Category: Ruminations

What is mujaddara?

• An Afghan guerrilla hiding in the crevices of the mountains.
• A dark polyester veil wrapped around the sweating brow of an observant Muslim woman.
  

No, it is neither of those things. But it's still a mystery to me -- green lentils, both pasty and firm, moist but not enough to make the bread soggy, topped with French's golden fried onions, or some natural equivalent. What else is in it? And why is it so freaking delicious with a little tahini and hot sauce?

Where's the old man? I want to watch him make my sandwich. You have never seen a man take so much pride in his sandwich creation.

---

The old man wears a paper cap, the kind that fattens into the shape of an eye when you squeeze the two edges together.

OLD MAN: What do you want?

ME: Mujaddara sandwich.

I wait for it.

OLD MAN: Mujaddara!

The word is magical from him. My coworker Jesse and I practice imitating the old man's mujaddara song. Mujaddara! MujaDRA! Mujjadddra!  It never gets old.

Try to order a combo, which is totally encouraged by the overhead menu, and the old man will look at you with disappointment in his filmy eyes.

OLD MAN: You don't want that. Your sandwich will fall apart.

He waits for the inevitable cave-in.

ME: Okay, just mujaddara, then.

OLD MAN: Mujaddara.

And then he turns back to the counter, picking out a container deliberately. He chooses a pita and returns to the steam table, dipping the huge spoon into the aluminum tray, as he does every day at lunch time.

He is slow. S-l-o-w. But he overstuffs that pita with more love than it has ever felt in its brief, floury life.

OLD MAN: Lettuce toMAYto?

ME: Yes please.

OLD MAN: Hot sauce?

ME: Yes, please.

A few minutes pass.  Maybe I turn to the many refrigerator cases behind me to grab a kelly green bottle of elderflower soda, or to eyeball the odd imported beverages -- soda of wormwood, sherbet-colored mango lassi, names emblazoned on the labels in the font equivalent of jazz hands.

The sandwich is wrapped in wax paper and sliced in half.  Here it comes.  He turns to his co-sandwich makers, his small hands wrapped around each C-cup half of the mujaddara sandwich. 

OLD MAN: Look how beautiful.  That is a beautiful sandwich. 

His smile is genuine, and those milky glazed eyes light up.  He nestles that perfect sandwich gently into its foil container, packs a few pickles on top and puts a lid on it.

How can you not love a man like that?

--

But where's the old man today?  I ask his colleagues, one a middle eastern man with a salt and pepper mane and a lazy eye, the other a tall African man with a round nose and apple-y cheeks. 

ME: Where's the boss?

Both smile.

SALT AND PEPPER: He's in the kitchen.

I imagine him working his alchemy on another potful, a small and shrinking man smiling lovingly at the lentils and whispering his incantation --

OLD MAN: Mujaddara...

Kalustyan's
Lexington and 28th
Upstairs

Also recommended: The olive oil moistened spinach with toasted slivered almonds and onion, the turmeric eggplant.  But not in your sandwich!  Take your sandwich to go and sit in Madison Square Park -- heaven.  Also, I can't get enough of their dried California apricots and "colossal" California pistachios, roasted and unsalted.

Saturday night, 9:30 p.m. 
State: Loopy from hunger
Place: Morandi, 7th Ave.

Twilight zone.  Bermuda Triangle.  Full moon.  There's something...weird about this place.  Am I in New York?  Somehow, this corner of Manhattan has been rendered as culturally homogenous as a Dubya-era D.C. steakhouse. 

I always notice the women first, and they seem to have come in pairs -- one 80% cocoa brunette, one Kleenex blond.  The blond sitting next to me wears a sequined white tank top over denim leggings; her brunette other half wears a black tank top with black leggings and expensive looking gold jewelry.  The blond eats steak with spinach; the brunette picks around her shrimp pasta.  Both sip red wine.  The bread looks barely glanced at. 

Another blond/brunette pair at the corner of the bar pay their bill and head out, only to be replaced by a younger blond/brunette pair who drink lemony cocktails in tumblers and prosecco in fat wine glasses.

They're like a bunch of black-and-white cookies -- sweet, a little bland, but still two flavors in one.   

Our gay bartender doesn't give a rat's ass for either flavor, though, and the black-and-whites  bristle at his lack of attentiveness.  Meanwhile, I'm a woman on a pasta-seeking mission.  I can't decide on what ratio of cream-to-carb I need.  Polenta with mushroom?  Baccala with crispy polenta? 

