Life without cheese: worth living, but complicated!

For reasons relating to nursing, I'm on a no-dairy diet for the foreseeable (nursing) future. Yes, I'm now one of those people. What follows is... something? Advice, I guess, fully on the nursing-mother end of things, or really for anyone in a similar conundrum.

The thing is, I'd apparently been on an all-dairy diet previously, given how difficult this has been. I thought of myself as someone who was sort of squicked out by plain cow's milk, but it turns out this was very selective squeamishness-veganism as it were, and that once you put together steamed milk in espresso drinks, milk in cereal, cheese (including those soft ones I couldn't eat while pregnant), baked goods, chocolate croissants in particular, and just generally eating foods whose ingredients I couldn't begin to guess, that's a lot of dairy! I keep returning to the Kate Moss line about nothing tasting as good as skinny feels, and thinking how false it is. Because unsurprisingly, eliminating cheese, ice cream, iced lattes, and pastries from my diet has made me thinner than pre-pregnancy and I would prefer the version with food. (My days also involve library baby time, not runways, which might enter into it.)

That said, I'm trying to get creative about this whole no-dairy thing. After all, there are people who give up dairy to be chic and wellness-y! Which comes in handy I suppose when needing to eliminate the ingredient for other reasons. So many vegan bakeries! So many milk imitations to put in coffee for an additional charge of 50 cents!

That said, my impression - perhaps Toronto-specific - is that Western approximations of dairy-including foods are ugh, and that the answer is (some) East Asian food. With that in mind, I went to H-Mart and rather than buying almost everything, went with full-on everything. Stroller is useful for this.

Going with cuisines that wouldn't be expected to contain (much) dairy also has the plus of not being the thing where it's assumed that you're eliminating dairy as part of a general all-ingredients-pose-problems diet. It's really just dairy I can't eat (at least, as far as I know at this point; I am jinxing myself), which makes me that much more interested in the presence of all other ingredients. If I can't put milk in cereal, I'm not going to rule out soy milk as well. If baked goods can't contain milk or butter, am not about to leave out eggs and flour. And yeah it's probably the moment to get past whichever near-vegetarianism I'd landed on.

I'm trying to treat this as an opportunity to buy the fancy groceries I wouldn't otherwise when I was still spending (redacted) per grocery trip on cheese. I have visions of complicated meals, of the surf and turf varieties. The reality: three halves of Montreal-style bagel with - because I'm running out of non-cheese topping ideas (enough peanut butter, enough avocado) and can't look at another egg - tahini. A steep learning curve, this.

Mush

When I first thought about "weaning" I imagined a situation where yes I'd still be nursing, but if something came up - say, if I needed to be out for more than an hour, or to do something decadent like sleep through the night - my husband could offer our child some food. I don't know if I could call my persistence in this belief naive exactly, because I spoke with many other mothers of slightly older babies - first at postnatal exercise classes, and then, at library baby time - and learned that "weaning," in this context, for a long time just means adding an extra step to your schedule, without any reduction in time or frequency of nursing. But I kept on imagining the time was imminent that my husband could just hand our baby a sandwich while I caught up on sleep.

Well! Baby is now solid-foods months old, and the other mothers were correct. This *is* an additional daily task. But an exciting one. Like most of humanity, I'm a big fan of food, and so I'm looking forward to introducing my child to more of it. But...how?

The old model, I guess, was purees from jars. There are now purees in pouches, but these are Bad and for emergencies only. Cheaper and (allegedly) easier: purees you make at home. This I have been doing, and just requires some advance planning. It fits with my own general approach to meals, and seems fine? And it turns out if you roast sweet potatoes for a long time, then puree them, that's really good! Not a new discovery in general but not something I'd otherwise have had the patience for.

But I'd read and heard good things about something called baby-led weaning. Just give your baby small bits of your own meal! Which sounds even better. Food is great! Purees, not super appetizing, although the freezer is now an interesting multicolored array of ice-cube-tray fruits and vegetables (and, less effectively, tofu).

There are a few issues with the baby-led weaning approach. Such as: this concept of an adult "meal" seems to have been imagined by someone with a lot of technical cooking skill (everything has to be just so texture and shape-wise) but zero interest in cooking itself. As in: what is this food you're preparing for yourself, without any salt or oil? (No sugar, either, which I could see getting annoying but is less immediately difficult in cooking.) And why no oil, if babies are supposed to be getting enough fat? Why is fat Very Important if in yogurt but not if in butter or oil or whatever? Why are you meant to give your baby cheese and bread and things of that nature, but watch out for salt, which is an ingredient in everything purchased outside? What if you're still in the eternal-seeming stage where you're slowly introducing ingredients - then can you offer foods containing more than one?

The idea is to avoid raising a picky eater, but make sure there is no sauce on any of your baby's food, except if it's a dipping sauce, which is the only way "BLW" babies are allowed to eat puree. If you put a spoon in your baby's mouth, it might as well be a joint, is the impression some of the books give. Some but not all - some are realistic about foods having different textures and that maybe putting some mashed-up avocado on a spoon and offering this up to an enthusiastic enough baby will not be - I mean, read the news! - the worst thing that could happen to a baby, and is in fact a good thing to happen to a baby, all told. Other books, however, are more like, purees, even of fresh ingredients you prepared yourself, are setting your baby up to never learn to talk or lift a spoon or whatever and - and this (not rejection from Harvard!) is the undercurrent of apparently all parenting advice, except I'm imagining some subset of it that's out to consciously avoid that theme - be fat.

Which, who knows, but also remember that at six months, babies start needing nutrients from more than just milk or formula, so "food before one is just for fun" isn't actually a thing. But also, iron-fortified oat cereal is processed and therefore unacceptable, except when I have oatmeal myself, I mean, someone or some machine has presumably processed the oats in question.

Also: choking. Which could happen regardless but seems as if it would be more likely if you're handing your baby an ear of corn or a drumstick, but what do I know.

Oh and: one of the books had the nerve to say that if your own family meals aren't baby-food compatible, as in if there isn't something salt-and-sugar-free of the correct texture and nutrient content, all ingredients verified - you could hand your baby, then there's clearly something wrong with how you eat and by the way here are a bunch of nauseating-sounding quinoa recipes as suggestions. It's like some extended, extra-bonkers version of the thing where pregnant women are said to be infantilized by health tips. And, I mean, I was fine with the nine months not drinking thing! But am I about to cook only unseasoned food and once again stop eating runny cheese?? Hmm!

Meanwhile it would seem that babies can indeed go from milk to purees to soft foods to regular food without the world ending if a step or two in the middle aren't skipped. There are also sensible advice-givers out there, prepared to admit that you can try both these methods, at the same meal, even, without the sky falling in, or winding up with a baby who'll grow up to eat only mushed banana. And I can - I tried this evening! it worked! - cook without salt, and only add the salt after (along with a gallon of soy sauce) and not quite as much oil as I might have otherwise. It's fine!

