Four authors from GOOD and three from ReadyMade, of whom I am one, have teamed up to write a special section in GOOD’s Winter 2010 issue. The GOOD (and ReadyMade) Guide to Slowing Down is online now, and if I say so myself, it’s a fun read.
Two quotes I liked from Adam Gopnik’s article about van Gogh’s ear in the January 4 edition of the NYker. (Incidentally, I didn’t know before reading the article that van Gogh was notoriously, maybe even annoyingly voluble; I am curious now to read some of his letters, which seem to be available in Penguin Classics form.)
On art-making:
“Where art since the Renaissance had attempted to limit luck in a system of inherited purpose and patterns, modern art demands that you press the pedal as hard as you can, and pray.”
On van Gogh’s dream of creating an artistic community in Arles:
“You always begin with a dream of community—Braque and Picasso in the bohemian hermitage Bateau Lavoir; the handful of painters brave enough to go abstract in the Cedar Tavern—and end with a reality of competitiveness and assault, suspicion and estrangement. …
…The real community is not that of charmed artists living like monks but the distant dependencies of isolated artists and equally isolated viewers, who together make the one kind of community that modernity allows.”
The one kind of community that modernity allows? Discuss amongst yourselves.
When I get up to the seventh floor of the Hotel Fort Des Moines, I inhale and think, “grandma’s house.” Not my grandma, though not unlike my grandma—it’s the essence of grandparents: dark, out-of-date colors and most of all that smell, like baby powder, Neutrogena hand soap, and something else—is it aging wallpaper paste? It’s been two months since my last visit, and I’m so glad to be back.
I love it here. I love the mottled green carpeting, the luxurious down-at-heel-ness of the rooms. The way it’s hard to find the light switch and when you do there’s the floral bedspread, the wallpaper with its ticking stripe, the few spots of rust on the sliding door of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. I have waited all day to take my things out of the green backpack, hang some of them in the closet and spread the others out on the luggage rack. To take my toiletries out of the ziploc bag; they’re all in tiny little bottles (thanks, Muji); I’ve gotten so good at traveling in the last eight months, shuttling back and forth from New York City to Des Moines, and a few other fun trips but this is business. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t fun too, unloading the books and folders and power cords from my handbag, placing things in neat stacks with plenty of right angles before going downstairs for dinner. The guy at the front desk greeted me in the fashion of someone who isn’t overtaxed by human interaction, and I appreciate that after New York. He has short hair, wears tiny studs in his ears, and seems genuinely pleased to welcome me.
There’s a storm front coming across the country. My weather widget warned of a Wednesday low of zero degrees. It isn’t that cold yet but the snow is expected. I am a little frightened of the possibility of intense cold but maybe excited even more than that. I unpacked the black long johns that I can wear under my jeans if necessary, set them on the luggage rack. Walking home from the office, the lights of town and the Christmas lights look sensational in the cold. Our courtesy driver from the airport says the only sign she’s had of global warming in her own life is that when she was a girl there were municipal skating rinks at some lagoons downtown, and that the same lagoons no longer reliably freeze. Yesterday in New York felt seasonably cool but it’s been a sickeningly warm November. And so the cold is bracing, seems right. I read the paper on the airplane and I’m thinking about Copenhagen, wanting to read more, trying to hold onto a diffuse sense of hopefulness.
