Choose your own adventure

When I started therapy, I felt like I was walking around with an open wound all the time. Moving back into my parents’ house, however, has been akin to carving a gash into my abdomen and taking an open-eyed swim in my own viscera.

For the years I lived in New York, I got back home to California once or twice a year, some years feeling less guilty about it than others. My father’s heart attack was alarming, but not wholly unexpected. The night of his emergency angioplasty, my mother had texted me, “Pau is in the hospital. Call for details.” Living across the country, I had always expected to get that text in the middle of the night. Whenever I got a late night call or message, I just assumed first that it would be about my dad, and was always relieved when it wasn’t.

Still, it’s hard to ever feel prepared to see a parent so physically fragile and vulnerable. I had known the day would come when duty would take precedence over my own preference for the east coast. I never meant to stay in New York for 14 years, it just kind of happened. I had created a life, a home, a family of friends in New York, not really considering that, one day, I’d have to leave that family for my blood relations.

My dad is up and about now, cooking breakfast for us every day and fixing the car when he’s not watching his Thai soap operas. I take pleasure in cajoling him to improve his diet, or poking him when he’s being a backseat driver.

I thought saying goodbye to New York would be the hardest part. But after two weeks packing up my belongings there, I’ve now spent about two weeks trying to make space for myself in my parents’ small 3-bedroom house in La Puente, CA. My dad had taken over my bedroom and my brother’s 10′x10′ room was being used for storage. When I arrived, the only clear space in my brother’s bedroom was a little pie slice for opening and closing the bedroom door. I’m continuing to dig out space for myself here, which is both a physical and emotional process.

The Saturday after I arrived was my neighborhood’s annual Clean Up Day. The local waste removal company allows residents to leave pretty much anything on the sidewalk for AM pick up. As we filled our driveway with stuff from one small corner of the garage, a Latino man with metal caps on his teeth drove by with a pickup truck and asked if we had any metal. He helped us move a non-working refrigerator from the garage, as well as some taking away random pots, pans, light fixtures, and a lot of other scrap metal my dad had squirreled away. I acted as translator, switching between Thai and my rusty Spanish to communicate with my parents and the young man. I introduced myself and learned that his name was Victor.

I thought we were fortunate that Victor had happened to come by on trash day and that, even more miraculously, he had wanted the junk we needed to clear out, but within an hour, a few more young men came by in their pickup trucks, asking for metal. A young woman drove up and inquired about whether or not she could take anything we were going to throw out. Her name was Rosalba, and she told me that the day care center she had been working for had closed and she was out of a job. Did we have any work we wanted her to do? Could she help us clean out the garage? We filled up her compact car with a lot of the things we had set aside to donate to Goodwill, which she was hoping to try and sell somewhere.

All in all, about 20 people drove by our house that afternoon asking if we had any metal to give away, including high school-aged students once school had let out. It made me realize how far away I was from my bourgeois life in Brooklyn. On Facebook and Twitter, I still live in that moneyed, #FWP world, but the sound and fury over media gossip and restaurant reservations and fashion trends seem like transmissions from another universe. Am I that person or the dutiful immigrant’s daughter? Is buying a $300 pair of sunglasses completely insane or totally normal? Am I hand-pulled pizza dough and house-cured salumi or am I fish bone soup over rice?

The other day, I caught myself standing in a certain spot behind the kitchen’s sliding glass doors, staring absent-mindedly at the kaffir lime tree in our backyard and dreaming of the world outside of this house’s small footprint, just like I did when I was 15. The difference between then and now is that I have seen that world. I’ve swept up vegetable trimmings in Union Square to earn a living; I’ve performed to a stadium audience at a summer festival in Japan; I’ve cried my eyes out from loneliness on the Tube between St. James Place and Westminster; I’ve seen the Southern Cross in the South African night sky. Now I’m here; this time, it’s because I choose to be here.

