Claire Eats

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.