instead, he read sporadic passages to me from a book about Russian Freemasonry, the description of an elaborate initiation ritual which was agonizingly concrete until he got to the part where the novice had to drink from "a cup of evil." Buried alive we get. Paddling we get. A cup of evil? I shredded the kale from its stalk, chopped it finely, streaks of dirt beneath it on the cutting board.

They returned from buying caps, already stealing each others' instead of wearing their own. Adrian back from the Karrot, the food was in any way hot by now. I finished up with the Corresponding Society rushing around me to start their meeting--my hands deep in a soup pot filled with kale, since there was no bowl big enough. Minced garlic, olive oil, a little bit of lemon juice. The shepherd's pie resting on the front burners of the gas stove. Everyone helped themselves onto enormous plates, because there were no human-sized ones, and anyways, we've all got to be giants once in a while. The pie was bland, but no one said anything, except me, and then Adrian and I told each other how it was silly to blush over a thing like that. She'd told me the meal she cooked for me the night before was bland, too, and really, we both know that doesn't mean anything. Still I felt like I was standing over the onions again, my face firing, trying to explain how it tasted different when I made it in Baltimore. "It tastes like potatoes, and lentils, and tomato," she told me. What bland? "If you meant that it's not spicy, then no, it's not."

But the kale is satisfying in any condition. Because it's vital. Because it feels nourishing to eat a thing raw you'd always thought you had to steam to hell and back before it was digestible.

Raw Kale Salad

1 bunch kale

2 cloves garlic

1-2 Tbsp olive oil

pinch of coarse sea salt

juice of 1/4-1/2 lemon (to taste)

-Rinse the kale leaves thoroughly. When clean, tear all leaves off the stalks into a bowl.

-Chop or rip leaves into smallest pieces you can manage.

-Add olive oil (1 Tbsp at first, more later if you need it), garlic, and lemon juice.

-Massage for up to five minutes, add sea salt, massage to distribute.

-Serve at room temperature if you have ten hands reaching into the pot, but chilled if you can ward them off while it refrigerates.

I ate a little bit, less than everyone else. Even Sweeney ate three servings, trying in earnest to become full with no meat. In the end, though, he said he needed a fried chicken sandwich, and that was that. "I think I'm allergic to all these vegetables," he said gravely. The meeting went on in the next room, I tried to entertain myself play-cleaning the warm kitchen, but I'd been at it too long. I sat on Adrian's bed, pulled the door shut, and smoked out the cold window, writing about what I wanted, and what that meant about me. Till Adrian herself popped in, red hearts all over a white dress, and asked me to help her in the kitchen. I put candles in a ring around a cake that Dave made, decorated like a NY-style black and white cookie. Too many candles at first, because Adrian miscounted and bought an extra box, I smoothed the extra holes out with a butter knife while she zested lemons into the tops of martinis. Since they had decided not to drink, "except a warm-up," until the meeting was finished, I supposed the gin marked the end. Dave stood at the doorway, growled effectively at Sweeney that he just couldn't come in the kitchen. Till I walked out into the wood paneling, and turned the lights out on their conversation with no warning, and Adrian had to re-ignite a few candles with the cake already in front of Sweeney before he could blow them out.

And the rest of the weekend was the vortex I remember. More gin and less vermouth, I almost walked into traffic and after Dave pulled me back, he apologized. "No," I said, "thank you." Not wanting to say, If the people around me would only let me, I'd walk into nearly every car I see. I told Mary Kate that I remembered sitting on the grass with her, and someone else, maybe Robby, while she ate vegetables out of a tupperware container. Hugged Robert Balkovich with no reservations and told him I love Fleetwood Mac now. Made coffee Sunday morning in Adrian's turquoise leggings and a yellow Pratt t-shirt she'd used to be a lion for Halloween.

And if anyone knows yet how I am about goodbyes, it's the New Yorkers. I walked all the way with them to breakfast, stood outside finishing my cigarette, while the waiters rearranged the diner to accommodate so many tired poets, and some fully awake, and one still drunk. Stood there with them, hugged everyone on the sidewalk, and told them to give my best to the few back inside. I walked back with no breakfast, and I was starving by the time I reached Lina's to collect my things and say goodbye. I ate half a vegetable kabob sandwich, screeching about polyamory and driving cross-country, one foot always a pivot for me to jump up from the table.

In line for the bus, I ran into and officially met Young Peter, who works at Okay Natural Foods. Not wanting to be presumptuous but not really minding, either, I sat down next to him for the ride home. When he saw me pouring something into my water bottle around the end of the Turnpike, he asked, "Is that Emergen-C?"

"Yeah," I said. "I figured, I drank gin last night, I drink Emergen-C today. It balances out."

"Emergen-C is like, two-thirds sugar."

"Are you saying I was better off with the gin?"

"God no," he said. "There's lots of sugar in gin."

We entered Baltimore at an odd angle, and we both sat marveling with no idea where the hell we were. It's funny, and I don't know which city it speaks to. How someone goes to New York for the first time, and someone goes back to New York after a long time. And they both come back to Baltimore and don't recognize a single thing until they're on the sidewalk again, with their brother's face saying, I guess this looks right.

Adrian Eats

2010-02-10T09:39:00.000-08:00

How to Eat Poorly

When you are quite broke (and pray tell, when you are wealthy, too) it is good to eat slowly. The food seems to be more plentiful, probably because it lasts longer. And no matter how sunk you are, nothing seems so grim if your head is clear and your teeth are clean and your bowels function properly. I find that during times of particularly feeble means, by inviting friends to dine with me, the larder multiplies like on the shores of Galilee. So when I say to eat "poorly" I mean "in the manner of the [ ]."

First, make a list of your personal staples. Buy two of everything. For me it's almost always: vegetable stock, chicken stock, coconut milk, a pound of walnuts, a pound of rice (white if I think I'm in the pan-Asian mood, brown if I'm a wholesome American), 12oz wild rice or quinoa, a dozen eggs, whole peeled tomatoes, black beans, kidney beans, spinach, kale, carrots, onions, garlic, lemons, good coffee to last me two weeks. I almost always have a couple cans of wild-caught salmon for making patties. What I have constantly in the cupboards, using little by little, is salt, pepper, paprika, dill, cayenne, cumin, turmeric, curry, and bay leaves. Also: soy sauce, vinegar, mustard, honey, butter, good olive oil, herbs growing on my window sill. On a whim I might add to the list: a fresh beet, three potatoes, butternut squash, asparagus, whole milk, a hunk of fancy cheese, oatmeal, a lamb shank, white fish, oysters, a can of Jyoti saag or curry dumplings. I never spend more than eighty-dollars a month on basic groceries, though of course there are always the late night runs for beer, gin, and ice cream. That's up to you though. Some needs exceed means. For instance, at the bodega last night, the man ahead of me in line asked for his Colt 45 and a pack of cigarettes on credit. "I get paid on the 18th," he said, and the clerk said OK.

A trick is to never buy snacks, not really. And avoid juices, sauces, and spreads except where the desire burns hot. Same for crackers and bars and chips. It makes a great deal of difference. Decide on a few non-perishable versions of things, like what to buy canned or frozen. I buy mostly organic, and it's often only a few cents more per item. A nice hunk of beef can be a great friend in tough times. Ignore specialty vegetarian products and go straight to the basics.

Then learn the simple tricks: a whole baked onion with goat cheese and rosemary, eaten with a fork; egg-drop soup; double-garlic greens; Spanish black beans; red beans and rice; hot-and-cold salad; a heap of of everything sauteed in a pan (burger, veggies, coconut milk, spices) into what Chanelle calls, "rubbish"; huevos rancheros; honeyed carrots; lettuce wraps; fritatta; kale and white bean soup; mashed potatoes; salmon cakes; a simple sauce of a couple peeled and squashed tomatoes, with onions, garlic and lots of olive oil, stewed slowly and put on anything--though the tomatoes are best if you squash them while stewing. Carry nuts in your pockets. Don't forget to peer in dumpsters or ask your local grocery store for expired things. My stepmother spent a weekend once teaching me how to make soup that would last until next Saturday, lasting twice as long (I swear) when you invite someone over to eat it with you.

Lily Eats

2010-02-07T06:17:00.000-08:00

In pictured

"Oh! Sorry," a girl says, jangling open the door to OK Natural. I've got a pile on the counter of things yet to be purchased, and Jon and I are talking about vegan cookies or why his mother won't buy quinoa. Jon asks her why she's sorry and she explains, "It feels like I barged in." She wanders around the store and I tell Jon, that coming down those steps, and bursting in with the bells, it sort of always feels like barging in here. I tell him I'm feeling sick and he gives me an Umeboshi plum, and encourages me to keep drinking the sample tea, it's late in the evening and "We have to throw out what's leftover anyway." I buy a kombucha, too, and a black bean enchilada that's nondescript but filling. Jon tells me about his girlfriend, how he used to date her current roommate and her former roommate, eats blue chips behind the counter and marvels at how hot the salsa is. He goes to put some things away in the back, while Peter and the cat watch the front.

Daikon radishes, Peter tells me, when he sees me reading a macrobiotic cookbook. And tempura--have you ever had tempura? We're all afraid of fried foods here because we use low-quality oil, but not tempura. If you order it in a restaurant, they'll serve it with daikon, because it balances the oil. One time, I was on a Greyhound bus feeling very meditative, and I had to get something to eat at a rest stop. So I chose corn chips, because there were only three ingredients, corn, oil, and salt. And I was eating simply, so I ate the chips. When we got off the bus, I had to get something to cut the feeling these chips had left, and remember, I'd been so meditative, I hadn't talked to anyone one the bus. So I found red radishes in a market, and thought, daikon, radish family, and bought three bunches of them. And they did, they cut the oil.

I make a note of this to myself, half-laid out over the book. In case of oil. Drinking twig tea, my feet cold in my boots. This is what I've found a thousand times since I began thinking about food. Little rules or notions or tomatoes that have fed people before me, that feel comfortably worn when I try them on for size. Don't put cream in your coffee at night. Don't be afraid of garlic. Don't be afraid of anything, in fact, and if in being unafraid you cut the nerve in your finger, blame the dull blade and move on. If it's numb forever after that. It will be the part of you that knows most instinctively how to cook, being passed on from some old recipe.

Adrian Eats

2010-01-30T08:44:00.000-08:00

The Strawberry Cake

The hostess brought out a strawberry cake for reasons I didn’t understand. Everyone climbed out of the pool to circle around the patio table, on which she’d set a stack of plates. The cake gleamed in the mid-afternoon sun. It was thickly frosted and double-layered, sitting in a skirt of yellow cream, collared with berries no bigger than my thumbs. Up until that moment, I had been patting my hair dry, waiting for a moment to leave, but I couldn’t now. I wanted the cake. The hostess tore the tab from a roll of thin chocolate cookies she’d tucked under her arm and passed those around. The pool water heaved from the sudden abandon of bodies. I ate my cookie and waited. But soon the boys slouched back to the hammock, picking at their skin in the sun. Girls flattened on concrete, turning out their bathing suits for a better tan. I sat down, listening only for the word gateaux, but it never came. I watched the cake disappear under evening shadow, untouched.