IMG_0583L.A. may as well be a foreign country to me since I haven’t spent much time here as an adult. I feel like I did when I moved to Stockholm, like every day is a new adventure. I speak Thai daily, and with Thai satellite TV news blaring in the background, I’m even expanding my vocabulary beyond 1st grade level. I’m also practicing my Spanish, learning to drive on the freeway, and exercising every morning. I’m getting to know who my parents are as retirees, and I’m showing them who I am as an adult.

I’m rich with simple pleasures, like sifting through childhood photographs, doing yoga in my backyard, or watching my 18-month-old niece mash handfuls of sticky rice into her mouth with unself-conscious joy. There are also difficult moments, like seeing how the blood thinner my father takes makes too much dark blood bubble out of a tiny wound, or going to the local Target and hoping not to run into anyone who might feel schadenfreude because the conceited bitch who pumped double middle fingers at suburban life when she ran away to New York City is now living with her parents again. But, overall, the days pass slowly, more slowly than they have for me in a really long time, and I’m grateful because my family and I have a lot of catching up to do.

Will I find a full-time job here? Will I ever move out of my parents’ house? Will people not call me in for job interviews because I have admitted that I have done therapy and I live with my parents? Friends, I have no fucking idea what happens next. Won’t it be interesting to see where this goes?

Ethnic food = Brown people food

thank-you-jesusCan we stop using the phrase “ethnic food” and just say “brown people food”, which is what we really mean? Nobody means Italian or French, even though those are ethnicities. The only thing that Ethiopian food has in common with Vietnamese food is that brown people eat it. So let’s just say brown people food.

Por ejemplo:

  • What should we eat today? I’m really craving some brown people food.
  • You’ll find soy sauce and canned water chestnuts in the brown people food aisle.
  • I try to avoid brown people food because it tends to upset my stomach.

 

NYC –> L.A.

I lived in New York for 14 years — even now, it’s strange to conjugate the verb in the past tense. But then I left as suddenly as I came. I’d been talking about moving back to L.A. to be near my family for years. When my father was hospitalized at the end of April (he’s better now, thanks), it was very easy for the apple to pick up and return to the tree.

Packing and unpacking 14 years worth of stuff has been an intense, exhausting process. Whenever you move, you are forced to sort through all of the things that represented hopes you once had — the electric guitar that never came out of its blue fur-lined box, the ice cream maker, the avant-garde dress with sculpted shoulder pads, a plastic bag filled with various international bills and coins. Then you decide which dreams come with you and which get left behind.

I had thought about doing ALL THE THINGS! I have ever wanted to do in New York during my final weeks there, but I didn’t. Besides, I told myself, I’ll be back for a stay in July. I couldn’t bear to do a goodbye tour. New York is part of my DNA. How do you say goodbye to yourself?

Untitled

But here’s where I sat today at a friend of a friend’s house, sipping mango lemonade and seltzer in a sun-warmed wicker chair in front of a blooming jacaranda tree in Beachwood Canyon. (I don’t even know where Beachwood Canyon is. I have to look it up on a map when I get a chance.) Down below, the neighbors across the street had put a ceiling fan out on top of their garbage can, and its wide wooden blades spun lazily in the breeze’s lick. Just left of the frame stood a house-tall rubber tree, its broad, perfectly ovate leaves like something out of a child’s chalk drawing. My friends’ toddlers had their own table out on the deck, tucked behind the long picnic table we adults sat at to enjoy a brunch of quiche, a lively salad, and the kind of fragrant ruby strawberries you can get everywhere in California.

I’ve been starting my mornings with a run around the neighborhoods I’m staying in, marveling at my hometown’s blowsy fecundity. A leisurely jog around my block alternates between the scent of night jasmine, baby pink tea roses, and snowy gardenias from a blooming bush as tall as I am. Jewel-toned bougainvillea pours down brick walls like winking sari cloth drying in the sun. The studded orange trees’ boughs shrug, ambivalent that nobody comes to unburden them of their heavy fruit. From my barrio in San Gabriel Valley to the sidewalk-less, steep curves of Bel-Air, the same sun shines hard upon all of L.A.

