Following up on our lists of historians and innovators to watch in the coming year, here are a list of great food writers who our bloggers are looking forward to following:

From Jesse:

The Perennial Plate is an online documentary series by Daniel Klein about food and communities. Season 1 had a Minnesota and Midwest focus. Season 2, which is still being rolled out, covers the continental United States.

Gilt Taste’s stories section is also worth watching as a “must-read” site. It started up last spring. While the section can get a little recipe-heavy during the holiday season, it features stories about food and culture from a wide variety of writers.

From Peter:

McSweeney’s, the book publisher, is putting out David Chang’s dude-centric Lucky Peach and also, get this, a cookbook written by Eat Pray Love‘s Liz Gilbert’s grandma.

Nicola Twilley of Foodprint/Edible Geography. She writes about “smellscapes,” the odors that define certain places; wacky food-based artists; edible insects; and she runs a lot of Q&As with interesting characters.

Naz Sahin, at Feasting Never Stops, runs a very visual blog with a great sense of humor—one set of photos shows anglers holding up their hands to show the size of the biggest fish they ever caught.

Cooked Books, by Rebecca Federman, takes a more literary approach. She’s one of the curators of the “What’s on the Menu?” project.

Also, keep an eye on the Gastronomica Twitter feed.

Steak tartare may not have been the best choice for this meal. Image courtesy of Flickr user Food Stories

For this month’s Inviting Writing, we asked for stories about food and reconciliation: how food repaired a relationship of some sort—or didn’t, despite your best efforts. Our first essay comes from Alexia Nader, a graduate journalism student at New York University and a freelance writer.

How Do You Apologize in Italian?

By Alexia Nader

I was up to my elbows in raw ground beef, anchovy paste, capers and onions, and completely panicked. “Call your mother now and tell them that dinner is going to be late, tell them to wait an hour,” I yelled to my boyfriend Marco as my chest sank—I had already ceded complete success. It’s bad form to show your dinner guests the frenzy of preparing a big meal; when they enter the door, the cook should have everything under control in the kitchen and look calm and composed. I was walking around the kitchen barefoot with frizzy hair and no make-up, wearing Marco’s dead aunt’s ancient apron and sweating profusely in the August heat. But I was determined to put on the table the meal that I had traveled two hours to Marco’s tiny hometown of Russi, Italy to prepare. It was my last plea for Marco’s family to forgive me for stealing their son away to America.

Two days before the Sunday lunch, I gleefully sketched out a list of dishes and ingredients for the meal. Having just returned from a month-long, self-guided exploration of Basque France and Bordeaux, I had foie gras confit in my pantry and memories of gambas and steak tartare at the forefront of my mind. What really determined my menu choices, though, was my refusal to make Italian food for Marco’s family after attending one inimitable lunch at Marco’s grandmother’s house. I could never compete with her four courses, honed to perfection by hundreds of years of Emilia-Romagna tradition—the antipasti were diaphanous slices of mortadella, prosciutto and coppa; cappelletti in brodo, puffy lunettes of fresh filled pasta that were the product of hours of painstaking craft, floated in a savory pork broth for our primi; tender and hearty roast rabbit with mashed potatoes followed; cake, coffee, and sorbet felt like a symphonic coda. Much of the same audience would soon be eating my food. I wanted to dazzle them with the exact opposite of rustic, traditional cuisine: an understated meal that, for them, would evoke both the exotic and urbane.

The attraction of the unknown had worked well when I first started dating Marco three years earlier. I was studying abroad in Bologna. He was an engineering student, precise and methodical in his thinking, shy and naïve—the complete opposite of the quick-talking city people that I usually befriended. Some months into the relationship, I learned that he came from a family of farmers. His uncle still owned a peach grove where Marco picked peaches for ten euros a day every summer, and his grandmother was the type of person who could wring a chicken’s neck for dinner without batting an eye and pick out a ripe cantaloupe by rapping on its tough rind.

On our first date my lack of an extensive Italian vocabulary prevented us from talking about most of our interests, except for one—our obsession with trying new food. I learned that Marco would try any dish at least once and, despite his hometown’s lack of foreign restaurants, had discovered and fallen in love with Japanese food. He learned that my childhood—living in Miami among people from all over Latin America and the Caribbean—had given me this compulsive need to sample and cook with as many flavors as I could get my hands on.

