Notes from the Prep List: Eggplant

As seen in a slightly different form on Food Riot.com, part of the Riot New Media Group, October 3rd, 2013.

"Somebody brought a few foxglove leaves in with some spinach from the garden...." - Agatha Christie, Postern of Fate

Maybe because I’ve read too many inter-war British murder mysteries to trust any member of the nightshade family, or maybe because my expectations are always baffled by the slightly slimy reality, I’ve struggled with eggplant for years. All the breading, soaking, and searing in the world won’t make an eggplant cutlet into a Wiener schnitzel no matter what it looks like on the plate. Baba ganoush is delicious and nutritious but it’s as drab looking as wallpaper paste. And when people claim to love eggplant, I can’t help but view them with a Miss Marple-esqe suspicion – if the butler didn’t do it, then the murderous culprit was definitely the gardener who substituted deadly nightshade for salad greens; who could love such a fiend? 

So, when eggplant appeared on a prep list of never-tried preparations, I was skeptical. Eggplant gets all squishy when cooked, the flesh texturally similar to an overripe banana, the skin as tough as a shark’s. In a restaurant where everything is beautiful, and on a menu with no room for the word “gloopy,” I was even a little bit balky. But cooking is about learning, and the culinary horizon recedes even as you think you’ve gained ground because quail eggs no longer give you the heebie jeebies…. There was nothing for it but to sally forth. 

My first step was to make a mental shift from the name “eggplant,” which conjures images of a sulfurous garden patch littered with shells and broken yolks, to the more European “aubergine,” which sounds like the name of a French exchange student who hasn’t yet lost her baby fat. (I like the idea of Aubergine and Courgette sharing a tiny apartment during their second semester at NYU, meeting for falafels in Washington Square, struggling to make ends meet, but generally having a good time in the big American city. Courgette has more boyfriends, but Aubergine finds her true love: math major and trombone aficionado Celeriac.)

The aubergines in the walk-in are beautiful, it’s true. A hotel pan of purple. Helpful website “Cook’s Thesaurus” lists no fewer than 14 varieties of eggplants, as well as their respective names, regions, skin-thicknesses, and relative bitterness. (A complete collection of eggplants from around the world is as diverse as the students in one of Aubergine’s night-school ESL classes.) We’re using Japanese eggplant, which are less bulbous than the American variety, and less bitter. Instead of the dark, brooding purple of a mid-winter night sky, the Japanese eggplants are cheerful and bright, like parasols or lilacs or silk blouses. Their looks are not their problem, for sure.

The recipe has me split the eggplant lengthwise, roll the halves in olive oil, salt, and black pepper, line them on a large sheet pan (which I oiled beforehand) and roast until tender. Which happens a little faster than you might think. When they’re pulled from the oven, the bright purple is all gone and the vegetables resemble old black ballet slippers. Yum! That’s not sad-making at all!

After they’ve cooled, scrape the flesh into a large stainless steel bowl and add a good amount of nuoc cham. Wait, what? That’s right. We’re not climbing into the northern Italian Alps for this eggplant dish, nor are we stepping off the gangplank in Tunisia. We’re in Hanoi, baby.  (That the eggplants are Japanese and the preparation is Vietnamese is just a coincidence; you are not getting involved in a land-war in Asia.)

Nuoc cham is a traditional Vietnamese dipping sauce made with garlic, chili peppers, lime juice, and fish sauce. I like adding a pinch of sugar, a little Sambal, and I think thinly sliced Serrano peppers are delicious in this. I’ve found that “Three Crabs” fish sauce draws the fewest cats, but do expect a certain, um, robustness to the smell.

For twenty split eggplants, add two cups or even more of nuoc cham. Right now the preparation will resemble a slippery pile of sardines, or newspaper ready for a papier-mâché project. Add a half cup of mint chiffonade and a full cup of basil chiffonade. Taste for salt and spice. You may notice the flavor of the eggplant has become slightly sweet, you many also notice yourself eating a lot of this before you label the container and put it on the prep shelf. Hmmm. Perhaps the problem was trying to make aubergine something it is not – it is spongey, it is weird, it isn’t ever going to sear perfectly, and maybe that’s okay….tasting it again as an accompaniment to scallops or trout, after the plate is finished with another member of the nightshade family – tomatoes, or perhaps a few quarters of roasted tomatillos – I realize I’m in the presence of deliciousness. The dish is greater than the sum of its parts; this is one of the reasons we cook.

After making this dish a couple of times, and another in which the eggplant is cubed, sautéed with (so much) olive oil and garlic, deglazed with balsamic vinegar and later folded together with similarly prepared Fennel, Courgettes, Red Onions, and Basil, I found myself liking Aubergine more and more. I’m not quite ready to embrace her and kiss both cheeks. But I’ll let her into the kitchen.  