At night I’d wake to the house shuddering from thunderclaps and have to peel the bed sheets from my sunburn, and get up to shut the window. Daybreaks outside Bordeaux were hot and dry. I would wake up sweating last night’s dinner, and feel sunlight, listen to the father pulling away over gravel in their old Saab on his way to work, murmuring to their black lab. I never would have known the storms from dreams if the sister hadn’t mentioned it when she offered me Coco Puffs that first morning. Coup de foud. She pressed her lips together not knowing what else to say, kissed both my cheeks, and left me on the veranda without a spoon.

A day before, the entire family met me at the Bruges train station, each offering to carry one of my things. I turned to the mother and tried to say “I’ve been awake for forty-eight hours” but I used the verb “to wake-up” instead, and she gave me a curved smile. Their house was cool inside, and from their kitchen table I could see stars rising in the still-blue sky out the front window. They stood around me while I clutched the baguette and the strange, gray butter they’d offered as a sandwich. “In America, bread is sliced,” I said. They looked concerned. I couldn’t remember the word for slice, and we volleyed words, growing louder and louder until the father said, Tranche! and the brother reached out, chopped my baguette in two, spread the mousse, and showed me to my room.

Even in the earliest moments of waking, there were formal greetings and departures—whether we were hung over or foul smelling, bonjour, bon nuit, a kiss on each cheek. The mother was stark and darkly featured. She looked like the Mona Lisa, and I froze up in her presence, as I imagined one would by the painting. (The painting, I eventually saw in Paris: a tiny canvas under a high ceiling, blocked by the digital camera flashes of a thousand Japanese tourists. I did not freeze up.) Grocery shopping with the mother one day, I froze in the produce aisle, remembering only the word for “avocado” after she’d asked me a question. J’aime des avocats.

Geraniums sat in clay pots on the windowsills of each stucco prefab in Bruges. Walls were rarely painted or varnished, and kitchen floors were often bare concrete. We had dinner at the aunt’s house outside of Saint- Émilion, and ate enormous pepper quarters sopping with olive oil, pork loin, and watercress. All the framework and beams were exposed except for the bedroom where the grandmother slept: is it your mother, or your husband’s? I kept asking. Every time she told me, she rolled her eyes thinking I didn’t understand for her accent (Pardon?), but I really just didn’t understand.

The mothers, in general, were toned, had firm skin and hair, and were very tense, with the exception of feeding times, when they became radiant: radishes with pats of unsalted butter, blocks of sweet, brownish pâté (usually duck), roasts under thin gravies, pasta with bacon, cubes of raw beef skewered for thirty seconds in a fondue pot of boiling water. Most produce came from a farmers market the father took me to on Wednesdays. A ladybug landed on my arm while we were picking out lettuce, and he told me they were called “beetles of God.”

Before I’d left home, I had practiced eating slower under the impression that the French ate at great leisure, disgusted by the way American’s inhaled food, to which end I was always the last to finish, while the family drummed fingers on their cleaned plates. Half of the dinners were served on the veranda, while the other half were served by the television which sat on a lazy-Susan on top of the fridge: Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Nanny and a Belgian soap opera were standard fare, and sometimes, on these nights, we had dinners of fries, hot dogs, and beer.

For parties, the parents would buy us a case of Rickard, make reservations for dinner in town, and then come home at dawn asking if we’d had a nice night. Only the Americans would get drunk and the French kids would mock them. The young men were sexless, bare-shouldered and they left their laundry on the stairs for their mothers to do. The girls my age were coy, and often wary when speaking to me alone. They invited me to movies, and took walks around the artificial boat lake in their neighborhood. There were house spiders the size of teacups which caused the daughters to scream, and the fathers to spring forward on their sinewy legs, an auto magazine rolled in their grip. The fathers loved patting their daughters’ hands or hair, saying, Ma fille, to which the daughters would respond darkly, Oui papa, ton fille.

The mother gardened in her underwear, and when the flashfloods came, hundreds of tiny snails flushed from the gutters and all family members ran outdoors, shrieking, to collect them in plastic vats. Plupluplu, the mother said, noticing my confusion. She made a gesture like running water. “What?” I said. Plupluplu. Inside they boiled the snails from their shells, while, lawn chairs and parasols tossed about the lawn in the storm.

Bordeaux was not divided in grids, but nebulous, and the sidewalks were cobblestone. The only way to navigate was to have been born there, which I was not. At dinner parties, family friends spoke at great lengths about their regional history, and which vineyard each wine came from, and which region each cheese was found when the plate au fromage was served. On weekdays, everyone left work or school and two hours for lunch together. Afterwards we sipped tiny cups of Turkish coffee around some table, eating chocolates or wax-coated canellas.

We spent my last night in their neighbor’s backyard over the grill (the other teenagers were watching a dubbed Jaws III inside) and when the parents asked me what I would remember most from my time in France, I listed a few things, and then raised my glass high and said, “And the wine!” because I knew it would make them laugh, and it did. Contrary to myth, they were a warm people, but sometimes they couldn’t understand a thing I said, or I them, and we’d just gape and wince and I’d feel no warmth at all.

It was the day before that I’d been sitting by the pool, waiting for someone to cut the strawberry cake. The effects of my longing could still be felt, baffled as to why no one had served it. This strong, sensual desire blocked by an inability to communicate was the moment that exemplified my experience of

France

. Though I never felt such a strong desire to eat something ever again, it fashioned my relationship to food, deepening one of my senses by having lost access to another.

Lily Eats

2010-01-27T08:33:00.000-08:00

Estimation

I had woken up early to give Nick a ride to work, but he had decided to walk. Wanting to avoid the idle feeling of a girl just playing records in some man's apartment while he's at work, I felt my way to the kitchen (it was light out already, but early, and I am young). It was nine o'clock, and I knew Ian wouldn't wake up for some time. About an hour, I guessed, judging by the mornings when he'd stumble into Nick's room, mountain hair and cigarette, and we'd three prepare for our different days, sunlight from 25th Street ringing against the turrets.

So there was time. I started with coffee, brought as a gift from my job, finely ground, the bean to convince me that coffees lighter than French roast could be worth a damn. We don't always want to hear that there are worlds beyond mud or water. I threw the old filter out with immediate renewal. As with all percolators different from my own, I walked blindly and purposefully into the measurements, probably adding more coffee and less water than I should. But you know the song: How you hit the START button and the scent is in the air at once. Like it's already brewed and been waiting for you to catch up.

I began a survey of the larder. I knew it would have to be almost all protein to start the morning; I had reached a point of no-oats-no-more. But the eggs would have to come last, they'd cook almost instantly, and there was so much time. So, with half audacity, half leisure, I picked up the odds and ends of breakfast where I felt like it. From a blue box, I found a block of cheese with mold sprouting on the north side, and grated a zealous amount onto the cutting board. I scrubbed out several pans that had seen better days and would probably see worse. The avocado appeared unredeemable, but what's brown is not necessarily bad, and I salvaged a fair pile of it, once bits of the rotting pit were separated. I couldn't tell if the brush was to scrub vegetables or dishes, so I washed three potatoes in the balls of my hands, palming away the dirt and setting them to drain beside the sink with plates.

I had made my peace that a sweet onion and can of diced tomatoes were to serve as seasoning. It wasn't ideal, but sometimes we all go to war with no shoes. And I reasoned there was plenty of pepper and our waking taste buds to improve what was lacking. But searching for a bowl to begin scrambling eggs in, and wondering whether or not I should fry bread, there appeared to me a whole shelf of faded spices. Cayenne that had lost its kick. Rosemary at the bottom of the jar. Grocery-store basil, which always means basil that smells like a pizzeria and not an herb. And an unsealed baggie of oregano, which I revived by crushing it between my fingers. This is how you settle an argument, I thought, sprinkling it over the potatoes while they drank up olive oil faster than I could pour.

Ian stumbled in around then, surprised at the meal nearly awaiting him, and I said, Sure, I'd love a cigarette. We talked for a while over the chilling coffee, about how the perfect housewife cooks and swears, and the liquid from the cheese that wasn't going to cook off the eggs no matter how long I let them go. That didn't taste so bad once you accepted it.

Claire Eats

2010-01-22T18:10:00.001-08:00

We're pleased to announce another guest post today. A true out-of-towner (for our purposes, someone who doesn't live in Brooklyn or Baltimore), world traverser and tea aficionado Claire Phelan has contributed a piece to What I Ate Where. She usually keeps her own court at http://everythingisruinedforever.tumblr.com/ but we've happily procured one of her stories.

My life, before we all dispersed for winter break, was quite the introduction to slovenly living. With an emptier fridge and fewer bookshelves, we could have been bohemians, evenings beginning with the usual rummaging through spare sheets, gold sneakers, rolls of paper towels, for my old black heels, since forgotten in the early hours of New Years Day in some Brooklyn dive. Old-money-now-no-money, weary glamour eating bits of bean slop out of cups in the backs of classrooms, dreaming of sushi and champagne.

With the end of the semester, inevitably, came sleeplessness, frozen fingers, a feet-deep swamp of belongings my boy and I had to wade through to make it to our mattress, and the deep-rooted, fuck-all frustration that comes from the severe lack of real, hearty meals. Against everyone's better judgment, it was out of this pure, raw need that I planned a dinner party in the midst of finals. I wanted to gather together a group of favorites and feed them, fill them with the fresh and heavy, leave them feeling fat and happy. The menu was grilled asparagus, shake-and-bake chicken, hasselback potatoes and Mezgaldi onions.

It was a disaster from the beginning: we'd double-booked the dorm kitchen and the stove top with some club's ethnic dinner, a crowd of girls drunkenly deep-frying pork chops in a vat of sizzling oil and Jack Daniels, who drowned out our jazz and banter with hip-hop and screaming. My friend Dan said it best, as we waited quietly beside our prepped ingredients for an hour for the counter to free up, looking ruefully at our platter piled high with breasts, "Raw beef looks GOOD, raw chicken just...I don't want to sink my teeth into that."

In the hassle over sharing the oven, the potatoes came out undercooked, the onions too sweet, and the asparagus cooled thirty minutes before I completed the rest of the dinner. The chicken was the fall-back savior- rolled in beaten egg, rubbed with flour, paprika and chipotle, and gently simmered in butter, it came out gorgeously tender, flavorful, juicy. A dish, that, for all its name, is neither shaken nor baked, is easy, cheap, and without fail a wowzer, as any spices in the flour turn out equally delicious. But we were a harried group, hurried, bored and hungry for too long, and I was left with the need for a gluttonous, rich meal still unsatisfied.

But I'm a brothel madam, a matron in an apron, a beefy-armed boarding house mistress with two sinks worth of dirty dishes and half a handle of vodka under the desk. My countertops are continuously covered in wine glasses, coffee mugs, a huge tray of baklava that draws people in like flies, and I'd one night left to entertain.

Pepperoni rolls are cheap, easy lovers, sleazy greaseballs slicked with charm and butter, hiding heart attacks in their back pockets. The recipe promised me a real crowd pleaser, the-bang-for-ya-buck where the kids wouldn’t know what hit ‘em. On our worn kitchen counter, one long stretch of bread dough rolled out with a dented can of pork & beans, rubbing it down with buttery fingers, the sprinkling of the elusively named “Italian seasoning”, and then layers of pepperoni and shredded mozzarella, both straight from the packet. Apart from the butter, spread liberally from my imagination, this felt like blasphemy, but it baked slowly, the dough rising, the however-manufactured cheese oozing out of browning corners until I forgot, and waited with a crowd of watering mouths behind me, to tear off a piece of melting cheese and meat. I sliced thinly and served the pieces up hot with a smile and a cup of warm marinara sauce. They don't call me Grandma Claire for nothing.