The same part of my brain that's able to turn off 'get wild salmon not farmed because reasons even though wild is $50 a pound and often tastes worse' when it comes to my own food consumption can do that as well for the baby-food variant. But oh, do I see (she types, having spent 10 minutes trying to figure out which is the appropriate First Yogurt, like Borat encountering the cheese section of an American supermarket) how it could all lend itself to making someone sort of lose it, when just as you're finally getting a tiny bit more sleep, but only just, you're meant to become instant expert in a dreary sort of home cooking, all for a person who is, simply on account of their age, more likely to offer the food in question to a can't-believe-the-luck dog than to put the carefully-prepared chicken shreds into their mouth.

Toronto's best inconvenient eats

Among the many reasons I could not be a food critic: how much I like a meal is almost entirely dependent on how hungry I am at the time, and how much I'm up for the food in question. If the answer to both is "very," then chances are I'm about to eat the best pizza/udon/dumplings I've ever had.

Scarcity is everything where food is concerned, even among the world's fortunate for whom this isn't about necessity, but rather, about the freely-chosen decision to get on that enormous line for that place you read about. The more involved it is to actually sit before the food in question, the better the food. That's why San Francisco is known as this great gourmand destination - the city is just one enormous line for a decent-but-not-all-that croissant. But when you actually get the croissant, it's 6pm and you're just so happy to finally have breakfast.

Toronto's climate and culture don't lend themselves to this phenomenon. It's not an especially laid-back city, and more to the point, it's almost always too cold to stand outside on a line. And yet, it's a food city. Maybe more so than New York, where the hot new restaurant is going to be more of about the scene. (She says, having mostly read about those restaurants, preferring to spend time back home on a continual Murray's mozzarella - Shake Shack - Greenmarket - Sobaya loop.) So yes, people here line up, year-round. I can attest to this as one of the people in question.

That said, a caveat is in order! That there's a line doesn't necessarily mean the food you're waiting for is worth it. After months of contemplating doing so, I eventually waited for the line-having ice cream on Ossington. And it was... fine? Then there's the huge line near Trinity Bellwoods Park for soft-serve ice cream that's purple or jet-black or something, at any rate apparently very Instagrammable, maybe tasty too but I've never been convinced enough to find out.

So, in order of somewhat subjective inconvenience, and leaving out places (J-Town for raisin bread and assorted Japanese ingredients; Gourmand for chocolate chip cookies...) whose inconvenience rests solely on my refusal to own/borrow a car, or that (Yummy Yummy Dumplings) are a bit off the beaten path but straightforward enough once you've arrived:

-Soba Canada. This is a Tuesday-nights-only pop-up, walkable from my apartment. I taught this year on Tuesday nights, so for a long time trying this was the dream. (Toronto has infinite ramen possibilities, but soba/udon are harder to track down.) I made a reservation for the one Tuesday I could go, but there was a soba shortage in Manitoba so that didn't happen. Then eventually another Tuesday worked out, and I went! Most of what I remember about the meal was that there was this huge table across from us, taking professional-seeming photos of their food. I remember the soba as being very good, but also that a bunch of menu items were unavailable.

-Tasso. At a storefront in Cabbagetown, bus and subway away, but quick. It's got the best French pastries (kouign amann especially) in the city, but is only open Friday through Sunday (but not this Friday through Sunday - they're on break), only in the mornings, and tends to sell out quite early. Yes, I have seen lines at Tasso in winter. The drawbacks: no seating, and the distinct possibility you'll get off that bus to find you're too late. The second-best pastries - Nadège - are also quite good, and there you can do things like arrive at 3pm and sit down with your croissant (or kouign amann), but Tasso is just... incredible. Once it's again comfortable eat-on-a-bench season, I'll head back.

-Famiglia Baldassarre. A free local magazine appears in the mailbox every so often. On the cover of the latest issue was a photo of some pasta being handmade, at what the interior of said magazine explained was a former pasta speakeasy turned above-board, line-having pasta place. A line? I was already intrigued. Advice to arrive 15 minutes before opening time? Yes. Open only four days a week? Oh yes. In further scarcity: every day, there are just two pastas to choose from, so you have to check on Instagram (and, uh, wait for the semester to be over) to see whether it makes sense to head out and get on that line. (I would not have taken the bus for duck-filled pasta. Spinach-and-ricotta ravioli with butter and parmesan, however...)

Well! The day came that doing this made sense (as much as it ever would), and... it was pretty involved. First step was a bus - and not one of the ones I normally take, but one requiring a bit of a walk first - to a neighborhood (Davenport, according to Google Maps) I'd never been to, and didn't quite understand. Was it super posh and residential? Was it abandoned warehouses? Whatever it was, it seemed an unlikely place for a business requiring foot traffic, but it would seem this is not such a place after all. It was May, but well under 50 degrees F. And yes, the line to sit went outside. But when I say "the line to sit," I'm referring to what I thought this was the line for. It was, in fact, the line to order. (A line that took forever, but everyone on it bonded over obsession with the prospect of hard-to-get pasta.) Once you get indoors, you first wait in a warehouse-type entryway, complete with a list of rules about ordering. Only then do you reach the line inside the place itself, where you can watch the staff make from-a-movie-looking pasta from scratch, as you alternate between salivating and wondering if you were a fool not to just put up some DeCecco at home.

Reach the front and you then have to wait for one of the handful of tables to become available. This wouldn't have been so tricky if it weren't for The Lady, who was telling a friend some apparently very engaging or engaging-to-tell story and would not stop, even though both were clearly long since done with their lunch, sitting there oblivious to the horde waiting to sit.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The line takes so long that once you get to the front of it, you need to have decided on your order, as well as on any pasta you might wish to purchase to take home, but also whether or not you want a dessert gelato bar for after. I knew from the get-go I'd be buying more pasta (I mean), but wasn't sure if I'd want the dessert, so I asked at the counter if it would be possible, line-logistics-wise, to decide after the meal. It would not. I decided against - this was about the pasta.

Several decades after setting out for lunch, I was in front of the best plate of pasta I have ever eaten, ever. Yes, I do tend to think this about cheese-filled pasta, including the kind I'd have as a kid, from the frozen-foods section of very much pre-food-movement New York supermarkets. But even so, the dough and filling were just better than they ever are, ever. While I was indeed biased by the long wait, because the advice had been to show up before noon, and I hadn't arrived much later, I wasn't unusually hungry, so I'd like to think this was somewhat fair judging. It was so good that I... got back on the (admittedly by then far shorter) line, not just to pick up the pasta I'd already bought, but also to buy some more. It wasn't even 2pm, the end of the lunch service (the store itself closes at 5), but they were already running low. 16 ricotta-only filled ravioli were, however, available. The trick will be not to sit down and eat $15 worth of pasta in one sitting, since that sort of defies the purpose of eating in, but I will probably do exactly that any day now. 