It’s hot out here. I’m diving in.

10 Weeks Until the Ride to Montauk

lc10 weeks until the Ride to Montauk century

Today’s mileage: 19 miles

Total mileage: 38.9 miles

Diet: Had three bowls of Lucky Charms at 11pm last night. I swear, it’s like half marshmallows now.

Feeling: My legs are getting a bit stronger, I think. This is good. But I’ve got a lot of work to do.

Spring, are you really here to stay, or are you doing that deadbeat asshole thing where you tell us you’re here for good and then you leave us with evil winter and his corporal punishment? Nevermind, I’m glad that you’re back, don’t explain. No lobster gloves, no balaclava today!

I’m reacquainting myself with my gears. My friend Raymond says I shouldn’t be riding with the chain on the big front gear and the big back gear, which means the 2 on the front and the 1 on the back of my 12 speed. I risk breaking the chain. I did not know this! So I’m trying to keep myself in the middle range of the back gear and switch between the two derailleur thingies in front. (Apologies to you people who have actual vocabulary for these objects.)

I’m always happy to give pedestrians a wide berth and to slow down when people want to cross. And I do enjoy that downhill part on the Prospect Park Southwest side. But it can also be a little hairy. Today, there was an older couple trying to cross into the park right where momentum is increasing the cyclists’ velocity as they zip down the hill towards the lake. The lady was wisely standing back at the side of the road, but unwisely refraining from giving her husband shit for being a dummy. The man had daringly dashed to the first white line, a streak of paint which may divide two lanes for cars on the weekdays, but on a Saturday becomes the wispiest of abstract notions. When I rode past, he was just standing on that line like the last standing bowling pin eager to become a spare. I yelled, “What are you thinking, my friend?” which he probably heard as, “What rrr thttt…”

Clearly I’m not ready for Manhattan traffic yet.

Home Economics: The Reclamation Potluck

What's in your fridge?
Photo by John Taggart

Some people want every meal to be made to order; once their food is in its finished state, it will never again see the inside of a refrigerator again. Hint: I am not one of those people.

I get anxious when parting ways with the last three tablespoons of stew, a picked-clean T-bone, or a Chinese takeout container half-filled with cold, hard rice. I have no shame asking the waiter to Drop. That. Plate. when one tries to clear the remains of ravaged crostini. I like food. I really like saving food.

For home economists like me, a meal tastes even better sauced with the satisfaction of knowing you salvaged what someone else might have tossed. In The Road, the protagonist in the fills up the bathtub with water in preparation for the post-apocalypse. With enough of that water and the contents of my always overstuffed cupboards, I’m pretty sure I could feed myself and some friends through three months of end times.

You probably could, too. The EPA says that we generate 34 million tons — as in 68,000,000,000 pounds — of food waste every year.  I see it happen in my own house on a much smaller scale. I have a lot of storage space, and it’s packed to the gills with dried chiles, cornmeal, juniper berries, and other odds and ends that were used once and then left to age ungracefully in the back of the cabinet.

The idea for a reclamation potluck came up during a chat I was having with my like-minded pal, Rachel, extolling the virtues of making meals from those cupboard orphans. Wouldn’t it be great to have a potluck where you have to make something with the stuff you already have in the house?, we thought. This would be especially fruitful for us food editor/writer types, as we tend to squirrel away weird samples and fancy food stuffs into the backs of our pantries and freezers.

The rules for a Reclamation Potluck:

  • Use something you already have in your fridge or cupboards.
  • Cook the kind of thing you would normally eat for dinner — no need to get fancy
  • Share with your friends

And you know what? The idea seemed to bring out our cooking friends’ A game. Rachel made a huge pan full of tangy grits plumped up with a broth made from random cheese rinds, along with cider-vinegary black-eyed peas, rich with andouille sausage. Francis brought some marrowy, meaty beans made with beef bones and rendered salami fat, which he talked up on Twitter for the half hour prior to actually coming to the party. When he finally arrived, he put them on the stove to rewarm, stuck the handle of a spoon into the pot, and held it out for me, imploring, “Just taste the FAT, man; that’s just the FAT.”