I decide on the pici al limone, hand-rolled spaghetti with lemon and parmesan.  The pasta is spongy and saline, reminding me very much of the packaged udon I overboiled the night before to soak up my four Friday night cocktails.  I say that with kindness; that udon is a comfort to me at any hour.

The black-and-white directly to my left split the bill with identical silver credit cards, pick up their evening-appropriate clutches and leave.  They are replaced by another black-and-white, only this pair is being accompanied by nearly identical male escorts in weekend striped button-downs and side-parted hairstyles.  Two cranberry juice and vodkas.  One glass of prosecco.  One enormous tumbler with Stoli on the rocks.  Can I get a lime?  Can I get an extra lime? 

The black-and-whites are all so perfectly coiffed and painted.  I am a fish out of water.  This place is so weird.  Did these people come in here on purpose?  Do they think it's weird?  Is it weird that I think it's weird? 

This is not my New York -- but is it their New York?   

I'm watching Ballerina and falling in love.  You know, I wonder if the reason there are always so many octogenarians in the audience for opera and ballet is not that they are artforms for people with money, but that as you get older, you like to see the accomplishment that follows years, sometimes decades of training, accomplishments you know you will no longer be able to achieve in your lifetime.

I'm watching these gorgeous ballerinas bending like reeds, and I know that their fate would never have been possible for me.  I mourn the rigidity of my thirty-something body, but also the inflexibility of my future, the narrowing of my paths.  It's saudade, a sweet sorrow.

Johan's apartment was a little Swedish haven in the heart of downtown Manhattan -- all white walls, extremely sparse and airy.  But he was using these overturned crates as coffee tables out in the living room that looked impossibly familiar, so familiar they made my heart ring.  Could they be?  They couldn't be, could they?  I pointed them out to him.

ME: Those look like farmer's market crates.

JOHAN: Yeah, that's where I got them.

ME: From who?  Do you remember?

JOHAN: Yeah, from a guy on the, let's see...west side of the market, in the middle.  He sold them to me, I think they were $15, maybe $20 each.

Which means they absolutely had to be from the Paffenroths of Paffenroth Gardens at the Union Square Greenmarket.  My first job in New York was helping the Paffenroths sell vegetables at their stand.  Not only were they my first employer in New York, but they're also like my east coast parents.  Isn't it crazy that Johan was using some of the Paffenroths' crates as decoration in his house?  Maybe that's not crazy to anyone but me, but it was CRAZY to me.

I heard Ilse Crawford speak about emotional design over the summer.  She said that having a piece with history in your home brings life to a space in a way that no new object can.  She showed  slides of Mathias Dahlgren's restaurant in Stockholm's Grand Hotel, which I had been to, and talked about the 300-year-old tables with uneven legs.  The souls of meals past etched deep in the heart of the wood can have an effect on the meals eaten on them today.

Of course, I understood in theory.  But before this weekend, I've never had an interior object resonate with me so intensely before.  Here were these familiar crates in an unfamiliar downtown Scandinavian loft, among white cabinets and in front of a flat screen TV.  Here, they were clean, worn, weathered and beautiful objets that echoed the slightly uneven planks of the loft's painted floor.  They have a story of their own, but they also figure strongly in my personal history.

I spent my first few years in New York lifting, loading and emptying those wooden crates at the Greenmarket.  I know their exact width and weight in my arms.  I know the way the slats feel when they're moist with water and caked with the black dirt of Orange County.  I know how three can stack perfectly together in a little latticed package, and I know the particular clacking sound they make when they're stacked together at the end of the day. 

I've seen them packed with dewy red radishes at 6am, the green leaves cushioned in the center of two red stripes.  I've seen them full of beet tops and carrot greens and hacked onion stalks, ready to be put on the truck and carted back to the farm for compost.  I've sat on many of those crates to eat my egg sandwich after the rush of morning customers was gone; I've rested my tired feet on them, waiting for the tents to be put away for the evening.

Alex has told me that he's sold the crates to people in the past for $20, enough to cover the cost of the materials.  But he talks about selling those crates with the same bemused tone that he has when he talks about people buying purslane, which he grew up thinking was a weed, a nuisance.  But it was with some pride that he told me, and I told Johan, that crates with the initials PP carved into them (which one of Johan's has) were made by Alex's grandfather, Peter Paffenroth, and might be 100 years old.
 
There's something thrilling about the idea that these very simple objects, just nails and wood, which may have passed through my own hands, are finding new life in a totally unrelated place. And yet it's also ashes to ashes -- those crates have survived Peter Paffenroth, but who knows how long they'll have a place in Johan's home.  It was a wonderful wink and smile from my own past.  And now I want to tell Ilse Crawford, hey, I totally get it.