For our many meals together in my cramped apartment, I cooked everything but Italian food—lentil lettuce wraps, arroz con pollo, tacos al pastor, panang curry—all dishes that made his eyes widen in surprise upon experiencing a flavor he had never known existed. I got an immense feeling of satisfaction when he called his mother and excitedly told her what new food he had just tried. He had lived for 19 years eating an unadulterated form of his regional cuisine; I relished corrupting his palate with my bastardized, global cooking repertoire. Marco was a convert, but his family, whose members had never been on an airplane or lived outside the humble, rural province of Ravenna, wouldn’t be so easily won over.

I decided on a three-course menu: mâche salad with foie gras, black grapes, and balsamic drizzle; steak tartare with toast points and truffle oil; and a fruit salad. These choices were a product of many hours staring off into space and mentally aligning different factors: the season, how hungry Marco’s family would probably be at 4 p.m., the late afternoon heat, how much truffle oil would cost and the day of the week. When I was growing up, Sunday was when we ate a Lebanese version of steak tartare called kebbeh nayeh; I planned on telling Marco’s family this as I set the plates of tartare on the table.

When Marco’s family arrived at the apartment at 5:00, the tartare was setting in the refrigerator, my balsamic glaze had reduced and I had conscripted Marco for the duty of brushing slices of bread with truffle oil.  Marco’s father and brother gathered around the table that I had set up near the balcony, trying to keep their fidgeting inconspicuous. Marco’s mother offered to help out in the kitchen. I burst out with a sharp no, and immediately stopped short, telling myself that subjecting your boyfriend’s mother to your control-freak cooking tendencies is not a step in the right direction. I brought out the courses, spread them family-style around the table, sat down, and tried to loosen up with a big gulp of prosecco.

There is one key element of a successful meal that can’t be planned in advance—lively, continuous conversation. Even though Marco’s family ate everything on the table, the unfamiliar food made them uncomfortable.  I gradually understood that, for Marco’s family, casual conversation was not appropriate for a fancy meal. They ate their foie gras and truffled toast points in silence, save for a few comments about how fresh the meat tasted and what a nice touch the balsamic glaze was. I tried to stimulate small talk but my attention was divided between eating my food and spying on everyone’s plates to see how much they were eating.

That the food was too strange and foreign was as much of a white elephant as the fact that the meal was meant as an apology. I was the reason that Marco was leaving his family; no amount of pleasure that could be garnered from my impeccably planned meal could obscure my role in the matter. My first try at mending bridges with food failed. I realized that, for a meal to meld, both the diners and the cook need to put their ideas of what the food should be and mean aside, and simply eat.  Had we done that, we would have been a happy group of four Italians and one American interloper, enjoying some delicious summer fare on a sticky August afternoon.

Always beware of sharp knives. Image courtesy of Flickr user Andy Ciordia

When we put out a call for stories about about food and independence for this month’s Inviting Writing series, we weren’t expecting such drama in real life! Last week we read about a dark-of-night battle (with a pig) for control of a farm. Today Sara Davis shares a bloody tale of a hard-won lesson in independence.

Davis is a an English PhD student in Philadelphia writing a dissertation about food scenes in contemporary literature. She blogs at Scenes of Eating: Reading Foods and Consuming Culture.

An Aesop’s Fable of Independence

By Sara Davis

When I relocated to Philadelphia for grad school, I moved thousands of miles away from family, friends, a city I loved and everything I knew. My mother helped me move to my new apartment and unpack all the things from my previous life: furniture I’d had since college, pounds and pounds of books, and going-away gifts from friends. One of these was a nice, shiny set of Cutco knives gifted to me from a friend who worked for that company. I’d been the resident cook in my peer group but didn’t have many nice tools, so it was a thoughtful and appropriate gift. This considerate friend is not to blame for what follows!

The evening after my mother left, I settled down to my new life alone in a strange city. I put on a movie and started to make myself dinner. With the noise of a familiar film in the background, I fell into a comfortable rhythm cutting chicken into small pieces for the skillet. Without thinking, I glanced over my shoulder at the screen—and sliced off the tip of my thumb.