JJ took some leftover frozen pork belly gaeng hang lay and threw it together with vegetables and thin rice noodles. He was humble and unassuming about it, but the dish was spectacular. You’d never have known that the sweet, tender, fatty pork, stewed with fragrant spices and plenty of whole kaffir lime leaves, had been resurrected from a cryogenic state. It reminded me of my dad’s nightly dinners, in which he’d mix leftover stir-fries into a bubbling broth with a packet of ramen; A toothsome noodle can revive anything.

Obvious benefits include clearing out your pantry to make room for new stuff, not letting food go to waste, and seeing friends. We covered a broad range of cuisines and flavors, which is one of the things about a reclamation potluck you just have to embrace:

Reclamation PotluckReclamation PotluckReclamation PotluckReclamation PotluckReclamation PotluckReclamation PotluckReclamation PotluckReclamation PotluckReclamation PotluckReclamation Potluck

For my part, I’ve been dying to use more of these salt-packed anchovies that have been sitting in my fridge, waiting for me to be interested in puttanesca sauce again. I also figured that, as the host, I could provide some greens for what was sure to be a starch-heavy table. This bagna cauda recipe is loosely based on one by Suzanne Goin in Sunday Suppers at Lucques. I really upped the anchovy count and decreased the amount of butter. All the salt is in the sediment, so be careful when you salt to taste. Any leftovers can be tossed into a salad the next day. If you’re as lucky as I was, you’ll also have reclamation leftovers to pad out your meal.

IMG_8826

Bagna Cauda with vegetables

3/4 cup olive oil
1/2 stick butter
15-20 salt-packed anchovies, soaked, deboned, filleted, and chopped
6 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
2 teaspoons of fresh thyme
Salt and pepper
Vegetables for dipping, such as fresh radish, endive, blanched cauliflower, blanched broccoli, blanched carrots, boiled fingerling potatoes, blanched artichoke heart
Lemon
Maldon sea salt

Heat olive oil and butter over very low heat until the butter is melted. Add anchovies and stir until they dissolve into the oil. Add garlic and thyme and cook for just one minute longer, being careful not to brown the garlic. Taste for salt and add as needed. Squeeze a bit of lemon juice in there.

Squeeze more lemon on your vegetables. Sprinkle with Maldon. Serve the sauce with a spoon so it can be spooned over the vegetables. Reheat as needed.

**

For more inspiration, I highly recommend Tamar Adler’s book, An Everlasting Meal. It’s a modern handbook for home economists, full of lots of brilliant dinner renewal tips.

 

11 Weeks until the Ride to Montauk

Not bad11 weeks until the Ride to Montauk century

Today’s mileage: 18.4 miles

Total mileage: 19.9 miles

Diet: Vegetables in bagna cauda, leftover chopped liver. Iron and nutrients, like a champ.

Feeling: Optimistic. And a tiny bit saddle sore.

It’s on! Raymond and I talked about doing five laps at Prospect Park. I huffed and puffed up that cursed Park Slope and felt a little less confident about completing five turns. After two laps, I tried to negotiate down to three but ultimately rallied for four when I realized that I’d been in the wrong gear during the 2nd climb.

The worst part is this irritatingly tenacious cold weather. The padded tights weren’t that successful at keeping my calves warm. My beloved lobster gloves were a bit too toasty, but somehow I managed to lose all of my right-hand gloves and am now the annoyed owner of four left-hand gloves. I’m like the Isotoner Michael Jackson.

Four left gloves

But I refuse to buy another pair of gloves. I am done with you, winter!

Free New York: the New York Public Library

New York Public Library, 5th Ave.

