Category: Ruminations

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.

I grew up in a Thai family in suburban southern California, circumventing endless idiotic jokes about my long-ass last name, fending off the jealous haters in kindergarten who made fun of (but secretly wanted) my shrimp and winter melon soup lunchbox, and going to Sunday school and summer day camp to learn all about the culture, religion, and language of a little axe shaped country on the other side of the planet.

Most nights, either my mom or dad cooked dinner; if my mom cooked, it was usually rice and some variation on what my friend Dottie calls the "brown and green" -- meat and veg stir-fry in very few variations. But if my dad cooked, we usually had a nice little spread -- a brown and green stir-fry, maybe some fried pork spare ribs, and a little soup. At temple on Sundays, we'd eat in the food court in the temple basement. We'd trade our dollars for $2 coins and 50 cent coins, which we'd use to buy delicious Thai lunches like Thai-style shumai, som tum with sticky rice and barbecued pork, stewed fatty pork leg over rice with egg and pickled chinese cabbage, grilled meatballs, or, my favorite, duck noodle soup. In the evening, before the 45 minute ride home down the 101 to the 60 in our hydraulics-free bouncing Chevy van, we would often stop by a Hollywood Thai restaurant for a delicious dinner. I liked to order rad-nah -- noodles with chicken and chinese broccoli in a thickened gravy flavored with yellow bean sauce. I'd ladle on spoonful after spoonful of chilies pickled in white vinegar and bathe my face in the fragrant steam. My brother, who would probably rather have been eating at Sizzler, would usually order a crab fried rice and put up the walls when any renegade spoon (especially mine) tried to get in on the action. In tribute to his Chinese heritage, my dad loved to order goy see mee, which is a lot like rad-na but uses deep fried egg noodles instead of sauteed wide rice noodles. My mom often ate yen-ta-fo, something I only learned to appreciate as an adult -- a spicy noodle soup with strange tripe-shaped chewy white fungus, an artificially red sweet bean sauce, water spinach, and an assortment of seafood.

So I was a bit confounded when in high school, some friends invited me to join them for lunch at a local restaurant that they loved. I was surprised by the growing popularity of Thai food in the 80s and 90s. I didn't know there were any good Thai restaurants in our hood, so I was skeptical. They asked me, "Do you know how to make pad [rhymes with rad] thai? I LOVE pad [rhymes with bad] thai!" In my sixteen years as a Thai-American girl I had never tasted it. We never had it at any of the Thai family birthday parties I'd been to. It looked like something that the guy who made the fried mussel omelet in the temple basement peddled as an accompaniment. I must have seen it before, but I'd never tasted it myself.

When we got to Thai BBQ, everyone ordered the famed pad [rhymes with sad] thai. A steaming plate of pad thai emerged from the kitchen and everyone readied their wooden chopsticks with watering mouths. The noodles I recognized as "sen lek," the skinny rice noodles I usually associated with noodle soups. But the color was a bit strange to me. How do the noodles get so red? What was with all those peanuts? Why had I never heard of this before? And then I tasted it -- sticky, soft and overbearingly sweet with the clean crunch of raw bean sprouts and peanuts. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it, and it really didn't have anything to do with my experience with Thai food. I was familiar with the flavors of northeast Thailand's cooking -- the bright, clean salt-tart heat of som tam, the mouth-watering savor of dried-fried beef. Pad thai was not really my cup of tea, and I was ready to leave it that.

But pad thai was not going to leave me alone. As I went off to college and started meeting new people, many of my introductions began like this:

POTENTIAL FRIEND: Hi, my name's [POTENTIAL FRIEND'S NAME].

GANDA: Hi, I'm Ganda.

PF: Ganda, what an interesting name. What kind of name is it?

G: Um, it's a Thai name.

PF: Oh, are you Thai? I LOVE Thai food. Do you know how to make pad thai?

G: [Huh?] Um, no.

I realized that pad thai was the dish people thought of first when they thought about thai food. And it had nothing to do with the Thai food I knew. Thai restaurants I went to had food that was overpowered by sugar and peanuts, sugar and peanuts, two things that were used very sparingly in my house. Why did pad thai become so popular? Why did people think Thai food was about sugar and peanuts? I think it got popular maybe because it's easier to pronounce than pad kee mao (hangover noodles) or pak boong fai dang (fiery water spinach) or moo daed diew (dried fried pork).