As I unpack the clothes I feel so relieved to have a little space and time in this room with the floral bedspread, the wooden clothes hangers. With two tiny closets and a bathroom and a microwave/coffee maker nook and a sitting room distinct from the bedroom, the space is almost enough to describe as a warren. I feel like myself again, after not feeling especially like myself all day, and it’s mostly good. I think about loneliness and/or aloneness, and my relationship with it; I think about my grandmother, and I don’t believe in ghosts but if I did, now would be a good time to; she’s been on my mind a lot lately. And she stayed here once or more, I found out, at the Hotel Fort Des Moines (other people who stayed here, according to the Hotel Trivia inkjet-printed on vellum in the information binder: Walter Mondale, Richard Nixon, Nikita Kruschev, the first George Bush, Charles Lindbergh, Woodrow Wilson). My father told me she did, after I told him about staying here the first time, and mentioned that I’d found out that some people who travel to this city on business avoid the hotel because they don’t think it’s modern enough, but it makes me feel at home. And maybe it’s the snow, or something, that has me remembering how my grandmother liked hotels, how my father says that when there was a snowstorm in Washington, where she lived, something that would make getting home from work difficult, she used to get a room for herself at the Mayflower, one of her favorite places on earth, and stay there overnight. I’m wondering what she did, what she thought, how she felt during those times. I’m thinking that if I could do it, I’d come to a hotel on purpose, too, when I needed to get some work or some thinking done. Like Bob Dylan. Like my grandmother. The grandmother I look like, the one I wish I’d gotten to know better. Sometimes I wonder whether I’m on to something with this sense of similarity between us. Maybe we would have understood each other.
The fitness center in the hotel is two treadmills and an elliptical trainer shut into a room the size of a walk-in closet. The swimming pool exists but is closed for renovations; it was closed for renovations last time I was here and something tells me that even then it hadn’t closed recently. It is hard to square the small, spare fitness center with the idea that this is a hotel that’s hosted heads of state, and trying to do so makes me think about how big the country is, how there’s more to it than my own bloated metropolis. “The breadbasket,” I thought today, as the plane descended through the clouds long enough for us to see rectangular fields outlined in light snow. Where did that phrase come from? Elementary school?
“I think you’re an East Coast girl,” said my sister, when we were talking about places to live. “Or Portland. But—”
“But what?”
“But you’re kind of—”
“Too uptight to live on the West Coast?”
“Yes!”
We had a laugh. It feels good to draw my imaginary oval smaller.
Three times ago when I came to Des Moines I had a cab driver take me to the airport on Sunday after a weekend of very few people. The last thing I was expecting here was to meet an African immigrant who had only been in town for two weeks. He had just moved here from New Orleans or Tampa or something unlikely. I forget why. He did not like Des Moines very much, yet. He asked me where I felt at home. He told me something about feeling at home, in the abstract, about the soil, about there being some soil that you want to fall down on, to touch, to mix with. It did not sound ridiculous when he said it. There was a place that had made him feel this way. It was not Des Moines and it was not the place he was originally from or the place he had just come from, either. I couldn’t bring myself to ask why, having the beliefs he had about places, he was no longer in the one whose soil had felt just right to him. Neither of us knew how to get to the address where I was going, and when we finally did arrive there, I was late. He scribbled his name and his dispatcher’s number on the back of a card and told me to call him if I ever again needed a ride in Des Moines, that we could continue our conversation about dislocation, home, and the purpose of life. I kept the card but I have not called him again yet. I have not given up thinking that I might still. Maybe we’d get it all figured out.
I wish I had all night. Des Moines has a soporific effect on me. I’m sure I’ll be in bed by 11. But there are things I want to do, pieces of work in the folders and notebooks. They’ll stay there, at their right angles, and my thoughts and words will grow less precise as the half-hours pass. I feel good, I told my friend in an Instant Message earlier in the day; there’s a storm front coming, and I have a warm hotel room in a building with a French bistro attached. I went, I had dinner. All the servers attentive yet somewhat awkward, and me too, and what is that? Is it weird to be alone, or weird to act French in the middle of a chilly, windswept continent? A man in a big party at the table behind me made an awkward joke about how he ended up married to one rather than another of the women in the party. Someone told someone it had been nice to meet them. “Thanks for coming out,” she said, as they all stood up and tossed down their napkins. There are enormous copper-colored Christmas balls on ribbons hanging from the ceiling, and on the wall, soft lights wrapped around real pine boughs. There’s 12-year-old Laphroaig scotch on the menu. Her favorite. Tastes like bandages. Maybe tomorrow night, I think, I’ll come down after working on projects, and have one for Lois. I’ll sit there and try to figure out what she used to feel.