"Kantaro"'s surreal relatability

I have a new favorite television program, and by "television" I mean Canadian Netflix. "Kantaro: The Sweet Tooth Salaryman," which I'm somewhere in the middle of, tells a story at once universal and highly specific. The highly specific first: it's about a Japanese businessman who gets his sales visits (to bookstores) done as quickly as possible, so as to try desserts in cafés near wherever those visits happen to have taken him. When he arrives at the dessert place, a mildly NSFW but ultimately more suggestive than literal scene ensues: eyes rolled back, syrup splashed, and then, inevitably, his head transforms into the (main ingredient of the) dessert in question. After each visit, he writes on a pseudonymous blog about the culinary experience.

The drama comes from the possibility that Kantaro will get found out at work for slacking off while on the clock. Much suspension of disbelief is needed, because a) he's the best salesperson, so maybe they don't care that he's eating a snack here and there, even if snacking for him evidently requires table service?, but also b) dude could just, like, schedule his blog posts, so it's not obvious where and when he's posting, with the times and places lining up with his sales visits.

So fine, this much is specific: we are not, all of us, Tokyo salesmen with distinctive eyebrows, who reach heights of ecstasy when eating traditional Japanese bean-based desserts.

The universal: who doesn't use Yelp or Google Maps or just a knowledge of whichever area to go eat the most delicious thing near whichever work task? Who doesn't get a doctorate in French in order to eat market cheese and croissants and other delicacies readily affordable even to a grad student, the trick being just to get to Paris in the first place? Who wouldn't choose to live and work near a dreamscape Toronto East Asian food corridor, with a Japanese convenience store in the back of a ramen shop, an H-Mart, and (at least) two amazing izakayas? Who doesn't order a bowl of scallion noodles at a Shanghai-style restaurant and then feel the need to recite exactly what is making the food so exquisite?

I can't quite imagine being as thrilled as he is (or to be honest, thrilled at all) about the prospect of a melon-flavored shaved ice, but replace "melon-flavored shaved ice" with "crema bomboloni" and I see where he's coming from. What makes Kantaro so great is, he's not a foodie in the sense of, he's sharing photos of food on social media for status purposes. He's genuinely thrilled with everything he's eaten, to the point where you're sometimes a little worried about him, and wondering if he should maybe keep a KitKat or something on hand, if the cravings are too much.

In some sense the show isn't even about food - it's about the tension between fun and responsibility, and about the way having just enough time to go do something makes whatever it is that much more enjoyable. In a really boring sense, it's a show about time management - the way that if you're trying to get something big accomplished, it's paradoxically easier to have a routine than to have all the time in the world. Except... it's totally about food.

Which brings me to maybe my biggest question about the show, which is whether Kantaro ever eats... meals. Anything savory? Ever? Or does he have regular meals but feel indifferent to them?

When croissants sell out

There is nothing that better convinces me a pastry will be amazing than learning that it will be near-impossible to acquire.

Recently, when on the Yelp page for a different bakery, I saw a review mentioning that the really good croissants were from somewhere called Tasso. Tasso? How had I not heard of this bakery? From the moment (a good long while ago at this point) I knew I'd be moving to Toronto, I've been keeping track of the eternal best-croissants-of situation. I thought I'd tried all downtown contenders, as well as some from further afield. While the baseline croissant standard is quite good (much better than, oh, say, New York), they sort of peak at Nadège or Bistro Normandie. From photos available online, and reviews, it seemed as if Tasso might be on another whole level. The real Parisian deal, but somewhere walkable (or TTC-able) from my apartment. How had I not known??

Here's how I hadn't known: it's only open three times a week, from 8:30am until they run out, which can be... not long after. It's also not near where I work, live or used to live, so there's no reason I'd have ever happened to pass by. (It's on a street I've been on maybe twice, both times to go visit an urban farm.) Convenience-wise, this was not so far from trying to go and get a croissant in France itself. But I was up, I was curious, so finally, today, I went.

I arrived and didn't see any sign indicating the name of the bakery. Instead, what I saw was a line. A San Francisco line. Not a November-in-Toronto line, or at least not one for something other than sneakers. (Young men regularly camp out all night in front of sneaker stores here, in all seasons.) But there was enough of a crowd, and not much else around that it could be for, that I deduced this was the place.

It was the place, all right. I got in/on line (which is it in Toronto? I'm trying to acculturate), between two families that knew each other. There was no Canadian politeness on any front in terms of either they or I moving position, as the whole thing is croissant scarcity, and everyone was very on edge about the possibility of the place running out. The man in front of me was telling the people behind me that one time, they ran out of kouign amanns at 8:35. So clearly I was going to need to order one of those. The woman behind me was saying that she no longer recommends the place to people she knows, as it's getting too popular, but not too popular as in too mainstream (I've just finished reading The Rebel Sell, so I feel obligated to point this out) but as in, someone else might get the last croissants. I felt sort of bad, being this interloper from outside the neighborhood, from America, even, which somehow makes it worse.

The people standing near me seemed to think the place was about to sell out. (Again, not sell out as in, like what some 6th grade classmates of mine were very concerned was happening to Green Day. Sell out of pastries for the day, or, rather, the week.) Others kept leaving with these big paper bags full of pastries. Why so many? That did it - I was going to get multiple pastries, too, if I wound up getting any, that is.

My turn came, and I could see... a bunch of things, really. I noticed a sign they put up when they're "almost sold out," which is amazing. I noticed that there's no seating - it's take-out only, but does serve coffee. An unusual choice in Toronto, to be sure. But mostly I noticed the pastries. Exquisite. Not over-hyped in the least, by the look of them.

Having now tried them (croissant and kouign amann), I can say that they are indeed the best in the city (barring any extra-secret bakeries open only ten seconds a week), easily as good as Parisian ones, and better than any in New York. The plain croissant has that flawless middle-of-croissant dough that I've basically only ever encountered at Le Boulanger des Invalides Jocteur, aka the best Paris bakery, which has sadly closed. This means... what does it mean? It means I now need to get up early on at least one weekend day and take some pastries home on the subway. In a very ambitious version, this gets incorporated into an early-morning jog. But the damage that could do to the pastries themselves might not be worth risking it.

Bowled over

What is it about bowls? Specifically: Why is food in bowls a thing? Because Instagram, is the quick answer. Food - specifically, healthy food - looks nice when photographed from above, in a bowl. The only permitted flat food is, of course, avocado toast.

There are breakfast versions involving granola, milk, and berries. Those I'm OK with. It's the savory ones that I'm having trouble embracing. These bowls - at like $12 a bowl - were very much a thing in Toronto. A city that also sells sub-$12 non-bowl lunch options, so I never wound up trying one.

