When pasta won't do

Weekends are for impractical cooking. That and impractically long NJ Transit trips, but the cooking's more interesting. The latest:

-Tofu! With from-scratch soy milk, which I sort of remembered how to make from the yuba, but barely. It... didn't turn out right, but this was my own fault for not measuring anything nor taking any temperatures. Next project on this front will likely be more yuba. What I came up with, tofu-wise, tasted like a watery version of store-bought firm tofu. Meh.

-Grilling! A friend who left town gave us his grill and we're trying to figure out how one works. Today it at first seemed like we had no idea what we were doing, then suddenly it was working as one would hope. And... it turns out that a grill is an efficient way to use up wrinkled bell peppers, but even grilled, one can only eat so many bell peppers. Now that we know that it works, yakitori on the grill is surely up next.

-Filling crepe-like pancakes with chocolate! (I do occasionally cook things that are not Japanese. More than occasionally, in fact, if one counts the 98% of meals that are pasta.) This is something I'd probably considered but never tried before. Basically you fill the pancake with a piece of (dark, is my preference) chocolate, as in, roll and wrap it around the chocolate, and return it to the pan for more heating. The end result is as close to a chocolate croissant as something that simple can be. The pancakes themselves are a simple enough ratio: one egg, half a cup flour, just under a cup milk, pinch of salt, and maybe a tablespoon, if that, melted butter.

WWPD Guides: How you know it's time to go to the supermarket

I used to enjoy food-shopping. Or not exactly used to - I did for the fleeting moment that it went something like this. Now that it involves the terribly exciting choice between driving to Wegmans or Whole Foods, there's none of that 'see what looks good at the market.' There's planning. Or there should be planning. I did not plan.

And so, the official WWPD guide to knowing when to grocery-shop:

-You smell the milk, can tell it's gone off, very off, but wonder what that says about buckwheat crepe batter made with that same milk a couple days prior. Upon discovering that the batter smells more like buckwheat than milk, you figure the batter is probably fine, and gets cooked anyway, so. That you continue to feel fine more than 12 hours after the might I say rather Breton breakfast in question may leave you vindicated, but may pose a problem tomorrow morning, when you want milk for your rather American mass-produced dry cereal.

-You find yourself thinking not in terms of meals, but in terms of bits and pieces that could possibly go together on pasta.

-You think of those "sauces" much-vaunted for their authentic Italian simplicity. The one that's just black pepper, parmesan (still a bit of that!, and if you point out that it's meant to be pecorino, you've missed the essence of this post) and pasta water, or that other that's just olive oil and garlic (haven't run out!).

-Or you find yourself trying to build a meal around a single mid-size artichoke. (For the third consecutive night - it was a container with three.) All the hot new farm-to-tables are taking a showcase-the-vegetable approach. Who's to say your apartment isn't a farm-to-table (the ingredients must have come from farms, and you do have a table)?

-Despite knowing full well that the kale you bought with such good intentions at least a month ago hasn't held up, you start guiltily trying to build meals around the kale. But not trying so hard that you actually remove the decaying kale from the fridge and consume whichever parts of it still look decent.

-You're out of jam. Jam! (WWPD finds the science behind giving up refined sugar convincing, but savory pancakes just aren't the same. Not that there weren't other problems with this morning's pancake.)

-You hear a podcast about beer-battered fish tacos and realize that while you do have beer, you don't have fish or tacos.

Kitchen cleanse recipes

If I don't think about it, all I eat is bread and cheese, pasta and cheese, and, OK, fruit. It's not that I don't like vegetables, but that they require some kind of preparation. (Meat, fish, and dessert are similarly complicated, but not things I'm particularly trying to eat more of.) Like everybody else, I want to be better about getting through the produce I buy, always with such good intentions. I don't want to waste food, to find shriveled carrots in my laundry. I also want to get through pantry items, and I've got quite a collection. (My apartment doubles as an Italian restaurant and an East Asian grocery.)

I try to imagine what would make sensible meal-preparation more appealing, more glamorous. Photo-ready, not that I'm taking pictures. I will think of it not as cleaning the kitchen, but a kitchen cleanse. A mandoline helps (or will, until I slice off part of a finger with it, as seems to happen to everyone who owns one sooner or later), as does a willingness to mix things that don't go together. So let me recommend the following excessively-time-consuming meals. Hey, it's a Sunday.

1) Shaved artichoke salad: Based on a salad from Bianca on Bleecker Street, and possibly a David Tanis recipe as well. You trim a whole bunch of raw baby artichokes, but after trimming each one, quickly shave it with a mandoline into a bowl with lemon juice (from one lemon's fine). Otherwise it turns brown. Shave in some garlic as well, if you're feeling adventurous with the mandoline. Add olive oil, black pepper, and grated parmesan. Salad's ready. Then boil up some pasta - at least you started with a salad!

2) Rice-paper (crisper-drawer-clearing) rolls: A Pinterest-ready cleanse-looking meal that's best combined with some kind of giant pastry you've already procured for dessert, which I foolishly had not. Using the artichoke-stained (it's unavoidable) mandoline, thinly slice whichever vegetables you find in the fridge and want to use up. Cucumbers, radishes, carrots (OK, I got lazy and never sliced the carrot), etc. Find some more substantial ingredient (pathetic unripe avocado, say), and slice that with a knife. Elegantly arrange this on a plate. Soften rice paper, and wrap whichever combinations of the vegetables you think go together. Dip these rolls into some kind of sauce. I went with a mix of soy sauce and sesame oil, because that's what I had, but something more in the hoisin sauce family would have been better. Maybe something with miso and sugar, but that - don't ask why - would have been too complicated.