[Thanks for the image, Seattle Stranger. I am in love with the elevators, too.]
I was just on the adorable looking British website Smallholder (in the UK, a smallholder is someone who lives on and farms a small parcel of land), and came across this banner ad.
What is this magical spray that alleviates stress, and why is it being wasted on animals? I want a spritz.
My essay, “Scattershot, Desperate and Sleazy,” is up now at the n+1 website. It’s about everyone’s favorite topic, online dating, and was originally written for, and read at, the Spring 2009 installment of the Brooklyn Rail’s Rant Rhapsody reading series.
If you read it, let me know what you think.
Update: It got published in n+1 number 8, with an even better title that I did not give it, “R We Going 2 Dai Alone?”
I’m so delighted to have just bought a new cookbook.
When I first moved to New York in 2003, as my only reader will know, I got a job working at a Soho coffee shop called Once Upon a Tart. Owned by a tall Frenchman given to double entendres, Once Upon a Tart kept me busy during the daylight hours, and fed around the clock. For shift lunch, I was allowed to fix myself up a lavish (and ridiculously healthful) plate of homemade salads, with a cup of vegetable soup and a piece of good bread. At the end of the day, when I put the store’s un-sold wares into large black plastic garbage bags to be hauled away by City Harvest, I always saved out a few items for myself. So even in my off time, I pretty much lived on sandwiches from the Tart: sliced pork loin, goat cheese with marinated radicchio, broccoli raab with sundried tomatoes and fresh mozzarella on cibatta, turkey with cranberry chutney and brie and frisee. They were really good toasted in the oven at home.
Perhaps the most sublime gastronomical moment at the Tart, though, happened on Saturday mornings. I worked the opening shift, so I had to be there before 7am. Getting up that early, often hung over, was pure torture, but I liked the walk down deserted Bedford Aveune, the navigation of an almost-empty subway system, and the emergence at Broadway and Prince, always flecked with trash from Friday night’s revelry. I’d walk the few blocks to Sullivan Street just as the sun was coming up, and duck under the half-raised metal grate into the store. One or two bakers had gotten there earlier than I, and before I wheeled the serving carts into place, brewed coffee, unwrapped all the cookies and pastries that had been carefully wrapped the night before, and did all the other tasks involved in getting the shop open for business, I’d enjoy a magical moment: picking which warm-from-the-oven variety of baked good to start my day with. A dried cranberry scone, crusted on the outside with fine baking sugar? An apple-cranberry muffin? Ginger-pear? A walnut scone, like a huge warm cookie with a dollop of apricot jam swimming in the center? As often as not, I chose a currant-buttermilk scone, and ate it with the first cup from the first airpot of coffee I brewed. It was a supremely civilized way to start a day of service.
So, during my time working at Once Upon a Tart, the owners of the business published a cookbook. At the time, I didn’t have $27.50 to spare on a book, and I had no way of knowing how nostalgic the dishes prepared at the shop would become for me. But I was on Abebooks.com not too long ago, and something inspired me to pick up a copy of the Once Upon a Tart Cookbook, by Frank Mentesana and Jerome Audreau. It came in the mail last week, and it’s been a glorious reunion. I can’t wait to make so many of the recipes that I remember from years ago. Leafing through the book has been trippy, especially looking at the photographs: I remember those window displays! Those glass cake stands! That blackened baking sheet!
There’s more I want to say about the Tart and the memories I have of it, but let me cut to the chase. Though I’m not usually much of a baker, the first recipe from the book I ventured to try was the one for currant-buttermilk scones.
I happened to be awake and dressed and home earlier than usual last Saturday morning. A and A were still asleep in their room. I’d picked up some buttermilk a few days before. All was in readiness. I decided to wake up the household with scones.
Currant-Buttermilk Scones
from Once Upon a Tart, by Frank Mentesana and Jerome Audreau
I made a half recipe–scones don’t keep well–so I’ll give the halved recipe here. This makes 5 scones.