I'm having trouble putting my finger on what my issue is with these bowls, exactly. Part of it is that I feel shamed by their existence - all that balance, those grains and greens where I'd sooner have pasta, (fewer) greens, and cheese. (The bowl-as-trough aspect isn't the issue.) It's a sense of inferiority for not going bowl, mixed with a sense of superiority for my non-faddishness in this area. (In this one area. I did buy a jumpsuit.)

But it's also the contents of many dishes labeled "bowls," which tend to sound vaguely nutritious but... bland. Cuisine-less, and not as in fusion, or the productive mix of existing cuisines. More like a bunch of supposed-to-be-good-for-you ingredients piles on top of each other. Thai or Chinese stir-fry, salade niçoise, Japanese or Vietnamese noodles with toppings, gnocchi with pesto, these all involve bowls, but they're not bowls in the utilitarian Western 2016 sense of the term. It's some sort of puritanical asceticism where you have a "protein" with your meal. Even if the ingredients are identical, a bowl is not a salade composée.

Consider this pro-bowl Guardian article, whose author writes, "I love how gentle and nurturing it feels" to eat one of these bowls. A bowl - and the Guardian ones actually look OK! - might taste good, but it's not really supposed to. It's supposed to nourish and nothing more. Which is, I think, what puts me off.

Hotpot: a recipe

A photo posted by @casa_della_bisou on Feb 7, 2016 at 7:10pm PST

I don't know what cuisine this is. But here's how I make hotpot:

-Meat: You'll want a nice cut of beef (ideally ribeye), but not much of it. It needs to be thinly sliced, which is no big deal if there's a supermarket near you that sells this, but if there isn't (or if, as is my situation, there probably is, but it's a choice between the place with Wagyu and the one where even tofu purchased near the butcher section stinks of rotten meat), pay up at whichever other butcher and do the partially-freeze-then-slice method. I have no idea for how long, only that I always get this wrong, and freeze it too little or into a solid block. (Maybe 3 hours would be ideal?)

-Rice:

Put up the rice cooker. If using a regular pot, start on the rice after the broth, I think.

-Broth:

Put chicken stock (packaged is fine) in the pot you'll use for the hotpot itself, but on the burner, so as not to waste hotpot-canister fuel before you're actually having the meal. If you have one of those induction-top situations, put on the burner immediately, as this will take forever.

Spices: Add to the broth one star anise star thingy; a few (not too many! I have done this!) Szechuan peppercorns; and a good number of dried, whole red chilis. (Or maybe fewer if the ones you have are really spicy.) Also: sliced fresh ginger, some less aesthetic-looking (but edible!) bits of shiitake mushroom, scallion, garlic. Let that simmer for... as long as you're preparing everything else.

Ingredient prep: Soak dried tofu skin. That needs to happen first, because it takes forever. Then, in whichever order:

-Chop scallion and chop (or better yet, garlic-press) garlic. Put these aside in dipping-sauce bowls, to be combined with soy sauce and sesame oil.

-Wash a tremendous amount of pea shoots and/or baby bok choy.

-Cut up remaining shiitake mushrooms. "Cooking with Dog"-style (that is, with a little cross in the center), if you're feeling ambitious.

-Tofu? Why not! (I like the one that's silky but not so much so that it completely disintegrates.) But try to get a smaller amount, since leftover raw tofu is complicated.

-Remember to take out anything else of interest (say, the thin mochi designed for hotpot) from whichever pantry.

-The meat! It should probably come out of the freezer by now. Take it out, and try to slice it thinly.

And then it's just time to eat the thing. Which is - apart from the setup itself - kind of self-explanatory.

A Chinese restaurant post

Last night my husband and I got Chinese food. As usual, we asked for soy sauce to go with. Also as usual, the request was met with a look of disgust. And finally - again, as usual - when the server returned with the soy sauce, she'd also brought along two forks, which we, as usual, declined.

As far as I can tell, the soy sauce-fork connection is that no one familiar with proper Chinese food (or these particular dishes) would ever ask for such a thing. If you're that cuisine-ignorant, you're probably unfamiliar with chopsticks. (Perhaps you'd like a shovel?) Alas, the combination of the sauce on one of these dishes and a bit of soy sauce is the most delicious taste to ever exist, ever, so the routine keeps on repeating itself.

It's apparently somewhere between weird and insulting to order soy sauce on the side at a Chinese restaurant. Where on the weird-to-insulting spectrum it falls, I couldn't say, although a quick Google suggests it's closer to the latter. I mean, it's obviously not a really odd request, as in, it's not like going in and asking for an ingredient that isn't part of the cuisine in question. They do have a spouted, customer-ready bottle of soy sauce, if not several. That is, it's not like going in and asking for, I don't know, ketchup or wasabi. And I doubt it's the cost - if that were the case, there'd be the annoyance but not the forks. And it's not all Chinese restaurants - at hot-pot places, you're encouraged to take a bowl and fill it with as much soy and other sauces as you'd like. (One reason among many that I'm always lobbying for hot-pot...) It seems like part of the problem, in our case, is that the dish with the sauce isn't from the Chinese-American part of the menu, so we seem for this one brief moment to be on a quest for authenticity, and then we ruin it.

Maybe it's something like ordering a cappuccino with dinner at an Italian restaurant? Cappuccinos being, of course, Italian, but apparently not to be consumed in that situation. Or maybe - probably - it's like when (high-end; I've only actually ever heard about this) chefs refuse to provide salt, because you're insulting their technique if you think the seasoning wasn't perfect already. There had been this delicate balance of flavors. Ruined! Ruined, perhaps, but so very, very delicious.

A post unrelated to shirts

Rather than dwell on the scandals of the social-media moment,* I'm going to revisit a topic I wrote about in 2004. Yes, matzo. Specifically, the question of matzo marketing. Recently I was listening to Dan Pashman's podcast about matzo, which is very much about matzo as a year-round food. One interesting tidbit was that religious Jews are apparently less concerned with matzo flavor-purity than are secular Jews. According to a guest expert, secular Jews think it's not kosher-in-the-colloquial-sense to have flavored matzos, whereas observant Jews will have... whatever is the matzo equivalent of a blueberry bagel, as long as it's kosher-in-the-religious-sense. Also intriguing, if not so surprising, given the year-round availability of matzo in regular supermarkets: lots of people agree that it's a better cracker than that which is sold as crackers.