But yes, you really do need some kind of main course or piece of layer cake or something after this, or you'll get cranky in the afternoon and start eating stale peanuts because you live in the woods and nowhere that sells layer cake is close by. (Amy's can you hear me?)

3) Kitchen "cleanse" stir-fry: As in, you get through stuff in the kitchen. You do not emerge Gwyneth-esque. This is actually a substantial (if vegan!) meal. I'd bought dried bean curd sheets (yuba, tofu skin, etc.) at H-mart a while ago, but kept forgetting I'd done this. Yet preparing them is not complicated at all, so much easier than making yuba from scratch. OK, it's kind of complicated, because until you soak them, the sheets are incredibly fragile. Anyway, you soak them until they look like yuba (it said 20 minutes on the package, but was more like 10), strain it, and stirfry it in peanut oil with garlic, ginger, soy sauce, sesame oil, and whichever vegetables you haven't mandolined. In my case, that was a sad-looking yellow bell pepper and some (ugh, why, why) kale. But look! Kale, with enough strong flavors around it, can morph into the generic, inoffensive leafy green you've always wanted it to be. Something the olive oil and garlic method fails to accomplish. Serve with a starch of some kind you'd also impulse-bought at an Asian market. I boiled up some rice-paper pieces (not rice cakes, nor exactly rice noodles), which weren't great, and regretted not going with the bean-thread noodles.

"Good quality children's literature"

-In principle, I'd like to be the sort of person who'd enjoy having lunch of roasted cubed acorn squash with arugula and farro, garnished with roasted seeds from said squash. (How frugal! How non-wasteful!) I'd like to be that person. But I'm not. Something about a lunch along these lines - its vegan-ness, or its absence of refined carbohydrates - made it feel like something that might go with lunch, but not be lunch. It tasted fine, but it was just sort of sad. It looked stunning, like something The Selby would photograph. Aesthetically, it worked. Nutritionally... I suppose it did, and that a grown woman with some modicum of vanity ought to enjoy something like this. But all I could think was how much better this meal might have been with a pasta-and-cheese component. Or something. It's not that I'm not someone who doesn't think it's a meal unless there's some meat, at least I don't think I am. But Nigella Lawson's chicken is now in the oven, and not a moment too soon.

-The latest in viral mommy-blogging controversy: a guide instructing non-parents what to buy or not as gifts for the children of friends and relatives. It's a pretty incredible piece of writing - intended for an audience, if not as large or critical an audience as it's received - in that it hits every possible hot-button note without the author's ever seeming aware of precisely why people are annoyed, this despite her active presence in the comments. Starting with her assessment of the two possible reasons someone might not have children: "Maybe it's because you haven't had them yet but plan to or maybe you like them when they belong to someone else but don't actually want your own." Or maybe... Where oh where to begin. (Fertility? Financial constraints? Not having found a viable partner nor wanting to be a single parent? Any number of personal reasons someone might not have shared with you, because they're none of your business? Gah!)

But then there's the premise itself - that rather than being unexpectedly surprised when random people who are not your children's parents buy them gifts, parents should feel entitled to this, and in a position to curate before the fact. There might have been a way to provide the same 'service' here - because it is baffling, to me at least, what to buy for young children, especially since moving away from Park Slope, where there was always a store within a few feet that specialized in this very shopping conundrum - that didn't involve chastising people for having the nerve to buy the wrong thing.

The list also demands a kind of hilarious time commitment on the part of someone whose children these are not. One is instructed to purchase "[g]ood quality children's literature," described as follows: "Go for award winners, classics or current bestsellers. Read it 6 times in a row and see if you still like it. Remember that we're going to be reading these books over and over and OVER again, so make them ones that every age will like." Time and pedagogical training that people simply don't have. And the suggestion that as a gift, you take someone's children "to a movie, or a museum, or an amusement park" is quite possibly why the word chutzpah was invented.

No overshare, though. Elsewhere on the same blog, yes, including the dreaded bath-and-potty realm, but not in the post I've linked to.

Jews' "sheer sexiness," and the insist-too-much paradox

At various points in the gargantuan stack of paper called my dissertation, I needed to cite something to do with modern-day intermarriage panic. Because the way it works, in academic writing, is that the fact that I know from living and breathing that the American Jewish community has long concerned itself with this topic isn't sufficient. That's not how scholarship works, nor should it. You can't footnote 'Take my word for it.' So in the process, I ended up finding that the whole 'intermarriage finishes what Hitler started' line comes up more often in references to anti-intermarriage sentiment (such as) than in the anti-intermarriage articles themselves. It's not that there isn't panic, just that it's often less hysterical than its more hysterical extremes.

In any case, if only I'd seen this sooner. I've now read Jack Wertheimer's essays and a couple of the others, but will need to read the lot of it. Mosaic Magazine (which... how had I just found this?) has an very useful array of the range of standard Jewish opinion on the matter, albeit the most informed and intelligent array one is likely to find. (And hey, a UChicago student is among the participants!) 