Adrian Eats

2010-01-12T08:31:00.000-08:00

Your Slobbering Heart

In almost every scene from the film version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn coffee is being served. Whenever the insurance man comes to collect dimes or the father is drunk or the children, on cold days, have just arrived from school, cups are being filled. It is the children in fact, who in the Christmas scene when the percolator is brought to the table, are first in line like slobbering animals, overjoyed to drink the dark caffeinated sludge that must have been coffee in 1910. While Johnny and his daughter are mourning the dead tree from their window, he says, "I wonder what they did before coffee was invented."Though someone now could list a few alternatives, the question remains: for Johnny, in his third-floor walk-up, would anything other than coffee do?

The thing is, different times and places have respective gastronomical needs. Nutrition is not a stock list of healthy ingredients, but rather a subjective guide for what you must do to keep the flame going. Whether it's coffee for children or kale by the heap or whiskey Wednesdays. Eating your way through winter on the East coast is different than on the West, and by no means whatsoever can one be appropriated to the other. Cloud-cover, temperature, cultural history, and the ghosts of a place are all factors that create these needs. The plain and unique nutrients your body craves is another (maybe you're hot-bodied, phlegmy, inflamed, cool-livered &c.) I'm only thinking about Elia Kazan's 1945 movie because I was in Portland recently and my mother put a VHS of it in my stocking, and it was only after I returned to New York, alone in my apartment and unable to sleep, that I watched it. Among other things the story indicated this flame, the wick of it shortening in this fast place, and the drinking of coffee -- briny, gritty, cowboy-black -- appeared as a regional antidote.

But who knows. It varies from bod to bod. Soy gives Americans hormonal problems, but the Japanese have been using it for centuries with no side effects. I know two people who are allergic to fresh fruit! When I lived in the Northwest, a piece of cake and ice cream made me feel hung over in the morning, but in New York it goes right on through. Sometimes your Eastern European or West Indies genes will surface, but Lo and behold! you were born in Missouri where the land and the produce make no sense to your constitution. Then what? Eat things that fill whatever you're lacking. Get hotter, colder, calmer, wilder. If you need to eat two hamburgers or all of the broccoli you cooked (even though you wanted to save some for lunch), do it: vegetables have significantly fewer nutrients than they did thirty years ago, and maybe you need to eat twice as many to successfully photosynthesize. My friend Cait used to say, "Let your appetite do its thing." Pregnant and menstruating women are our finest models for this. Ten pickles, a tire iron, red clay, six almond pastries from the Hassidic bakery! It's not about gluttony, it's about listening to your slobbering heart!

I was paused at a light the other day, and Ray Ray and David Bernstein rode up next to me. We said hello, each of us on errands, and then they invited me to dinner. An hour later, I met up with them at David's co-op holding a container of garlic-stuffed green olives. We made coos coos with chopped pecans, cashews, raisins and dates. The three of us sat on stools and boxes, stirring pots, talking, adding ingredients: bok choy, mushrooms, onions, carrots, and a single egg. I talked about my interest in writing about the implications of the BQE, and David talked about his secret spaces project, wherein he tracks down and activates unused nooks around the city. Turmeric, mustard, soy sauce. "Should I add lentils?" he asked.

"Lentils take a long time," I said.

"Yeah, but I need lentils. So I'm going to add them."

And he did. The perfect anchor for a cold night.

Lily Eats

2010-01-11T09:17:00.000-08:00

More Cream

I was to be in the city to meet Ian at nine. But for all of our pragmatism, it is still cold in January. Flesh-cold, like the coins to pay the boatman cooling in our eyes. Like every corner and socket and animal in Baltimore is so cold, accosted, cold. It had been a day of missed connections--my shift at the coffeehouse shortened, cancelled plans, a day that demanded adjustment to the point of surrender. By the time eight o'clock saw me I was deep into a little dinner with my father, roasted vegetables from a shallow bowl--dense, layerful brussel sprouts, red potatoes and red onions; sweet, resilient turnips. Slow-roasted because he couldn't find a lid for the roasting dish. We talked a little, and ate from our laps watching television, like any family who reads sometimes wants to do. I remember thinking how my stomach was an endless and unsettle-able world, a frontier to remain wild, the olive oil pooling in our plates. He gave me a broiler pan, "I bought it for meat but I never used it," that I could use to crisp up the soft skin of bread loaves--throw a cup of water into the broiler, shut the door quickly, and let something as peasant as steam do your work for you.

Locked into this kind of tranquility, it's hard to imagine starting a car, frozen like water to the driveway--unnatural to enter the coldest world at night, you should be staying put. But remembering just how long winter will drag without friends, and to break the cycle of disrupted plans, I went. To meet Ian, and we to another friend's apartment, and Ian left, all the boys talking business and hating the finicky neighbors, and lesbians who are in love with them, my picture on an old friend's wall--I turned to Nick and said, "I am going to get a milkshake," with enough deliberation to affect a statement and an invitation all at once.

So back to Ian's to scoop him up, thankful to be just blocks from the Sunday all-night January shakest milkshake in the city, and not have to question. A kind of diner, but with no whisper of the customary red-white-black color scheme. With wooden tables, decorated in mannequins and matchbox cars and all manner of standard-issue kitsch. For this, and for the homemade whipped cream. A generous, thick-necked waitress came to take our order. All of this had started in my head after all, and not without a clear picture. It was not about a milkshake, it was about a strawberry milkshake.

"We're out of chocolate ice cream," she told the two undaunted boys, one of whom I knew to hate the stuff without exception, and I can't remember which one asked excitedly if the strawberry and vanilla flavors could be swirled, but a rush of comfort seemed to come with her response. A robust, even egging, "Why not?" and immediately, both ordered it. There was a second where I didn't want to be thought of as missing out, and almost changed my order to a round for the table, but I stayed silent, she deftly snapped up our menus, and as though my companions had asked, I said something about being a purist or a Puritan, and meant it happily.

The red cups came out on our matron's tray, just thin enough to eke through a straw instead of a spoon, frozen strawberries that had to be shoveled quickly to your moth if they were to make it at all. And the whip on top some kind of daydream--porous, weighty, and more cream than sugar. We drank and conversed equally, kicking each other with incidental abandon under the table, eyes bright with what would have been sadness if we hadn't made it giddiness, with what would have been the months we are lost for if we hadn't beat the weather at its own game. Like reptiles or children, absorbing the heat we found until it was our own. Knowing we had kept our own table, the flash of some grown guardian for our foray into the world. Saying, Here, before that, hold this to you first, it has worked before.

Lily Eats

2010-01-04T08:05:00.000-08:00

Petticoats and Petticoats

There are things which don't begin to be true until we know them.

First, rules. Like a voice telling your Italian family you don't need meats or cheeses will never be heard above skinny hips. Never throw out the runoff from any pan. MFK's sacrosanct footnote that coffee is good with cream at dawn and black at dusk.

Then your equipment, which is another way of saying instincts. Suddenly a mortar and pestle makes sense next to the olive oil, you know that the cutting board doesn't need to be scrubbed so much as brushed clean, one sweeping motion over the trash can: Here's where the secrets are. If you are eating your best--which is to say, hopeful where you can be and truthful where you cannot--this trash can will not be trash at all, but an unmet opportunity to begin composting. Not papers and foils but seeds, stalks, partly-zested rinds. It will be a testament to your craftiness if it's clear you tried to boil every part of the beast before calling it unusable.

Next your observations. At the inception of this new world, the lipstick and grit, your entrance of the kitchen, it quickly becomes clear that what matters is not what you know, but what you notice. A friend off-handedly mentions cardamom in a letter about her mother's illness. A glance past a lover finds her herb garden, the soft marvel that, it being December, you are all still alive. A bite of a cookie becomes a wonder at the differences between mace and nutmeg, the scents from two dry jars.

Finally, your questions. Can it be the same, to eat yourself and to feed others. To eat and to think about eating. The days off the calendar mark with surety that we know something real happens here, but after all this time do we have no name for it. At our inarticulate best, we recognize it as a shape-shifter. One moment, peppermint tea, then the cloudy day we chose for baking bread, then the specter of some retired warrior we resuscitated in time for seasoning: with bravery here, cayenne pepper. Questions like where do we get our power and where can we buy the best onions. Why is all soup better the second day. Is anyone thinking this through.

As an aside, which comes easier than an answer. For those nervous: Dismay your mother-in-law by trying chocolate and bananas in the same cake. For those frightened they will drift off the ground, a tin of muffins will serve as anchor at a party thrown by any decent former love. For those unplanned, the hotter curry powder is best. Seats without backrests will keep you all upright, and in rich, good behavior. And conversation, conversion will come.

Adrian Eats

2009-12-22T00:31:00.000-08:00

The Shortest Day

In traditional celebrations, St. Lucia is a flaxen lady proffering lights and treats. Families are supposed to stay up all night in order to ward off Lucifer. When dawn breaks, the youngest girl in the household serves hot drinks and sweet, flat, yeastless cookies, like Stroop Waffles. She is wearing a white gown or braids. Sometimes a mass is held wherein all of the children, girls and boys, dress up as Christ to dispense gifts to the congregation. Since this is clearly a pagan rite turned Christian saint-day, it's more likely than not Lucia was meant to be celebrated on the solstice, which is today: the coldest and shortest of all days. It doesn't carry the weight that it does in Scandinavia, where at the end of the winter they actually go journeying for the sun to make sure its still there.

In Baltimore, we honored St. Lucia by celebrating traditionally, which is to say conflating traditions. Lily's good vegetables (did she mention the crusty, hot garbonzo beans? The shallots as tender and white as poached eggs?), Chelsea's generous fritatta in a cast-iron skillet the size of my backyard, as well as her blueberry flaxseed pancakes. I baked a quick gingerbread loaf (Lily grated a knob of ginger), and there were also apples, tangerines, smoked gouda, amaretto cookies topped with pine nuts, and a hundred French pressings of coffee. We sat calmly, in the warm hollow of Lily's apartment. We drank mimosas and watched Home for the Holidays and stayed up only half of the night, until three at least. Chanelle awoke at dawn and walked into the refrigerator in half-sleep, which we assumed was a gesture that protected us from Lucifer. She's blond, too, like all the Christ children, blue-eyed and careful-handed, Lithuanian. The hallways were bare and open, and she lit them, Lily and I nested in her iron bed. Lily was calm, and her house was light, her cabinets high. I gave tarot readings. It was a weekend of heart-ache, and throwing Lucia to the devil (after all, does she seem any more than a sacrifice?). We made ornaments the next day. The sunset was pink and underlit from her father's studio in the city and he said, "Baltimore is known for beautiful sunsets."The comment was ironic, even I knew that, but still I believed him.

It's balmy and mild in Portland, where I'm visiting. Now the real solstice has come to an end. I woke up this morning in an old friend's new bed. It was raining, "unrelentingly," she said, and I was reminded of something about her which is that she has always used words correctly. She took me to Random Order and showed me the pies. Two cups of Stumptown coffee and a slice of apple-blackberry with walnut crust. We were glad to have shared a bottle of white wine the night before as opposed to red, because we had woken feeling light instead of filmy. You are what you eat. She left to go to work, and I sat at the window seat, the unrelenting rain. A young, bearded man took the stool next to mine, reading a tattoo magazine. I read a book about the tarot. We sat there for an hour or two sharing, as far as I could tell, the solstice, and when I left I almost said as much. Happy first day of winter, happy last dark noon.

