One of my finest memories of the brief time I spent traveling was Orthodox Easter on the Greek Island of Patmos. My traveling companion and I arrived fairly early in the afternoon, and were met at the ferry by the owner of a nice, cheap hotel. We rented rooms, and he dropped us off at one of the nicest places we would stay on the whole trip. (Go to Greece in April!) Shortly after we got settled, there was a knock at the door, and the hotel owner insisted that we join him for Easter dinner. Why the hell not?
The first stop was a local restaurant, which would probably be more memorable if it weren't for what followed. After a full and delicious meal at the restaurant, we hopped back in the truck, and zoomed into this neighborhood full of beautiful white homes. We stop at a large one of these homes, and pile into the backyard, where the owner, his wife and children, and other friends greet the hotel owner, and us, as if they had been awaiting our arrival. There was roasted lamb, to be eaten with the fingers, and homemade wine, and goat cheese. There were toasts, loud, boistrous, bilingual, there were compliments on my companion's and my beauty, and there was a feeling of welcome and joy that settled the general anxiety and uneasiness I had felt for most of the trip.
This was my first experience with true, uninhibited, unworried hospitality. I have always wanted my home to be like that one: relaxed, open, and bawdy. And that brings us to the topic, the crawfish boil. A totally informal way to have your friends stuff themselves and drink too much. The first time I ever ate crawfish was at college, during one of the festivals that happened during the spring. It was delicious (and I'm a head-sucker). I've loved crawfish ever since.
For those not in the know, a crawfish is a freshwater crustacean (there has been some debate over whether or not they are insects). It looks like a tiny lobster, and it lives in the mud. It is cooked in boiling water (more on that later) with spices and served on newspaper. The saying goes "Pinch the tail and suck the head," and this is a fairly accurate description of how to eat a crawfish.
Last May, John and I, and 3 other misplaced Southerners marooned in the slow to come Boston spring/summer, mail-ordered live crawfish and had a boil in the backyard of our little apartment in Cambridge. We were quite good at it, so we tried it again this weekend, only now, we're in MS, the crawfish were cheaper, and the Southerners who came were hardly misplaced. Despite the chill in the air due to the rain, we were happy, and hungry. When I heard one guest muse about how the party reminded him of college, I felt an odd sense of accomplishment. Here, gathered around an old table covered in newspaper in my garage, were 9 people who were mostly strangers, and yet, we gathered together eagerly, to share and to eat. To fellowship, if you will.
I did, I have to admit, have some qualms about the cooking method, particularly after I let one of the fellows crawl on my arm and thought he was quite charming. I suppose this is why our parents tell us not to play with our food. We may feel guilty about eating it and become vegan or something equally abhorrent. I asked John, feeling a bit ashamed to ask the question, whether or not it was ethical to boil crawfish alive, and he looked at me with the same look that he gives me when I suggest we get a puppy, a look that is fully of incredulity and concern for my sanity.
"Everything you eat has to die somehow," he replied with a shrug. I allowed that to satisfy me. And I reread a section of Julie and Julia about cooking lobsters:
I had read up on all sorts of methods for humanely euthanizing lobsters - sticking them in the freezer, placing them in ice water then bringing it up to a boil (which is supposed to fool them into not realizing they're boiling alive), slicing their spinal cords with a knife beforehand. But all these struck me as palliatives thought up more to save boilers from emotional anguish than boilees from physical. In the end I just dumped them out of the paper bad into a pot with some boiling water and vermouth and vegetables. And then freaked the fuck out.
The pot wasn't big enough. Though the lobsters didn't shriek in horror the second I dropped them in, their momentary stillness only drew out the excruciating moment. I was like that instant your car begins to skid out of control and before your eyes you see the burning car wreck that is your destiny.
...My final victim was another Chinatown denizen. He was spryer than his predecessors, flailing around in his bag for the entire subway ride. Because shivving a dead lobster in the back would be no challenge at all.
I put him in the freezer for a while when I got home, to try to numb him, maybe make it go a little easier, but is there such a thing as an easy vivisection, really? After half an hour or so, while Eric retreated to the living room... I took the lobster out of the freezer and laid him out on the cutting board.