All Summer in a Melon

As seen in a slightly different form on Food Riot.com, part of the Riot New Media Group, July 31st, 2013

Professional cooks live on scraps of rib-eye trim, bowls of rice cribbed from the steam table, and the odd sandwich slapped together on the fly, eaten while crouched behind the line before the next slew of tickets hit. On days off, I might order a pizza or some Thai food, or go out for a burger and a beer, perfectly happy to let someone else do the cooking. But still, even with the relatively recent arrival of other people’s children, even with the responsibilities of jobs and Grown-Up Stuff, there are occasional evenings when my friends, family, and I carve out enough time to cook and eat together.

The last time this happened I decided to put together a watermelon salad. A simple affair of watermelon, cucumber, jicama, serrano peppers, a lot of cilantro and mint, a splash of vinegar, and just enough salt and freshly cracked black pepper. Perfect for a hot July evening, the salad is a refreshing accompaniment to grilled foods and a flavorful antidote for dehydration. I went with cubes of various sizes for the melon, cukes, and jicama, and thin rounds for the serranos. Pleasantly Sesame-Streetian shapes, comfortably within my Cheffy OCD parameters. The herbs were a rough-chopped green confetti.  Wee! 

My brother tasted it and made a face — “What is that white stuff?”

“Jicama.”

“Hexama?!”

I’m laughing now; he thinks food should be taken in capsule form and the inevitable food fanfare of these evenings is almost lost on him. Tasting a spicy-savory version of tried and true watermelon was brave…but his face! Oh, the hilarity.

The two of us stood in the kitchen and talked jicama, among other things, while our friends put the children to bed. But I couldn’t stop eating the salad. I’d ask a question and then stuff my face while he answered. When the four of us sat down to eat, I grudgingly shared the third I’d left in the bowl. But my spoon kept wandering back. I badly wanted to forgo any semblance of manners and simply tip the bowl back, just guzzle the sweet-salty-spicy melon water.

As the summer wears on – and I’m lucky out here in Seattle where temperatures rarely top ninety – my thoughts turn again and again to the blatant, unapologetic refreshment of a watermelon salad. Throw in some feta! Top it with toasted pepitas! Make a black pepper syrup! Such a forgiving, amenable ingredient, as well as a handy way to transport water across deserts. So, I guess Watermelon Salad with Serranos and Friends was my second favorite thing I ate in July, beating Fried Chicken Bits Over Reheated Rice, and Grits with Some Stuff. There was a Cheese and Tomato Sandwich coming in a close third, but the winner turned out to be an exercise in simplicity.

With watermelons on the brain, I recently went ahead and bought a small one from one of the vendors down at Pike Place Market before heading in for another long, busy shift at the restaurant. Coming home from work: late, tired, too thirsty for water, too dehydrated for vodka, I opened my little fridge and there it was! I had forgotten all about it!

Next to a heel of bread, a knuckle of cheddar, and a short stack of mostly empty to-go containers, there was my favorite July treat: A watermelon split and devoured in the light of a propped open refrigerator door, the juice puddling a bit on the checkered floor. Standing there in the dimly lit kitchen, I wiped the juice from my chin with the back of my hand and let my mind wander. Summer and rind, sunshine, sprinklers, kiddy pools, and hot grass. The shopping trip for a new Trapper Keeper still weeks away. Hot dogs, grape soda, road-trip Tropicana orange juice. Dampened dust, tepid lemonade. The mild melancholy of having no seeds to spit. The urge to go jump in a lake. I was slurping up all the Julys, past, present, and future, the watermelon refreshing my spirit. Truly delicious.

Chef Philosophy, 101

As seen in a slightly different form on Food Riot.com, part of the Riot New Media Group, July 8th, 2013

There are as many philosophies about food and cooking as there are items on the Cheesecake Factory’s menu. Locavores, pescatarians, vegans, raw foodists all have their mantras, just as junk-foodies lick their orange fingers after finishing a bag of Cheezy Credos.  Restaurants exist to feed this diverse audience, a spectrum of people too tired to cook, those who are celebrating, those who read about the fried pig face in Seattle’s free weekly and simply MUST try it, and those who eat only sesame seeds mixed with fireweed honey and kale.

On the other side of the kitchen door, we have the people actually making the food, who labor in conditions similar to foundries and salt mines, who somehow manage the Sisyphean nature of restaurant cooking with aplomb (mild aplomb. Sometimes rage). Fries into the basket, basket into the oil, fries into the bowl, fries onto the plate. Repeat until you die. Don’t forget the salt.

As so many aspects of restaurant work resemble pushing a boulder up a hill, the conclusion drawn by Albert Camus in his Myth of Sisyphus is comforting, in a peculiarly French way. He wrote, “It is the struggle itself….one must believe Sisyphus is happy.” I had heard a different translation (I think in the movie “Party Girl”) that used the word “content,” but either way, the implication that the endless struggle to push a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down, or cook sliders in the low, dark purgatory of Happy Hour, is in some way fulfilling, despite (or because of) the futility.

