COUPLED UP

Last wedding post, I promise. (And it wasn’t even my wedding!) The day of Meredith’s wedding, it poured rain, which at first was stressful, but in retrospect was kind of nice. Everything was foggy and cool and sort of mysterious looking, in that Twin Peaks-kind of way. Definitely preferable to the scorching 100+ degree temperatures we were enduring only days earlier.

THANK YOU MOMS

So many rad photos of moms floating around the internet today.

Happy Mother’s Day!

STAYING CLOSE

A recent post from For Me, For You almost made me lose it. When do you know if a place is your home? How do you know? In the last two years alone, I’ve lived in Ithaca, Portland, San Diego, and Montreal. The first three places all felt like home to me. Montreal, I don’t know. I don’t know if it feels like home to me yet. But will it soon? And how will I know? What makes a place “home”, anyway?

I just returned from four blissful days in Ithaca. It is the town where I became an adult, it is the town where I started my life as a writer, my life that I wanted to have, that I chose to have. It is the town where I fell in love for the first time, where I discovered cooking, where I adopted Joni. It was the town where I got my first real job, where I learned how to ride a bike, where I learned how to live alone. Even though it felt so deeply good to be back in Ithaca this past weekend, it’s not my home anymore.

What is home? For me, home is where I feel at peace. Where I feel complete and whole. Where my heart feels content and happy, even though my life — like anyone else’s — is often pierced with confusion and uncertainty. But after only half a year in Portland — and plenty of murky ambiguity — I knew unequivocally that it was my home. After (almost!) the same amount of time here, I feel less sure. Part of it is a new city, in a new country, with a foreign language; part of it is lack of family, lack of hearts that sing straight into mine. I know these things take time; I wonder how long I should wait.

That’s enough overshare for now. But tell me: What is home? When will we feel at rest? I’ve posted this before, but it bears repeating, as a mantra, or a reminder, or a prayer:

Truly, truly you couldn’t speak of discovery of the unknown unless you were unknowing. You have to make a room inside your own ego for what you don’t yet understand, and hold open the possibility that this is what you’re actually looking for. And that then becomes a very personal matter rather than a universal one, because you can’t account for what other people don’t know. But you can acknowledge inside yourself those things which you did not perceive until the encounter forced you into a recognition. You cannot keep score of that for anyone else, but you can acknowledge transformation of your own perception by experience. When you find something about yourself, you don’t throw it away, it’s a treasure. It’s symbolically very important because it acknowledges a transformation in yourself.

PINK SPOT

Miss my kitty today. That’s all.

HIGH CONCENTRATE

I will rarely slavishly follow a recipe’s directions — it’s just not my style, too fussy and doesn’t feel me — but in the case of a big, British, uber-traditional roast beef, I knew had to get it right.

It all began on a recent trip to NYC, where we bought a used copy of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s weighty tome The River Cottage Meat Book. It’s not perfect — his long-winded rhetoric could definitely use a judicious round of heavy editing — but there are some gems buried in all of the redundant technical chatter. For one, he presents a near-flawless argument for dry-aging meat, and his menu for roast beef looked particularly tantalizing (admittedly because of all of the tasty side dishes, including my favorite: Yorkshire pudding).

So, we decided to do it. Exactly by the book. (One link to the recipe can be found here). And after plenty of research, we decided to buy a hefty five pound roast — dry-aged no less than 30 days — from La Jolla’s butcher, Homegrown Meats. It wasn’t cheap  (I’ll spare you the knowledge of just how much it cost), but the rich, deeply concentrated flavor of grass-fed, dry-aged beef is utterly indescribable. As a once-in-a-lifetime thing, it’s worth doing.  

Naturally, I was in charge of the Yorkshire pudding (surprisingly easy, and results astonishingly moist) laced with glistening roast beef drippings, pan-fried leeks with shards of kale, buttered peas with torn mint, and hand-folded horseradish cream (made with creme fraiche and fresh horseradish root, be super careful when you shave it up, it cleared my sinuses rather furiously). I also made a quick appetizer of mashed potato croquettes (in homemade breadcrumbs with parsley), which was pared with Adam’s sauteed lobster tail. On his part, Adam was in charge of the wine (definitely the most important task), sauteed mushrooms, thick red wine gravy, as well as jointly keeping an eye on the roast.

British food, in my opinion, is not one of the world’s…. greatest cuisines, but this meal — so quintessentially English in nature — happens to be one of my very favorites.

OSSO BUCO FANTASIES

At home, I finally tackled one of my very favorite untouchable ‘restaurant’ dishes: osso buco, Italian for ‘bone with a hole’. A savory, rustic Milanese veal dish — perhaps no other dish is a better pairing for a frigid winter night — osso buco partly derives its intense richness from hours of braising exposed bone marrow, which gently leeches its jellied fats into a thick burgundy sauce. The resultant braise is imparted with an ineffable meaty richness that is truly incomparable. In fact, the best part of the meal might be at the finish, when the bone’s exterior has been picked clean and the inner marrow ready to be scooped out with a spoon. (I prefer the bone marrow — perhaps too rich to eat on its own — to be spread on a piece of fresh bread and sprinkled with plenty of gremolata, and chopped shallots, too, if you happen to have it).

I picked the traditional River Cafe recipe for its purist ingredient list (no anchovys this time) and verdant gremolata (I used lemon zest, parsley, and an excessive amount of raw garlic), and at the market splurged on three gorgeous, juicy, thick-cut veal shins. After two and a half hours, the veal was impossibly tender, the sauce luscious and shiny. Although traditionally served with a risotto Milanese (that’s with saffron), I had my heart set on a fluffy mashed potato bed to soak up the crimson juices. And to finish, the apple cake that I am sure we are all tired of by now, but which I cannot seem to get enough.

As you can see, we weren’t the only admirers of my osso buco — poor little Joni patiently watched the festivities from the sidelines. We satiated her little feline appetite with small bites of veal… there was certainly more than enough to share.

EVE OF HOT POT

Hot pot is a culinary Chinese tradition that can be interpreted in an infinite number of ways. In our family, we tend to keep things simple and spicy. Every year, instead of anticipating Christmas morning with an overstuffed turkey and the requisite side dishes, we usher in the holidays with a festive Christmas eve meal of hot pot.

Heaping platters of finely sliced raw meats — including lamb, chicken, beef, or pork — are placed alongside plates of raw seafood like shrimp or fish. The tissue-thin slivers of raw meat — the thinner the cut, the faster (and better) it cooks — are poached in a tiny mesh basket that is carefully lowered into a hot pot full of bubbling water.  A variety of other aromatics, including snow peas, rice noodles, sprouts, mushrooms, lettuce and spinach, also flavor the broth. Finally, the cooked meats and vegetables are doused in our homemade savory peanut-sesame dipping sauce, and carefully tucked into a pita-like toasted Chinese bread.

At our house, the piping-hot bites are punctuated with ceramic cups filled with dangerously potent Chinese sorghum whisky. At the close of the meal, the reduced hot pot broth is ladled out like soup and slurped down with plenty of hot sauce. I’d choose it over a plate of dried-out turkey any day.

TIME WARP

Me with my family back in my mom’s Cal Arts days. Although I look quite different now, my mother, 20 years later, looks exactly the same.