...The poor guy just sat there, waving his claws and antennae gently, while I stood over him, my lardgest knife poised at the juncture of chest and tail. I took a deep breath, let it out.
... I pressed down, making an incision in the shell where Julia said I could quickly sever the spinal cord.
The thing began to flail.
...Clear blood leaked off the edges of the cutting board onto the floor as the lobster continuned to flail vigorously, despite the fact that its head was now chopped neatly in two....I sawed away at the thing, managing to get about halfway through before I had to leave the room for a bit to clear my head.
But I think perhaps I'm approaching a Zenlike serenity when it comes to crustacean murder, because when I reenetered the kitchen to the sight of the giant thing pinned to the cutting board... I just giggled. (Pages 149-164, seriously reduced)
The fact of the matter is that most of us are going to eat lobster and crawfish anyway, and the least we can do is to make ourselves go through the possible psychic trauma of killing the creature ourselves. We are removed from the process of what makes our steak a steak, or our fish a fish. Cruelty is something to be avoided, but a fairly immediate death in a pot is merciful compared to being cut in half alive. I'm guessing. In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan says this about a meal that he has hunted, gathered, and created from scratch, in a very literal sense: "The pleasures... are based on a nearly perfect knowledge" (410). And in some small way, this idea applies to the crawfish, and possibly, though I cannot speak for Julie Powell, the lobster: when we are fully aware of what we are doing to another creature, and why we are doing it, then perhaps our minds can more fully enjoy the product of what we have done.
So why did my husband and I boil 36 pounds of crawfish on Saturday? Perhaps this is circular, but, we did it for the pleasure we could take from it, and the pleasure we could give to others from it. Maybe pleasure should not be the standard by which we measure all of our ethical decisions. But, then, all of our ethical decisions were never measured by the same yardstick anyway. Pleasure should be a consideration when we eat, as well as ethics, sustainability, and nutrion. If we leave out one of these factors, then we can never really acheive what it was I felt in Greece. If we think of each of them, in careful consideration, and giving each its proper weight, we can enjoy ourselves and our company while we eat. And really, this is what a party should be.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
On Oysters
The first time I ever had an oyster was with my then boyfriend and now husband (henceforth referred to as John)at Felix's on Bourbon Street. It was my freshman year in college, during September. My friend R had come with us. This trip has many huge memories: running through the downpour holding stuffed pandas, my father's anger at being unable to keep me from going, R's terrible, terrible snoring, sleeping in the same bed with someone I loved for the first time. But the oyster is powerful.
I had ordered some sort of po'boy I'm sure, given my love for hot sandwiches, but John had ordered a dozen oysters on the half shell. Having grown up with a father who refers to such things as "boogers," I had never eaten one. John offered me one, and feeling brave, I accepted. I watched his method of preparing the oyster: saltine, oyster, horseradish, tabasco. Bite. Chew. Swallow. I followed his lead, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Thus began one of my favorite of our food adventures.
Of course, at this point, the oyster just tasted like a chewy piece of spicy slime. The texture is an acquired taste. Oysters are bivalves, and edible ones do not make pearls. The first person to pry one open and slurp down the contents was truly brave, and truly a gourmet. Oysters are allegedly aphrodisiacs, an interesting allegation. They are not particularly phallic, like some aphrodisiacs, and it might take a bit of a stretch to imagine them as vaginal. But the experience of eating an oyster, and just an oyster, is highly erotic.
I first experienced this in Ireland. In 2007, in May, John and I went on a whim. We have a habit of doing fairly objectively stupid things on a whim. (This will come up in other entries on shellfish.) Our last night in the country, in Limerick and ordered a plate of oysters. They came, in big shells full of salty brine, with no offered condiments, no horseradish, no lemon, certainly no tabasco. The muscle had been gently separated from the shell, and no utensils were needed. One simply poured the oyster, brine and all, into one's mouth.
How decadent. How divine. The brine tasting, of course, of the ocean, and the sweetness of the oyster came through cleanly, without hiding beneath sugary cocktail sauce, or too much heat. The feel of my lips on the shell was so odd, and it has become one of those sense memories that makes me insistent that we should actually touch our food, at least as we prepare it.