But I was also struck by Pashman's intro, which consisted of this... almost apology for taking on a Judeo-centric culinary topic. I get that part of it is because he's introducing a Southern Baptist matzo-producer, but he also seems genuinely concerned that he'll have listeners who will be like, 'ugh, what's this Jew doing, telling us about all of this Jew food we don't care about!' That intro reminded me of nothing more than intros to monographs I read in grad school, where the author explains that a book about French Jews is really one about France, apologizing for having dared broach such a particular subject... as though it were possible to write an academic text of that sort that covered France generally. And I kept wondering, would Lynne Rosetto Kasper apologize for an item on Italian-American cuisine? I mean, maybe she does this and I don't notice it? Somehow, though, I doubt it. There's something specifically Jewish, I think, in this fear, this overcompensation for being thought to think we're "chosen." And I mean no disrespect to Pashman - I'm sure I do this as well. I doubt if being aware of it much helps.

Anyway, I'm also remarking on this because: matzo brei! Now that's a food with which to alienate Gentiles, as well as, alas, some Jews.

*OK, one final, personal note: For all the talk of TBTB and so forth, in my own, day-to-day life, I'm surrounded by scientists, most of whom are men, and all of whom dress much better than I do. I think it may relate to their being European. Or just to the number of items in my closet splattered from matzo-brei preparation.

A "bookish" roundup

I was frequenting this brunch place in town, not because I like brunch, but because that bread. It's this odd mix of fluffy and wholesome, with all the grains and such I like, and none of the ones I just sort of tolerate. I figured it came either from the place or, more likely, from some special Central European bakery, perhaps a wholesaler, I'd have no access to. And... today I discovered said bread at Wegmans. $5 a (huge) loaf, or $3 for half, but still a better deal than the $13 (now $15) for the brunch. There are also soft pretzels that look... familiar, but those I haven't tasted to confirm. 

It's quite possible (I have my reasons to suspect) that everything the place sells comes from Wegmans, which is on the one hand disillusioning, but on the other... I mean, eating out always means a markup. They probably don't want customers to know their stuff comes from the supermarket, but they, I don't know, curate it? I'd have never found this bread otherwise, and it's amazing. ("Seven Grain Bread," for those in Wegmans territory.) And it's on the whole a good thing for me personally that I can recreate the meal I so enjoy. But this may well spell the end of a briefly-revived stint as someone who does brunch.

***

So I was trying to cross the street just now with my husband and our dog, and we were at a crosswalk without traffic lights. It wasn't particularly dark out yet. There was a car coming, but quite far, and on a 25mph road, so I stepped into the road - I think we all did? - and made the 'we're crossing' gesture. The car slowed down in a way that indicated the driver saw us, then sped up, only to more abruptly stop once we were definitively in the crosswalk. As the driver passed, he shouted a sarcastic, "You're welcome!" from his SUV, as if he'd done us the biggest favor in the world, allowing us to cross where you're supposed to, the way you're supposed to. And... I know I'm newish at driving culture, but is this a thing? You're supposed to thank cars that allow you to cross in a residential area, in a crosswalk?  

When I'm driving, I stop for pedestrians (without making a thing of it! they have the right of way!) and sometimes get a gesture of appreciation, but by no means usually, and I by no means expect one. I suppose maybe it's weird when a pedestrian thanks the driver who stopped first, but not the one on the opposite side of the road, but I've had this happen exactly once, and lost exactly no sleep over it. So, to be clear, this guy was in the wrong, correct?

***

A guy I think I went to college with (name sounds familiar, don't know if I'd ever met him, had no preexisting opinion of him, but it's a huge school) wrote this week's Modern Love. It reminded me of a novel I read not that long ago, so much so that I kept wanting to congratulate the female author on creating such a convincing heterosexual male protagonist. 

Anyway, what interests me is this:

I was amazed to have gotten this far. As my friends were sick of hearing, it made no sense to me that a gorgeous woman in her early 20s who spoke four languages and had lived on three continents was spending her Saturdays with me, a 31-year-old bookish type from Pittsburgh.

 And:

“How old are you?” one asked, which put our substantial age difference — something we had not yet talked about — suddenly under a spotlight.

(You can tell this is someone from UChicago because of the "bookish type" self-description.)

Anyway, a pairing of "31" and "early 20s" doesn't seem all that outrageous, although there's often a life-stage difference between 20 and 24, one far greater than between 24 and 31. I would say something about how you never see 31-year-old women with several-years-younger men, until I remembered several couples I'm friends with who fit that pattern.

What struck me, then, was how much of a thing it is, for a 31-year-old man, to be dating a younger-but-not-indecently-so woman. This isn't just, for him, a thing that happens once you're an adult, and are socializing with people who weren't necessarily in kindergarten the same year you were. It's part of her value. It's not enough that she's beautiful - she's a catch because of her not-31-ness. And yes, this absolutely did strike me because I, too, am 31. I'm surprised-but-not-really that even men as young as 31 would find same-age women excessively ancient. That a woman of legal age could be, in some meaningful sense, a younger woman to someone 31.

So I've watched some "Millionaire Matchmaker" in my day (and so I nominate myself for the alumni award for Least Bookish Type, literature PhD notwithstanding), and there, the men of course want younger women, but this will be for one of two (stated) reasons. One is that it hits them at a haggard 57-ish that they'd like kids. The other is that they just prefer women under 25, 30, 19, whatever, which is the trickier issue. These same men will also claim they want to settle down. (Yes, I understand that it's probably semi-scripted and actually an interwoven series of ads for cupcake and flower companies.) One put it... best?... when he said his perfect woman would be 29 and three quarters forever. The late-middle-aged man in question looked like a cross between Eric Cartman and Donald Trump.

It seems, in other words, a gamble to be appreciated for your youth. For your beauty... well, beauty may fade, but is more subjective. A man might cease to find a woman beautiful without her having changed in appearance, or might continue to be attracted to her because he still sees her as she looked when they met. But a man who settles down with a woman because she's such a great distance from the age at which he thinks women cease to be interesting... I mean, she will, barring unforeseen disaster, turn that age.

"Small plates to share"

For our anniversary, my husband and I went to a restaurant in town that I won't name. Not because I didn't like the place - I did like it! - but because anything other than 10 out of 10 gushing may lead to angry emails from owners, or eternal banishment (again, I did like it, but more like 9/10), or who even knows. Maybe I'm still reeling from an incident, early in WWPD history, when I blogged (accurately!) that a certain now-defunct Brooklyn coffee shop was pretty but overpriced, only to get furious emails from Mr. Coffee Shop, who'd Googled the name of his coffee shop and somehow imagined that telling me his coffee shop wasn't overpriced would, I don't know, make me remove the post? I checked, and it's still up, so I suppose that didn't happen. But it did have the effect of making me reluctant to ever mention the name of a food establishment other than the handful of old favorites (Chelsea Thai, Dos Toros, Sobaya) that I'm giving a uniformly rave review. 

