November 2004 Archives

Ah, Thanksgiving.  Thanks to the god of gluttony for creating a day in which we solely celebrate the joy of snarfing.  Thanks to my Tibetan friend Tashi 2 at the Greenmarket who proclaimed this glorious holiday "Turkey Graveyard Day."  Thanks to my friend's friend Cory for making me get off my ass and post something about this, the greatest food holiday EVER.  Thanks to tryptophan.  Thanks to Martha Stewart for the original recipe from which this is adapted.  Thanks to my friend Miho for introducing this transcendent recipe to me.  And thanks to all four of you, dear readers, for hearing this tree fall in the forest.

Adapted from Miho who adapted it from Martha

Best Thanksgiving Side Dish Ever

This is a great dish to eat with turkey or chicken.  It's like forest nymph manna, full of fruity, nutty, herby goodness.  It makes you feel like a mighty forager in some wooded area, cooking up the bounty of the earth. 

2 cups brown rice

1 cup wild rice

9 cups chicken broth

2 tbsp. rich, creamy, delicious, irreplaceable butter

1 medium yellow onion, chopped

1 handful chopped celery

1 large cooking apple, skin-on, cored and diced

2 handfuls of dried apricots, (don't get those gross unsulphured hippie market apricots, please.  California or Mediterranean sulphured are best for color and flavor)

1 handful almonds, coarsely chopped

1 glass of white wine

1 tbsp. fresh thyme

1 tbsp. fresh rosemary

2 more tbsp. fresh, scrumptious butter

In a large pot, cook brown rice and wild rice together, substituting chicken stock for water, according to directions (they have the same cooking time). 

Heat a large pan over medium flame.  Melt butter.  Saute onion, celery and apple til translucent.  Dice each dried apricot into 3 pieces.  In a separate dry heated pan, toast the chopped almonds til golden brown.  Add wine to onion celery apple pan, and pick up the brown bits with your spatula.  Add the apricots and cook a minute or two until they plump up a little.  Add almonds, herbs and butter and remove from heat.  Fold fruity nutty herby mix into cooked brown and wild rice.  Serves a lot.

***

Don't burn your rice.  My tip on cooking any rice: when you start cooking it, the liquid takes time to come to a boil.  When it comes to a boil and you turn the heat down to simmer, the steam will be coming out like crazy.  When the steam starts to dissipate and then the steam almost stops being released from the covered pot, you know your rice is done.  It's like microwave popcorn -- when the popping slows to 3-4 seconds apart, you take know it's done, and you take it out before it burns.  And use your nose -- cooked rice will smell like delicious cooked rice.  If the steam has slowed down a lot and it smells good, take it off the heat.  Trust your nose.  Or use a rice cooker.

I am going to my co-worker Dottie's house for Thanksgiving and I am very very very very excited.  A full report forthcoming, if I can ever wake up from the post-turkey coma.

www.eatdrinkonewoman.com should start working in at most two days. hope it works! i'm a bit of a luddite when it comes to servers and DNS and domains etc. so we'll see if I've followed the directions right. This is probably extremely uninteresting to you so I will shut up now.

Little Bean is a bubble tea joint by my house in La Puente that I've been frequenting for years. I'm a little obsessed. They make the best tapioca tea ever. The sweet-potato based starch ball is perfectly cooked -- gooey, soft and mucilaginous with a little bit of resistance in the center of the pearl, perfectly sweetened and, I think this is the key, SERVED WARM. While lesser tapioca tea joints shake their teas and incorporate the tapioca into the frothy mess, Little Bean lets the blobs sit in the bottom of the cup, adding ice and room temperature milky tea on top of the slop which allows the tapioca to maintain its textural perfection. Besides offering green tea, red tea, and coffee in any permutation (with and without sugar, with and without milk), Little Bean also serves their tapioca with fruit smoothies, various flavored milks, teas, and juices, and with their popular shaved iced dessert. I have tried to prepare the bubbles at home but without much success. Email me if you have any tips.

Recently, my friend Julie took me to EN Japanese Brasserie as a birthday gift. We arrived unfashionably early at 6:00 in order to have time to catch an 8:30 movie. EN is housed in what can only be called a cavernous space in the neighb between Tribeca and the Meatpacking District (I hereby coin the name "Tri-tip" to describe that area. Pass it on!). Since we were eating at such a godforsaken hour, there were only 4 or 5 people in a space that could house a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade float. We stepped up to the maitre d' podium and said, "We're two." The hostess asked, "Do you have a reservation?" and the cavernous space echoed, "reservation...reservation...reservation..." We said, "No." Hostess then checked her log to make sure there would be enough space in their Canada sized restaurant for two small people. Then another host (for there were about four of them holding court at the podium) whispered, "Well, there's always room at the pspssspsssspp." So they seated us at the corner of a large square bar-seating area. Because we didn't deserve a table. And we didn't have a reservation. By the time we left, there were maybe 10 people in the place total. Very annoying.