I have, as you might imagine, exactly ten trillion things to say in response even just to the parts of this series I have read, and maybe five trillion ideas of ways and places to pitch whichever aspect of my response doesn't get channeled into the academic version of this that I'm also working on. And I suppose, Petey, I also have thoughts on the new finding that Jews are actually Northern Italian, although this is really a single thought, one I'd already expressed on Facebook, which is that this explains why my apartment is basically the kitchen of an Italian restaurant, Casa Della Bisou. But in the interest of not blathering on altogether forever, I'm going to narrow this post down to the awkward question that always comes up with this topic: How, or really if, Jews who oppose intermarriage should try to eroticize endogamy.

Sylvia Barack Fishman, probably the leading scholar in the field of contemporary Jewish intermarriage, writes: "Individuals, families, and communities need to show, by example and by word, why Jewishness matters—to create in sons and daughters an appreciation of the appeal, and the sheer sexiness, of Jewish men and women." This came up on my Birthright trip as well, when the group leader asked the young men in the auditorium to behold the beauty of Jewish women. The first part - "why Jewishness matters" makes sense, but the second? There's nothing like a well-meaning authority figure telling you that someone - or some group - should do something for you erotically for that not to happen. While I personally have no trouble believing Jewish men can be good-looking, somehow the statement that I, as a Jewish woman, ought to think this summons the image of Brian Krakow - the guy you know you should like, but can't get yourself to. 

Which brings us to the problem with addressing intermarriage with more outreach along existing lines. As it stands, Jewish events aimed at the maybe-not-yet-married age demographic are virtually always thinly-veiled attempts at matchmaking. College students are invited to attend Jewish "singles" events, as though one can be an urban American single at 19. What if you just wanted to see an Israeli movie, or learn about the Dreyfus Affair, and if you happened to be unattached and met someone romantically, so be it? Why couldn't it all be a bit more casual? College itself, for instance, doesn't feel, while you're there, like an elaborate plot to mate you off to someone on a similar socioeconomic path.

Mostly, I'm just skeptical that unless we return to an era of something drastically less casual - arranged or quasi-arranged marriages, or unless all Jews up and moved to Israel, any sort of large-scale change in this area could occur. Points of contact among Jews can be increased, but without a full-on secession from the mainstream community, socialization will continue between Jews and non-Jews. And if every time Jews are placed in close proximity, there needs to be this overt now go mate vibe, a certain number of Jews with an interest in Jewish culture end up not going to what they fear will be a meat market. 

It would be much simpler to say (as used to be said) that marriage is about reproducing the community, forging allegiances between families, and whether or not you find your spouse "sexy" is irrelevant. But once spouses are to be chosen on the basis of individual desire - which is to say, once a baseline of chemistry needs to be there before either party even considers compatibility in other areas, not that chemistry trumps incompatibility - it's only natural that the conversation about how to stop intermarriage would veer towards the ill-fated project of asking Jews to find one another hot. 

Maintenance, high and low

-What must a man over 30 own? There's now this list... I guess the main thing about it is, it doesn't account for subcultures (or, as they said on this BBC sociology podcast I now listen to, "masculinities" - emphasis on the plural). In some pockets of society, masculinity continues to be performed through ostentatious disregard for shopping, even the kind of shopping that markets itself as investing in quality. The more holes in a garment, the longest stretch since the last haircut, the better. But the list does kind of nod towards that version of masculine self-expression, including as it does certain items (an umbrella, more than one towel) that it's just assumed a woman would have sorted out long before 30.

-Barilla, as you've seen many times via Facebook already no doubt, has recently been outed as the homophobic dry pasta. Which does summon the obvious question: Is DeCecco similarly problematic? Maybe someone needs to look into this, because that's whose sales will now skyrocket.

-Make-me-a-sandwich-gate. The thing where a woman has a blog whose premise is that if she makes her boyfriend 300 sandwiches, he'll upgrade her status to fiancée. So what of it? Is she merely another entry into the tradition of women being entrepreneurial under the cover of domesticity (ahem, Martha Stewart), digging as she so transparently is for a book deal? Is there maybe some element of role-reversal in the proposal - she's kinda-sorta proposing to him in an elaborate way, with these sandwiches. Maybe? Except not at all - it's gross both because of the make-me-a-sandwich trope and because it's this exaggeration of the idea that a woman must prove herself worthy of a commitment, whereas a man just kind of has to exist to be presumed husband material.

-Ugh, to the skeptics, yes, calling some random Jewish woman a "JAP" is a slur. (Referring to a "JAP" subculture/aesthetic, that might not be, given that some women do seem to identify as such.) No, being Jewish (and male) yourself doesn't make you an authority on this, because it's an intersectional slur - against Jewish women, not all Jews, not all women. (Unclear how central "American" is to this, as I think variants exist elsewhere.) And it's a slur precisely because of the way it's used, which is to say, against American Jewish women generally, regardless of whether they've exhibited any high-maintenance behaviors. If you haven't had it hurled at you apropos of basically nothing; if you haven't spent your life under the preemptive accusation of excessive primping (if only!); if you haven't, as a woman, found that everything frilly you do go in for serves to confirm an ethnic stereotype (woman paints nails, woman; Jewish woman paints nails, fussy princess)...

The gnocchi workout

The Canal Towpath! How had I not been jogging there before? If I'm going to run for a long time (and I'm going to say seven miles counts), far better that way than the treadmill, the tick-y woods, or running as many 0.7 mile road loops as I can stand. Apart from the bit at the beginning of the jog, when I had to dodge a couple men who'd gotten out of a van to pee on opposite sides of said van, thereby blocking the narrow road to the towpath, it was a bucolic experience indeed.