So. The place - and if you live here, you will soon know which it is - is the newish, less-expensive (but still, Princeton) version of a wildly expensive place just outside of town. It opened shortly after another restaurant also promising farm-to-table, Brooklyn-by-way-of-Central-NJ cuisine. That one, which I was so curious about for however long, turned out to be sort of... bad. A nice bar, but exactly the kind of American-means-bland food that these source-fetishization menus (not uncommon, as I recall, at cheaper places in New York) seem to imply. After that disappointment, it was back to the regular lineup: lots of cooking pseudo-Italian food at home, or if going out, Ajihei for schmancy, Shanghai Bun for not-so-schmancy, Chung Sol Bat in Edison or Nam Phuong in Philadelphia for excursions, and... I'm starting to think that if the cuisine doesn't include soy sauce, chances are I'm less interested. So there wasn't any great rush to try the latest sourced-ingredient establishment. 

That, and everything I'd read about the place - and I'd read a lot! not much new ever opens around here! - said that it would be small portions at entree prices. Under more let's say urban circumstances, with more options, I'd see something like that and be like, forget it, never going there. But it's Princeton. Options are few. And the prices seemed kind of... not that high for this town, even allowing for the apparent need to order more. Our waiter reiterated the "small plates to share" concept, and asked if there was anything we couldn't/wouldn't/shouldn't eat (don't remember how he phrased this), in a friendly way, but one that indicated that small portions and unexpected ingredients were things people were complaining about on Yelp.

Well! The portions were not tiny, which would make me think this was a conspiracy by the place to get people to order more (we really didn't need five dishes for two; three would have been more than enough), except that the people saying this online are telling you not to go there because you'll be ripped off. Anyway, a salad was the same size (and style of dressing) as at the not-tapas-inspired place down the street. Luckily I'm a big fan of that salad. Especially luckily, given that these same greens seemed to come with almost every dish. Everything also seemed to come with dollops of white cream (or was this the famous foam?), each with a different taste. OK, one plate did seem small - the falafel salad my husband got, with falafels that looked quite molecular. 

Then - and here I'm giving away the place, so be it - I had the "stuffing gnocchi," which were my introduction, I suppose, to... is this molecular gastronomy? At any rate, to food more posh-and-now than I'd probably ever come across. It was gnocchi - at least the texture and appearance of gnocchi - but the taste was Thanksgiving stuffing through and through. As gnocchi and stuffing happen to be two of my favorite foods, I couldn't have been more pleased. Plus, I got to enjoy these two starchy kid-foods under the guise of sophistication. There were also mushrooms, which I've relatively recently taught myself to not mind (still not so sure about a giant portobello, though), maybe even enjoy? Maybe. And the foam-cream with this dish was "smoked curd" flavor (maybe? it was the only listed item that made sense) and delicious.

The other not-so-small plate I dug into enough to remark on was smoked arctic char. I was expecting something in the lox family, but pleasantly surprised to find something that - much in the manner of the deceptive-in-a-good-way gnocchi! - looked like cooked salmon but tasted like smoked trout. It came with the very tasty eggs of an unspecified fish, and some potatoes I'd have been more excited about if I hadn't just eaten all that gnocchi. (How will I ever recreate stuffing gnocchi at home?)

The desserts looked a little too... main-course-ish. One included peas and "sable", which either meant whitefish, rabbit, antelope, or a kind of French cookie, according to Wikipedia. It's 50-50, from the context, whether it was the fish or the cookie. There was also an ice cream sandwich with barley and rhubarb - possibly wonderful, but I'm a culinary peasant whose preferred ice cream adornments are cookie dough or rainbow sprinkles. There are many reasons I'd never make it as a restaurant reviewer, but that's got to be one of them.

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.

"Jansson's Temptation"

Food diaries exist. Right? This is a thing? I remember we had to keep them for a week freshman year of high school - a week when I happened to eat many eggs, I recall, and had to account for my cholesterol consumption in biology class. I haven't had reason to keep such detailed track since. But today, what I ate probably does merit one, and since I don't think Grub Street's knocking, WWPD it is:

-At what felt like 4am, due to some combination of the time change, the need to catch a particular train at Princeton Junction, and having stayed out till almost midnight (old age), but was probably more like 8am, I think I had grapefruit juice, some Raschera cheese without crackers (by which I mean matzo) because I was all out, and coffee.

-At my Canadian-family reunion - in New York, not Canada - I first had a giant cappuccino, with sugar because it seemed useful, what with the sleepiness. Then I had gravlax, which was excellent if unfortunately partially covered in a cream sauce of some kind (and as for why that would be a problem, despite my very much enjoying a whole-milk cappuccino, clearly this is not a nutritional concern, but some kind of latent picky eating that reemerges if surrounded by enough family members), with a side order of something called "Jansson's Temptation." I was not the only cousin curious to know what was so tempting to this Jansson. Alas, Jansson seems to like an anchovy-flavored potato gratin. Fortunately, there's no combination of potato, cheese, and salt I can't enjoy.

-At the Paris Baguette on 32nd Street, I had a mini mochi doughnut. Dessert!

-Iced coffee from Stumptown. Black, no sugar. Delicious. $3.50, so it really should be.

-Against all sleepy odds, and thanks in no small part to that iced coffee, made it home via the stretch of pothole that is the trip between here and Princeton Junction. Fed and walked a stir-crazy poodle. Once back from the walk, had plain pasta with more Raschera, which may or may not be a cheese that's meant for pasta, but it melted nicely. Wanted to include vegetables of some kind (there's kale-of-best-intentions in the fridge, and some winter asparagus), but exhaustion ruled out that possibility.

-Fell asleep for an undisclosed, insufficient amount of time. Woke up ready for... dinner? Second dinner? Remembered, and consumed, the remaining non-doughnut mini-mochi, because all it required, preparation-wise, was opening the package it came in.

Let it be stated for the record that this is in no way representative of my usual habits. But if you're doing an NPR show or writing a Well blog post about the failings of the modern Western diet, feel free to cite this diary as Exhibit A.

Random food-themed keeping-track-of-links roundup

-I do like David Lebovitz's disclaimer to his recipe for an impressive-looking red wine poached pear tart: "For those who don’t drink wine, there’s no swap out for it in this dessert I’m afraid." You can just see him anticipating the commenters who, despite objecting to wine as an ingredient, see this recipe where wine is clearly an essential ingredient - the first named in the recipe title! - and then insist on asking how they, too, can partake.

-Before I make that, however, I plan to make the Cooking With Dog custard pudding a second time. It came out great the first, but had to sit in the fridge for a couple days before it set. It also had to steam for maybe twice as long as directed, but that may have been that the heat was on too low. Whatever the case, it seems vaguely miraculous to make crème caramel from scratch. Technically I ate these as puddings, but if all goes according to plan, this time I'll actually overturn the ramekins for full effect.

-Mark Bittman's essay about a very down-to-earth jaunt through France and Italy supports or really is the hypothesis of Alison Pearlman's Smart Casual.