It didn’t hurt right away, so I sat down to think about what I knew about first aid. (Not much.) I didn’t have health insurance, and I didn’t have enough supplies in my brand new apartment to tape myself up, so I wrapped a towel around my hand and walked to Rite-Aid. My first meal alone was delayed due to an unexpected test of survival skills.

After a month or two, the tip of my thumb grew back. I’d cut past the white edge of my thumbnail, but in time my thumb regained its domed shape and the whorl of my thumbprint. My new thumb is composed mostly of scar tissue: It’s tough, less flexible and acts as a built-in defense against any future slips of the blade. In other words: an Aesop-level allegory for independence acquired the hard way!

For the rest of you, may ye be of sound health and mind so you can send in your essays by Friday, June 10 to FoodandThink@gmail.com. We look forward to reading them and will post our favorites on subsequent Mondays.

Bangkok’s floating market (courtesy of flickr user tommykwok630)

Thai Spaghetti
by Jamie Simon

In 2009, I spent ten days in Bangkok, traveling with my father who was attending a Peace Corps Medical Conference. I had never been to Asia and was looking forward to taking in the local culture and trying to blend in as much as my very Western (and very pale) self would allow. I ate exotic vats of simmering meats at the Floating Market, tried my first dandelions at Cabbages & Condoms and mustered the courage to try some of the street food along Sukhumvit Road. Even though I was familiar with American Thai food, the authentic stuff was an entirely new experience. I was never quite sure what I was eating, but there was always a clarity, a hominess and, of course, a brilliant amount of spice to it all.

Unfortunately, my stomach was not as big a fan of the food as my taste buds were. I had had some bouts of heart burn in the past, but nothing like what I felt about five days into my Thai adventure. Everything I ate seemed to cause an intense pain between my shoulder blades. After a brief consultation with 20 or so Peace Corps doctors (if you’ve got to be sick, be sick at a medical conference), I was told I was experiencing esophagitis and that I should take it easy on the spicy foods.

After a day of consuming only water and Thai Pepto, I thought I’d try and eat something in the hotel restaurant. The menu, though filled with Thai dishes, fortunately had a few American staples. After looking at my options (hamburgers with onions and peppers, ribs with BBQ sauce), my best bet appeared to be the spaghetti Bolognese—hold the hot pepper flakes. It went down OK and I was cautiously optimistic about my culinary prospects for the rest of the trip.

Alas, even the most banal of Thai food still upset my stomach and my back. To this day I have no idea what caused my sudden sensitivity (the docs seemed to think it was MSG), but I know that for the rest of my vacation all I could eat was the Thai facsimile of spaghetti Bolognese.

Baked cardoons, courtesy of Flickr user h-bomb

For this month’s Inviting Writing, we asked you for stories of lost foods—cereals, soft drinks, cookies or foreign foods that you savored once but can no longer easily find. Today’s memory comes from Susie Petitti Tilton, who works at Williams-Sonoma and has a small business baking decorated sugar cookies. She blogs about a town in Italy called Faeto where her grandparents came from—and recently heard from a man whose great-grandfather was her great-grandfather’s brother. “The Internet does indeed shrink the world!” she writes. Her website is called Sweetie Petitti.

In Search of Lost Cardoons

By Susie Petitti Tilton

I am the daughter and granddaughter of grocers; you could say I come from a lineage of foodies. When I was growing up, we always had the most amazing things to eat, even though we lived in a very small Iowa town. In addition to the products we sampled that came through the grocery stores, we had many relatives in Chicago, and our favorite Italian bakeries there were always on the must-visit list. We also had a garden that only an Iowa farmer could rival. I spent many summers with my dad picking beans, tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchini, among other things.

My grandparents were Italian immigrants, and I had a large extended family of great Italian cooks. One summer, my dad’s Aunt Molly arrived for a visit. We were excited to enjoy her amazing biscotti (which we still call, appropriately enough, Aunt Molly Cookies), home-made ravioli and her chocolate cake. She was a beautiful woman, very tall, and  quite skilled in the kitchen. She headed out one day into our woods armed with a knife, and emerged with an arm-load of leafy greens—plants I had looked at my whole life with no idea what they were. They resembled rhubarb, but grew wild in the woods where I played. Aunt Molly called them cardoni; most would call them cardoon. She cut off the large leaves and cleaned the stringy stalks with a paring knife. I remember her dipping the stalks in egg and flour and then frying them in a pan until they were golden brown. We sprinkled salt on them and ate them as fast as she could make them. The flavor is unlike anything I have ever eaten in my life.