The night ended in Happy Hour with my mother, ginger-sake mussels and chicken pate and another piece of pie on the opposite side of town. And not only that, the table upon which we ate was inscribed with a quote about pie being intrinsically American, and any pie-eating nation being indestructible. Or it ended in an Eliza Barchus Victorian, on the street I grew up on, with an old neighbor who brought out rose-infused vodka she's had bottled since 1998. Her ceilings were so high and peeling. The wallpaper hasn't been changed since 1926.

Lily Eats, and eats.

2009-12-18T04:52:00.000-08:00

Writing your favorite story

He was a good vendor because he'd sell cheap what was about to spoil, give advice with bananas. Chanelle had a cousin that could have been my brother, and the air was so dry for a cold day, we sat on a hillside talking about the moment in our lives when we had family, or had family bad. We met like most people do; in New York. I remembered longingly a mango I'd dropped in the dirt a few weeks earlier--which I had rinsed off in a drinking fountain, and seemed to hold for me all the water in the world. I had met Adrian in New York too, but more routinely since we went to school together. And it’s not to say that either of them were ever late for anything, but that they had the good sense to avoid rigidity when they needed.

It was not with surprise, then, that I received a phone call from Chanelle saying they’d be late coming to Baltimore—between the plan and the bus there had been a hard night, she explained. At the stove, it wasn’t until I inventoried what I had yet to cook that I realized I’d been allotting extra time all along. The kale softly steamed with vinegar, mushrooms brown with wine, sweet zucchini, thick artichokes, and eggplant in the bottom of the salad were done. The vegetable juice was cooling on the front burner. I had used all the butter in the house, and a little bit of sugar (from another house, since I never bought it) and had only taken care of the vegetables. I had begun with one recipe—for two pounds of caramelized shallots—and in a rare occurrence, hadn’t had to consult a cookbook for anything since. There’s the alchemy, I noted: when you cook selfishly. How sex is born—from knowing what feels good. Righteous food assembled from your organism, from what you'd like to smell.

MELISSA eats.

2009-12-05T09:47:00.000-08:00

Today we've got something a little new. A comrade-across-the-table has graciously written a guest post for What I Ate Where. Melissa Weinberg is an artist who farms, or a farmer who arts, currently living in Baltimore, MD. She notes that this piece was begun in fall, but you can still find beets in farmer's markets for the next few weeks, and good prose is year-round.

punctuation: birthday cake.

"The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies."

-Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

i once held a deer's heart in my hand. i was working on a farm in new york state. a farm where eggs are shades of brown and blaring yellow yolks slosh and glisten inside.

these days i make eggs on weekend mornings. after acquiring my ingredients for the week from the bustle of the farmers market. too many familiar faces. retreat back to my kitchen. crack eggs. chop vegetables. i lose my breathe at least once a day in these leaf showers. when things are constantly falling from the sky. ideas. leaves. dreams of snow. love. dust. daylight. a kind of protracted intuitive movement, this handling of eggs. delicate and heavy as eyeballs, reminding me of my own fertility and expiration.

there were several native apple trees on the farm. one day, two friends went to collect apples from those trees, some deep in the woods. it got dark and started to rain. they still hadn't returned. we talked about going to find them, but eventually they stumbled out of the woods, sacks of apples in hand. kisses evaporated. leaking clothes. and made cider. peeled, cut, and stored apples for days.

the fall is fat. it is plump and pulsating.

its days hinge on the urgency that comes with the expectation of colder darker days ahead.

its vegetables hide underground, feverishly storing sugars. the flesh of its fruits wait patiently inside hard weathered shells.

it is secretive.

it is a season of beets.

the crew on the farm consisted of about six twenty-somethings, most with artistic, idealistic, adventurous and earth-loving inclinations that lead them to desire the experience of long days of hard physical labor producing vegetables. with all the side effects that entailed: the opportunity for solitude and remove from cities, an unexpected sense of camaraderie among coworkers, health benefits of eating fresh food and working til you think you might drop, the possibilities of personal growth through unfamiliar experiences.

the farmer, a rough around the edges and kind-hearted kiwi, almost a characature of himself, was a man with survival skills and instincts to rival a lion's. he was a connoisseur of guns and knives as well as a man with extensive knowledge of plants and animals.

aware of his butchering skills and distain for wasting, neighbors would sometimes call and let him know of a deer that had just been hit by a car within the past few hours and was still on the side of those country roads. he would drive out with another farmhand, manage it in the back of his truck and bring it back to the farm.

standing in the woods on one such day with the boys from the crew, who were all overeager to learn how to hunt and butcher, i watched as the farmer sliced into the animal and pulled back its skin. the smell was overwhelming as we all leaned in to examine, like medical students hunched over our first cadaver. avoiding flies.

the farmer let the stomach of the animal and all of its contents fall out of its frame. coils of intestines followed. a few slices with a sharpened blade and the deer's heart was in the farmer's bloody hands.

"here, melissa."

you never think of an animal's heart as an object on its own. severed from its veins and arteries and fluid relationships with other organs, the heart is a fat sack of muscle and blood. a perfect combination of the world of metaphors and language and the world of the corporeal. what sustained life just hours before sat meaty and languid in my hand.

the boys butchered the rest of the deer that afternoon. there were pots of blood and water out on the porch. in plastics bags the flesh of that animal got packed into our freezer, with a little left out for dinner.

i chewed slowly that night. gratefully. my tongue as alert as it's ever been with a slightly metallic lingering taste.

i had a dream about carrots (ripping them up from my garden to find them huge and healthy and smelling like soil). i had a dream about the word "galvanize." i had a dream about snow (cold moisture on skin. constellations on pavement. dissolving. dissolved. resolving. resolved). but snow is still a dream and autumn is in full swing. my arms hang and sway from the sides of my heart cage. it is a season for walking. the season i was born. the season i gasp and gasp and gasp.

it is a season of beets. those firey hearts that narrowly escape frost. dense. neatly containing the earth's blood. persistent; they stain hands, counter tops, cutting boards.

beet's thoughts go something like this:

"what are you going to be like when you're old?"

"what are you smiling at?"

"here."

"i get a recurring thrill from exposing myself"

"it's ok to be alone and surrounded by soil."

when my birthday rolled around, another worker on the farm made me a chocolate beet cake. i was getting older, the leaves were falling all around us, the end of tomatoes was near. so we ate beets.

this is what beets remind me:

that food is about ritual. a lining of the heart. a repeated turning of a bike wheel. a passage around the sun. that there are visceral ways to punctuate time. a steady knife and a steady slice, deep and submerged into the orb of a crisp apple. hands stained and sore from all the work they've done and all the thoughts they've tried to put to rest.

that there is nothing about food that doesn't echo the body.

that plants are not products. they are body parts. they are disorderly and unsettling. they are limbs and pulsating organs of our little earth. and they have an origin.

(when you taste something of whose origin you are aware, you have held its heart).

that there are certain memories that come gracefully and gratefully back to me and are spurred on solely by subtle changes in the weather. if you are paying attention, this shift of seasons is deafening. terrifying. devoid of gravity. the whole world is suspended.

i am crinkling a leaf between my fingers. i am walking down the street with my eyes closed. i am wishing myself a happy birthday.

i am holding my breathe and when i breath out, everything is falling from the sky.

Beet Chocolate Cake with Banana-Peanut Sauce

1 large beet
water
unsweetened apple sauce
2 tbsp. water
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. apple cider vinegar
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup unbleached white flour
1/2 cup cocoa
1 cup sugar
1 tbsp. cornstarch
2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. cinnamon

Peel and dice one large beet. Make sure to get as much of the beet juice on your hands as possible so they will be stained and you can remember this experience for the next few days. Place the pieces in a saucepan with water to cover and boil until soft. (You can also used canned beets if you don't have much time, but the red hands are sort of important.) Allow the beets to cool, and then drain them, reserving the red water for another purpose. Put the drained beets into the food processor with 1/4 cup (clear) water, and process until pureed.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Oil or spray your cooking pan(s).

Put the pureed beets into a 2-cup measure. Add enough apple sauce to reach the 2-cup line. This is a very satisfying step if you do it artfully and slowly because of the extreme contrast of the beet puree and the apple sauce. You can make a design or just create an eye of apple sauce in the center of the beet pool.

Add the 2 tablespoons water, vanilla extract, and apple cider to the beets and mix well.

Mix the dry ingredients together; then add the beet mixture and stir until well-combined. Stir for a long time. Stare at one spot in your kitchen while you do it. Think about the last time you kissed someone. Think about the last time you went for a bike ride. Think about the last apple you ate. Make a promise to yourself to do something that you will feel good about. It can be anything.

Bake for 35-60 minutes, depending on the size of pan you use: more for small, deep pans and less for a 9X13 pan. (I used a 9X13 pan, and it took 35 minutes.) Test by inserting a toothpick into the center; it's done when the toothpick comes out clean.

Allow to cool completely before cutting and serving.

Banana-Peanut Sauce

1/2 of a 12-ounce package lite, firm silken tofu
1 banana
2 tbsp. natural peanut butter
1/4-1/3 cup agave nectar, to taste
1/4 tsp. vanilla
1/2 tsp. lemon juice

Blend all ingredients in a food processor or blender until smooth. As you add each ingredient, take a small taste. Remember those individual tastes when you eat the sauce later. (This is where you can mix in some of the beet juice to give the sauce a pink color.)

Refrigerate until needed. The sauce will thicken in the fridge, so it's best to give it time to chill if you plan to sandwich it between layers of cake. Serve over cake.

Makes 8 servings.

Lily Eats

2009-11-30T19:23:00.000-08:00

Our blessed feet

My grandmother, like so many others, has a physical aversion to peacefully resting in a chair for more than thirty seconds, or two bites of her meal, whichever comes first. One eye on the clock and you'll see--it's never longer than this before someone needs another soda, a serving dish is empty and can be washed, coffee needs to be brewed. For more than two decades, Thanksgiving has been an affair at her house--Antoinette, the matriarch, Mee Ma, constantly giving away housecoats she only wore once. This year was the first time that my uncle Al's advancing Lou Gehrig's discouraged (if not prevented) him from leaving the house for the occasion. A family never maudlin, brave and tragic without fail, undeniably Italian--we moved the dinner to Al's house.

Having recently relinquished some of the finer points of veganism, I still went into the first hurrah of the holiday season with the notion that it'd be hard out there for an herbivore. This being the case, I wanted to contribute to the family spread. It's probably at this point that I should mention a fact of cutting relevance--that since the inception of the Bundt pan, more than 50 million have sold. 49,999,999 of those pans could be anywhere now--could be paperweights, or birdbaths, or armor for child soldiers--but fifty mil is Antoinette Herman, and it has housed a cake for every birth, death, mitzvah, and bank holiday since she got her hands on it. Devil's food bundt cake with buttercream glaze. Vanilla cake with chocolate frosting. "Sock-it-to-me Cake," with a ribbon of cinnamon and walnuts baked into the center. "Hey Lil, that's Sock-it-to-me Cake," my uncle yells across crowded living rooms. Since I started carrying a spiral notebook with me everywhere I went, my uncle takes the trouble to sift through every family gathering for the noteworthy stuff on my behalf. Hunched over, ice cream sliding around our paper plates, engaged in something as basic and sacred as eating dessert. "Lil, where's your journal? Write that down. Sock-it-to-me Cake."