My parents are in Thailand now, so I wound up having orphan Swedish Christmas with some NYC stragglers.  One person got stranded here after his flight was canceled because of the weekend blizzard, one person was finishing closing on a new apartment, and a few, like me, were staycationing for no particular reason.  Given the travel nightmares abounding -- major delays, swine flu, explosive-rigged terrorist -- I can't say I'm sorry about it.

Besides, I'd been hoping to do Swedish Christmas since I left Stockholm.  My Swedish friend Lina and her friend Johan hosted and we made the julbord (Christmas table) of my Ingmar Bergman fantasies.  We even watched the beginning of Fanny and Alexander, the part before it descends into domestic violence nightmare.  Tjohoo! 


Lina and Johan in the kitchen.

I adore Lina's singular sartorial sense.  She's near six feet tall with short, asymmetrical blond hair and she's always the most interestingly dressed person in the room.  On Christmas night, she wore a single shoulder length earring with little tufts of recycled fur and a metal mesh belt in the shape of a snake clamping down on its tail. She was dressed in the colors she had painted her apartment walls, which she referred to as her "favorite ice cream flavors. The bedroom is Haagen Dazs vanilla and the kitchen is Haagen Dazs coffee."


Janssons frestelse on the left, prinskorv in the pan next to it.


Herring, consumed with snaps.  Skål!

The Swedish palate favors sweet and pickled flavors, far east spices like cardamom and saffron, fishy little fish like herring and anchovy, zero garlic and buckets of butter and cream.  As with all cuisines, you can rank the foods' level of accessibility, universally-lovable cinnamon buns being Level 1, bulging, natives-only cans of surströmming being about level 10.

So our julbord's Level 1 dishes included:
Classic köttbullar (meatballs) with rårörda lingon (stirred lingonberry preserve), pressgurka (pressed cucumber) and cream sauce
Lussekatter (Swedish saffron buns)
Prinskorv (little cocktail sausages)
Ham
Gravad lax (cured salmon) with dill on rye bread
Glögg (mulled wine)
Eggnog
Various cheeses
Pepparkakor (gingerbread thins)
Apple pie with vanilla ice cream (Paj, as it's spelled, is actually quite Swedish)

Level 2 dishes were:
Janssons frestelse (Jansson's temptation), a julienned potato, onion, cream and anchovy dish that sounds weird but is less weird than it sounds
Sweet pickled beets
Sill (herring) plate with curried herring, cream herring, matjes herring, mustard herring and dill herring, with boiled potato, knäckebröd (hard bread) and Västerbotten cheese
Snaps (aquavit)



Johan's meatballs were superb, and it was instructive to watch a native expert's technique.  He rolls the meatballs a little larger than I have -- about 1 1/2 inches in diameter, making sure to push any errant pieces of onion into the meatball so they don't break apart.  A generous amount of butter goes into the nonstick pan to melt down.  Then, before he places the very round meatballs in the pan, he jiggles the plate they're on a bit to make sure they roll around easily.  Then into the pan they go, enough to almost cover the entire pan in a single layer. Johan immediately gives them a good shake to make sure they roll and brown all around.  None of them fell apart.  Genius!  Another key -- LOTS and LOTS of white pepper.  

Dinner was such a lovely affair, about ten of us sitting in white chairs around an all white table, two caterpillars of tea lights flickering against elegant conical glasses filled with syrupy frozen snaps.  I led Helan går, since that's the only drinking song I know, and Lina and Johan each contributed a few from memory.  (One of them translated to something having four legs, something having three legs, and a cock having no legs but it can stand on its own?)  Am feeling a bit nostalgic for Sverige, du gamla, du fria.

Recipes forthcoming!

The town I grew up in was predominantly Catholic, and you'd have no doubt about that if you saw it during the holidays.

Right after Thanksgiving, La Puente would start lighting up like Vegas. Holiday enthusiasts all over the neighborhood would string giant colorful gumdrop lights from the eaves of their homes.  A few eager beavers might have a red-nosed reindeer lamp or a giant candy cane or an apple-bellied Santa on their green lawns. In later years, strings of icicle lights would drip from the rooftops -- the closest thing to a white Christmas we'd get to see in Southern California.  Plastic Maries and lambs and camels and bearded men in togas or whatever would come out of hibernation for their yearly display, patiently awaiting the arrival of the baby Jesus doll.  The Holy Ghost could feel confident about receiving a hero's welcome on almost any doorstep in my neighborhood.

