James Joyce Eats

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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