(The French are always comforting us in kitchens: the smell of shallots and thyme simmering in butter, a bouquet garni infusing a stock with bay, thyme and parsley, the way sauces bound by liaison have a fuller, richer flavor than those thickened by cream alone…)

Camus’s conclusion may explain why cooks stay on the line instead of working in the Front of House, where they would make three times the money – there are less existential reasons to stay in the kitchen, most of them related to temperament and alcohol intake – but line cooks are, by and large, a proud folk, not necessarily happy, but scarred, burned, marked and fulfilled in some way by work that barely pays the rent. If a line cook becomes restless with his or her particular boulder-hill combo, he or she can go into management, a career move bringing them closer to the real Sisyphus, as all accounts of the original have him down as a bit of a hubristic jerk, which is so much more like a Chef than a Cook.

There are Chefs who bully, threaten, yell, stomp, rule by fear rather than love. There are those who coddle their cooks, who serve them mint tea with honey during service. (Not really.) The philosophy behind the behavior of the angry Chef goes so much farther than simply being narcissistic outbursts, or exhibitionist stylings of a coward who is in so far over his head that he must resort to scaring the men and women who work near him. The truly great, scary Chefs are like that because they are in pursuit of the sublime, the moment when plating is finished, garnishes placed, and Beauty, impermanent, fragile, meant-to-be-devoured Beauty, looks back at them from the plate. The pursuit of this particular venaison blanc requires a team of lean, fast, line dogs, who love the taste of the hunt more than the security of health insurance or IRAs. The pursuit of excellence requires very high standards and no small measure of ferocity. One bad Yelp, one spawning oyster, and suddenly the table is tipped onto the floor of mediocrity. Excellence is the quarry for all Chefs, but the angry ones tend to get the most press.

My Chef philosophy rests as much with the public as it does on the shoulders of the cooks. We are not there to gallop across the countryside for ourselves. We are here to feed the others, the ones who chose us for the moments in their lives, the birthdays, anniversaries, idle Tuesdays, or sorrowful Saturdays. The moment a diner walks through the door, they have decided to include us, a gang of tattooed strangers, in their very lives. To me, that inclusion is a gift of astonishing worth, a jewel worth hunting for, and instead of devouring the prize, tearing apart the stag, and lifting bloodstained muzzles to the moon and howling (with whiskey in hand), I’ve tried to teach the cooks a philosophy that looks out to the dining room, toward a calmer, more sustainable quest for excellence, a sense of contentment. Next thing you know, I’ll be brewing minted tea.

Notes From the Prep List: Gnocchi

As seen in a slightly different form on Food Riot.com, part of the New Riot Media Group, July 15th, 2013

"Now and forever now." - Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Somehow, in the eighteen years I’ve spent in kitchens, I managed to work every station, climbed from the Hobart dish machine to the dizzying heights of becoming a Chef de Cuisine, ran a multi-million dollar restaurant for three years and thirteen menus, and never worked as a prep cook. Dishwasher, yes. Grill cook, Sous Chef, Lead Line, yes yes yes. But it wasn’t until I decided to step down from management for a minute that I discovered the allure of the Prep Shift. Even though I am again a Sous Chef, because I can't seem to help myself, I don’t work on the Line. I wallow in the luxury of simply making food, as though I am preparing for a huge dinner party every night.  Of course, there is a bit more stress (and fewer martinis) than if I were cooking at home. There is an element of riverboat gambling to what I do – I look at the numbers, plan my night, and push my chips in; if I’m on a roll, none of the cooks will rush over to me with wild eyes and sweaty faces, waving an empty six-pan around. I will hit my marks and the food will be ready before the guys need it. It usually works. But some of the items are a bit process heavy – I can bust out blanched rapini in under ninety seconds, but then there are the spicy-sweet accompaniments to charcuteries, the forcemeats themselves, the tiny-cubed caponata, and the humble little dough balls we call “gnocchi.”

What begins as a tub of ricotta, egg yolks, Parmesan, nutmeg, salt, white pepper, and flour spends some time in a stainless steel bowl, a lump of dough, resting, a bland illustration of potential energy. This mass goes through several iterations: The rolled snakes, the cut pieces, like pillows, perfect for a tiny bed and a clothespin-sized doll who doesn’t mind getting a little flour in her hair. And then the finished pieces, grooved and thumb-dimpled, the declivity perfect for a single drop of sauce, one flake of parsley.

The longer the cut pieces sit, the more they want to return to their original state. The longer the dough itself sits on the table, the greater the chance one edge of it will begin to crack with unincorporated flour. So I have to work fast. There are two distinct flour piles on either side of the table. One pile for my palms so I can roll a chunk of dough into a shape I haven’t really dabbled with since kindergarten play-dough and high school pottery. It’s a long cylinder, slightly smaller across than the diameter of my ring finger. With a bench scraper, I start cutting the pieces – if it were my ring finger, the first cut occurs just between the cuticle and the first knuckle. These first cuts, these first few gnocchi, mean I’m out of the woods – if the line needs more, well, see: We have more! The gnocchi exist, only to a point, but this is a good point at which to have arrived. In gambling terms, I’m now holding a pair of twos instead of bluffing with a six-high hand.