On those dark December nights, you could spot our house from the other end of the street.  Candy-hued bulbs twinkled on every single house on the block -- every single house but ours.  Our house was like a black hole, a void, a spot as dark as sin at the end of an otherwise cheerfully lit street.  X marks the heretic spot.  This slot machine is out of order.  NO TRESPASSING -- Christmas spirit, that means YOU.  It was like the easiest game of Find the Heathen ever.  Whenever we rounded that corner, I'd sink a little lower into the back seat of our van.

"Pau, can we pleeeeeeeeeze have Christmas lights this year?  Pleeeeeeeeeeze?  We'll help you put them up!" my brother and I would beg.

"And who's going to take it down after Christmas then?" my parents would ask.

"You don't HAVE to take them down!  You can leave them up all year!  See, everybody else does that!"

They never relented.

But we got Christmas. Or something Christmasish.  We had to beg my father to bring our Christmas tree down from the garage rafters.  It was a balding plastic fir, probably purchased at Sears or Best in the late 70s, a perfect geometric cone you could practice equations on.  If we were lucky, we'd get it up the week before Christmas, a decade of tinsel still strangling the abrasive green needles.  It would stay up in the corner of the living room through Christmas, through New Year's, through all of January, and maybe by February my Pau would put it back in the garage.

Of course it's a little sad to not be with my family on Thanksgiving, but my god, New York is such a pleasure when everyone clears out.  Holiday weekends make it possible to go out on the Lower East Side on a Friday night and not be suffocated by the descent of the usual choadfest.

Which is how we wound up at Bacaro last night.  I don't go out very often on the weekends because I'm too much of a grandma, but seeing as how my chances of finding a date while sitting at my computer watching Law & Order SVU on Netflix streaming are strangely low, I've decided that it's time to get out there.

And it was a wonderfully brisk night, no?  Just the right side of winter.  A little hard and shiny but with a hidden heat, like the black patent heels I had on with plum tights.  Like the delicate swirly stem of the wine glasses holding the warming, dark cherry Valpolicella we drank all night.  Like the curlicued, shiny white plate holding up a round pool of velvet, buttery polenta and creamy, saline baccala.  

We were there with our friends Andy and Jen, who were in town for the evening.  Eventually, we had 8 people on the bar stools around the front seating area.  We stayed for a good five hours, doting on the fresh face of our curly-haired waitress as Negronis and herbacious Aperol cocktails melted us like chocolate onto the cold marble slab table.  Our crystal tumblers were never without water; a freshly lit white tapered candle replaced the one on our table that had gone down to three inches. 

I could have stayed all night, alternating vino and nibbles, sending text invites to absent friends that went from cajoling to belligerent as the night progressed.  Little fried meatballs arrived like shooter marbles in a glass cup, poppable and crunchy.  When I felt the wine sway in my stomach, crumb-coated fried rice balls oozing a mess of mozzarella brought my thirst back.

Plenty of exposed dark bricks capture the flickering bling of the huge acrylic chandelier, the crystal on the tables, the sweet engraved mirror and the copious candlelight.  The place definitely feels like it's been finished with a woman's touch, and the presence of many pretty women in ripped black lace, striped bustiers and Sol Moscot eyeglass frames were a testament to its feminine appeal. I'm sure it's a totally different scene on a busy weekend night, but I'm so very glad I got to see it like this.

Bacaro
136 Division St. btwn Ludlow and Orchard
F to East Broadway

Considering we met through his apartment listing on craigslist, it's funny how many random things Doug and I have in common.

Had an amazing Thanksgiving with Adam, Jessica and their family at Lunetta.  Polenta with ragu, stuffing with plumped, rehydrated raisins and fennel sausage, crazy porky beans, moist heritage breed turkey, banana pudding, tons more...and I'm eating leftovers in front of the TV right now.  I'm bummed to not be with my family, but I am not bummed about missing the airport madness.

Back to my banana pudding and TV!  Enjoy your Thanksgiving, dears.

Tequila is so sneaky.  I thought I was fine, I was fine, I was fine until I fell asleep last night, having rolled on top of all of my clothing with half a cold sweet potato in one hand and a bottle of water in the other.

But it's wonderful to have a day off.  God, it's fantastic.  And I'm really looking forward to T-Day dinner, which I'm spending with a few friends and a few strangers in Brooklyn.  I can't tell you how excited I am about the prospect of getting home on my bicycle.

Must go hunt a coconut down for my Thanksgiving sweet contribution.

I am dating this yesterday because I'm cheating.  Nablopomo has squeezed me dry.  And a girl needs a night off.