Nevertheless, I may keep on going to the gym as well. If only because the butt-toning machine - and none of the others - has instructions only in Italian:

Which fits with my earlier impression of Italy as a place unusually concerned with this area. This in any case became the only strength-training machine at the gym that interested me, the translation exercise a gateway into exercise. 

The only drawback is my strong association of the Italian language with food. Whatever "ginocchia" is (knee?), it brings to mind the potato-dumpling pasta (in a Gorgonzola sauce, or maybe pesto) I'd rather be having. Not that working out means abandoning pasta for kale juice. If anything, one may work out specifically in order to eat even more pasta. But not, like, during the leg-press. Or leg panino, as is the technical term.

Part III: the pilgrimage

The big food event, the one planned in advance and everything, was a visit to Chez Panisse. Well, the café of the place, both because even that is quite a splurge (aka the usual prices at nothing-special Princeton restaurants, thus explaining the exquisite turn in my cooking - pain au chocolat, agedashi tofu, thin-crust pizza... - since moving here), and because the café seemed to involve a menu with options, while the restaurant did not. It seemed the right, festive way to mark two 30th birthdays.

I'll save the descriptions of Berkeley (including the "gourmet ghetto" - am I alone in cringing at that name?) for the neighborhoods post. But the Waters phenomenon is really at the root of the food movement, and thus of interest to anyone who's been following it. I'd been to Chez Panisse while visiting the area with my family as a kid, that time also, I think, at the café, so while technically I could check that box (and thus fail whichever Charles Murray quiz), I can't say I remembered much about the actual experience. Only that at this one restaurant, every vegetable, even the ones I didn't normally like (which, given my age at the time, was probably most vegetables; I grew up before that Francophile parenting book explained how to make your kids like zucchini), was delicious.

But back to 2013. The place really has a culture, which I suppose makes sense for a restaurant that's such an institution. They offer seltzer as a (filtered! snazzy!) tap-water option, which is fabulous. The servers replace "you're welcome" or "no problem" with "of course," which I - of course - began overanalyzing in my head after hearing it for maybe the second of many times. "Of course" suggests that of course someone is always bringing you food; why would it be remarked upon that someone is doing so on this occasion? Which, particularly to someone who generally eats in and doesn't have, like, a staff, is kind of hilarious. If you overanalyze it. Which you should not.

There's a lot less of the farm-to-table pretentiousness than a) I would have expected or b) than one finds in the imitation. Not every ingredient has its provenance mentioned, and there isn't the whole farmhouse-chic thing, with waitstaff in plaid shirts, etc. No complaints!

And there's an added 17% service charge, which is apparently controversial, but which really shouldn't be. This system is probably good for the servers, or maybe not because an environment like this (rich-hippie) seems like it would inspire a lot of tips in the well-over-20% range. The check leaves space for an additional tip, which, eh. Some customers apparently tip twice without meaning to - which I could well see happening after a bit of wine - and then complain about it online once they sober up. But even if you see it, it's as if one is stingy or unsatisfied with the service if one just leaves the included tip. It somehow increases, rather than removes, the awkwardness around tipping from the customer end, and leads to the quasi-requisite calculation/estimation of at least 3%. I'd say the place should just up that fee to an altogether appropriate 20% - or better yet, incorporate proper pay into the prices - and be done with it, but when's the last time I ran a restaurant?

In any case, the point is the food. Which was very good, but no Tacolicious.

The best analogy for Chez Panisse would be... when you go to a modern-art museum, and there's a painting that's just a solid-colored rectangle, and you, the philistine, are all, why do we care? or you the not-complete-philistine are like, I've seen better rectangle paintings, and then someone less sitcom-addled than yourself (maybe the writer of the wall text, maybe your art-history professor) will explain that the significance is that this hadn't been done before. So this might not be the best-executed rectangle, and it may not hold up against today's rectangles, but it gets credit for bringing us the rectangle concept.

With the Alice Waters phenomenon, if you imagine that farm-to-table, high-quality-ingredients-in-simple-presentation had not yet been invented, then yes, a plate of ricotta ravioli with cherry tomatoes and basil is indeed awe-inspiring, as is a mesclun salad with baked goat cheese (which according to Wikipedia, Alice Waters invented!), and it's not impossible that I ordered not so adventurously but I don't eat at places like this often enough not to get what sounds most appealing to me, but I digress... Both were great, while my husband's meal seemed to be more the sort of thing where simple ingredients don't suffice. A pile of fresh corn kernels is possibly not that exciting. The nectarine "galette" (a kind of pie) was good in the way that fruit tarts made with good fruit are good, and they had the good sense to include a dollop of vanilla ice cream. Was it $10 good? No more or less than a restaurant dessert ever is, which is why I rarely order dessert in restaurants. The bar - is it better than a bowl of Haagen Dazs at home? - is unlikely to be met.

Anyway, once that sort of cooking has been invented, once this is also how everyone with access to/interested in farmers' markets cooks at home, the experience is maybe less a revelation than a reminder that Chez Panisse has access to better ingredients than a New Jersey home cook (armed with an old copy of Waters's pasta cookbook) ever will. As a man Alice Waters has indirectly taught to fish, I may not need her further assistance.