It was with all of this in mind that I set out cooking for Thanksgiving. A slow curry--coconut milk, cubed sweet potatoes, chickpeas. A head of cauliflower in, the whole apartment becoming porous. Holidays are as temperamental as some people--their flavor is something to be prescribed, not accepted. I started another pan going, simmering quinoa and crimini mushrooms in vegetable stock. When everything in a kitchen swells and reaches a certain temperature, it suddenly doesn't matter--that your family might be dying, might not eat chana masala, might have deep-fried the turkey.

Dizzy at this half-familiar, half-novel altitude, I started to bake a swirl cake. In my tiny, galley-style kitchen, I assembled the vanilla batter. Having exhausted my supplies of both counter space and mixing bowls, I put the batter to rest in the corner of the floor in which I was least likely to step on it, and began combining the ingredients for the spice cake batter in an oversized tupperware container. It was at the point of swirling the batters in the Bundt pan (without mixing them. Never mixing them,) that the notion of batter rising temporarily escaped me. Having filled the pan to its rim, I began baking, and returned to my tinkering at the stovetop.

To dissolve this band of wandering cake demons, minstrels threatening to tell at any moment, I take myself down: half the cake burned and half remained a kind of cake pudding, and the whole thing cleaved into coarse crumbs when I tried to take it out of the pan. There are moments in every little life which don't just allow for, but induce, a kind of functioning heartbreak. The kind of heartbreak you can take still standing. Thankfully, there were no less than eight pies that had been bought or baked or won at the race track. Isn't this the season, thick-skulled on the cooling rack? Thankfully. Thankfully, while our grandmothers are alive none of us are too responsible for cake. Even in November, with the world starting to move in, this keeps us on our feet.

Adrian Eats

2009-11-29T14:23:00.000-08:00

Expressing Gratitude in General

The day before Thanksgiving, my boss at The Karrot put a sign on the door which he'd scrawled in permanent marker: "Traditionally, this is a time to celebrate the harvest, and express gratitude in general. Sorry, we close Thursday. Enjoy your dinner." Both "dinner" and "Thursday" were underlined with yellow highlighter. I didn't see the sign until Saturday, when I found it stashed behind the register. It had been torn at the top from being taken down. He couldn't have said it more purely. For instance, by saying "traditionally," he wasn't being sentimental about the American myth but rather pointing out that a holiday has been put in place by the forces-that-be in spite of the initial event having ever taken place (a customer at The Karrot recently told me that Thanksgiving was invented by the tobacco leg of the West Indian Trading Company.) The point is that it is there. Tobacco companies or not, a day to be observed, governed by the principal Thanks A Lot. Standing behind the register with the sign in my hands, I wondered if I had spent enough time in gratitude.

When I arrived in Seattle, my grandmother had just finished sifting through each volume of Gourmet from the past ten years and put the ones aside for me she thought I'd like. "They've replaced my subscription with Bon Apetit. It doesn't even come close." She had a hard time moving about the house, but had made a spicy meat sauce and fusilli for dinner, with "bread salad". She poured us cold, white wine. My sister's train arrived, and there she was in her black Converse, even taller than the last time, in high school now. She was wearing a t-shirt that said, "Obama is the new black." My grandfather described the shape of the city to me ("...an hourglass"). We fought uproariously about the differences betweens yams and sweet potatoes: my grandfather and grandmother stating their cases over and over, simultaneously ignoring and becoming enraged by the other. He insisted we eat the Nutella even though it expired in 2002, and so we did, my sister the only one bold enough to say it tasted like Play-Doh.

Olivia and I slept in the little room with the big bed that overlooked the reservoir, and in the morning I had a long cup of coffee with my grandmother. The light was good and gray. Before I headed to West Seattle, my grandfather insisted on taking me out to the garden (using both his canes) so I could pick his herbs and garlic for the feast.

My mother and I walked up California Avenue that night, talking about the past few weeks. We passed a bar and she gasped and said, "Let's get a glass of wine!" But I didn't have my ID. We passed another bar and she said, "Should we try anyway?" But we knew we shouldn't. Olivia had set up the dining room so that the Cascades were visible from the seats. John had cleaned the carpets, was still cleaning the carpets at midnight. We all shared a box of dough nuts in the morning, watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on television, after my mother and I walked slowly around the grocery store for a while, picking things up, smelling them, putting them in the cart.

I am not from Seattle, but much of my family is there. And I never go home for Thanksgiving, but a number of things led me to believe that I should this year so I told everyone who wasn't already in Washington to meet me there, and I promised that I'd cook. My mother and I watched sad, sad, beautiful World War II movies on PBS from the kitchen in our aprons. John scrubbed the moss from the balcony. Olivia lit candles in the fire place. She got grumpy, moaning around the house at about two, so I insisted she drink some red raspberry leaf tea. I boiled a pot, and finally she sat down and had some. I asked her how she felt now, and she said airily, as she wandered into the next room, "Well, I don't feel like hurting someone anymore."

We cooked two five-pound-chickens, and stuffed them with lemon and lime wedges, rosemary. I put butter, sage, and garlic under the skin, and lined the baking pan with carrots and herbs. Salmon cakes (made with fish my grandfather caught). Mashed russets with lots of butter and rosemary (Olivia's idea.) Mashed sweet potatoes/yams (we never reached an agreement) with garlic, cayenne, and thick bacon. Green beans and brussel sprouts sauteed with fresh mint and chili flakes. Spinach salad with walnuts and goat cheese, slivers of avocado, soy sauce, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Stuffing made with bread from a French bakery my grandparents dumpster dive at, plus a heap of onions, celery, sage, chicken stock and bacon fat. Anjou pears, peasant bread, and nuts on little plates. Everyone else brought pies, cranberry chutney, my uncle -- a ham. Everyone served and all of a sudden the meal was over. That was it! I thought we'd be picking our teeth by the candlelit spread for hours, but no: people disbanded to other corners of the room, the lights came on, the pie came out, the conversations be came exclusive -- and I was still left wondering who all of these strange, interesting people were. Thankful and bewildered and very full. It is quite marked, this shift from childhood to adulthood, when family transforms from something simply to be experienced into something to be figured out.

2009-11-26T08:53:00.000-08:00

"the shopping for thanksgiving was very lovely and it was cold out. i took my shopping cart and arthur who lived next door i mean in the next apartment and we went to all these stores on the east side. there was at that time a vegetable market on east houston street, more expensive than the other east side vegetable markets, but very good, with everything very fresh, and i bought yams and mushrooms and fennel and millions of salad things and avocados and chestnuts to cook with everything. already i had the turkey and sausage and all the italian goodies, the olives, alici, and the spices my forty eight of them in test tubes in test tube racks marshalled at home. then arthur and i squeezed into the tiniest cheese store it had two other costumers and it was overcrowded, i have noticed more cheese stores are like that are tiny like that, cheese stores and bread stores and no other kind of store. we bought fromage de brie and very good crumbly provolone and something new to me called kashkaval, cause the man said taste it and i did and it was marvelous. and then did i have enough apples and pears for the cheese so we went back to the vegetable store and bought more apples and pears. the man was taking in mushrooms as big as a fist, baskets of them from his car, but he wouldn't sell them he said they were for himself for his own thanksgiving. then we bought the wine, some of it, some was coming with people tomorrow and huge loaves of italian bread because the man in the bread store said no he wouldn't open tomorrow and i wondered all the way home how to keep it fresh.

and i used my icebox and michael's icebox upstairs and arthur's next door because there was so much stuff. there was really a lot of stuff, o much more than i've said. and boiled the chestnuts in wine and cooked sausage in spices and left it all standing together for overnight, it would all stuff the turkey. and the next morning early sara came over with many things among them fresh dill and we made three salads and i baked asparagus and made all the antipastos we used to have at home and finally it was three o'clock and people began to come.

the whole of the living room which was a bedroom became a diningroom with extra tables and there was running back and forth to all the iceboxes and soon we started eating and we ate as i said for nine hours altogether. grapefruit antipastos turkey mushrooms-and-sour-cream baked-asparagus-with-wine-and-cheese all three salads and yes of course candied yams and cranberry sauce though you weren't supposed to that year the newspapers said, they said the cranberry sauce was sprayed with poison, but then we figured so was everything else and so were we, we ate four cans of cranberry sauce with the turkey.

and sam fell asleep on my bed. people kept falling asleep and waking up and eating and it got darker and darker and very late. and a painter came in a girl i used to know a girl i hadn't seen for two years with her child and ate too and i ate so much i remember for the first time in months not feeling cold. and al who had a show to light got ther finally and said somebody at the theatre stole the walnuts and figs, he was brining the walnuts and figs, and i said thank goodness we'd never eat them anyway. and we started him off from the first eating everything, eating all the things we had eaten until he caught up. and then we all got to the pastries and coffee and brandy and panforte and fruit and cheese.

and hugh came in with seth and said martin was sick so we made up a special package with pastries and all kind of goodies to send back to him, and hugh ate some and so did seth and there were three or four conversations going on at once. seth talked about jail, hugh talked about going to peru, al and rody and sam talked theatre shop. i kept stopping everybody to tell them to eat more things and tom warner kept trying to put in words about turkey, the country he meant, and nobody listened but he looked very happy. the baby took off her clothes and sang happy birthday and told us it was a party and we told her yes. when hugh was leaving we gave him a flower for martin."

--Diane di Prima, Dinners and Nightmares

Adrian Eats

2009-11-25T11:29:00.001-08:00

Procure a Vegetable Love

I have no patience for the "tossed green salad." In fact, I'm beginning to find it offensive--not unlike the way I feel about vegetarian restaurants that rely on their atmosphere instead of delivering fine fare. Meat, cheese, or nothing of the sort accompanying them, vegetables should be treated with respect, which is to say they should be lusty, spicy, and basted as preciously as a roast. I want a salad of a dozen tiny artichokes, three Roma tomatoes, green beans so fresh you can hear them crack from across the room, heavy cream, and a handful of California walnuts. "A dozen rosy potatoes... carrots sliced as thin as hairs," MFK Fisher says. "What in peacetime prevents us from such play?"

Not that we're in a "peacetime" of any sort, but maybe a politically-correct-time, a time of hyper-health, or some other condition that at times makes eating vegetables a crude, somber task. Go wild. Roast a bulb of garlic, mash it with a boiled beet or two. A shepherds pie, with rhubarb, peas, squash, and nasturtiums. Like a gourmet burger, try fetishizing broccoli: imagine, battered or baked, it's floret crusted in cumin, arranged on your plate like a Smurf forest.

Asheley and I went to the Vinegar Hill House down by the Con Ed station a couple of weeks ago. "Hill of the wood of the berries." She is a fine dining companion, no more a purist than a sybarite, and though she eats meat, does not prepare it at home because it freaks her out to handle "an isolated part of something, rather than the whole thing." I found her sitting at the bar over a gin and tonic (no gluten, either) and I ordered a Jameson. She was wearing a '40s butterfly-coat, her long blond hair hanging like a cape. We sat at the bar until they insisted we take take our seats. When the server came Asheley asked for the trout ravioli, and then laughed when he panicked.

"There is no trout ravioli! I made it up," she said. "I've always wanted to do that."

She got grilled chicken served in a cast iron pot, and a twice-baked butternut squash. I got foie gras, lentils, pickled onions. And all of it was enjoyed on a level plane, tit for tat, thigh for stalk.