Certainly the experience was imperfect: the brine dribbled down the chin, bits of shell and grit slid into the mouth while slurping the oyster. As with any raw, or only lightly cooked, food, there is a risk of illness and disease, although with oysters this risk is more due to what we do to our oceans than to the inherent nature of the oyster itself. But isn't that really what the erotic is? Salt and sweet. Messy. Noisy. Risky. A state of heightened sensory experience. When we don't cover our food, it can feel the same as when we uncover ourselves. Certainly we might end up regretting it, but our lives would be so much more empty if we did not do it.
And now, when I eat oysters, as I did last night at Trios, it is rarely without my husband, and it is always with the knowledge that there is a lot of possibility in this food: raw, bare, with a variety of choices for eating (we were offered crackers, crostini, and cocktail sauce at Trios). What matters most to our experience of the oyster is that we try all the choices, even the ones that are the simplest. It sounds contrived, and it's a poor way of saying what I mean: oysters are important because they offer us the chance to really adventure. They are sexy, they are disgusting, they are risky, they are delicious.
I had ordered some sort of po'boy I'm sure, given my love for hot sandwiches, but John had ordered a dozen oysters on the half shell. Having grown up with a father who refers to such things as "boogers," I had never eaten one. John offered me one, and feeling brave, I accepted. I watched his method of preparing the oyster: saltine, oyster, horseradish, tabasco. Bite. Chew. Swallow. I followed his lead, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Thus began one of my favorite of our food adventures.
Of course, at this point, the oyster just tasted like a chewy piece of spicy slime. The texture is an acquired taste. Oysters are bivalves, and edible ones do not make pearls. The first person to pry one open and slurp down the contents was truly brave, and truly a gourmet. Oysters are allegedly aphrodisiacs, an interesting allegation. They are not particularly phallic, like some aphrodisiacs, and it might take a bit of a stretch to imagine them as vaginal. But the experience of eating an oyster, and just an oyster, is highly erotic.
I first experienced this in Ireland. In 2007, in May, John and I went on a whim. We have a habit of doing fairly objectively stupid things on a whim. (This will come up in other entries on shellfish.) Our last night in the country, in Limerick and ordered a plate of oysters. They came, in big shells full of salty brine, with no offered condiments, no horseradish, no lemon, certainly no tabasco. The muscle had been gently separated from the shell, and no utensils were needed. One simply poured the oyster, brine and all, into one's mouth.
How decadent. How divine. The brine tasting, of course, of the ocean, and the sweetness of the oyster came through cleanly, without hiding beneath sugary cocktail sauce, or too much heat. The feel of my lips on the shell was so odd, and it has become one of those sense memories that makes me insistent that we should actually touch our food, at least as we prepare it.
Certainly the experience was imperfect: the brine dribbled down the chin, bits of shell and grit slid into the mouth while slurping the oyster. As with any raw, or only lightly cooked, food, there is a risk of illness and disease, although with oysters this risk is more due to what we do to our oceans than to the inherent nature of the oyster itself. But isn't that really what the erotic is? Salt and sweet. Messy. Noisy. Risky. A state of heightened sensory experience. When we don't cover our food, it can feel the same as when we uncover ourselves. Certainly we might end up regretting it, but our lives would be so much more empty if we did not do it.
And now, when I eat oysters, as I did last night at Trios, it is rarely without my husband, and it is always with the knowledge that there is a lot of possibility in this food: raw, bare, with a variety of choices for eating (we were offered crackers, crostini, and cocktail sauce at Trios). What matters most to our experience of the oyster is that we try all the choices, even the ones that are the simplest. It sounds contrived, and it's a poor way of saying what I mean: oysters are important because they offer us the chance to really adventure. They are sexy, they are disgusting, they are risky, they are delicious.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
On Potatoes
When I was a junior in college, I spent a semester "enriching" myself by studying abroad in the UK. By enriching, I mean drinking, gaining 15-20 pounds, getting laid, and pursuing my passion for potato based foods. And drinking.