Of course, there's a history of imported foods becoming bastardized for palates that maybe wouldn't be ready for the real deal. Candy-apple red sweet and sour pork (disgusting by all standards as far as I'm concerned), California rolls (I like them, but they don't have much to do with the sushi tradition), ham and pineapple pizza (also something I happen to like) -- they're all American creations. Pad thai is actually a Thai dish, but for some reason, people here think that it's the national dish of Thailand. That's like saying brie is the national cheese of France. Brie is a great cheese, and brie is quite nice, but there is so much more to the world of French cheeses. It would be a crime against the many other cheeses of France to only eat brie. And it's a crime against the expansive world of Thai cuisine to only ever order the pad thai lunch special.

If you're in New York, I encourage you to go to my favorite NYC Thai restaurant, Sripraphai in Woodside Queens. Their menu is extensive, their ingredients run the gamut, and they will still make you some pad thai if you can't let it go. If you're in L.A., go to Ruen Pair on Hollywood Blvd., my favorite Thai restaurant anywhere. Make sure you point and order anything from the specials whiteboard (which happens to be written only in Thai). It will rock your world. Without excessive peanuts and sugar.

On Wednesdays at the Union Square Greenmarket, there's a sheep farmer who sells lamb bits, sheepskins, yarn, yogurt, cheese, and Araucana chicken eggs. She's on the north side of the square. BUY THESE EGGS. Morris of Windfall Farms sells the same kind of eggs for $5/half dozen and they are worth it. But this nice lady sells them for $2.25/half dozen and they are just as delicious!!

The Araucana chicken egg often comes in a green, brown, and sometimes pale pink shell. The yolk is a bright orange-yellow and, because the eggs are so impeccably fresh, the yolk floats high above the white. They are rich and delicate and flavorful and everything an egg dreams of being. These eggs are worthy of a nice truffle shaving, but they are incredible on their own. Most of the time I fry eggs and don't eat the yolk but I've finally found an egg I can love wholly. Don't waste these eggs in cake batter or meatloaf. Savor them over-easy, or scrambled, or soft boiled with a little toast to sop up the gold.

One of my favorite things to do is to medium-boil an egg and mash it up roughly into a bowl of hot rice with Maggi sauce, a sort of variation on soy sauce. Dreamy...

Having been brought up with the kind of company that would have papaya salad and filled tapioca balls as hors d'oeuvres and pinatas as entertainment, I never really had the chance to try caviar. I also must admit that the viscous salinity of ikura and the pop rocks glow of tobiko never really appealed to me in sushi. So, I always thought, caviar, eh, that's other half's food.

But recently, I met up with some people at a friend's house. While they were downloading Mahavishnu orchestra songs with impossibly long song titles and extolling the virtues of Kool Keith's flow, Sean asked me, "Do you like caviar? Because we have, like, five pounds of caviar and I don't know what we're going to do with it."

I said, "No, I'm not a caviar person...well, actually, I can't say that because I've never had caviar. I've had ikura and tobiko, but not any caviar caviar." So I thought about it a bit more, and I said, "I'd love to try the caviar."

Sean and Lizzy disappeared into the kitchen for a while. When Sean reappeared, he had four tiny, thin toasts on a plate, surrounding a huge tin of black pearly beluga caviar. He also brought a little container of creme fraiche and halved lemons, while Lizzy provided some chopped red onion.

So I took a fragrant little toast (which Sean explained he had pan toasted with a little butter), spooned on a frugal forkful of glistening caviar and topped the pile with a dollop of creme fraiche. That first toast bite was like nothing else I'd had before. First was the crisp-tender tear of buttery sweet toast, followed by the silky milk of the creme fraiche, and finally, the rich, soft, pop-and-ooze mouthfeel of the beluga caviar. It wasn't as salty or bizarrely yolk-like as ikura. Instead, there was just a hint of the ocean and a smooth slick of delicious oil.

Yuka, Lizzy and Sean began to debate over which was the proper method of eating caviar -- creme first or caviar first? Yuka suggested that the creme should be a base for the other flavors, and also sang its praises as a paste on which the caviar can stick. So I tried it another way -- thin buttery toast spread with a touch of creme fraiche, followed by a generous scoop of caviar, finished with a squeeze of lemon and a scattering of chopped onion. Delicious! The tart cleanliness of the lemon and cool bite of the onion made the caviar burst forth with even more oceanic boldness, then recede into the palate like a black wave.

