Items From Our Catalogue

Item: This post is coming to you from my dismal office, as I wait an hour for the next bus to ferry me to the train station, the first step of my 2+ hour commute. It will be even longer tonight, because I missed the early bus. I had (somewhat irresponsibly) let class out early so I could catch it, and then I spaced out and missed it anyway. Is this "pregnancy brain" (gag) or ordinary incompetence?

Item: I have become too lazy/dull/generally pathetic to participate in my own meme. Will this be in the DSM-5?

Item: You should check out (and submit to, in all senses of the word) starhillgirl's very fun new tumblr blog, Lunch. Make your lunch famous on the internet! I'm going to pull a fast one and call my Thanksgiving Sandwich entry my Come And Eat post for this time.

Item: I made half as much sweet potato pudding this year, since Sugar had requested a savory sweet potato dish. I should have made more pudding -- it was gone in a day, and I only got one sandwich out of it. The savory option is currently dying a quiet death in the back of the fridge.

Item: All that frantic eating seems to have led to another growth spurt. Internets, I am certifiably enormous. I am back to running into things every five minutes. I am in denial about the fact that turning sidewise to slip by objects or people has become comic in the extreme. (Imagine it -- I, not un-wide, approach a narrow passage. I pause, turn 90 degrees, thus rendering myself twice as wide, and proceed to shove my way through.) I would say picture to follow, but I think we can all agree that said picture is more likely to actually happen if I don't make any promises.

Item: While spending a very nice weekend with friends outside of Boston -- and the fact that I can call the weekend very nice, despite how much of it was spent dealing with a teething toddler, a sudden lack of heat and hot water, and an obstreperous landlord ought to give you some idea how wonderful these friends are -- I discovered that I could cleverly heft my (considerable) self out of their comfortable but very low armchair by pushing down on its arms and hovering my butt in the air such that my legs swung perfectly underneath me. I was very proud of being strong (and short) enough to manage the feat and performed it more than necessary.

Item: Pride ever goeth before costcochondritis, as it turns out.

Item: This is plenty bad, but how much worse it would be without Dr. Russian, who was on call last night when I left a tearful message with the answering service, after a day of increasing agony. "Take the percocet!" quoth she. Good doctor, that.

Remember This Game

Hello from the calm before the cooking storm, chez Bionique. My mother is here, which has forced us to begin to make inroads in the junk filling the "spare" room (of course, no room can ever be truly spare in a New York apartment), at least to the extent that the aerobed can be jammed in there. Tomorrow, I will wear myself out cooking Thanksgiving dinner, as I love to do. I am still trying to decide which sweet potatoes to make: Sugar prefers them savory (being sufficiently sweet enough on her own, I reckon), but while I like them savory, I LOVE cold leftovers of sweet potato pudding, gobbled on its own or as a dense layer in the "Thanksgiving sandwich" I look forward to all year. (A Thanksgiving sandwich is turkey, sweet potato pudding, cranberry sauce, gravy, and any other leftovers you care to stick in there, all cold.)

Besides sweet potatoes of one or more kinds, we'll have turkey (we are not vegetarians, only lesbians), cornbread and pecan dressing, biscuit, maybe some mashed potatoes (lest we die of carb deficiency at table), a few pies, a non-wheat dessert (the surprisingly lovely almond cake from IKEA? candied pecans and baked apples?) and whatever other oddments occur to me in the next 24 hours. (Gravy, ice cream for the pies, and other such condiments are implied, of course; and cheese, bread, nuts, and pear paste to build the appetite. Can't be too careful.)

The Dane-stralian family will be bringing green beans, cranberry sauce, and their very scrumptious nearly-3-year-old. I've been a boorish hostess and made it clear that no orange nonsense is welcome in cranberry sauce at my house, thank ye. Another friend is bringing a mushroom dish that apparently cooks for nine hours. I reckon we won't be TOO hungry after.

Meanwhile, what are YOU making (or eating) for Thanksgiving?

I thought perhaps it might be nice to play our old Come And Eat game this weekend, with posts about what you eat at Thanksgiving dinner or what you eat instead or what you do with the leftovers -- or what have you, my dear, benighted, unAmerican friends. (I admit that those of you with antipodean addresses are likely too high on the coming of spring to need a big feast to cheer you on, but the rest of y'all in northern climes must be dreading the dark, too. Nothing like a few thousand calories shoveled down in a single sitting to take the sting out of the coming of winter and/or prepare you for hibernation.)