I've got a lot of mixed feelings about this arena of life, mostly because I oscillated between very solitary and very outgoing, and could not figure out what the hell I was doing. Sensing a theme here? At any rate, for some reason, the Brits, and my motley crew of American/Canadian pals did not mercilessly mock me when I danced the way my college friends did. This is not to say they thought I was a good dancer. They were merely a)kind, b)not yet immune to the cuteness that is embodied in my awkward flailing, or c) too drunk to notice. At any rate, while I mostly cooked for myself while I was there (things like stir-fries buried in sauce, beans and toast, and pasta with red sauce), after we went to the Union - the on-campus dance club - we would often prevent our hangovers early by indulging in chips cheese and gravy. I believe Canadians call this Poutine, which I find personally too close to poontang to use (by the way, in case you don't realize that clicking on a link labeled with a slang term for genitalia is NSFW, here is your official warning. Also, if you fall into this category, learn some common sense). I prefer to stick with the cumbersome but accurate title "chips cheese and gravy."
This delicacy is made by taking warm french fries, sprinkling cheese over them (mozzarella works well) and pouring warm gravy over that. It makes a brownish, globby mess on the plate, and unless you are familiar with its glories, it doesn't look particularly appetizing. You certainly don't want to overdo the gravy, because while you want a certain softness to the fries, and you want the cheese to melt, you do not want french fry soup. The type of fries matters little, as they are really simply a vehicle for the gravy and cheese, but teeny crunchy fries, while tasty, are hard to eat without making a huge mess.
The taste is delicious. It is salty, and beefy (or turkey-y, depending on the type of gravy used), with the firm texture of the fries, and the creaminess of the cheese. Eaten with a fork, and accompanied by a beer, it is the ultimate in late-night cravings.
So why did I eat it Sunday night for dinner?
The husband and I had gone to the hinterlands to visit my family for the weekend. I had visited a new grave, walked through the woods several times, and eaten more homegrown vegetables than I had in the last 2 months combined. On the way home, I felt ill. I was nauseated by the sandwich meat proudly displayed on the Subway billboard, and felt like my head and throat were going to rebel and move away to Alaska, where the cool air would ease the throbbing and the dryness. So why did I crave the food of late nights and sweaty, smoking dancing?
The memory and the psyche are astonishing, amazing things. Eating this food, I did not think of the faces that once sat around me, laughing tiredly, ears ringing from the speakers above. Sunday night, as I ate, I thought of my husband, whom I knew at the time I was in the UK, and who was on my mind a great deal during those months. I did not think of the fairly painful memories of that time. Instead, I thought of how, kneeling beside the couch on which I had collapsed, exhausted and sick, he kissed my forehead and without a second thought went to the store (after driving 3 hours already that day) to buy the things to make me the snack. Just as when I am hungover, or have the flu, he will just accept the situation, and provide me the starchy sustinence I crave: the potato, in all its forms.
The potato is easily manipulated into a variety of forms: fried, baked, mashed, roasted. It takes well to a variety of seasonings: salt, cheese, butter, rosemary, gravy. It is warm, soft, giving, nurturing. It is easily digested, and easy to eat thoughtlessly. If the potato were your friend, it would be the friend that spent the night just because you were lonely. It would be the friend who always had a bed made for you so you didn't have to walk home in the rain. It would be the friend who listened to you complain about your other friends, without joining in, without telling them, and without judging you. The potato is forgiveness dug up, dusted off, and given to you, just to make you feel better. No other reason.
And so, even though I don't crave the bad music, bad outfits, and bad dancing I used to do in that dark smoky room before scarfing down chips cheese and gravy at 2 in the morning, I do crave what the potato did for me then and still does: assures me that despite the fact that I am drunk, hungover, sick, or otherwise imperfect, I am still rooted in a world where those things are forgivable. And for me, who can barely forgive myself for much lesser sins, the potato is a reminder that while my fights may only be with myself, I can recover from the body blows.