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1.5 teaspoons baking powder
.5 teaspoon baking soda
.25 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup sugar
10 tablespoons (1.25 sticks) cold butter, cut into 1/4-inch cubes
1 large egg
half cup cold buttermilk
1.5 teaspoons vanilla extract
half cup dried currants
1. Position your oven racks so one is in the center of your oven. (The recipe in your book says to line your baking sheet with parchment paper, but I didn’t do this, and suffered no ill effects.)
2. Dump the dry ingredients into the bowl of a food processor (I used A’s Kitchen Aid stand mixer, for the first time ever, with the paddle attachment. It worked just great.) Pulse a few times to mix them.
3. Add the butter all at once, and run the food processor for 15 seconds. Switch to pulse, and continue pulsing until there are no chunks left and the mixture looks like moist crumbs. Be careful not to over-mix the ingredients. (Note: this took a lot longer with the Kitchen Aid, but the point is that you don’t want to over-mix the butter because if you blend the hell out of everything, you’ll get a flat, overly dense scone.) Remove the blade from the food processor, and dump the crumbs into a big bowl.
4. In another, small bowl, whisk the eggs to break up the yolks. Whisk in the buttermilk and vanilla. Stir in the currants.
5. Pour the wet ingredients into the bowl with the ‘crumbs,’ and stir with a wooden spoon. Stop as soon as no flour is visible. You don’t want to work the dough a moment longer than necessary.
6. Use a half-cup measuring cup or your hand (KS note: Your hand! It’s fun!) to scoop the batter out, and plop it onto the baking sheet, leaving 2 inches between the scones.
7. Place the baking sheet on the center rack in the oven, and bake the scones for 25-30 minutes, or until the tops are golden brown and a small knife or toothpick inserted into the center of one comes out clean.
8. Remove the baking sheet from the oven, and place it on a rack to cool for a few minutes. Use a spatula to transfer the scones to the rack or a serving dish. Serve fresh out of the oven or at room temperature. (KS note: Um, if AT ALL possible, serve them fresh out of the oven. Duh!)
A few more notes; I can’t resist. While the scones bake, your house will fill up with the heavenly smell of pastry. The scones aren’t too sweet, and they’re nice and buttery: you definitely won’t need to spread butter on them before you eat them. They turned out quite well—they really did taste like the ones I remember from the shop—even though I forgot the quarter-teaspoon of salt, though they’d probably have been even better with. While the scones bake, and the house fills with that wonderful smell, you can clear away the mess (and actually there’s much less mess than if you were to have cooked, say, a whole dinner), and when your housemates walk into the room rubbing their eyes, you can be sitting there fresh as a daisy saying, hey guys, I made breakfast!
In conclusion: I love the Kitchen Aid. I love scones. I love Frank Mentesana and Jerome Audreau. I love the weekend.
Thursday evening, 8:25 p.m.
A’s beau came up from Virginia for the weekend. He is a good guest.
Being a good guest is an underrated, or under-discussed, art in itself.
On the table: beer cocktails, in this case Guinness with cassis lambic. Not sure it was a brilliant combination, but it’s fun to sit around pouring and sipping and comparing notes.
Tapioca grosses a lot of people out. There are many who’ve never even tried it. Yes, it’s the same shape as that fish-bait-smelling fish roe that you get at sushi restaurants sometimes if you’re not careful. But it’s pretty benign, just round and chewy. Suspended in a creamy, delicately vanilla-flavored pudding base, I like it a lot. Tapioca pudding is a fine old-fashioned dessert/snack, a hefty smack of sugar and starch and fat that you can tell yourself is still all right because it’s made with lots of milk.
Anyway, I tried to make tapioca pudding a few times in grad school, with mixed results (good flavor, bad texture; seems I bought regular tapioca pearls when the recipe called for quick-cooking, or something, so I ended up stirring for 45 minutes in disbelief, and still producing something like parboiled BBs of starch in a lovely pudding matrix). Anyway, I thought I’d learned something from that experience and that I’d give it another shot last week. I couldn’t find the recipe I had used before, so I bummed around on the internet until I found something that looked reasonably tasty.