I made twice-baked butternut squash at home a few days ago, and a leg of lamb. The squash is as easy as it sounds: bake at HI-heat until soft, scoop flesh into a bowl and mix with herbs, breadcrumbs, butter, sour cream, coconut milk, whatever. Then spoon it back into the squash rinds (they'll keep their shape) and bake a little longer.

Lily Eats

2009-11-24T10:05:00.000-08:00

Bones

The same hillside in Brooklyn is not so much unless you remember: it was Chanelle's tree (not that she planted it or owned it or did anything to lay claim to it, but this is unclouded in your mind, inescapable, Chanelle's tree) and the same stretch of land where Robby lost his phone, but was better off without it, and so serendipitous, the same where Sweeney told you--casually, like lighting a fire--that the fallen soldiers from the Battle of Brooklyn were entombed in the park. Below the steps, an imitation, playing at a hillside.

So, What We Ate There happened under the trees, the first real opportunity for face-to-face conversation in eight months. I had called Adrian as soon as I got into town, visited her at the Karrot, overheating in my winter coat, telling her emphatically, "I started smoking again! And I'm no longer a vegan." (Because don't you know, Lily, I'll respect anyone's decision, as long as they're bold, as long as they're behind it--) Every time I write to her, I've taken up some positive new eating or living habit, and every time I see her, I've regressed to some old bad one. To the point where maybe my good health (and skaal! to it, and to yours) is just a myth for Adrian to hear about when we live in different cities.

It's cold in Brooklyn. Not the kind of cold that makes you reluctant to go outside, but the kind that gives you a big, unadventurous pause when you consider lingering out there. And we are brave: and we had made up our minds to have a shot of whiskey at Alibi before going to the park, in preparation for sitting. Slow down now, and you can see a kind of meditation. But we don't need to be so brave, can be a little afraid, and the bar wasn't yet open at three-thirty in the afternoon. Instead, we stopped at a coffee shop so acknowledged on DeKalb it is easily ignored. We ordered tea and almond biscotti and I thought of a time I'd been in the same cafe, a time when I'd realized I was falling in love and so spilled my drink, and apologized to the girl behind the counter who told me (world-weary, now) "It happens all the time."

And so to the hillside--ginger lemony tea, and Lina driving her bicycle up the hill to meet us. The three of us ground our backs into the tree-roots, collecting dirt, talking about what makes us tick and what makes us gain weight, stubbing cigarettes out into acorn caps. The biscotti were mild, cut from a bread that would have been fine, a bread to be content with, even if it hadn't become dessert--they tasted like amaretto bones.

Lily Eats

2009-11-13T13:18:00.000-08:00

Last fact about Gandhi in a long series, 1996

Remember,

he walked into the sea

to carry the salt out.

Like it was some limp

child, blue or starving,

or he the layman's Jesus,

or like it wasn't planning

to come ashore, anyway.

Adrian Eats

2009-10-21T07:58:00.000-07:00

Truck Stop Coconut

I went tumbling into the truck cab just beyond the California border. The driver was blond and gaunt, and he was firm about getting us in quick. Robby hoisted me from behind and Sweeney grabbed my arms, bracing himself against the dashboard. The momentum from the extra weight of my backpack sent me sailing over the trash that covered the floor, into the raised bed behind the seats. The driver reached over Robby, and slammed the door, took out an American Spirit Light, and smoked it quickly. "I'm Wayne," he said. "I can take you as far as Fresno."

For several miles, everything was silent except for What a Long Strange Trip It's Been which seemed to be issuing from all corners of the cab. Wayne explained that we were going to have to hunker down in the bed when he drove through weigh stations, and as he spoke, I realized that the cab floor was virtually covered in fruit rinds: apple cores, orange peels, shredded lemon halves, whole coconuts with the tops sawed off, avocado peels with fork-marks through its green flesh. There was none of the usual truck driver garbage, no chip bags or candy wrappers or soda cans. In an unaffected tone, Wayne asked where we were from. We could have said the moon, and he wouldn't have been surprised. We tried to explain where we were going, but realized pretty soon that we weren't exactly sure. "Wayne," I said, over the roar of the truck, "you sure eat a lot of fruit."

"That's because I recently started a raw foods diet." He enunciated the last part, as though in quotes, to keep from seeming pretentious.

"Sure," I said. "That's great. Do you feel better because of it?"

"I'm getting fuckin' sick of fruits and vegetables--but yeah, I do."

When I asked what he ate, he said, rather darkly, "Salads." But then: "Lots of kim chee and sauerkraut, too (which he provided a comprehensible recipe for) and fish, too--I let it marinate in citrus for four hours, so that it kills the bacteria but protects the enzyme. And also, cured meats, like salami. All of that's raw. But I make my own beer. That's one thing I can't give up."

As Wayne elaborated, I thought about the dissolution of socio-economic distinctions--in a lot of ways Wayne was this totally blue-collar, chain-smoking, gruff, guy who grew up in the poor town in Michigan. We had just come from a solidly middle class, new-age wedding in Mendocino, and here he was talking about the same stuff they were: the importance of digestion, of keeping the natural enzymes in the food so that the body has more energy for everything else. "Some people use fifty-percent of their energy for digestion," he said, taking out another cigarette. "By the way, will you change the cheesecloth on my sprouts?"

Sweeney and I were crouched on the bed, and realized that amongst all the other debris, were two large pallets holding Mason jars full of sprouts. Wayne directed us as we fished through bags and boxes which were splayed everywhere, until we found a roll of cheesecloth and a pair of scissors. We cut the cloth into strips, and then unscrewed the lids of all the sprouts, and replaced the old strips--bouncing with the truck all the way. Wayne, still smoking a cigarette, one hand on the wheel, took each jar and dumped the excess water out the window: one by one.

At a truck stop near Redding, he straightened out his cab, threw away the trash, and a soft silence fell between the four of us. Sheepishly, we brought out rations from our backpacks, much of which were leftovers from the wedding, and shared with Wayne. He cracked open the crown of a coconut and handed us three straws. We took the straws and froze. "Well," he said, and we put the straws in and drank. It was sweet, cold and not filmy the way it is in supermarkets. We gave him some hummus, bread, and pesto, all of which weren't raw, but OK, he said, "because at least the bread was sprouted." He took out a cooler, and drew a couple of jars of homemade kim chee, which he shared with us. It was a warm day, angling toward late afternoon. Back on the road, I sat against the back of the cab, spooning the flesh out of the coconut and listening to Wayne's story:

"This shit's hard on your body. I've been trucking for five years, now. A lot of guys come out of it with serious body problems. Rail workers, by the end of their career, all have sciatica. It's when this nerve running from your hip down to your feet gets all fucked up from the bumping of the cars. They get paid for the rest of their lives because of how much damage engineering entails, er, incurs...

"I like to pick hitchhikers up. I used to be homeless. I was homeless in Berkeley for nine years, more or less of my own choice. I mean, in Berkeley, you can eat three meals a day year around if you're homeless. I used to hitchhike a lot, then... but then, Carmen got pregnant. Carmen's my baby-mama. We'd only been seeing each other for a few months, and she was working at this daycare in a church. Since she conceived out of wedlock and all, they fired her, and so, well, we had to get a house... we have three kids now. I was just home for my daughter's 6th birthday... I love me kids. And I love Carmen. I just never wanted to marry her...

"There's a lot of folklore surrounding Mount Shasta."

"There is? Like what?"

"Well, supposedly there's this guy, Saint Germaine, who roams around the base of the mountain, sometimes stopping into towns. He's a prophet, a mystic-guy. And then, there's supposedly a race of aliens--so, yeah. I guess those are the only stories..."

Wayne's Kim-Chee/Saurkraut

Head of cabbage (chopped in strips)
Finely chopped carrots, radish, broccoli, garlic, pepper, etc...
Spices

Put ingredients into a jar, and pack down with water or miso so that the liquid is just a little higher than the vegetables. Keep the lid loosely, but fully covering the opening. Let sit three to four days.

Lily Eats

2009-10-19T04:52:00.000-07:00

Ants Erotic

Even that first house, where you lived before sex existed. The wildness of your backyard, a country of buckeyes and decaying apple trees and English ivy, which your mother shredded to dirt and saplings in the interest of killing that bamboo, that bamboo will take over the yard if you're not careful. And all your forts and stashes razed, leveled, you hit puberty, shave off your pubic hair, tell your mother it looks like she napalmed the lawn. All of a sudden, you are exposed to a whole new street--Tulip Avenue, which runs behind your house, and which the jungle kept hidden until now, there are neighbors you never met--longhaired, stuttering boys poking at your new bareness.

Somewhere on this new road, there is a pet macaw, which your mother likes because it is a piece of the exotic, cerulean and yellow--but it rails into the night, no words, just matches the train which screeches at the base of the hill. Tropicana oranges. Coal. Commuter cars. When you were thirteen, you walked along these tracks with your brother, against the brick-colored rock, carved out to make room for trains, down over the Viaduct, where that boy was killed when you were eight, but keep up now, thirteen, and smoking one of your first joints with your brother, and all of a sudden that rancid heat tickled you. Places you didn't even know had nerve endings--your elbows, the arch of your feet, were tickled, you giggled and your brother laughed, and with your open mouths hot straw rushed in.

Sex didn't exist yet but muscles were a different matter--you played softball, or something like it but with no rules, in the field next to the Children's Center. You made the boys use your softball because the laces were yellow, not red, and your strange, wrinkled little kneecaps were branded with grass prints You lived less than a minute away, and had running taps, but out of glee, drank from the spigot on the outside of the Presbyterian church. Your mouth was instantly numbed, and you were learning for the first time that things taste differently according to how you acquire them. Later, this will serve you well, the pungency of all skin appealing to you at times and repulsing you at others, and you will know, This is the water you want.

There was also, in summer, the issue of the mulberries. Both purple and white grew--purple along the paved road leading into the state park, white in your backyard, along the fence, and on the street perpendicular, where you found yourself walking. The purple were too sweet but they were a satisfying color, and because of it, you ran the risk of eating one infested with ants and not knowing until you tasted a mild blood on the back of your tongue. The white deprived you of this excitement but were tarter, came up with the first crocuses of the year, unraveled to reveal a dark core. Where everything was being held together, and still eaten. Mulberries were no specific delicacy, but they came forward every year with no coaxing, like the most domestic of lovers, and in this availability, were seductive.

All kinds of fruit, really. The pears in Mr. Smith's front yard which flourished for years--but his wife moved out, there were outstanding warrants for his son's arrest, and the pears seemed to rot before they ripened. Honeysuckle along chain link fences, which mothers tried to pull up by the root but daughters relished, learning the gentleness with which one must demand that single drop. Women are always coming in an out of an appreciation for nectar. Plums which may not have been plums at first but which you ate anyway, to the dismay of your friends, convinced you were poisoned, I am dead, Horatio, but no--they were plums, as plums are wont to be. Their taut, sour little bodies thumped to the ground every year, and you ate, taking no real pleasure in their taste, but exuberant with their presence.

There must still be fruit that grows there, but you haven't eaten it in years. The blackberries you crushed between your thumb and forefinger have stopped blooming or else are pulverized by new and smaller hands. You drink water from the sink, watch the new chestnut trees rise--bent, like a grove of question marks--in the backyard. You think, there was nothing so erotic as my life before it, nothing in these homes and yards. You drive into Baltimore proper, climb into bed with your lover, who has no garden--and, kissing him, find that you have a mouth full of ants.