I spent part of my morning on the top floor of the main New York Public Library at 42nd St. and 5th Ave. CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS IS FREE, PEOPLE? There are lamps, chandeliers, windows taller than some people’s apartments, wi-fi, and loads of BOOKS that you can summon a (civil) servant to retrieve. The chairs are big and wooden and don’t roll around. To work in that silent cavern is utter bliss.

Oddly, many tour groups roll through the room with their DSLRs and camcorders. I wanted to yell, “HEY! YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO A DRIVE-BY! YOU KNOW YOU CAN TAKE A SEAT AND BASK IN THE READING ROOM’S GLORY LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, TOO, RIGHT?” But I didn’t. You know, ’cause I was in the library.

Why in the world would you ever wait for a grotty table at a crowded Starbucks when you could come here and spread all your belongings out over a long wooden table like a queen? LIKE A QUEEN, I tell you.

 

Chinese Restaurant Syndrome

So I was doing a little research and came upon this little passage in the 1997 edition of The Joy of Cooking. I have no idea if it’s still in the most recent edition, but it made me laugh:

MSG

 

Also known as MSG, this substance has recently been revealed as the cause of the allergic reaction known as Chinese Restaurant Syndrome which causes untoward physical side-effects in some people.

Ha! So then I was like, that’s not a real thing, is it? And, actually, I found Chinese Restaurant Syndrome listed on MedLine Plus, the National Institute of Health’s own medical dictionary site. The entry was last updated on October 14, 2012. The NIH says studies have not conclusively linked MSG to Chinese Restaurant Syndrome (though I really don’t see how you can legitimize the syndrome and not legitimize the connection to MSG. What else could it be?)

My favorite part of the entry is that an alternative name for the syndrome is “Hot dog headache”. That sounds like a euphemism for the repudiation of a sexual advance.

UPDATE: My friend Eszpee points out that Modernist Cuisine calls bullshit on the anti-MSG crusade:

“Alas, the bottom line is that science has found no health effects due to MSG consumption at the levels in which it is present in food.”

(For the record, I am very confident in my ability to pick out food with MSG in it. My mouth dries up like it’s full of cotton balls. But perhaps I should put this to the test.)

UPDATE 2: Ooh! Ooh! Now if you, like me, are kinda curious about how one cooks with MSG, here’s an interesting discussion on Chowhound and a sort of oddball post on Serious Eats about how much to use in addition to your regular seasoning. (Basically, very, very little. Like, a pinch for every two servings. And lay back on the salt/soy sauce if you do use it.)

6 Dead Simple Ways to Improve Your Restaurant Website

FREE advice! You just have to deal with my crankiness.

I am not here to admire your taste in hex colors or to click through your clever sections. And stop autorotating through your image galleries, because these are not photos of Sports Illustrated babes in bikinis and I am not a teenage boy needing to loop through them, hands-free*. I want information and I want it now so I can get my ass off my computer and into a seat at one of your tables. PLEASE TAKE MY ADVICE.

1. No music. NO MUSIC. NO MUSIC. NO MUSIC.

2. Include a map, for the love of God. Put a map on it, preferably a Google map. Include a link out to the larger map on Google Maps so I can get directions.

3. Address and phone number as text. Make your contact info TEXT, not part of an image, so I can email that shit to my friend who is meeting me there or call directly from my phone. Put it in the footer or the header so I can always find it, no matter what page I’m on.

4. Mobile optimize! Speaking of phones, I bet 40%+ of your traffic comes from mobile. Prioritize your mobile site.

5. Show me your interiors. Actually, some pictures of the dining room would be nice so I know what I’m getting into, whether or not my friends will fit, whether or not the table next to me will overhear me talking about my alarming rashes. I also want to know if you have a garden, and what your garden looks like, so please show me.

6. Hours. Put your hours in, preferably in the header or footer like the address and phone number, as long as they aren’t too complicated. And if it’s near a holiday, put your holiday hours on your home page, even if you are still going to be open.

</rant>

*A postscript from my friends on Facebook — kill the interminable Flash intro. It doesn’t work on Apple devices, and nobody wants to see it, anyway.