So. Come And Eat, would you? Sign up below with the address of your food post, any time this weekend. Please paste the address of a particular post, not just your whole blog, so folks know where to comment.

Come and Eat: Oil Can What?

Okay, I've put this off long enough, eh? So please, Come and Eat.

Tonight, I'd like to introduce you to the collection:



(bigger here)

This isn't every can of olive oil we've ever purchased together, but it's close. Yes, that means we moved most of these halfway across the country. Because I am crazy. And because I had a vision of one day having a huge outdoor wedding party, with these as flower vases. (But mostly because I am crazy.)

The collection started when we lived in Chicago, on the far north side near the Indian neighborhood. We'd go to a certain discount grocery store out on Devon, where vegetables and spices and rice were cheap, and buy whatever oil they happened to have that time. Sometimes it was pretty good. Sometimes ...not so much. The worst was "El Toro" -- third from the right here -- but its can is one of my favorites, along with Alafia and La Regina. It makes me think of Ferdinand. Seriously terrible taste, though. Not recommended.

For years, I had no answer to the question everyone who sees the cans asks: which one was the best? You might have noticed that I like to think about (and talk about) food a great deal, so it was somewhat embarrassing to admit that, as long as the oil I eat every day in nearly every meal isn't El-Toro-wretched, apparently I pay it no mind. Regular con-a-sewer, right here.

Then I found Fortuna. I bought it at DiPalo's, on Grand Street in Little Italy, and it you live in New York and don't know what I'm talking about, it's high time you got off the computer and found out. (Be sure to stop by Alleva Dairy for some cheese while you're there. I bought the can on the far right there, just after we came to the city. I signed my credit card slip on top of a huge wheel of cheese.) I wanted to buy the cooler looking can -- red and blue and very 70's -- but the woman at the counter was having none of it. She all but forced me to buy the Fortuna, and was she ever right. It's a truly lovely oil, light and flowery. A little of that drizzled on some chickpeas and all's right with the world. Heavenly days.

So now I have a problem. Do I continue my tradition of buying a different can every time? It's getting harder. I have to go farther and farther afield to find ones I haven't bought before -- astute observers will note one brand appears twice, mostly out of desperation. Or do I recognize that I have found the perfect oil and settle in for a long and delicious run of monotonous appearances?

And what the heck flowers am I going to find tall enough to put in these cans anyway?


So, what are you up to this week? Paste the address of a post about a food or meal into Mr. Linky. Please paste the address of a particular post, not just your whole blog, so folks know where to comment. (And as always, please put a * by your name if your post features babies/pregnancy.)

Come And Eat: Beignets and Goat Tacos on Mothers' Day

Hello, internets. Did you make it through Mothers' Day? I hope so. I've read several thought-provoking posts on the subject in the last few days -- check out this or this or this. I've also been feeling grateful that Mothers' Day isn't a big deal in my family -- my mother had forgotten it was Mothers' Day until I called -- which I think makes it a less fraught day for me this year than it might be. (Or maybe it's just that I'm hopeful that next year will be different, thanks to the approaching IVF. I feel lucky to have that hope.)

In reading others' posts on the subject, though, I began to wonder if part of the reason Mothers' and Fathers' Days aren't big in my family is because my parents are IFers, too. Maybe they, too, got sick and tired of the holidays in the years they were trying to conceive. Maybe they chose to withdraw from them to protect themselves. Maybe the whole experience made them too aware that there's nothing fair about who does and doesn't get to celebrate those days.

When I was a child and my mother would refer to how it took her a long time to get pregnant, I shrugged it off -- obviously it didn't work quickly because the perfect combination of sperm and egg to make Wondrous Me doesn't just happen every day. I didn't think about how the wait might have made them frustrated or sad, because obviously it all worked out, right? It's only now, as I face some set-backs of my own (and so far for not nearly as long as my mother faced them, and with more medical help than she had available -- though she took what she could get: Clomid baby right here), that I begin to understand my mother a little better.