I've got a lot of mixed feelings about this arena of life, mostly because I oscillated between very solitary and very outgoing, and could not figure out what the hell I was doing. Sensing a theme here? At any rate, for some reason, the Brits, and my motley crew of American/Canadian pals did not mercilessly mock me when I danced the way my college friends did. This is not to say they thought I was a good dancer. They were merely a)kind, b)not yet immune to the cuteness that is embodied in my awkward flailing, or c) too drunk to notice. At any rate, while I mostly cooked for myself while I was there (things like stir-fries buried in sauce, beans and toast, and pasta with red sauce), after we went to the Union - the on-campus dance club - we would often prevent our hangovers early by indulging in chips cheese and gravy. I believe Canadians call this Poutine, which I find personally too close to poontang to use (by the way, in case you don't realize that clicking on a link labeled with a slang term for genitalia is NSFW, here is your official warning. Also, if you fall into this category, learn some common sense). I prefer to stick with the cumbersome but accurate title "chips cheese and gravy."
This delicacy is made by taking warm french fries, sprinkling cheese over them (mozzarella works well) and pouring warm gravy over that. It makes a brownish, globby mess on the plate, and unless you are familiar with its glories, it doesn't look particularly appetizing. You certainly don't want to overdo the gravy, because while you want a certain softness to the fries, and you want the cheese to melt, you do not want french fry soup. The type of fries matters little, as they are really simply a vehicle for the gravy and cheese, but teeny crunchy fries, while tasty, are hard to eat without making a huge mess.
The taste is delicious. It is salty, and beefy (or turkey-y, depending on the type of gravy used), with the firm texture of the fries, and the creaminess of the cheese. Eaten with a fork, and accompanied by a beer, it is the ultimate in late-night cravings.
So why did I eat it Sunday night for dinner?
The husband and I had gone to the hinterlands to visit my family for the weekend. I had visited a new grave, walked through the woods several times, and eaten more homegrown vegetables than I had in the last 2 months combined. On the way home, I felt ill. I was nauseated by the sandwich meat proudly displayed on the Subway billboard, and felt like my head and throat were going to rebel and move away to Alaska, where the cool air would ease the throbbing and the dryness. So why did I crave the food of late nights and sweaty, smoking dancing?
The memory and the psyche are astonishing, amazing things. Eating this food, I did not think of the faces that once sat around me, laughing tiredly, ears ringing from the speakers above. Sunday night, as I ate, I thought of my husband, whom I knew at the time I was in the UK, and who was on my mind a great deal during those months. I did not think of the fairly painful memories of that time. Instead, I thought of how, kneeling beside the couch on which I had collapsed, exhausted and sick, he kissed my forehead and without a second thought went to the store (after driving 3 hours already that day) to buy the things to make me the snack. Just as when I am hungover, or have the flu, he will just accept the situation, and provide me the starchy sustinence I crave: the potato, in all its forms.
The potato is easily manipulated into a variety of forms: fried, baked, mashed, roasted. It takes well to a variety of seasonings: salt, cheese, butter, rosemary, gravy. It is warm, soft, giving, nurturing. It is easily digested, and easy to eat thoughtlessly. If the potato were your friend, it would be the friend that spent the night just because you were lonely. It would be the friend who always had a bed made for you so you didn't have to walk home in the rain. It would be the friend who listened to you complain about your other friends, without joining in, without telling them, and without judging you. The potato is forgiveness dug up, dusted off, and given to you, just to make you feel better. No other reason.
And so, even though I don't crave the bad music, bad outfits, and bad dancing I used to do in that dark smoky room before scarfing down chips cheese and gravy at 2 in the morning, I do crave what the potato did for me then and still does: assures me that despite the fact that I am drunk, hungover, sick, or otherwise imperfect, I am still rooted in a world where those things are forgivable. And for me, who can barely forgive myself for much lesser sins, the potato is a reminder that while my fights may only be with myself, I can recover from the body blows.