Just like your three-year-old could - as goes the cliché - paint that Pollock, you can leave Chez Panisse (the café part, at least) confident in the knowledge that you've cooked equally delicious meals yourself. So the value of eating at Chez Panisse isn't - judging by this one experience, but if someone wants a proper restaurant review and will fly me out there to eat at the place a few more times just to be sure, I accept - that you'll get the absolute best meal of your life. It's that you're getting the original.

A peace sign made of garlic. Of course.

Dissertation Pasta-gate

So a visiting prof at NYU, at the intersection of business and psychology and so not someone I'd ever heard of, tweeted the following: "Dear obese PhD applicants: if you didn't have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won't have the willpower to do a dissertation #truth". This tweet has caused the internet to explode. It's unclear to me whether he meant applicants to the University of New Mexico, where he's otherwise a professor, or to NYU, although it's a safe bet he wants slender grad students nationwide.

In any case, I join the chorus: what the what? What is this man even talking about? It's offensive, yes, "fat-shaming," sure, and no doubt upsetting to many heavier academics. It probably does necessitate a bit of a dig into dude's role in admitting students - are ones he OK'd especially svelte?

It's problematic, then, but it's also bizarre. What would one thing have to do with the other? It's not like writing a dissertation is some kind of athletic feat for which physical condition would be relevant, and then there could be some kind of conversation about whether or not it's fat-shaming to suggest that those who weigh 600-plus pounds are unlikely to win triathlons. (I'm so far from doing so myself that I don't have any idea how those who win them are built.) It's not like PhD students are some caste akin to supermodels, known for our ability to meet narrow aesthetic specifications. To write a dissertation is to sit on your couch in your pajamas. There's no particular size requirement for that.

Anyway, a NYMag commenter has the winning response:

Technically, he isn't fat-shaming. Being on the Atkins Diet on a grad student salary in NY requires not only willpower, but the ability to create a budget and possibly write grant applications so as to fund your steak and salmon-filet habit.

Indeed. What's grad school without pasta? Without bagels, ramen, or rice? And pizza! And free bread and cheese at receptions! Grad students who stopped eating carbs would stop eating, and stop dissertating as well.

A big deal

You know when you find out that someone you went to high school with is now kind of a big deal? And you feel that special mix of excitement at having known them when (assuming this wasn't someone you remember disliking) and the horrible realization that it's been X years and your... deal isn't so immense? Up there today for that Facebook thing where everyone got billions of dollars or whatever was... yup. Front and center next to the most famous names, on the usual news sites, plus, because we are of course Facebook friends, the entirety of today's feed. I mean, "billionaire" is effectively incomprehensible to a humanities grad student. That's a whole lot of... asparagus? dry pasta? There are other uses for money? The incomprehensibility of sums like that, except in the context of, I don't know, GDP, aside, it's kind of cool to realize I was, I vaguely remember, kind of acquaintance-friends with this person. Less cool when I think of what the market value is of knowing a lot about nineteenth-century France, but cool all the same.

Steakation photos are up

Not in any particular order, though, so the curious will have to guess which photos were taken in Belgium, which in Paris.

Grade Pending

-"South Park" must - must! - take on "Bridalplasty."

-As Terry, the chef on "Fawlty Towers," would have it, "the better the kitchen, the filthier it is." True, true. All my favorite spots (including, alas, the only affordable sushi in Tribeca, the best almond croissants on the Upper West Side...) are worst-ofs according to the Health Department website. My preferred restaurant in Chinatown had been closed altogether. In theory. Christmas day, its business was booming. A Christmas miracle! Still opted to return to a different establishment.

-Spot the astrophysics joke. I made the mistake of reading this aloud to my boyfriend, who wasn't fully listening, and who thought I was saying some 24-year-old in his field had been described as "noted."

-What is "New American Style"? If we're going by what represents America abroad, I'd think something less... white than this description. (Theory: old rich white people style moves east to west across the Atlantic, young inner-city minority-group style moves the other direction.) But then again, preppy has long since been reappropriated by the least-preppy Americans. No doubt the same will be true of "heritage," if it isn't already, or if "heritage" isn't just preppy with natural fibers replacing whatever it is that goes into making fleece.

-Snow, finally! Of course, the cape I ordered ages ago arrived just in time. It probably could still be worn, but my commitment to making snow-angels prevents it.

Limited-edition lunch

Yesterday I finally visited the Canadian delicatessen everyone's been talking about. It's a nice idea, bringing a bit of Jewish Montreal to Brooklyn. And the matzo ball soup was not half bad. I ought to have a review of the famed smoked-meat sandwich. Is it authentic? Succulent? Vegan-convertin' good? Can't say. Note to prospective diners: when you're told it will be an hour till you get a table, you will not be warned of the slim likelihood that you'll actually get to eat the dish you've come for when time comes around. (Yes, the place had just been written up, but the same is true of my beloved Dos Toros, and there you're guaranteed the tacos of your dreams in five minutes or less, $3.75 a piece, compostable cutlery included.)

While I'd read that the signature sandwich came in limited supply, it was very much still mid-lunch time when they ran out. Is the idea that this makes the dish more highly sought-after? Because there was nothing like watching others polish off their sandwiches and knowing one would not be mine.

The whole limited-supply situation/gimmick/whatever-we're-calling-it appears to be very much tied up with the Slow Food-type ethos of the place. Sure, if they were serving industrial meat, they wouldn't have run out. But see, they care about where the food they serve comes from. Which is why there isn't any of it.