I have to say: some of the things I cook in the kitchen are better, some are worse, but I don’t usually choke completely. This pudding, I ate half a serving of and actually ended up throwing the rest away. It wasn’t inedible, but it definitely wasn’t what I had in mind. Words I would use to describe it include rubbery, eggy, singed, and badly seasoned. I tried to surmise some of what went wrong, below, but if you have tapioca pudding insights, please feel free to share them with me. I’d like to know how to make this campy, comforting dish, and it doesn’t seem as though it should be that hard to.
Tapioca Failure
1/2 cup small pearl tapioca
3 cups milk (I used 2%)
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
Mix tapioca, milk, and salt; simmer five minutes, add sugar gradually
Beat the eggs in a bowl
Mix some of the hot tapioca mixture into the eggs, a spoonful at a time, to warm the eggs up so that they don’t cook suddenly when they hit the pot, curdling the mixture
Mix in the warmed up egg mixture with the tapioca mixture on the stove
Bring this to a boil slowly, stirring the whole time
Stir constantly for a few minutes at low heat, until you get a pudding-like consistency
Cool for 15 minutes, add vanilla
Serve warm or chill and then serve (I did the latter)
Notes on a Tapioca Failure
Well, there were a few things that went wrong. First, I slightly burned the tapioca and milk mixture early on, creating these gummy, menstrual-looking brown bits that kept detaching from the bottom of the pot. Don’t be fooled when it says “simmer several minutes.” You have to keep stirring the entire time, to prevent burning.
Likewise, the whole thing of warming up the egg mixture. Do not skimp. Add lots of spoonfuls and get the eggs good and hot. I think I didn’t do enough of this, because my final pudding had a perceptible egginess to it, as if it were full of microscopic particles of cooked egg. I do not think that is what the recipe was aiming for.
Some tapioca recipes ask you to soak the tapioca in water overnight to soften it before cooking. This recipe didn’t, but I think it would be a good idea. The tapioca balls in this seemed almost, but not quite done. Still a little too chewy. Ew. Also I think I prefer large pearl tapioca to small pearl, and which would doubtless take a lot longer to cook, so soaking seems wise.
In the end, the vanilla flavor was overdone and cloying. I think that is partly what I get for buying the cheapest vanilla at the store, and partly what I get for pouring in a bit too much (demoralized by early indications that this recipe wasn’t going to turn out, viz. menstrual-looking bits, I’d lost the discipline to use measuring spoons).
Consistency: I was worried while cooking that the pudding wouldn’t be firm enough, but in the end, it chilled down to a rubbery consistency, almost reminiscent of those pale-blue dissection mats we used to use in high school biology class. Not ideal. Should I have stopped cooking when the pudding looked a lot more watery? But then the pearls would have been even more underdone. Anyway, maybe the lesson is that if you’re going to chill the pudding, it will set up a lot, so you don’t need to cook it to the consistency you’d want to eat it at.
All in all, I think I could have gone to buy a tub of cool, delicious Kozy Shack Tapioca Pudding for approximately the price I paid for the ingredients of this homemade disaster. I think I may attempt tapioca pudding again at some point—if for no other reason than I can hardly imagine what else I’ll do with the extra tapioca balls I now own—but I think I’ll try a different recipe if I do. Perhaps you know a good one?
Quotidian lunch, extraordinary gadget: still life with broccoli, sardine toasts, New Yorker, and brand new iPhone.
I know five people who live in a house in West Philadelphia. One of them, I’ve known for a really long time. He told me, on behalf of all the people, that I could come down and stay in their spare room for a few days and check Philadelphia out.
The house looks out over a Sunoco gas station and an A+ market. It appears pretty anonymous from the outside.
Inside, it has things that New Yorkers can only dream about: six bedrooms, miles of creaky staircase, a heartbreakingly ornate wooden mantlepiece and banister that you can chisel white paint off of if you are bored.