I have time for these reflections because the Pantry cook called in sick and the other prep cook is trapped on the line making salads and desserts instead of standing next to me, either rolling and cutting or rolling across the board and onto the sheet tray. The thirty minute, two-person prep task has become a Buzz Lightyear affair, the snakes and pillows stretching and piling to infinity and beyond. I have two choices. I can go insane, or I can roll the gnocchi and get on with the next task in about an hour, depending.

Roll, cut, sprinkle, roll, roll, roll.

The gnocchi are like snowflakes, no two alike, or, as I prefer rolling across the diagonal, the little gnocchi resemble sea-shells, the sheet tray is a strewn beach.

Roll, cut, sprinkle, roll.

There is a closed-in-the-closet sensation below my belly, claustrophobia brought on by feeling trapped in a never-ending task. I think, I’ll throw away a pound of dough. No one will be the wiser.

Roll, cut, sprinkle, roll.

But then I pass the mid-point, take the filled tray to the freezer and line the second with parchment paper.

Start again. Rolling and cutting. Rolling and cutting.

The clumps stick together like eight-year-olds in a haunted house.

Roll, roll, roll, roll.

The tension has given way to calm, the realization that this too shall pass. I will reach the end, roll the last gnocchi. In quantum terms, in a parallel universe, this task is finished, and gnocchi exist in a perpetuity of completion… It’s okay. Rolling gnocchi is finite, like life, love, peace, and hot showers. The task, like so many seemingly-endless prep list items, has changed the way I approach any seemingly endless task. Knitting, writing, walking, reading The Classics: Just one sticky little square after another.

The pillows-turned-shells will be blanched, portioned, cooked and served over pork. My sense of touching and overcoming the Infinite dissolves into knowing I have created something delicious, with time to spare. My pair of twos held.

The Master and the Marmalade

 As seen in a slightly different form on FoodRiot.com, part of the Riot New Media Group

"...and you will agree that a spotted dog or a drowned baby is hollow mockery, a whited sepulchre, without it is made with suet. There is an art in puddings, to be sure; but what is art without suet?"
 - Jack Aubrey upon being presented with a decent spotted dog, The Ionian Mission, by Patrick O'Brian

Yesterday I finished The Surgeon’s Mate, book seven of twenty in the incredible seafaring adventures written by Patrick O’Brian and starring Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin. True to form, the book was delicious, and I couldn’t be more delighted to have thirteen books ahead of me. 


As the stories are set during the Napoleonic Wars, my vocabulary and diction are a little odd right now, as I find myself saying things like, “Handsomely, handsomely now..let’s scud along under close-reefed topsails.” But that’s okay. My dog is my primary audience, and while he isn’t great with American English, he knows well enough that a “close-reefed topsail” means a falling barometer and rising winds. Best make do with the oilcloth or peacoat when walking to the park, and leave the umbrella at home. Not only do the books give the reader a hyper-detailed look at a bygone era, they are accidental food writing at its best. There are descriptions of messes shared with other captains in ports-of-call all over the world, a life-saving grove of cold-weather cabbages found when Aubrey’s ship creeps into Desolation Island (book five; so good!) and the food enjoyed with family and friends when the captain puts in to England for a moment and visits his wife, Sophie, and his “turnip-faced” children at Ashgrove Cottage. 

Menus throughout the books range from prison victuals to sumptuous feasts. Many of you probably remember the 2003 movie, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, in which Russell Crowe played a charming, battle-hungry Captain Aubrey, and Paul Bettany brought a nice spark to Dr. Maturin (though he was too handsome for the part – in the books, Maturin’s looks are most often described as “froglike”). The movie made me feel as though the entire cast was having fun and I’ve watched it at least six times. While the primary action of the film, and half of its title, was pulled from book ten, the screenwriters plucked moments from a few of the other books and threw them in, making a bit of a muddle, or a stew (maybe a burgoo?), which won’t make it easier to write another movie, which they are doing, right? (RIGHT?) 

The movie has a great scene in which the officers and Dr. Maturin are at their mess. After quaffing copious amounts of wine, the officers had moved on to their nightly glasses of port. A somewhat florid Captain Aubrey brings Maturin’s attention to two weevils traversing the table and asks him which is the better one. Dr. Maturin sighs, the naturalist among barbarians, and says something like, “All things being equal in terms of diet, environment, and the natural proclivities of the species, that one there,” he nudges a weevil with the end of a knife, “is clearly the greater weevil.” And in a crashing good humor, Jack Aubrey cries with delight, “Oh ho, I have you there! For in the Royal Navy we must always choose the lesser of two weevils!”