Which is, after all, a good thing to do on Mothers' Day.

Now. Please Come and Eat:

We started the morning with the kind of breakfast that you have to plan the night before: homemade beignets. We used this recipe, from a New Orleans cooking blog that hasn't lead me astray yet, and this week we learned from the tough mistakes of last week (yes, we will be big as houses soon, but HAPPY houses) and went easy on the kneading. I mixed up the dough on Saturday night, Sugar kneaded it just enough, and it sat in the refrigerator overnight. In the morning, Sugar rolled it out and cut the beignets, and after they rose again, I fried them in sunflower oil.








The blessed thing about beignets is that the recipe makes far more than we can eat ourselves. They allow us to enjoy the blessings of generosity. Last week and this, we packed up a bag of them for the Plant Whisperer, who spends this time of year raising operating funds for our community garden by luring everyone who walks within 6 blocks of the place in the gates and convincing them, in a mesmerizing display of virtuosity and salesmanship, to buy armloads of vegetable starts and blooming perennials and whatever else we've dug out of our beds for her to sell. The Plant Whisperer is no glutton, so it is especially gratifying to watch her devour food we've made.



We also carried a bag to the friend who lent us his car to look for a place to have our wedding party. We traded the newspaper-wrapped pile of powered sugar and dough for his keys, and drove out to the ocean at Fort Tilden, where we saw feral roses, a tiny crab, and the homey and welcoming Studio 7 of the Rockaway Artists' Alliance. It was very cold and the wind was fierce and exhausting. We did not find picnic shelters or anything else convincing in the way of a party-venue (though Studio 7 would be a great spot), but we did find a beach we'd like to return to in summer. And so ended the planned part of our day and our eating.

Since the friend of Automotive Generosity assured us he didn't need the car before midnight, we decided to bite the bullet and go buy the IKEA dining room chairs we'd been considering, despite the fact that the best color had been discontinued. Our current dining room chairs, found in Chicago alley several years ago, are vintage charmers, with turquoise vinyl upholstery and elegant chrome legs. Under the vinyl, the wooden seats are giving out, such that a slight shift in body weight can cause the legs to suddenly give way, tossing the erstwhile-seated guest floorward. The back legs extend too far back for our small apartment, and I've never felt the same about them since breaking my toe on one. We were hungry, but IKEA has cheap and acceptable food.

IKEA Brooklyn is in the remote neighborhood called Red Hook, known for its giant grocery store, its semi-decrepit shipping works, and for the best Central American food in the city, cooked by the vendors who come to the soccer fields there every summer weekend, selling elotes and pupusas and agua fresca to the Latin American families who come to play and watch the soccer games, and to people like us, who just like to eat well. We make the walk -- except for the shuttle buses and water taxis IKEA now runs, public transit to the area is dismal -- through the heat, over the stinking Gowanus canal, and under the rumbling Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in the summer time, but as it's several unpleasant miles from our neighborhood, we don't go as often as I'd be happy to eat the tacos and huaraches and ceviche sold there. I'm embarrassed to admit that we may not have gone at all last year, but I thought as I drove through the gnarls of traffic under the BQE that I'd have to do better this year, despite the sweaty, gritty walk, make a point of coming once the vendors arrived in June.


In the old days, before the city made them replace the tarps with trucks


At the huarache stand.


And then, like a dream, they were there: despite the cold and the wind, the vendors' trucks were lined up at the park, dispensing quesadillas and horchata and my favorite of all: goat tacos.



And the goat was sweet and tender, Sugar's tacos al pastor complex in their spices, and the watermelon agua fresca divine. A meal of grace: something you can't possibly plan for or make happen or even deserve, that you get to have anyway.




So...what are you eating this week? Paste the address of your food-related post in here, and we'll all come over to eat! (Please place a * after your name if your post is about pregnancy or children, for the sake of any in the ALI community who are presently in The Bad Place.)

Come and Eat Update

Hi gang,

Seeing as how several people have signed up recently on last week's Come and Eat list, how about we just have that one run for two weeks. I'll post a new sign up on Sunday or Monday.

Meanwhile, if you want to play (please play!) write a post about a meal, and put a link to that post (better than to just your blog's main page) on the Come And Eat list here.