The occupants bought an old, single-head espresso machine at a property auction, or something, last year, and hooked it up to the plumbing under their sink so that it has its own water supply. It kicks the pants off any yuppie made-for-home model you can imagine. The floors in this house may be sticky, the high-ceilinged rooms a little cold, but you can creak downstairs and make yourself a fresh Americano whenever you want. Naturally, I exercised this power several times a day.
Wanting to thank my hosts for putting me up and for sharing their food and coffee beans, I decided to get groceries and cook dinner one night. I picked a one-pot meal from my past—lentil stew, which is pretty much the first complete dinner I learned how to make after moving out of the dorms in college. I still make it every now and then. It’s cheap, makes good leftovers, and tastes better than a lot of more complicated things.
Then I ended up expanding beyond the one pot. They had such a nice collection of well-seasoned cast irons! So, dinner, in three acts (actually better if you start the stew first and then make the other things while it’s cooking):
I. Bacon on the Side
One-half package of the cheap bacon: $1.24
Cook the bacon. Drain on paper towels. Give it to everyone who’s not a vegetarian. Normally, I’d put some bacon into the lentil stew…but I kind of liked it this way. If you’re going to eat bacon, you might as well freaking eat bacon?
II. Lentil Stew
One bag lentils ($1.39)
Two small onions ($.36)
Three carrots ($.34)
Several stalks of celery ($.79)
One tablespoon dried thyme ($.75)
Olive oil
One bay leaf
Three cloves garlic
Price per serving: $.91
Chop the onions, carrots, and celery into small pieces.
Heat olive oil in the bottom of a large, heavy pan, add the onion, and cook on medium heat until the onion is soft. Add the carrots and celery, and cook a few minutes more.
Rinse the lentils and drain them. Add them to the cooking vegetables, along with the thyme, bay leaf, and three cloves of garlic (peeled and smashed with the flat edge of a knife). Add about six cups of water and raise to a boil. Add some salt and maybe some pepper. Then turn the heat down and simmer, uncovered, for about half an hour.
Stir occasionally, especially as the water begins to really cook off. Cook it until the lentils are done and breaking up a little, and enough of the water has gone to make for a nice, stew-y consistency.
Serve with red wine vinegar on top. This stays hot like molten lava, so be careful not to burn your mouth.
III. Blanched and Sauteed Kale
One bunch kale ($.99)
Three shallots ($.65)
Olive oil
Lots of salt
Price per serving: $.41
Anna taught me this method for cooking greens. I don’t think I practice it quite as well as she does but I still get pretty good results: it takes bitterness out, makes classic tough greens super tender, and somehow locks in a beautiful, preternatural green color that’s better than what you started with.
Boil a very large pot of very, very salty water. (I probably used four or five tablespoons of kosher salt in mine.) While it’s boiling, wash the kale, then take the whole bunch and use a large knife to slice it into very thin strips. (Anna calls this a chiffonade and does it more carefully, usually, but then it’s hard to do it carefully with kale which is so curly anyway.)
Add the greens to the boiling water. Put the lid back on. Bring it back to a boil as fast as you can, and watch the greens intently. They probably only need about two to three minutes. When they’re almost tender enough to eat, strain them into a colander. Actually, plunging them into a big ice-water bath is best. But this time I got away with just pouring them out into a strainer and running cold tap water over them to stop the cooking.
Once they’re pretty cool, you can set them aside until you’re ready for this next step. Chop up the shallots into fine strips, and cook them in olive oil until they’re getting just a little bit browned. Add the kale and sauté it until it’s just ready to eat. It should be soft but not so over-cooked that it loses its freaky greenness. If the blanching water was salty enough, you won’t need to add more salt.
It feed four, with enough left over for a midnight snack. Also, I think this dinner might be some kind of personal budget recipe record so far: a complete meal for $1.63 a person. Here’s hoping they don’t take the cheapskate-ness into account when deciding whether or not to have me back again. The love it was made with? That was priceless.
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