My grievance is not even with this particular place, but with the turn in the food movement towards the fetishization of local-seasonal-sustainable. Rather than seeking out a world in which food that's fresh and from-scratch is a given (either just in yuppie establishments or better yet, further afield), these qualities have become selling points through which some restaurants distinguish themselves from the norm. Perhaps this will eventually spill over to a wider array of places, what with the laws of supply and demand. This would be great.

But the trend of appreciating high-quality ingredients above all else has if anything shifted down expectations, making any place that serves fresh food the latest foodie hot-spot. (Witness the trend of "house"-prepared food in restaurants. What are restaurants if not places that prepare food for scratch and then serve that food to customers?) If there's now a greater concern about local and ethical production than there once was, the popular enthusiasm for a place that gets it together to serve non-disgusting ingredients is now so great that one could very well dump the lightly-rinsed contents of a CSA box onto a table in a room decked out entirely in salvaged wood in certain neighborhoods of the city and the lines would wrap around the block.

Simplicity in arrabiata

If I were to write a cookbook, it would consist of one recipe:

Pasta Arrabiata

-Heat olive oil, chopped yellow onion (or white onion? is there a difference?), chopped garlic cloves, and red pepper flakes in a pan.
-Pour in can of whole tomatoes. Add chopped fresh tomatoes if a few need to be used, or, if good ones are cheap and available, go the all-fresh route.
-Break canned tomatoes into smaller pieces either before or after the step mentioned above.
-Salt, black pepper.
-Stir occasionally so the above-mentioned sauce doesn't burn onto the pan.
-Wait over an hour, hungrily.
-Put water up to boil.
-Is it done yet? (Anticipation is key.)
-No. Nor is the water boiling.
-Finally! The pasta goes in. Ideally penne, because 'penne arrabiata' has a nice ring to it, but any mix of short pastas will do.
-I like my pasta on the crunchy side, but my dining companion does not. Depending your situation al-dente-wise, remove the pasta when appropriate, remembering to turn off the heat under both pot and pan. Remember to say aloud that you're doing so, so that you don't go out after and find yourself wondering if your apartment is about to burn down.
-Cheese is not totally necessary, and I say this as someone who thinks cheese is pretty fundamental. If you don't go with cheese (Parmesan or similar), either some capers or nothing at all will do just fine.

It's not that I can't/don't make other things too. But somehow this has become the dish - the one that always turns out well, that doesn't require preparation of any other courses, that doesn't go out of season (and given the farmers' markets here, we're down to a few remaining apples), and that isn't the kind of dinner it's possible (for me at least) not to be up for. If you're hungry for dinner, this will not disappoint. If variety's your thing, it just might.

Screw chronology

In grad school there isn't really spring break, but Jo and I decided to have one evening of break-like activity - a non-pasta dinner and a non-free movie - to mark the end of that which is technically 'vacation'. Thanks to some especially slow-moving weekend MTA service, I'm now a matter of pages away from the end of L'Argent! Which, for the record, is still not all that much about Jews.

So first off, the movie. The new Paul Rudd buddy flick/bromance, 'I Love You Man', was kind of a disappointment. (This from someone who very much enjoyed 'Don't Mess with the Zohan', the various Apatow productions, and other entertainment aimed at the male and immature.) Can a movie be pro-man without being anti-woman? Sure, but this one doesn't manage it. The main female role, the protagonist's fiancée, is meant to have a smaller place in the plot than her man's new best friend, but is it necessary that she have no personality whatsoever? When the protagonist asks himself why her, the audience is stuck incapable of answering the same question. Her two best friends (who of course have a Ladies' Night that they refer to as such) fit neatly into the clichés of hot-thin-wife-to-fat-repulsive-man and sad-sack, terminally-single-and-desperate, pleasant-looking but a little too chubby, a little too open about her sexual willingness to ever get a boyfriend. Snagging a man, a 'tasteful' rock, a baby, a sushi dinner, these are the ambitions of Woman, a humorless creature who is, alas, the sole possessor of the anatomy the straight man prefers.

Then again, the fault might go less to the movie than to the audience. No, a man kissing the Paul Rudd character is not cause for yelps of disgust. In the scene it's supposed to be funny, not horrifying, that a gay man thinks he's on date-date, not a hetero 'man-date'. Though the movie itself takes great pains to show its acceptance of gays, the audience (and this was on 19th and Broadway - practically Chelsea! what does this mean showings are like elsewhere? OK, so maybe it was the movie...) did not seem to have gotten that message, howling at all hints of male-male sex. (And no, to whom it may concern, the movie offers up no naked Paul Rudd whatsoever.)

******************************************************************

The dinner preceding the cinematic experience was at nearby La Luncheonette, on 18th Street and 10th Ave. Highly recommended, although as predicted, I might still kind of prefer the nearby Thai food. (We went today, in fact, and spotted Lutz from '30 Rock'! See, it pays to take multiple weekend-service subways for Thai food.) But the Pad Gra Prow at Chelsea Thai contains, I think, some kind of addictive delicious ingredient, so it's not a fair comparison.

But, back to the dinner.

La Luncheonette is a classic French restaurant in, I'm guessing, a space that used to be a luncheonette. The food itself is not diner-y in the slightest.