Ha ha! I love puns, to my universal discredit, so this moment filled me delight. One really must always choose thusly. I don’t like weevils, though, and was dismayed by how many of the tiny squirming insects wriggle across the pages of the series. But their presence is simply another example of O’Brian’s detailed descriptions of shipboard food, shipboard life, really. During my own sailing adventure, we had to take precautions against stowaway weevils by transferring any grains – cereal, flour, corn meal – into plastic containers and getting the cardboard off the boat straightaway before the eggs hatched. 

(Weevils are not the only animals aboard O’Brian’s ships. Dr. Maturin’s scientific curiosity drives him to bring all kinds of species aboard, whether to draw, dissect, or simply observe. There are chapters devoted to the determined alcoholism of a captured sloth, another in which a pregnant prison-mouse enjoys crumbs proffered on the end of a spoon, and dozens of other incidents featuring animals living, dead, preserved in barrels of salt and vinegar, and even one or two extinct species make quiet appearances, including a counterpane made from a dodo.) 

During my sailing adventure I learned quite a bit about cooking on a gimbaled stove. One part terrifying, two parts timing. If you open the oven when the ship pitches to port, you must pull a hot pan uphill. If you open the oven as the ship lists to starboard, everything in the oven wants to slide out onto the floor BUT that’s the perfect moment to grab the pan and get it to the top of the stove as the ship rolls back to portside. Sometimes sailing seems like nothing more than a series of unexpected intersections with gravity, and that my aunt was willing and able to make popcorn – already the scariest food in the world – during a blue-water passage between Vanuatu and New Caledonia was a source of absolute amazement. 

There isn’t a whole lot to do when you’re a newbie at sea, so I read a lot, including the first book in the series. Being on a boat made Master and Commander more interesting and also educational despite the differences in number and type of sails, size of boat, size of crew, and number of guns. We had three sails, four if we were to fly the spinnaker, on a 41-foot sailboat housing five people. No cannons or guns that I knew of. Captain Aubrey’s usual command had 21 sails, each raised or lowered in a beautiful choreography based on water and wind, anywhere between 100 and 150 men and boys, and many, many guns. Given my limited experience on boats, even I could tell that Lucky Jack was a very skilled sailor and a terrifying opponent in battle. A man of many appetites. 

For restaurant professionals the books are treasure troves of comparisons. The Naval hierarchy, so similar to a kitchen’s chain of command, is one thing, along with the necessity for order and discipline, everyone’s reliance on routine, and the shared tendency of both Naval and restaurant folk to hit the grog a little too hard every now and then. Delightfully familiar moments occur when two captains describe an up-and-comer in terms almost identical to those used by restaurant managers when it’s time to promote from within. 

And, perhaps because I live in Seattle, I’m continuously struck by how much the two principals really enjoy a nice cup of coffee, no matter the breeze or bullets. A calm prelude to battles won with smoke, noise, shattered wood, flying splinters, and cannonballs crashing through the netting, while the sea rises beneath you, the wind howls through the rigging, and blood flows from the scuppers; a strong cup of coffee beforehand sets one up amazingly. Perhaps half a dozen eggs, a rasher of bacon, and a loaf of buttered toast with marmalade, as well. No sense going into battle on an empty tum. 

In The Surgeon’s Mate, food plays a slightly larger role than in the other stories. Instead of simply providing background details about the lives of Royal Navy men during the early 1800s, and thereby adding levels of verisimilitude that make the books every bit as enjoyable as any Jane Austen, more so if you like your action outside of a drawing room, or if you like action, any, at all, the food in The Surgeon’s Mate provides the essential ingredients for the story’s denouement. I won’t spill the cat from the bag, but shipwreck, potential torture, a bucket of freshwater crawfish, perhaps one too many cream-based sauces on the road from Brittany to Paris, and the good Doctor’s well-timed splash of laudanum, spare our heroes for the next adventure. I’m sure there will be both coffee and marmalade, and maybe, as they’re headed for Turkey, there will be a pivotal moment involving baklava. But now I’m just being greedy. 

Guilty Pleasures

“All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.”
 – Jack Torrance, scary dad from The Shining.

When I pick up a Mrs. Pollifax or Harry Bosch story, I know I won’t put it down until I’ve gobbled it up. Banksy’s hair drifts into the corners, mapping the currents of air along the floor boards of my little apartment.  Lewis flares his gill flaps and tries to get my attention. The dishes in the sink receive a quiet, watery plunk from the not-quite-truly-leaky faucet with the calm equanimity of ceramics everywhere, since the dawn of kilns. And I read and read, immune, swaddled in story. Until….Until the sharp prick of guilt goads me from the sofa and I sigh, bookmark my adventure, and get back to work. 

Ah, guilty pleasures, such delicious treats. 