Starting next week, it'll be weekly. For reals.

xo
Bionic

Photo Friday + Come and Eat Update

Since Calliope's fantabulous Photo Friday theme this week is food, I'm going to cheat and just re-run my the pictures from our inaugural Come and Eat post....

Yes, this is in fact a shameless plug invitation for you to use your Photo Friday submissions for Come and Eat, too.

C'mon, y'all. All the cool kids (Schroe, starhillgirl) are doin' it.

Come And Eat

My mother's favorite verse in the Bible is John 21:12. It's after the resurrection, and the disciples are fishing. A man on the shore calls out to them, hears that they are not catching much, and gives them some advice -- Try putting the nets on the other side of the boat. The nets fill up, the disciples realize the man is Jesus, and they begin to shout and carry on. Peter jumps into the water to swim to him. And Jesus says to them, "Come and eat breakfast."


Don't worry, my non-Bible-thumping ones. I'm not going to start sermonizing regularly. (For one thing, Sugar would have a fit. For another, I'm an Episcopalian, and we know our limits. Ours is not to preach but to polish old wood pews, to wring our hands over "tradition", and to try not to spill our martinis on the needlepoint pillows....) Take comfort: the Bible-thumpers are clucking their tongues over my lowercase "him" above -- I like Jesus better as a son of man than as a son of God, sometimes. I am an equal-opportunity offender.

Come to it, that verse might be my favorite, too. It gets to the heart of my beliefs about human connection: that the best way to show (and to build) our love for each other is to break bread. This idea is hardly unique to Christianity, I realize, nor to religion.

So, please: come and eat with me.


I'd like to invite you to last Sunday's dinner. It was a quiet affair, at home in our cluttered apartment. I'd rather cook and drink wine and talk to you than wipe down the backsplash; I hope you don't mind. I started cooking a little later than I meant to, so we'll all have to sit around and talk while the food finishes. Sugar made a pie, whose crust she almost wouldn't let me take pictures of, because the weather is damp and the dough was testy and she was afraid you'd disapprove. But I know you'll see that pie as more perfect because of the fingerprints left from her mending the dough. (And I assure you, it tastes just fine.) The pie is made of rhubarb -- which always makes me think of Sugar's grandmother, who grows stalks taller than she is -- and strawberries for the coming of summer and peaches from the freezer, a last-minute improvisation when the strawberries and rhubarb didn't fill the shell.







You'll meet my most long-standing friend, who sat on my mother's pregnant belly as a baby and started crying when I kicked her. She's still threatening to get me back for that, but I say it was fairly dealt: she SAT on me, after all. Our mothers were close during their pregnancies and her mother watched us both as babies, so we are built of some of the same food. (These days, I take some comfort in the knowledge that none of that would have happened if my mother had been able to get pregnant when she'd first wanted to. No Bug in my life? Impossible.) I can't believe that after being separated as young children, we've ended up living three blocks from each other, hundreds of miles from our various early homes. Womb Buddy's talking about moving away, and we're trying to talk her out of it but mostly trying to feed her well while she's here, make sure the bonds of shared food stay strong.


Israeli couscous with broccoli rabe -- I don't know how this is supposed to be cooked, but this is how I cook it.


And now, if you'd like, it's your turn. I've read some beautiful posts about food and eating together on your blogs recently (to say nothing of my ongoing delight in starhillgirl's requests to log my lunch) which inspired this attempted meme. Add your name and blog to the Mr. Linky list, and write a post about a meal this week. The ways food bonds us are multifarious, so your post can be pictures of a meal you made, a favorite or new recipe, a shared croissant with an old friend at a coffee shop. It can be wordy or just a picture.

I'll write one of these every week and invite you to do the same, like an edible version of Mel's (late, lamented) Show and Tell. Visit each other's posts, please, and write comments to let folks know you've come to the table. If you're writing about kids or babies -- and I hope you will, because I believe feeding children is about much, much more than just making sure they don't starve to death -- put a * after your name, in case ALI (adoption/loss/infertility) folks aren't in a good place for that. (Tip o' the cursor to Calliope's excellent suggestion at her Photo Friday project.)

(This is my first time using Mr. Linky, so maybe leave a comment, too, in case I didn't do it right.)