On Food and Food Writing
I've always been a big eater. Truly an eater, in the sense of consuming, rather than savoring or even tasting. Part of this may have been because there was a time when I was very tall, very thin, and very active, and thus had a gnawing pit of despair where normal people keep their metabolisms. At any rate the habit of stuffing myself carried over into adulthood, and, of course, became aa way of easing boredom and depression. I thought, and still do think, about food almost all the time. I can frequently be persuaded by my undisciplined mind to think about food rather than work, laundry, driving, or any of the usual mundanities of life. This borderline obsession is one reason of many reasons I'm very glad I met my husband, a man obsessed with food almost equally, but in different ways. I eat to satisfy; he eats to enjoy. I have no backbone and cannot refuse seconds, even if they're not offered; he seems to understand this feeling of "fullness" that I have only recently begun to get acquainted with, having spent most of my life thinking I wasn't full until I had tasted everything and the button of my pants was going to pop.
I will take this opportunity to say that I am healthy. I don't have an eating disorder - much of this relationship with food I've described is a response to my anxiety disorder, which I am treating. I generally eat too much, but what I eat is (usually) healthy. I'm a healthy weight, and my glucose numbers are beautiful (they were checked last week). My big problem is stress, and this blog is an attempt to do something that satisfies my soul to help ease the stress response that eating can be, and help me enjoy that which I am very passionate about: good, simple food.
My husband is an adventurous eater, and while I wasn't picky, I had never thought about all of the culinary possibilities of the world until I met him. A huge part of our lives together is exploring and enjoying and creating food. We are enjoying the process of learning about this world. I wouldn't classify myself as a "foodie;" that term seems to presume I am a bit of a know-it-all. While I'm confident about the knowledge I do have, I understand that this food journey is a journey. If I encounter information, I want to absorb it. To be honest, I haven't felt this excited about educating myself since my freshman year of college.
Lately, I've been reading a lot about food: books, websites, recipes, magazines, etc.... Recently, I have finished both The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, and Julie & Julia by Julie Powell. I am in the process of reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, and I am moved by the connection in each of them between food, personal spirituality, personal fulfillment, and personal ethics. As a woman who struggles with her place in the world and her path, I've let these authors inspire me. Rather than use this space for the purpose I created it for in October (which I obviously haven't been), I thought I would use it for a project similar in purpose to the project in each of the above books. Instead of a special project, or travel, or intensive research, however, I will use this as a place to muse on my own meals, simple or complex, to look at the history and story of those meals in the spirit of actively considering my life and my actions. I hope to be inspired and motivated by this space. I hope to relieve some of my angst (and extend the life of my Ativan) in this space. If you're reading along, and commenting, great. If not, I will still be writing.
I will take this opportunity to say that I am healthy. I don't have an eating disorder - much of this relationship with food I've described is a response to my anxiety disorder, which I am treating. I generally eat too much, but what I eat is (usually) healthy. I'm a healthy weight, and my glucose numbers are beautiful (they were checked last week). My big problem is stress, and this blog is an attempt to do something that satisfies my soul to help ease the stress response that eating can be, and help me enjoy that which I am very passionate about: good, simple food.
My husband is an adventurous eater, and while I wasn't picky, I had never thought about all of the culinary possibilities of the world until I met him. A huge part of our lives together is exploring and enjoying and creating food. We are enjoying the process of learning about this world. I wouldn't classify myself as a "foodie;" that term seems to presume I am a bit of a know-it-all. While I'm confident about the knowledge I do have, I understand that this food journey is a journey. If I encounter information, I want to absorb it. To be honest, I haven't felt this excited about educating myself since my freshman year of college.
Lately, I've been reading a lot about food: books, websites, recipes, magazines, etc.... Recently, I have finished both The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, and Julie & Julia by Julie Powell. I am in the process of reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, and I am moved by the connection in each of them between food, personal spirituality, personal fulfillment, and personal ethics. As a woman who struggles with her place in the world and her path, I've let these authors inspire me. Rather than use this space for the purpose I created it for in October (which I obviously haven't been), I thought I would use it for a project similar in purpose to the project in each of the above books. Instead of a special project, or travel, or intensive research, however, I will use this as a place to muse on my own meals, simple or complex, to look at the history and story of those meals in the spirit of actively considering my life and my actions. I hope to be inspired and motivated by this space. I hope to relieve some of my angst (and extend the life of my Ativan) in this space. If you're reading along, and commenting, great. If not, I will still be writing.
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