My whole life, I have been on a mission to find my childhood treat. I found seeds one spring—they are in the thistle family—and planted them in my garden. It was one of my first summers in the Deep South, and I was unprepared for the violent summer heat, and my cardoons did not survive. Recently, an international market opened here, and I have had a great time tasting all kinds of produce that hadn’t been available before. Imagine my surprise when I was shopping one day and saw cardones. The spelling was Spanish and they were cultivated in Mexico. They didn’t look like the cardoons of my childhood, which were much smaller, but I have since found there are many varieties.  Of course I bought a large bunch and headed straight to the computer. Every article and recipe I found suggested soaking or cooking the cardoon in lemon juice to remove any bitterness, and then frying or cooking them in a gratin. I don’t remember the soaking step all those years ago, but Aunt Molly may very well have done this.

After cleaning the stalks with a paring knife, I peeled the largest of the fibers off the stalk, trimmed off any dark spots and cut the stalks into manageable 3-inch lengths. I soaked them in lemon juice for about four hours and then rinsed and dried them. I simply beat a few eggs and dipped the cardoon pieces in the egg, dredged them in flour and fried them in canola oil. Lots of salt is a must. Many people compare the flavor to artichokes, and they are in the same family, but I disagree. The flavor is unique. But sadly, my cardones weren’t exactly Aunt Molly’s Cardonis. They took me back to my childhood but were not as I remember.  A trip to my small Iowa town is on the agenda for the summer, and while my kids are picking fresh sweet corn and nibbling mulberries, I will be wandering the woods looking for cardonis, just like Aunt Molly.

Bean tostada, courtesy of Flickr user lunita lu

For this month’s Inviting Writing, we asked you to share stories of lost foods—cereal no longer on the market, hard-to-find diet sodas, dishes you remember from another place or time that you yearn to taste again.

Carole Baldwin is a marine biologist at Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and she’s also an expert on food. Her book One Fish, Two Fish, Crawfish, Bluefish explains how to choose the most sustainably harvested (and tastiest) seafood. Her “lost foods” aren’t extinct fish species, but childhood treats that some of you might remember. “I’ve often wanted to share these two memories,” she writes, “largely in hopes that somebody could help me rediscover the foods that produced them.”

Lost Cookies and Beans

By Carole Baldwin

I grew up in the small town of Hampton, South Carolina, which in the 1960s was home to two grocery stores: Red & White and Piggly Wiggly. Red & White carried a type of cookie that I will never forget. The cookies were rectangular, like graham crackers, and covered with fine crystals of sugar. Embedded in the cookie were lots and lots of slivered almonds. I can still taste them today. This was a foreign cookie—Swedish maybe—and the brand name began with a “K,” but that’s the only part of the name I can remember. The cookies came in a blue bag that had a roll top with tabs on the side to hold it closed once rolled up. That’s my first “lost food” memory, and it makes me wonder what other foreign delicacies that store may have harbored.

Another memory also involves foreign foods and is from about the same time. When I was 7, our family made a cross-country trip to visit friends in San Diego. While there, we went across the border to Tijuana. I sort of remember festive colors, music, streets crowded with vendors, etc., but I strongly remember what we had for lunch: bean tostadas from a food cart on the corner of a street. Although I would become something of a “foodie” later in life, at 7 my palate wasn’t very developed (although I did order and love licorice ice cream on that same trip while in San Diego). The fact that I even tried a bean tostada is remarkable. The fact that I loved it and still remember it so vividly is astonishing. There were only three ingredients: a crunchy tostada, beans (refried, I assume), and shredded lettuce. The flavor of the beans is what the food memory is all about. I have eaten Tex-Mex in the United States and real Mexican food in Baja California and never again tasted the flavor in those beans. I’ve pored over Diana Kennedy’s Art of Mexican Cooking and tried dozens of frijoles recipes, and I haven’t been able to recapture the essence of those beans. To this day, when I’m heaping shrimp or meat, cheese, salsa, sour cream, guacamole, hot sauce, etc., on tacos and tostados, I think about those Tijuana tostadas. They were simple and simply delicious.