My number one guilty-pleasure song is that one by the Goo Goo Dolls. You know the one. And “Boys of Summer” by Don Henley, which I’m listening to RIGHT NOW. I have a mile-wide soft spot for musicals, especially “Chess.” As I spent a few formative years in a book and record store with a bunch of jerks who believed there is an absolute right or wrong, good or bad, in taste, I listen and warble along alone, not wishing to invite criticism. To a certain extent, the jerks have a point: Some of it is trash. But as my Sommelier friend Guy says about choosing a bottle of wine, “It doesn’t have to be hard. Pick what you like.” (He is the Unsnob in a snobby field, a tall glass of water in a room filled with sand.) But what holds true for wine – if you pick what you like, and figure out what it is about that particular wine that grabs you, you’ll expand your palate and next thing you know, you’ll be telling people they’re unrefined bumpkins, absolute Cretins, for liking Merlot – is also true for music, maybe. I'm not sure my fondness for the Goo Goo Dolls has unlocked any secret rooms of musical understanding. I am still annoyed with those arbiters of taste. For me, music evokes time and place. “Boys of Summer” (and every musical, ever) reminds me of working at Boulder’s Dinner Theater in the late ‘80s, my youth, my fledgling years in kitchens, my early association with poker and Luck. Maybe the real guilty pleasure here is over-indulgence in nostalgia.

Indulgence seems to be the key definition to a guilty pleasure. Picking up a Stephen King, a Michael Connelly, or a Dorothy Gilman book will not, past a certain point, push my boundaries of human understanding. But reading is a very private indulgence. I can simply open a door, step through and vanish. Maybe the guilt comes from knowing I am not hammering out 500 words, or sweeping, or doing the dishes, but the pleasure far outweighs the pain of ignoring chores.

   

With food, the pleasure (and the guilt) is usually in direct correlation to the number and type of calories.  An extra dollop of mayonnaise in my rabbit salad. A spoonful of whipped cream, just because I happen to be visiting Cold Side. Another helping of spaghetti,and another, until I am logey and bloated, nursing a semolina hangover. I love sandwiches. I eat them in corners of the kitchen, or hidden upstairs behind the hot water heater; my wolfish manners are embarrassing. Also, the pastry cooks need to hide the spiced pecans. And the candied pistachios. Cheese is a problem.

But right now I am in the grip of a new indulgence:

I am hooked on a medical drama. I’ll admit this is not the first time – “ER” held top spot on my Must See TV list, back in the day – but living as we do in the days of Netflix, I can stream whole seasons at a time, I can indulge in the joys of a show that takes place in Seattle, makes me cry occasionally, and features actors with really nice hair. To hell with homework. To hell with chores. I’m spending my evenings with Meredith Grey and her dysfunctional friends.

Not only does a “Grey's Anatomy” bender bring a little perspective to a Chef’s freakishly stress-filled world (“The customer got wheat toast!” “CODE BLUE! CODE BLUE!” “He’s going into de-fib…where’s that white toast?!” “Push two of epi and charge paddles to three-hundred…CLEAR!!” “We just 86’d white bread!” “We what?! Send Paulo to the store! Stat! We’re losing him….” “Chef, his wife is Yelping on her phone…can you come talk to her?” “Not now! Where’s that toast? Charge to four….CLEAR….!” “Chef, we lost him. He’s throwing his napkin onto his plate.” “No! Try again! Fire white toast!” “Chef….he stiffed the server…” “*Sigh* Time of promo: 14:23.”), but I also get a small dose of science with every episode.

While it’s not quite as good as working in a medical bookstore, or even renewing a subscription to “Discover” magazine, “Grey’s Anatomy” makes me feel as though I’ve kept a hand in. As it takes place in a teaching hospital, the doctors are doing a lot more than sewing up lacerations. I’ve seen a couple of very interesting clinical trials, learned way more than I’ll ever need to know about post-procedural fistulas, and hey, remember stem cells? These cats are actually growing organs in dishes! Neat! Wait'll you see what they do with a three-dimensional printer!

Possibly as a way of tempering the guilt, as I watch I draw corollaries between cheffing and doctoring. The white coats, the fondness for sharp blades, the long hours, the drinking, the clogs, the shenanigans. Huge differences, of course, hats off to doctors, that’s a long, hard haul, a road I didn’t take. But I’m glad I don’t have to hire a medical billing specialist, even when a ten-top requests all separate checks. I’m glad people come through our door when they are hungry and reasonably happy, instead of scared and possibly dying. Watching television doctors lose patients on the table underscores my sense of career satisfaction.  Is a nine-year-old with cancer going to bleed out on my prep table today? No. 

But it would be a mistake to think that kitchen stress is all for naught. The life of the restaurant is at stake, which provides the livelihood to dozens of people. To keep a restaurant healthy and thriving, a Chef must teach discipline, diligence, and instill in his or her crew a definite sense of urgency. We must teach and watch, remind and correct, all day, every day.

I’m almost caught up with “Grey’s Anatomy.” And then I don’t know what I’ll watch, or how I’ll set fire to all those hours when I could (…should?...) be doing something else. Maybe I’ll dive into “Game of Thrones.” And I’ll tell you what – after what happened to George and Izzy in Season Five, the Red Wedding will be no problem, no problem at all.