The braised leek and lentil salad was delicious in just that way that restaurant food should be - lentils I understand, but I could not turn a leek from the store to what appeared on the plate without some serious effort and perhaps a different kind of pan. But I'm still planning to give it a shot.

Oh, and we had wine! Apparently something called Chateau de Haute-Serre, Cahors, is far, far better than any wine I can remember tasting, ever, and at $18 a half-bottle at the restaurant (and, says Google, the same amount for a whole bottle at a wine shop), it is not a beverage graduate students should be developing a taste for. Boo.

When we first looked at the menu, I told Jo I might just get the lentil-leek dish and another appetizer. He called me out for the fool I was, wasting our only fancy meal for months on some salad, even if it did come from Nice, so we split the lentil salad and I went for the rack of lamb, $30 (rather than the $7-$12 appetizers) and well worth it. It came with green beans that tasted nice and lamb-y, thanks to their proximity to the lamb, along with a scoop of potato gratin, which never hurts. Jo's steak with peppercorn sauce sadly did not look super amazing, and he admitted it was not that great. From the enthusiasm with which he 'tasted' my dish, I'm assuming it was quite the disappointment. (Fear not, he left me with more lamb than I knew what to do with.)

Dessert, a tarte tatin, came with something I did not want to try, that Jo thought tasted like sour cream or mascarpone, and that at any rate that is probably something delicious and French that I should be sophisticated enough to appreciate, but, err, no. Cheese I like, but anything sour and creamy is just gross. The tart itself (which has lost its 'e' now that we're speaking English) was, much like the leek appetizer, delicious in its I-could-not-make-this-at-home-without-dirtying-all-the-dishes impossibility. Which is precisely why we did not order the flourless chocolate cake.

So I was slightly nervous about eating in a grown-up restaurant while 20-something, but the service was lovely. Granted we were ultimately charged for two desserts after only ordering one, but once we pointed this out, the staff apologized and removed that charge. (I've found that in NYC restaurants you have a 50-50 chance of getting a bill quite far from the amount it should be, with a 50-50 chance each for too high and too low. Restaurants are busy. Unless the staff tells you that, surprise, your dish was actually the higher amount, despite what the menu said, which also happens and is annoying, I don't hold it against a place for what I tend to think is unintentional overcharging. It's just a good idea before paying to, you know, check.) It was still the most expensive meal we'd ever gone out to together. While I did not feel ripped off in the least, just disappointed Jo's steak hadn't been better, it was still kind of like, that didn't just happen, when we got the check. Back to pasta (and Thai food), indeed.

Fine dining

Amber's lentil soup sounds much more promising that the one I'd already gotten going upon reading her post. (This is what Elaine Benes would deem a "small coincidence.") Mine consists of, in completely unmeasured amounts: lentils (Canadian ones, which look, as one might guess, like a cross between French and regular ol' American lentils), olive oil, not-fresh thyme, fresh rosemary, yellow onion, garlic (some burnt, some not burnt to compensate), dashes of supermarket-balsamic and gourmet-store-white-wine vinegar, salt, and pepper. And water. And, I'm a bit concerned, pink nail polish, having just noticed that I've chipped two nails, although I think this preceded the soup production.

In other culinary news, while I had a great time catching up with a friend (who will go unnamed, on the off-chance her feelings about the place were more positive), the restaurant we went to, "Les Enfants Terribles," was... what everyone said it would be. It was not so much a case of bad service as of usury-meets-food-service.

(Cultural note: The restaurant is not quite French in terms of cuisine, but it is by-and-for French people. After noticing the NYMag reader reviews, I was hoping being with someone French would make me more welcome, but... no. As my friend pointed out, this was a place where a waiter was wearing a beret-like hat to remind us of his Frenchness. If you enter not under the impression that French waiters are rude--Francophile that I am, I did not--you will be left thinking either this, or that every other French waiter you've encountered has been positively dripping with politeness. Rudeness is, clearly, part of the show at this establishment, at a place where the waitstaff do shots between serving dishes, and where, if you are sitting on the outside chair, as I was, they yell 'excuse me' furiously every time you sit up straight in your seat. Tiny though I am, I felt very much the gigantic American.*)

So, back to the story. First, I ordered a dish that was $15.50. The waiter asked if I was sure I didn't want the special, also something involving beef. I asked (how gauche!) how much the special was, whether it was the same amount as the one I'd picked. Oh, it's $24. Hmm. I attribute the waiter's sneakiness to the fact that I'd ordered a drink, which perhaps signaled that I was willing to spend anything. Alas, a few sips of one drink, even by someone as Ashkenazi as I am, did not take away my other, also stereotypically Ashkenaz willingness to risk unsuaveness to avoid being overcharged.

The lesser beef was not bad, and the fries were fries, always a positive experience. I was even spontaneously brought ketchup, which I attribute to my being a feathered-haired, fanny-pack-and-white-sneakers-wearing, 6'6" and 300 pound American. I like ketchup, so all was well, except when a waiter wished to pass by, and I was not crouching obligingly.