Lily Eats

2009-10-19T04:41:00.000-07:00

"A family who has at least two kinds of whole, cooked garlic--garlic to be eaten as its own food."

(That's amore). A family, which is where people go to eat and join and die, though I've heard some people go abroad for that. For this one in particular: plump noses, and silent r's brought for the holidays from Boston, Antoinette (An-tone-ette) the Matriarch, the Oma and Bestemama, nervously stacking plates and emptying cans and looking for more bread. It's not even her house, but when you get to be so old, who can sit still? And who can move very much?

There are three different constitutions, I told my father--and I'm Pitta, and bitter foods are good for me, and (tears in my eyes, now) I'm supposed to avoid garlic. His eyes snapped to, "Eat as much garlic as you want," the authority and desperation of a general under siege on his own soil. Or maybe, "Eat as much garlic as you can."

Gourmet to All That

2009-10-14T09:26:00.000-07:00

"Julia Child, one of my Boston neighbors, epitomized this old-school notion of apprenticeship. As her dinner companion one evening, I watched as she became frustrated by the restaurant’s dim lighting, grabbed a huge watchman’s flashlight from her pendulous satchel and proceeded to illuminate her main course. She wanted to investigate her food before eating it, the waiter’s recommendations notwithstanding. This act of spontaneous journalism evolved from a lifetime love of education and reverence for true expertise. Her first question upon meeting a young chef was always, “And where did you train, dear?”"

-Christopher Kimball, "Gourmet to All That", NY Times Op-Ed

Adrian Eats

2009-10-14T07:07:00.000-07:00

Mama Comes to Town

Last Friday evening, for the first time in history as parent-child, my mother ordered us a bottle of wine at Chez Lola's after arriving from Portland for a visit. It was a cold night. Chez Lola's is this psuedo-French restaurant on Myrtle Avenue, which I hadn't been to since the brunch, two winters ago, when Sweeney and I finally decided to be together--on the sidewalk, afterward, we'd found a box of sticker rolls: rainbows, bears, hot air balloons, Israeli flags. Beyond all else, my mother was excited to see that I was carrying a bicycle helmet when I walked in. "My girl," arms open, then, "--a helmet!" I ordered duck ravioli, and a woman who may as well also be my mother, Cindy Maze, ordered a broiled chicken that came with creamy, white, mashed polenta and peas. Like potatoes, but with a higher note, a sweet taste at the back of your throat. We drank the wine, talked about New York. About naughty Sam Adams, the Portland mayor, letting your kids grow up etc... After all, here we are. We ordered a thick slice of red velvet cake, baked on restaurant's premises. I didn't know this until the moment it was served, but traditionally, the reason for the 'red' is beet juice. Beet juice! It was rich and wet. Most bakers substitute it these days for red-dye. No wonder most red velvet cakes available taste like dust.

All the boys helped out (shredding, setting) when my mother came over to my apartment for dinner. I got frantic towards her arrival--I don't know, wiping dust off the sideboards?--but when she walked in the door, the artichokes were ready. Greg was visiting from Harvard for the weekend, and he helped me serve (what I would have done if he hadn't been visiting, God only knows): eight steamed artichokes with a bowl of lemon juice. A spinach salad with shredded carrots, soy sauce, and goat cheese. Salmon cakes with onions, walnuts, dill, fresh sage (from my herb garden!) and Greek yogurt, and Greg's Superhero Mashed Sweet Potatoes:

6 to 8 large sweet potatoes
More butter and some milk
A lot of garlic (we're talking, 10-plus cloves, a whole bulb, whatever)
Some pancetta or bacon, diced
Enough cayenne pepper to make you nervous

Boil. Mash with butter, milk, and garlic. Fry the pancetta/bacon, but with haste, and not to the point where it loses it's chew. Stir into the mash, along with the cayenne pepper. Serve hot. It'll keep you from catching an autumn cold.

We all squeezed around the kitchen table, which we moved into the living room to accommodate everyone: Cindy and Nadine were there, too, along with all the boys, some from the cellar. We ate and bellowed, Nadine told us about narcissistic musicians she slept with in the 70s, and Cindy and I talked about the Trinity Alps, the women we share in our lives from home, the mysteriousness of girls-grown-up. Robert's roommates recently moved out because the woman was pregnant, and she left several boxes of pregnancy tea behind which Robert gave to me. So after dinner we all, including the boys, drank Yogi Tea's Mother-to-Be, eating colorful, tasteless cookies from an Italian bakery my mom stopped at earlier that day.

The day that Robert gave me the pregnancy tea (in addition to other abandoned food, like a strange Ukranian grain, elbow maccaroni, flaxseed etc...) we were sitting in his 12th-floor apartment on a sunny morning after breakfast, and he said, "Sometimes it amazes me that I am able to live on my own--like, that I haven't accidentally killed myself yet. And what's even more amazing is that I, you know, scrub the shower without anyone asking me to, and sweep. Stuff like that." I agreed. After all, it's things like not putting furniture next to the radiator that you don't learn until after your first house has burned down. How have we not made more mistakes? I suppose there's time. Having two crones visit me for the weekend--two women who I draw a very specific wisdom from, who at some point became women I looked to--emphasizes this miracle, this phenomenon: how do we do it without them? If we are in such amazement, how much doubt must they have had, letting us leave? If I'm astounded every time I pay for electricity, they must experience a constant bewilderment: three-thousand miles apart, and suspending all worry. My mother said it's about a willingness to suffer, to let your child suffer, and suffer with them.

Lily Eats

2009-10-06T21:02:00.000-07:00

How mine should taste

The closer to the heart, the quicker it heals. Joel tells me this with the tattoo gun already buzzing in his hand, just before leaning in. Nearby then, I think, and tell him about the bakery, wonder how fast is my pulse. I already had three cups of black coffee--one free with oil change from a generic-blend Dixie, one that I spilled down the front of my shirt on 36th St., and hurt just as much as the tattoo. One over half a vegan burrito (tofu chorizo, a puddle of mole, shoestring potatoes cooked mild where cheese might go) in a restaurant where cell phones aren't allowed. And I have a fast heart, or so said my doctor, who went out of business, but I've seen enough to believe in this observation she was dead on.

+That spot doesn't feel too good, does it?

-Not really. But I almost sliced the tip of my finger off a few weeks ago, and since then I've been trying to zen out about pain.

Chelsea had the breakfast polenta, and we talked about making Halloween mean something. Whether it was about butternut squash or baked pumpkin seeds, or how a typewriter is all a man needs to go crazy. Brittle cornmeal, two fried eggs tucked under molten white tortillas, a copy of the calendar between us. I taste the end of a polenta triangle to know what mine should taste like. On a Tuesday morning Hampden is like a vacant post-parade: none of the usual walking tours, just resident crazies and shopkeepers, a woman with a curbside sale neurotically rearranging the same Coca-Cola playing cards and imitation Tiffany vases. Boys with skateboards watching me feed the meter, the crisp stench of mourning beer and menthol and crosswalks. Ah, buddy. It would almost hurt more not to get a tattoo.

And after, down the Avenue on the balls of my purple suede feet, I convince Chelsea to stop in Ma Petite Shoe--a quality footwear & quality chocolate emporium, and ask for cacao with no milk. The Taza line is all vegan, the salesgirl tells me. I buy two round disks of dark chocolate infused with yerba mate, wrapped in unbleached paper. All the stores on this block are inside row homes, and we climb down the perfunctory 4 stairs to the street. We try out the chocolate--a grainy, separatist moment, with the sugar traveling first, knifelike, to the brain, and next the cocoa beans, and finally some dark shudder. The tea (so close to blood) and my skin already scabbing--maybe healing, but no quicker for its proximity to my heart.

Adrian Eats

2009-10-02T13:57:00.000-07:00

Slow Cooked Yellow Squash

At this point in the season, yellow squash is one of the only remaining vegetables from summer that hasn't been forked over the border for growing. The very last of them are still being picked close by. (For instance, at the Red Hook farms, which I visited the other week.) Now is the time to cook your final, true-to-the-season yellow squash, and glean that last bit of summer zing to bring with you into the cold months. The only squash you'll be getting come a fortnight or so, are the big, often frightful winter variety, who's taste resembles potato. They can be tasty, if done right and cooked long enough, but they do not beat a forkful of that squeaky, hot September gourd of yore.

(With help from Mark Bittman's, How to Cook Everything.)

1 to 2 lbs of firm yellow squash, with big middles
3 tbs of butter or ghee* (easier to digest in the winter)
2 tbsp of local honey**
Minced fresh mint leaves
Salt, pepper, paprika
Wooden spoon (for gentle stirring)

Cut the squash into 1/4-inch rounds. Plop the butter on a large skillet and turn heat to HI. When the foam staves, dump in the squash and turn heat to MED. Add salt. Stir gently for ten to fifteen minutes, or until the squash begins to brown. Flip often, but allow to cook unevenly. When some of the rounds have become translucent, add the honey, minced mint, and other spices. Turn heat off completely and give it one last toss in the heat of the cooling skillet. Serve quick.

*Ghee is clarified butter, popular in auyervedic nutrition. Due to its lack of lactose, it has recently become more widely available to mainstream consumers concerned with food allergies/intolerances.

**Organic honey from bee farms in your particular region is great for the immune system. The bees are making the honey from local flora, thus providing you with important antibodies specific to your environment.

Lily Eats

2009-09-27T19:30:00.000-07:00

In emergence, October

“How might we be able to see which foods were selected by taste and which by necessity?”

--Alan P. Outram, Food: The History of Taste

The night I cooked all the plants in our house and drank white wine. Chickpeas, crisp roadside romaine, a pale tomato, a half-pepper, tough white onions. All of it in olive oil and paprika and black pepper, with shredded carrot on top beginning to rot. It wasn’t my wine, it was Chelsea’s, and it wasn’t my pepper but my father’s, and I paused every other bite to wonder—if my brother who had already been to jail would now go to prison, if just having a pineapple was enough to constitute dessert, or if I needed to actually cut it up. The food, so clean it was almost bland, and the wine could have been anything. I had just spent one hundred dollars on a good knife, which was the exact price I had decided a good knife would be, and it was so close to winter I was ready to mince the ends of the table, my bedsheets, more onions.

I had been in the habit of eating alone, which means not really eating but feeding while doing something to neglect how human one is. Like crying all over the table, if that embarrasses you. Usually I read. First I had tried with a cookbook: scanning vegan po’ boy recipes for new flavors, or love, or trochees. Then some book I had long associated with the autumn—about orphans and apples and how many life spans can outlast one author if they’re really trying. Then I couldn’t read, couldn’t even eat really, which was rare for dinner and I was no closer to full. Chelsea ate from rust-colored pottery in the next room, and shifted around piles of laundry, and at the plate said, “This is good,” even though it wasn’t, but she was right.

If I were going to ever be full I would have moved to it by now. The glass of wine was low and moist, and I gnawed at the end of a carrot-head. I hadn’t made love in so long that I slept with my windows shut and my own body barely a novelty. I was eating, and so would survive. I was eating, and so knew as little as I could about survival. Later, I would be hungry again, rouse my bed and make a fuss about almonds and women, the seasoned cast-iron, the fence that feeds us all with a good view of our neighbor’s yard. Yes, this will be green grass. Yes my bed deep and metal, and the function of bread far away. Yes how we dream.