Lizzy and I finished off those toasts, I with contemplative digestion, she with the soft declaration, "I love caviar..." in her luxurious English accent. I'll probably never eat caviar as decadently as I did that night, and perhaps I'll never get to eat beluga again. I'm glad to be experiencing these things for the first time at an age in which I can fully appreciate them; things like caviar, bitter puntarelle, anchovy, foie gras...So if this was my only experience with caviar, I will always remember it as a sumptuous, rare, perfect dining experience.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/13/dining/13CND-CHILD.html

my friend Dottie is the greatest. She sent me this note:

Lorna gave me what she called a "hairless" mango she said they come from the Phillipines....I thought, hairless, like most Asians?  "..but all mangoes are hairless", I protested,  to which her reply was that it was hairless inside.

Last weekend I bought uncured frankfurters from Violet Hill Farms at the Greenmarket. I don't know if they're any better for you, but they taste damn good. Especially in my favorite yellow trash specialty, hot dog fried rice. With peas and ketchup. Yum.

On a side note, I will be working at the Paffenroth Gardens stand this Saturday. One of the guys in Alex Paffenroth's Tibetan army of market helpers is going to Nepal for a couple of weeks and I'm subbing. So come by and say hello if you're in the area. And no, you can't have free vegetables.

I don't understand why people want to dine outdoors in New York City. I understand if you are in the loving hands of Thomas Keller in pristine Yountville surrounded by napping lettuces and the sweet smells of a lush green herb garden; where the only sounds you hear are the rich ting of expensive china being replaced at the table and the soft thwak of a rabbit being conked on the head for your coniglio agnolotti.

But what is enjoyable about sitting out on the NYC sidewalk while eating food? I used to live on Bleecker and the Bowery and the restaurant downstairs insisted on having outdoor seating for their patrons. And I always wondered, was it the sound of cars honking interminably six feet away? Was it that intoxicating perfume of dogshit, garbage, and exhaust that heralds summer in New York? Was it the charm of the bum from the next-door men's hotel pissing away the PBRs he threw back over at Mars Bar, getting ready to swoop in and steal the waiter's tips from the table? Was it those pesky West Nile Virus carrying mosquitos? And the sticky humidity itself? All while you have to chew and swallow crab cakes and poached eggs? How can people eat like that? All for a little anemic sunlight and a fetid breeze or two?

Can somebody explain it to me?

After many aborted attempts at starting a blog, I have finally gotten the angle right. Welcome to the coconutella world. It's all about eating and complaining. I'm all about eating and complaining. Here's the email i sent out about an upcoming gig with tidbits on some LES joints I happen to love:

the second Miho Hatori show is happening next Friday, July 9 at Tonic! The lineup includes Timo Ellis on drums, Brandt Abner on keys, Fred Rubens on sampler & guitar, Fernando Isella on keys and electronics, Cavas on bass and yours truly on backing vox.

Please come by. We're playing with the lovely Ursa Minor.

Friday, July 9
Tonic
107 Norfolk between Rivington & Delancey
With Ursa Minor
8 pm
$10
tonicnyc.com

My quick picks:
Soy -- Soy owner Etsuko is the hip oka-san you never had. When I'm dining alone, I love going to Soy and ordering the tofu salad, california tofu, meat gyoza, and if i'm still hungry, salmon nameshi, which I wash down with Etsuko's spicy ginger lemonade.

Schiller's -- yes, it's loud, yes it's full of people who are more beautiful than you are, but the food is good and affordable, so stop being a hater. The burger is pretty reliable, the mac n cheese, like its twin at balthazar, is gooey and scrumptious, and the crisp fish and chips is, as far as i'm concerned, the best in town.

Sugar Sweet Sunshine -- come on, you know you want cupcakes. and unlike magnolia, you don't have to get in a catfight with bulimic fashionistas over the last lopsided cupcake. they've got lots of clever flavors like sexy red velvet with satin buttercream, orange cream cheese-sicle, and pistachio. a tip: they'll make a delicious and beautiful birthday cake for you with only 24 hrs notice (sometimes less) instead of the eight months (okay, maybe not that long) notice required at magnolia. a hint: my birthday is on october 25.

g