-Former food critic Frank Bruni takes a brave stand against pickitarianism. As a commenter points out, Bruni might have mentioned that other food critic's book on the same topic.

In defense of posting photos of your food

Setting aside the question of why photographing one's food would be a "food selfie," here's what I want to know: why is it such a thing to denounce the taking and sharing of photos of food? Some Guardian commenters liken it to posting photos of the scatological result of food consumption, but even those less viscerally repulsed seem to object for a great many reasons. If you photograph your food, you're apparently doing so rather than eating it. (Not sure I follow the logic - assuming a smartphone, chances are, your food hasn't gotten cold. There seems to be a mistaken belief that once someone takes the photo, they must immediately go onto whichever social media site to post the photo and browse others.) If it's interesting food you're photographing, you're a braggart and a snob; if it's just the usual, it's 'who cares?', so basically you can't win.

I'm afraid I don't see the problem with taking pictures of your food and posting those pictures on social media. Of all the things one can post, it strikes me as among the least offensive. You're not sharing secrets, or whining. You're not letting all who weren't invited to whichever party know what they'd missed out on. You're sharing an experience - solitary, as far as everyone else is concerned, if it's just a photo of the food. You're recommending a recipe idea or establishment - you're providing a service!

Smartphones and the like have introduced so many frightening things - the family that opted to watch "Mean Girls" without headphones on NJ Transit being just one; the impossibility of being a teenager at a party outside the potential view of your parents and future employers being another. Is "food porn" really such a concern?

The only ways I could see food-posting going wrong are a) if the food photos are truly nauseating, like some kind of stew that may taste great but looks like vomit, b)  if they're accompanied by 'my life is so wonderful' text, or c) if the photos are only of upscale establishments in exotic locales, for months on end, with text about how such places are overrated. And yet it's rarely along those lines. You ate an excellent croissant? By all means, post a picture - the worst that happens is I'll be inspired to seek out a croissant.

Maybe, then, the objection is fundamentally to phones, camera-having or otherwise, being out in restaurants. That much I could understand. The whole dynamic of a phone out changes a dinner. It gives the impression that the person whose phone is out would rather be somewhere else, or is so important that headquarters will summon them at any time. If you're the one whose phone is stowed away (or - but I've gotten better about this! - forgotten at home), it seems as if you're more invested in the dinner than your companion. If someone else's phone is out, I tend to feel (or used to - I think I stopped caring about this) that mine should be as well.

Ina Garten, Edina Monsoon, and other role models

FreshDirect has arrived in the bustling metropolis where I live, and with it, two $50-off coupons per household. Between the $8 delivery fee, the lower prices on most items than nearby supermarkets, the implicit necessity of tipping, the eliminated need to drive to the store, the reduction in impulse purchases, and the need to reach $125 for the coupon to even kick in, I can't yet tell if this is, like, wise. But it's certainly appealing. It's freezing out, the roads are icy, and strip-mall grocery shopping in New Jersey is something like the opposite of perusing the Raspail organic market in Paris. There are, I suspect, no romantic photos of Ina Garten exchanging banter with someone from the bread department at Wegmans.

It feels very decadent, very Edina Monsoon, having one's groceries brought to one's door, but could well turn out to be the cheaper option.

But what I really can't tell is if it's quicker to choose groceries online or at the store. There's something frustrating yet freeing about not having to physically inspect each onion, when ultimately you're cooking them down regardless and one's as good as the next. So it ought to be quicker. But because you're at home - perhaps with several other windows open with actual work, it can be a procrastinatory sinkhole that, unlike other online shopping, feels deceptively practical.

Practical, that is, until you realize you've had the same FreshDirect window open for the past five hours, going back and forth to it whenever you need to clear your head. Three tomatoes or four? Or is that pounds of tomatoes? How did one tomato just come to over $2? (Actually, that turned out to be a very expensive tomato, which I then removed from the virtual cart.) And which cheese? Is camembert something you can buy sight-unseen? Should I be suspicious that this brand of it costs more everywhere else? When you go to the store, you walk through it and eventually you're at the registers, at which point you know you're done. This way, you enter and never leave. (I have, after several days, submitted the order, and am choosing to ignore the 'modify your order till 5pm' option.)

Drawbacks, then, are the strangely addictive nature of online food-shopping, but also the false promise of NYC-specific treats (striped bass - and all alcoholic beverages - seemed available, but no; dreams of bagels and pastries went unfulfilled), and the let's say Eurocentric aspects of the offerings. Not only is FreshDirect not, understandably, the Japanese supermarket I might want it to be, but rice paper, for example, is not happening. As an alternative, they recommend wax paper or parchment paper or something. The other drawback, of course, is the distinct possibility that with this as an option, and with basically all my work and entertaining these days being couch-compatible, I will never again leave the house.

Sushi-Rice Risotto with Vermouth and Out-of-Season Asparagus UPDATED

Forget the kitchen cleanse recipes from before. I have the kitchen-cleanse recipe. It was without a doubt the best use of leftovers in a dish better than any of the previous that I could imagine ending up with. We're going to call it Asparagus Risotto, although we're not planning to serve it to any Italian friends any time soon, because it's probably not technically risotto.

Day 1 (!!!):

1) Eat Nigella Lawson's chicken. Somehow manage not to eat all of it, or at least to have chicken skin, bones, and garlic peel remaining.

2) Toss that and whichever other juices are in the Pyrex into a pot. Investigate fridge items needing to be gotten rid of. Toss in a carrot, plus the remaining fridge-dried herbs (rosemary, sage, and a small amount of thyme). Add a halved, peeled, small white onion, not to get rid of it, but because this is supposed to help. Salt, pepper, done.

3) Cover with cold water. Bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer. Google "simmer" to see if it means what you think it does, while remembering something Melissa Clark (?) once said on a podcast about how it's possible to give yourself food poisoning with chicken stock. Wonder if that applies to stock made with chicken that's already cooked.

4) Stir, poke at, or skim the thing with a skimmer. Try not to remove the vegetables in the process. Forget the skimming, remembering another podcast about the wonders of schmaltz.

5) Once it's been about two hours, strain the result. Share the still-quite-tasty chicken bits with your dog. Keep the still-kind-of-tasty carrot pieces for yourself.

6) Somehow or another, make sure it ends up in the fridge overnight, preferably after cooling a bit at room temperature.

Day 2:

7) Heat olive oil in pot. Chop and add small white onion.

8) Add sushi rice. Stir.

9) Add some vermouth. Much less vermouth than rice. Stir. Wistfully ponder that you totally intended to have martinis when purchasing this. Instead, you're cooking with the stuff.

10) Time for the broth! Remove broth from fridge. When skimming the fat off the top, note that the entire thing has congealed. Cook with it anyway and Google after dinner, only to learn that this means you made excellent chicken stock. Huh!