The fall had been winter not long before, and I had hardly noticed when it birthed and birthed. But here was squash to the table, and new pumpkin, and my mother again, grim, again bailing water from my brother’s boat. On a pile of work clothes and straight dialogue and work, pancakes. If there were chickpeas to tell if I was coming out of pleasure or need. If there were chickpeas and there were.

Adrian Eats

2009-09-25T07:38:00.000-07:00

Autumnal Equinox

It was Sunday, almost a year ago now, when Greg showed up for dinner. Sweeney and I were busy erecting fly traps around the apartment with a combination of sugar water and resin. The flies had seemingly moved in permanently, and thirty of them sat slurping the water with their proboscuises on our kitchen counter. I abandoned the task to take out the trash, but as I made my way toward the dumpster, a box-edge from inside the sack tore into my leg, mid-step. I left a trail of blood to our front door, and panting, said, "I don't know what happened." Sweeney ran to the store to get Band-Aids and I was sure he'd get Raid, too, though I was still banking on the sugar water. Flies buzzed around me in the silence of the empty apartment. The season was just beginning to cool, and I stood on the patio, letting my wound air. Then I remembered the laundry: it was soaking wet in a washing machine, and the laundr-o-mat closed at four o'clock on Sundays. So bleeding, ran across the street and started shoveling the wet laundry into a basket. "Your shit was done a long time ago," the laundress said, closing up shop. "I know," I said. "I'm sorry." A few other ladies in there who had been laughing before I walked in, were solemn now, scowling at me. "I'm sorry," I said again, using my bloody leg to open the door.

By the time Greg arrived, I had propped a large two-by-four between the walls sandwiching our patio, and was hanging the wet clothes over it. It was cold, but the mosquitoes were still out, and I was getting bitten like crazy. Greg's face in the gate: "Hey!" he said. "What are you doing?" I let him in and eventually Sweeney returned and my leg stopped bleeding. We sat at our table drinking tea, talking about Thoreau, and a number of domestic things I can't remember: a plan to make pumpkin soup, an oyster night. Greg had baked a loaf of bread that day, had been doing so in fact every Sunday since July (it was October) whether there was an occasion or not. We ate his round, brown bread in slices with butter. Without telling them I went quietly inside to make dinner.

Whole grain rotini cooked in lentil stew, cayenne and black peppers, so that the pasta was heavy, sloppy, brown. Red and yellow bell peppers, onions, sauteed, HI heat. Fried yellow squash, and jar of cold pumpkin butter to finish up the bread with.

Dark was really beginning to settle. My leg wound would definitely scar. I brought the pots and bowls of food outside, and though the men were surprised, we ate as casually as siblings. Halloween was approaching, and we'd hung cobweb on our gate the day before. Ray Ray, another neighborhood friend, came by on his bicycle, tooting it's horn. He saw us eating, fingered the cob web: "This place sure has gotten old..." We let him in, and he stayed for a while, telling us about his enormous mangoes from the farmers market, how he won't drink tea if its too hot to cold the cup. A Commedia dell'Arte clown, who's as much of a purist as he is a jester. Eventually he left, howling and caroling away on his bike. Darkness was complete.

Sweeney, Greg, and I decided we would do this every Sunday until the end of spring. We would imagine a meal. Merge our ingredients. Greg would make bread. It would still be warm from the oven. We would eat outside until it got too cold. In this way we would somehow avoid the winter, but of course we did not.

Lily Eats

2009-09-22T05:38:00.000-07:00

A few in skin

How eating an onion you become unreadable: A skin ensconcing
sea, and once done, back to the sky--
Your mouth a meeting-place,
and the hot chemicals of your mind.
You were eating
when we met, and so untreatable
in the usual ways. By my hand,
I counted three hearts in the room
where you, and I, and the onion

One, that all living things

are in love, two, that they don't wish
to escape, three

That accepting this, they dine.
So now it is the steel moon
and refusal to starve
and all its following stars for you,
shrouded by your own body
on an alone porch, with your feet
swung high above the garden.
"Some people," you say
"are still eating in twos," so
with an onion you become unmistakeable.

Adrian Eats

2009-09-15T18:09:00.000-07:00

“BREAKFAST is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same traditionalized reverence that most people associate with lunch and dinner. I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours… the food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruit, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned-beef hash with diced chiles, a Spanish omelet or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice ofkey lime pie, two margaritas, and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert… Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, two telephones, two notebooks for planning the next twenty-four house and at least one source of good music…”
- Hunter S. Thompson

There is a common bond between egg and potato. Indeed, their fates are divided, as it is possible that one would someday walk if incubation weren’t interrupted, while the other, left alone, would only continue brooding in the dark, its eyes pressed to the mulch. But if not for their shape, then their secrecy, does their union become apparent. “Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg until it is broken,” says M.F.K. Fisher in Alphabet for Gourmets. And the potato, equally pallid and blank, requires an unearthing as violent as the cracking of a shell, and a reluctance just as innocent. They deserve to share a plate, then, especially in the service of breakfast. Not for health, as coupled they lack most nutritional tenets, but for the secrets they relinquish in digestion. And the secrets are many, and so are the mornings: so this is how Lily and I first ate.

In Bed-Stuy there was only one good cup of coffee, a café called Choice on Lafayette and Grand, where you had to stand in a long noisy line, only to have your order pitched at you by the angry Francophones behind the register. I caught Lily leaving Choice one day with a hot cup in her hand. Deeply-browed, shaved head, great posture; we’d hardly spoken before, but her taste in establishments was enough. And she, or I, insisted we dine there together the following Saturday, and we did: displayed behind glass while we waited to place our orders were little, glossy tarts, pastel-blue macaroons, chocolate twists, filbert-and-crumb crusted salmon cobbler, platters of cooked vegetables tossed in a cool, vinegar salad, and plump, orangey croissants. Lily ordered the quiche-of-the-day (let’s say broccoli, mushroom and Swiss) and I, the spinach omelet with sweet cream and spiced potatoes, served atop hydroponic lettuce in a pastry box. We got an Americano each and ate from our laps on a bench outside. “Oh, God,” I said, taking a bite and again, “Oh, God.” Lily chewed graciously and we needed not mince words. This was every Saturday thereafter, and maybe the first time either of us had truly eaten since moving to the city.

There was a small, gray room at the end of our residence hall that smelled like the inside of a State Park bathroom, equipped with four electric burners and a filmy basin. It looked out onto a parking lot, from which we viewed a number of apartment fires over the year. We only ever had enough money to buy the same things when we made dinner together, which we began doing after that first Saturday: quinoa, a bag of spinach or a can of Indian spiced Saag, a carton of curried lentil broth, garlic, some bread, egg-in-a-hole, and the same canister of table salt we used through the first year and applied by pouring directly into our palms and rubbing the grains into the hot pan. Sometimes we had a pat of butter, and later my mother sent me a box of spices by post but she forgot the turmeric which was the most important one. It was not that we were poor—we were two floors apart in student housing—we sat on the floor and ate from our bowls because we wanted to. On weekday mornings, we’d make oatmeal the way my boss at the organic grocery up the street had instructed:

Radhames’ Special Oatmeal
1 Cup water
½ Cup whole milk 2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 Cup rolled oats 1 tsp. vanilla extract, salt
Bring water to boil in a small sauce pan. Add salt, 1 tsp. cinnamon, and vanilla extract. Stir gently. Add more if you want. The man himself would insist,“It’s all about the timing.” When bubbles start to form, pour in milk. Bring to boil again. Stir, slowly now. Add oats, turn heat to Lo and let sit for 5 minutes with a tight lid. Add rest of cinnamon at the end, and any nuts or dried fruit (just a raisin, a walnut or two), dislodge with a fork, twirl around and salt to taste. It should be rich and seeped with flavor. It should be obvious that it was cooked in a broth of love.

The morning after Lily quit smoking, as a consolation prize, we got up early to by tamales from a woman who sold them out of a shopping cart on Myrtle Avenue. It was drizzling, but a poncho had been fastened over the steaming husks, and we bought three. When fall came, there were the apple cider doughnuts at the farmers markets, the splurge on a fresh, brown egg or two; the weekend we visitedBaltimoreand D.C. and ate nothing but fancy Italian antipasti. Plus theice cream place on St. Marks with flavors like sesame and corn (we both ordered pistachio); and the innumerable faces outside the common kitchen, with our meager ingredients; and all of us studying literature. One night, Lily and I ran into the two quietest girls in our class on the street, and the four of us decided to get drinks. The quiet girls and I shared a pitcher of Bud, but for Lily, glass after glass of Jameson, and we grew louder. We shared a window sill that faced the table, and were carried off be each other, the girls in our wake. We laughed all the way back to her room and watched Shirley Templemovies and woke up in the morning—the most beautiful, rich November morning streaming through the thermal windows and I woke up in her bed and asked if she’d go on a walk with me. Arm in arm she read to me from Diane DiPrima’s Dinners and Nightmares, which she’d been carrying around in her coat pocket since I met her, and we knew something about food, and feeding, and the written instruction and seduction of such, and we knew something about New York City, the toasted alleys and gutted charms, and by the blessing of being nineteen, holding the conviction, all evidence to the contrary not withstanding, that nothing quite like this had ever happened to anyone else.

M.F.K Fisher says she writes about food because “like everyone else, she is hungry,” but also because at the center of all physical hungers are the psychic ones, too, and thus, necessarily, the consummation of them. It does not create the tension, but sharpens both personal and historical tension where it already exists. And it is a lens that Lily and I are looking through often. Lily the potato, and I, the egg.

Lily Eats

2009-09-15T18:06:00.000-07:00

That she says, "Most of the tenet nutrients are missing"--because if you set an egg & a potato before some people they'd tell you they had everything they need. Not just as far as food, but general life-things. That if you've got eggs and potatoes, well, you've got that covered--& must have invited some of the good gods to your hearth. The next step is cleaning out the gutters and waiting hard for spring. We agreed for as long as we could about eggs, and for Brooklyn ate them, before one of us yelled something about health, and the other started talking about blackstrap molasses.

She came to see me in Baltimore, or we went together. It was playing nice: like how D.H. Lawrence calls an orgasm a crisis when really it means death. The hand making the food is sometimes only as important as the hand, sometimes the food. The sum-of-all-parts nights are what we call meals out loud. Chicken legs full of glass because Adrian shattered the too-hot baking dish by setting it in a too-wet sink, her hair piled on top of her head. Her sweetie who I almost call her husband drinking a beer behind her, reading with both hands, and an argument about Africa, and the culture, not art, of writing. Later we walked without him, and talked about our two cities like they were very different. Our two brothers who, since they had survived, might as well be discussed.

So we ate in the long row--how buses award three seats to the people willing to sit all the way in the back, next to the bathroom. And windowless smells like a latrine, surrounded by our own schoolbooks, becoming caught up, ate food from Baltimore--focacia, and hand-stuffed cannoli we had made with my father, listening to Judy Collins. Fontinella cheese and sun-dried tomatoes plumped in oil--food we would never seek out, but nonetheless ate well together. And no table, our commonalities the tunnel, and the dinner. We ate for so long and with such zeal that we couldn't remember which of us had introduced the other to caring about this stuff, that our homework was finished by the time the bus stopped, that we believed I was actually on my way back to New York. SO that "the nutritional tenets were missing," can she be surprised?, supposing we dined so well we left them behind, a cross marking the point of impact somewhere on the turnpike.