Robinson is a freelance writer from Knoxville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in Mental Floss magazine, Curve and Games.

Tab soda cans, courtesy of Flickr user WilWheaton

Waiting for the End of the Tab

By Kelly Robinson

The first time I ever heard the word “addict” was in relation to Tab cola. I was 10 years old, and a neighborhood pal was apologetically explaining why her family’s garage was piled floor-to-ceiling with six-packs of empty bottles. “My Mom’s a Tab addict,” she said.

I had to ask my own mother what the word meant, and she laughed when she learned the context. “It means that someone has to have something,” she explained, “because they can’t live without it.” “I guess I’m a Tab addict too,” Mom added.

The idea that two women in one neighborhood were addicted to a soft drink stunned me. What would happen if they didn’t get it, I wondered? That question, along with the fact that my diabetic mother had declared Tab “off limits” to my brothers and sisters, combined to create an aura around the drink that couldn’t have been stronger to me had the bottles been locked in an antique trunk marked “mysterious treasure.”

I began sneaking Tab at every opportunity, noting the level on every two-liter and quaffing the stuff quickly in my room. Tab had saccharine then, and the bitter taste was almost as tongue-numbing as szechuan peppercorns. While the drink is now flavored with Nutra-Sweet, Tab maintains a flavor unlike any other diet soda—less cloying, boldly acidic.

Now, as an adult, I find Tab to be the perfect match for bourbon, with any other mixer tasting too sweet. But while the drink hasn’t completely disappeared from the market, it has vanished from anywhere social: no vending machines, no restaurant soda fountains, no bars.

To enjoy a Tab, I have to enjoy it at home (via harder-and-harder-to-find cans) making the drinking of it a solitary vice. Gone are the days when, as a child, I drank Tab from a glass bottle (with its signature grainy texture and yellow starbursts) in the public pool and vamped while singing the jingle, “sixteen ounces and just one cal-o-rieeeee” to anyone who would watch.

The forcing of Tab drinkers underground makes it a special moment, though, when I spot a rare kindred spirit. About twice a decade I see someone else make for the obscure corner where the few stores that still stock it relegate their stash.

We make eye contact and look shocked. Then the shock gives way to understanding, as we feel a silent bond. We rarely speak, but when we do it’s about the fear that Tab will disappear completely. We gravely fill our carts with what we worry, every time we shop, might be the very last of our calorie-free nectar.

My childhood curiosity returns: What would happen if we didn’t have it?

Delicious Kale on a warm spring day. Image courtesy of Flickr user Another Pint Please

For this month’s Inviting Writing series, we asked you to tell us about the most memorable meal of your life. A pattern emerged from the stories we received: nothing focuses the mind on a meal like hardship, hunger or disgust. Today’s entry reminds us that meals don’t have to be traumatic to be memorable (and that sometimes food tastes even better if you reject standard table manners).

Emily Horton is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C., who specializes in food and culture and is an enthusiastic cook. As she explains about her story: “What inspires me most, as a cook and a writer, are traditional foodways and remarkable ingredients, which is where the food I wrote about in this essay takes its cues. This meal was so memorable to me in part because it was so fresh in my mind, but also because it epitomized what I value most in cooking: simple, unfussy food made stellar by way of local and seasonal ingredients, and the shared experience of cooking and eating with others.”

The Magic of Kale

By Emily Horton

Kale is best eaten with the fingers.

I don’t think we had specifically planned to make dinner. But it was already around 6:00 when my friend John came by; it was a Friday and warm, and there were dogs to be walked. This being March, when warm days are a tease and thus impossible not to ravish, I thought company would be just the thing. “I’m bringing kale,” he said.