11) Add the gelatinous broth (just cold, keeping the rest in the fridge) in stages, letting it absorb (lowish heat). Taste every so often to decide how much more salt (a ton, in my case) you're going to add.

12) When you taste the "risotto" and the rice is cooked, rinse and chop the asparagus - get this! - the raw asparagus remaining from the previous night's dinner. Stir in the asparagus, toughest bits first, until it's all in.

13) Done! Serve.

14) Kidding! Grate in as much parmesan as physically possible. And pepper. And more salt. Never enough salt.

15) Eat two or three bowls of the result.

16) Realize that you don't notice how much you've eaten of this until after you're done. Sit on couch, unable to move. Picture how the rice was expanding in the pot each time you added more broth, and imagine it's doing the same in your stomach.

17) Despite this, start thinking ahead to...

Day 3:

18) I will, at some point in the next few days, attempt arancini. This will also, in principle, use up some stale bread, for the breadcrumbs.

UPDATE

Arancini proved disappointing. Bad, even. They're meant to be deep-fried, but because I was impatient and wanted this for breakfast, even though we have a deep-fryer, I didn't use it. Also because they need to have lots of cheese, but I hadn't grated any into the leftover risotto. A quick attempt to add some in the morning, while also getting non-breakfast-related things done, was insufficient. With more cheese, and with the rice actually heated through, they'd have been much improved. That said, the breading part itself reminded me how easy and delicious breading can be. All future meals are to be breaded.

In defense of a cluttered countertop

According to the Guardian, high-end kitchen gadgets have recently (!) become status symbols. Is this new in the UK? British readers, fill me in on this. Johanna Derry cites increased sales of some such items since last year, so maybe? But how about the year before? Derry's nostalgic for the days "when the only kitchen appliances we kept on our counter tops were kettles and microwaves." But when was that the case (and student apartments don't count)? Is this because British people moved from tea to coffee more recently?

Regardless, grumpily complaining about the whosawhatsises that now exist for absolutely everything - asparagus peeler! avocado halver! - has been a thing in the States since I can remember. The ingredient-specific knick-knack devices represent the junk that accumulates in middle-class homes (and, more generally, Western decadence), while the really high-end machines, often in an unused kitchen, offend because they're evidence of the rich, who don't have to cook, playing at domesticity.

For a time, the status symbols were these luxury items, preferably housed in a giant suburban kitchen, or in Frasier's Seattle apartment on "Frasier." Then it switched over, and status became, I don't know, a small NYC kitchen where you prepare Greemarket produce? Or maybe it's always been the same - the gadgets have been like expensive workout clothes - cool to hate, but coveted all the same. It's the same dynamic re: wanting to be hardcore.

But allow me to more enthusiastically defend the having of kitchen implements. What I've found is, the anti-gadget brigade are people who romanticize domestic labor. I'm thinking of a recipe for buckwheat crepes I was looking at (I'm on a buckwheat crepe kick, don't ask), and it called for buckwheat and all-purpose flour (all you'd possibly need, flour-wise) and, because why not, some mortar-ground buckwheat kernels. It's as if home cooking doesn't morally count unless it's been made unnecessarily difficult, with a Luddite flourish.

These same commentators also tend to live in cities... where counter space is particularly scarce, but also, crucially, where restaurant meals and takeout are easy alternatives. If you can't so readily outsource, you want to make a wider range of foods at home, efficiently. I mean, I want to do this. Thus the rice cooker, etc. A significant, if not particularly luxe, "etc." that I won't elaborate on.

"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.

"Princeton" dining guide UPDATED

Living in the woods has turned me into a far better cook than I'd have thought possible. Or at least more varied. Croissants! Sushi! Agedashi tofu! Pizza! And so much more. This is because my first year living here, without a car, the only possible restaurants were the ones in town, which tend to be places to take one's business clients - $50 a person for something bland. Relatively cheap, relatively flavor-having food seemed out-of-reach unless homemade.

A car changes everything. Once you go a bit further afield than the bike will readily allow, things improve. I'm including Philadelphia but not New York, because of the time, tolls, and NJ Transit required for the latter, and you have to draw the line somewhere.

Been, will be back:

-In Princeton itself: Stick with Ajihei (sushi), both coffee shops (Small World and Rojo's - the latter may have better coffee, but the former has seats/people-watching), and Terra Momo or whatever the bakery on Witherspoon is called these days. Also: Thursday farmers' market in season. Cheese from Despaña. Mozzarella from D'Angelo's. Bent Spoon for ice cream.

-Near Junction: Shanghai Bun. Closed Tuesdays, which is easy to forget.

-Nomad. Pizza in Hopewell, which is basically Greater Princeton. Since figuring out pizza at home, I've had less incentive to go, but it's there and it's excellent.

-Chung Sol Bat. Korean barbecue in Edison. Expensive and not especially vegetarian-friendly, but a good splurge for omnivores.

-Paris Baguette and H-Mart. French-Korean bakery (get the milk bread and cannelles) and Korean supermarket, respectively, in the same Edison strip mall. Combine the two if possible. And don't go late at night (which I almost always end up doing), or you'll miss the fish-market part.

-Pad Thai in Highland Park, Siam in Lambertville, Thai restaurants. I generally prefer the latter, but opinions differ. And it's mostly a question of which direction you want to go in.

-Shake Shack, Philadelphia. It's Shake Shack - fast food with a nod to quality.

-Spread Bagelry. Montreal bagels in Philadephia. Given the absence of even Northeastern U.S. bagels in Princeton, you may want to pick up a few.

-Nam Phuong. Vietnamese food is better in Philadelphia than NYC. This will prove it.

-Artisan Boulanger Patissier. As are croissants.

To-try:

-Chaikhana Uzbekistan. In Philadelphia, but some part of outer Philadelphia that's apparently about a half-hour from where I live. The area also has Moldovan food, which I don't believe I've ever tried.

UPDATE

Uzbek mission accomplished. While this was not my first encounter with Bukharian cuisine, according to WWPD records, my last was in 2006, so it had been a while. This time, no explicit material flashed on the screen - just a musical variety show. It's a funny cuisine for me, I suppose, because it's on the one hand ever so exotic (Central Asia!) and on the other, something very close to my own ancestral cuisine. Is because these are Central Asian Jewish restaurants, or would there be significant Ashkenazi/Eastern European/Central Asian overlap regardless? Manti and kreplach taste just about the same - a bland, oniony meat dumpling you (apparently!) need to have grown up with to appreciate. In any case, I enjoyed it. Although I wouldn't recommend it to anyone averse to meat dishes listing unspecified "meat" as the principle ingredient. As the DVD playing on the giant TV screen suggests, this is not a know-where-your-food-comes-from cultural environment.

/UPDATE

-Izumi. Japanese food in Philadelphia, inevitably closed whenever I'm in that area.

-Suggestions welcome.