The check appeared suddenly while we were still eating, but I didn't take offense, because the same happened to the Latvian model and her date sitting next to us. (That this was a beautiful-people place is both the restaurant's saving grace and its downfall.) Problems arose, however, when our waiter, the same man who'd tried to sneak the special, chased us as we left the restaurant, explaining, now in English, that you have to leave a 20% tip, and ours was not 20%. I've never before felt true nativist rage, not even when, last summer, the whole of Europe arrived to remind Americans just how useless our currency had become. I kept thinking, I'm from here! That's not how it works! I didn't go into the whole 'I'm from here' bit, which was, I think, obvious. But I did point out that there's no mandatory tip--if this particular restaurant had one (which would not be surprising in that they seem keen on ripping off those too beautiful and drunk to care) they hadn't exactly alerted us to it.

Which about brings us to the lentil soup.

* My "I am not French" tag has never been put to such good use!

Assorted excitement

-IFSer Damien tagged me to answer the question, "Why blog?" He asked in French, but I'll answer in English. So, leaving aside the obvious (narcissism, procrastination, graphomania), I started this blog because a college classmate of mine told me to turn my column in the school paper into one. Why I currently blog is something else. As a grad student, one grows used to the idea that one's ideas count for little. This is as it should be, considering how relatively little I know. But writing here, I can try out different ideas without asking anyone to respect mah authoritah. Sometimes these thoughts go somewhere, but it's at any rate all at a different pace and for a different audience than grad-school papers. I put less into the blog, and get less out of it, but it still strikes me as worthwhile, if only because it helps to write and (on a good day) construct some semblance of an argument more than just a few times per semester.

-Speaking of not constructing much of an argument, I reacted to the VP debate.

-But the weekend highlight was the dachshunds. There were puppies. Not getting one was the hardest thing I've ever had to do, and I've objectively had to do things that are more difficult.

-Also a highlight: I left Park Slope and went to Williamsburg and Greenpoint with Clementine. Fun but, as I realized traveling back, far. Apparently the hipster dudes (one, anyway) like my years-old Banana Republic scarf. I excel at unintentionally ironic.

-Less successfully, today, Jo 'six-pack' and I went to a (the) Park Slope Belgian bakery, since it was on the way to the IKEA shuttle, only to discover that it (bakery, not IKEA) had been closed by the "Health and Mental Hygiene" folks. We were not shocked, but it meant no croissants till Red Hook, which defines first-world problems. To an extent: we considered brunch in Park Slope, until discovering that the place we were considering charged $4 for a bagel, with egg dishes priced accordingly. The realization that we cannot afford to dine out (not that we'd want to, having reexamined that food inspection site) led us to buy so much at the Fairway pre-IKEA that we could barely carry the stuff home. Which about brings us up to date.

"The place is cheap:" Restaurant review, Freemans

I've mentioned this before, but the thing about being a grad student, or frugal, or a frugal grad student, is that your swanky night on the town is someone else's slumming it. It's a bit of a let-down, but there it is.

That said, Freemans is fantastic. Tucked away at the end of an alley, and decorated with more taxidermy than the Palins would know what to do with, the place is not for vegetarians, or for those who want to forget where meat comes from before tucking in. Jo had steak and I had lamb stew with a potato dumpling; the two women sitting next to us had ordered the same. "La meme chose," they noted; like everyone else in New York, these women spoke French. It helps make my field of study seem vaguely practical... Anyway, we are all four of us very wise, because the meat was clearly the way to go--the woman next to me on the other side ordered the fish-corn-lobster main course, and I hope it tasted better than it looked.

For dessert, the Frenchwomen, Jo, and I all opted for the warm brownie with ice cream, which was, I mean, take a guess. How could that not be amazing? I've never understood the trend of restaurant critics faulting a place for serving warm chocolate cake. 'So cliché,' they say. I say, it's food, not fashion, and heating chocolate so that it's just so will never stop being a good idea. Perhaps not as good an idea as making meat into stew and serving it with a dumpling/spaetzle dish of some kind, but a good one all the same.

Fine, so perhaps now I'm thinking, 'back to pasta,' financially, but the undeniable fact is, grad students and others who make some but not much money can eat in restaurants. Not every day, but often enough. How? It's quite simple: by not ordering drinks. This is easy enough if one happens to be in a French department, because you can always have wine at one event or another before dinner, but another option is to enjoy, as we did, and as those sitting around us did, a bit of chateau de la pompe. Considering a drink is in the $12 range at restaurants where dishes are not much more, a grad-student couple who orders drinks is basically taking an invisible third and fourth person out for a meal. Easily avoided. That way, you too can dine well, and even spot, as we did, a minor celebrity.

Restaurant review: Pita Joe

When in Rome, you order schnitzel. OK, not Rome, but a new fast-food place known for its schnitzel. Why, as I broke my years-long rule of not eating anything that comes from 14th Street (Whole Foods excepted) did I order the falafel? Could it be because I think schnitzel looks sort of nauseating, even under the best of circumstances? In any case, even with the student discount, this was a falafel sandwich for $6.50, which is to say, my expectations were high. Did it deliver? Kenvelo. It was far better than the unfortunately far more convenient and aesthetically indistinguishable Maoz, but not as good as the out-of-the-way but still walkable Taim. Although I can't quite judge, given that I remember thinking, as I entered the place, that I was really not at all up for a hummus-based meal of any kind.

Assortment

This will help put a Democrat in the White House.

Grad students live forever.

Take that, Whole Foods! Plastic bags are, as I suspected, totally awesome.

I can't find a link to either of the ads I'm thinking of (one on TV, one on the subway), but why do certain community- and for-profit colleges have ads depicting an entire class of students all enthusiastically raising their hands--the same hand-- at once? It looks disturbingly... political.