Rabbit Salad Sandwich

This method is a good way to use up any rabbit left-over from the last braise, just adjust the quantities of the gear to work with how much protein you have. This will also work with fried tofu, left-over turkey, and chicken.

Picked rabbit hindquarters

As much mayonnaise as you can handle

Chopped tarragon (or chervil)

Halved red grapes

Toasted walnuts

Maybe a little celery. Maybe.

Salt and Pepper

Some nice bread. I prefer a slightly sweeter loaf. Get what you like, though.

Combine the action. Put it on the bread. Find a corner. Devour your treat.

Tea & Cookies

“In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines,

 lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.

They left the house at half past nine...

The smallest one was Madeline.” – Ludwig Bemelman

I’ve decided it’s time to read Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. 

And while you might assume this decision coincides with a long convalescence, or incarceration, in fact, the decision to pull the two hard covers off the top of the bookshelf, blow off the dust, and begin what may be the longest slog in my reading career, was a result of wanting to find the oft-quoted madeline scene.

I also decided to actually make the cookies today, which required a trip to the Market for a pan, a trip that ate into my reading time. I may have been able to stave off the napiness of my “Sunday afternoon” (that’s Wednesday to you) long enough to find the paragraph, which occurs within the first 100 pages, but the walk to Pike Place, the time spent browsing through the giant bouquets, the decision to bring home a trout for dinner (Lewis stared at me the whole time I ate), the light chores, the chat with Mother, the fiftieth episode of “Grey’s Anatomy,” the re-reading of a Connelly: all conspired against settling in with Marcel.

But I think that’s okay. I spent some time looking at Wikipedia pages and the handful of blogs devoted to Proust and I’m running the risk of losing my original point. Which was simply that there are certain phrases, certain thematic elements running through a handful of books which were so crucial to the collective brain as to obviate the actual book.That is to say, there’s no sense in sitting down to a tasty read if the read in question has been read so often, taught so often, misquoted, plagiarized, and dissected to the point where you believe you have the full story, and so, contrariwise, I wanted to actually read the damn thing instead of flipping through the collective brain's wacky card catalog, I wanted to read a paragraph that may encapsulate the meaning behind food writing, the impetus to evoke. 

But what I learned today was that the “Madeline moment” as I’d come to think of it, was really much more of a neurological function of the hippocampus, and much less an evocation of past through taste and smell. You see, I had thought that when Marcel tasted the bit of soggy cake floating in lime-blossom tea (um, what?), he was reminded of something, which is what I think we all tend to use the madeline moment to mean, but a closer reading of the passage, and the helpful words of a Proustian scholar-blogger, indicate that rather than simply being reminded of a simpler time, as I am when I smell Countrytime Lemonade™ (once the coughing stops), Marcel was transported. As though he existed in both times at once. I also found out that translations of the story more recent than mine are called In Search of Lost Time. Very different than Remembrance of Things Past.  The active verb suggests a certain tension, as when at work, trying to make the flour mixture for the fried chicken bits, we were searching for lost thyme, not idly remembering where it was wrongly put away in dry storage.

In any case, the sensation is called Involuntary Memory. And like most brain stuff, it’s cool, and complicated. Not just evocation. More like time travel.

But I need to focus if I’m to bake these cookies.  

There is that other thing though – the evocation, the welling-up, the oral tradition of food stories. Food writing is jam-packed with vignettes recalling the “first time I tasted something tasting like something”, or “how my life changed because I ate something slippery.” Bourdain, Aschatz, Fisher, Hamilton, the 40,000 plus food bloggers out there, ALL write about those firsts. Not because it’s bad or boring (sometimes it’s really boring), but because those moments DID change their lives. I’m staggering down memory lane right now, working on a food memoir, not because sharing the ways in which tasting macerated strawberries on my third birthday set me on an unwavering course to a career in food  (it was a wavery course), or because those strawberries are a landmark in my cognitive development, but because sharing stories about food, since food is something we all have to relate to, provides a truly profound sense of commonality.

(A somewhat major digression: I’m a big fan of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, an outfit that provides a haven for elephants and rhinos orphaned by poachers. They recently shared a study measuring the survival rates among herds which had lost the older matriarchs to ivory hunters. Apparently, younger herds suffered greater mortality during times of drought and stress because they had lost the memories of the matriarchs, who, as tiny baby girl elephants, had been led by their mothers and aunties to remote watering holes. Now, I’d bet my incisors that the food-writing tradition, the recipes shared through story, shared kitchens, community cookbooks and the rest of it, is a spoke on the same evolutionary wheel.  This may be obvious, given the predominance of women in the food-writing blogosphere, but what I just said about commonality? Well maybe we should think about those shared stories as a way of bridging the vast divide between species. Maybe thinking about old lady elephants as grannies with battered old gnocchi boards would lessen the world market’s demand for ivory. Just a thought. Okay, back to Proust.)