(In case you were wondering about the food, it was expensive but good. I enjoyed the pork belly, the grilled chu-toro, and the warm tofu, but one serving is only good for one person. I can never have enough tofu.)

*Short stack -- a quick note on something that didn't inspire a full-length post

In An Alphabet for Gourmets, the inimitable M.F.K. Fisher (of Whittier, CA, haaaaayy) said on the subject of dining alone, "If One could not be with me, 'feasting in silent sympathy,' then I was my best companion." M.F.K. has had tons of genius things to say on the art of eating, but her sentiments on dining alone are some of my favorite.

Of course, not everyone feels the same way. Some people can't bear the thought of dining out by themselves, much less preparing a whole meal at home for one. As Joni Mitchell sang, "But when he's gone, me and them lonesome blues collide/The bed's too big, the frying pan's too wide." The act of going to the market, collecting all the ingredients, slaving over a hot stove and a cleaning up the mess seems like a lot to go through when there isn't someone around to appreciate your good work, or perhaps more importantly, someone to share your gustatorial experience with. I have no scientific evidence to back this claim up, but sometimes food just tastes better when you're digging in with other hungry folk.

But sometimes, dining alone can be a wonderful thing, a chance to spend some time with your charming self, discussing the issues that matter to you most (not aloud, of course), and eating exactly the things that you crave at that very moment. I've been dining alone more often lately, and I am remembering just how satisfying it can be. Fancy restaurants, coddling service, and festive atmosphere have their place, but not when you're dining alone. I love simple food enjoyed in the leisure of time and silence. Sometimes, I don't want to have to think hard about my dinner, about whether or not cocoa, foie gras, and anchovy work together, or about how the little kitchen elves manage to cut such perfectly cubical brunoise, or about the hovering maitre d' who'd love to turn the table over for the patrons shivering by the entrance.

On Monday afternoon, after a three hour hair modeling stint at Bumble and Bumble university, I decided to take a nice stroll down Hudson to Myers of Keswick, the little British food shop(pe) in the West Village, to buy myself some goodies for days when I'm too lazy to do more than pop the lid off of a can and fry some toast in butter. As I was stocking up on tins of Heinz baked beans, Cream of Tomato soup, and Spaghetti, I noticed a sign on the wall advertising the Chip Shop, a British style fish and chips joint in Brooklyn that I'd always wanted to try. It sounded like the perfect treat on a cool autumn day, so I decided to make a date with myself and check it out on the way home.

It was a very San Francisco day, with high sunshine and a brisk wind. It was about 4 p.m. by the time I made it back into Brooklyn, and I was ready for a little late lunch/early dinner to warm up. I ordered a hot mug of PG Tips with milk and sugar, a plate of crisp-fried cod and fresh but slightly soggy chips, overcooked olive colored English style peas, and a ramekin full of pickled onions in malt vinegar. I thought about so many things as I picked away methodically at my plate. I thought about my dear friend Matt who's currently slogging away in England. I thought about how they managed to make the fish batter so crisp, and how it was genius to turn the fish fillet on its side so the whole thing would stay crisp. I thought about washing my hair. I thought about what the ingredients in Branston's pickle might be. I thought about the little ketchup bottle on the table which was in the shape of a red beefsteak tomato. I thought about whether I prefer malt vinegar or tartar sauce with the fish. In other words, I thought about nothing in particular and let the thoughts pass through my head like the cars whizzing by in front of the restaurant.

I ordered a second cup of tea because the first was so impossibly delicious (English tea really is very different from the pencil shavings that pass for "English Breakfast" tea here). The waiter, a scruffy blond with a working class accent, cleared away my table except for my steaming mug. The Chip Shop is the kind of place where they play a constant loop of Beatles music everyday -- it's shticky, but my friends and I listen to the Beatles and the radio so rarely that it was a real treat to listen to these familiar songs, these nostalgic songs, for the first time in a very long time. I was staring out the french doors onto 5th Ave. on this perfectly sunny, apple-crisp fall day when "Til There Was You" came piping through the speakers sweetly. And I just had a perfect moment, you know? Where the milky tea was the perfect temperature and exactly what I wanted to be warming my gullet, and the song in the background was the perfect soundtrack to a perfect little frame of my life in New York. It was the ultimate decadence for me -- a selfishly chosen, gratuitously plentiful dinner enjoyed with a dopey grin on my face and the quiet swirl of my thoughts.