One of the problems with food writing, with writing in general, actually, is the fatigue one feels with one’s voice. Proust had to lock himself into a house with cork-lined walls in order to channel his voice long enough to write his masterpiece, but you can bet there were days when he must have longed for a moment of cerebral silence. In food writing, as you sit down to write about tea (not lime-blossom) (and yes, it’s actually a teasane), you cannot help but slightly loath the tone, the voice, the perky food writing chatter prattle, when beginning a sentence with “The first time I tasted rooibos…”

So instead, I will tell you about the fifth or maybe sixth time I tasted rooibos. And then we will bake cookies.

 

October, 2004. I had rented a car in Cape Town, driven north up the coast, turned onto a mere squiggle of a road that took me through the Cedarburg Range. Unpaved, uninhabited, steep blasted reddish rock landscape on the edge of the Great Karoo. At the time, I was trying to escape feeling sad. Or, at least to give the sad a larger seat so it didn’t seem so big. Stepping off the side of one’s known world is a good cure, or maybe only a tonic, but I do recommend it. After hours of driving, of mastering the stick shift with my surprised left hand, I arrived at the Lord Milner Hotel in Matjiesfontein, a faded relic of a time during which sick whites took their tubercular lungs into the middle of nowhere for “the air.” After dinner and trifle, I had a pot of rooibos, which was my routine while I was in South Africa, because the taste of the tea, the smell of it, took me back to the south-facing, ponderosa pine spotted hillsides of my childhood. The taste was not Proustian in intensity, I was not transported the way I am when I smell blanched fin herbes and recall the verbena tea(sane) I foisted on the younger siblings. Simply reminded. The smell and flavor illuminated a landmark in my sensory past, helped me see my origins, which was the reassurance I needed at the time. If you know where you come from, you might have a better chance of figuring out where you’re going. Or at least more informed. 

Rooibos is delightful. Iced or hot, with lemon, or with milk and sugar. There is no caffeine but there is a robustness to its flavor which makes it seem almost like a black tea. In South Africa you can buy it in a can, like our Nestea Brisk Tea™ (a taste that would evoke tennis lessons and hot tar), but I preferred the evening ritual of a hot pot of tea. The name means “red bush,” because, get this, it comes from a red bush. Not really. It’s green and then dries to red. I just read the Wikipage and guess what?! It’s a legume! The legume thrill-ride continues! Also, rooibos has about a million cancer fighting, antioxidant, cure-what-ails-ya compounds. As it only grows in one place, however, climate change will probably cause its extinction within a century. I’m going to start hoarding.

So where are we? We explored the differences between my idea of what a Madeline Moment was and what the big brains say it is. We talked about the importance of sharing stories about food and also confessed to a claustrophobic sense of self-natteryness when writing about it.  We revealed our love for hot beverages made from spiny bushes. Nothing left now but to bake some cookies. This is a food blog, after all.

Lemon Lavender Madelines

This recipe couldn’t be easier. Could. Not. Be. Easier. So the next time I try baking madelines, I will use ground nuts in place of flour, change the way I add the butter, maybe experiment with savory (jalepeno-cheddar? Bay-leaf and black pepper?), or adding fruit. The fun thing about madelines is the shape – the cookies are the perfect size to slip right into your face. There are conflicting stories about the origin of the name but I’ll let you do the foodwork, I mean foot work. Look in the Gastronomique, or The Professional Pastry Chef.

2 large eggs

2/3 c sugar + ¼ cup for post-baking dusting

1 Tbsp lemon zest + 1 tsp to combine with post-baking dusting sugar

¼ t lavender (be sparing or your cookies will taste like soap) + ¼ tsp for post-baking

Pinch salt

1 t vanilla extract

1 c cake or all purpose flour

10 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted and cooled, plus 1 Tbsp for the pan

  

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Generously butter and flour your newly acquired madeline pan, ignoring the fact that you couldn’t quite get the goo from the price tag scrubbed off, even though you know this will bother you for years.

In a mixing bowl, beat the eggs and sugar until a lifted fork/whisk/beater drips mixture resembling ribbons. Add the lemon zest, lavender (or don’t), and vanilla extract. If you want to use orange zest and almond extract instead, that’s fine, just means a different name at the top of the recipe. Sift in the flour and mix until barely combined. Drizzle in the butter, mixing until again, it’s just combined (you’re trying to avoid stretching out the glutens in high-protein flour – if you use cake flour, you’ll have less of a problem in this department).

Spoon one Tbsp into each declivity.

Bake for about 14 minutes, turning the pan half-way through, or until the edges are brown and the cookie “springs back” to the touch.

Gently remove the darling baked goods and sprinkle some lemon lavender sugar over them.

Repeat. This recipe gave me about 20 cookies – two pan’s worth.

Brew a cup of your favorite tea.  Sit, sip, taste, relax, remember.