In my kitchen he emptied his bag of its contents: a bunch of Siberian kale, sweet, tender and mossy-hued. If it’s not the variety responsible for inspiring those “Eat More Kale” T-shirts, it should have been. We cooked it in a Dutch oven over a low flame, slicked with a glug of olive oil, a few dribbles of water and some sea salt, until it turned into a silken, glistening heap. We emptied the greens onto a plate, grabbed juicy bits with our fingers. Forks have no place here. We’re not sure why. “It’s so much better eating it this way,” he said. I nodded. We finished the plate with fewer words; we hadn’t bothered to sit down. I credit the kale for its sumptuousness. John says my technique is magic (it’s nothing special, and I’ve since taught him how to replicate the results). But flattery gets a person everywhere, and when he asked if I might bring him another beer from the fridge (could I open it, too?), I only narrowed my eyes a little.

“I have an idea,” I said. I remembered a dish I had coveted all winter, refusing to make for one, that had seemed too lusty of a thing to be eaten in solitude. We set about cracking walnuts, pounding them with garlic (actually, John took both of those tasks because he’s a better sport than I am), grating copious amounts of cheese. We stirred butter into the walnuts, then the Parmigiano, then olive oil. We boiled fresh linguine, nutty with spelt and oat flour, saving a bit of the cooking water. I turned everything into a bowl. The pesto covered the pasta now like a creamy coat, and the heat coaxed such a fragrance from the walnuts, heady and floral, that we understood why adding herbs would have been something of an interruption. We took the single serving bowl to the table, two forks, in the interest of minimalism.

John sat back in his chair, the wicker one without a match, and closed his eyes. “Wait a second, I’m having a moment.” There were bits of walnut shell in the sauce that my teeth kept catching. I decided not to care.

Apartheid-era South African armed forces. Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images

Judging from the responses we got to this month’s Inviting Writing query, “what was the most memorable meal of your life,” many people’s most memorable meals were memorably awful. The experiences may have been unpleasant at the time, but they make for good stories later.

Today’s essay comes from Erich Hugo, who is now a digital strategist and digital service designer living in Stockholm, Sweden. But in 1992, he was a soldier in South Africa. He explains the circumstances: “Military service in South Africa during apartheid years was mandatory for all white males over 18 to fight the supposed U.S.S.R. and Communist danger. I served for little more than a year before the democratic elections. But by that time, the illusion of apartheid was shattered and the army was nothing more than a mechanical institution of a dying political system. We were not motivated soldiers, just kids biding our time.”

The Joy of Cooking Dried Eggs

by Erich Hugo

When writing about food and the pleasure of eating, it is easy to get carried away in the culinary halls of thought where sweet smells and musty aromas bring Rome and Paris to mind. My story is a little different.

It was in the final days of apartheid South Africa, and I was one of the last of the white male military intakes. Just because apartheid was falling to pieces did not mean the military training was any less arduous or our young instructors any less brutal. I was selected to become an officer, which made the training even worse, because one had to stay sharp mentally as well as physically.

During the end game of our training, we had to go into the bush and spend a dozen days living off the land. We were given seven rations (seven days’ worth) of ratpacks [contents listed below, none of them fresh] to last us the 12 days, which meant that we would inevitably run out of food and really live off the land.

One might believe that South Africa is a warm country, but this was midwinter in the desert and the temperatures were often below freezing at night. It was so cold that five soldiers would crawl into a two-man tent just to keep warm. And in the mornings we would stand in front of the diesel generator’s exhaust stream, putting our hands and fingers out, just to get warm. I guess we shortened our lives considerably that way.

By day nine we had all run out of food and that, combined with marching between 15 and 20 kilometers during the day, made us hallucinate with hunger. Some intrepid chaps caught some snakes and scavenged some duck eggs—a meal for a king, I jest thee not. I had never thought that ingesting such foreign food would induce such gratifying pleasure.

Then, on day 12, one of the officers in charge took pity on us and we got an extra ratpack. The meal was a king’s feast, better than anything from the finest restaurants in Paris or New York, from the “Just Add Water Eggs” to the tinned food and the rum and raisin energy bars.

Contents of a typical ratpack:

2 tins of preserved food, usually fish in curry, bully beef, Vienna sausages (hot dogs for Americans) in tomato sauce, or beans in tomato sauce
2 packages of crackers
Instant porridge (malt)
2 energy bars of the highly artificial variety
Powdered soup (chicken broth, minestrone or beef)
Powdered milkshake
Powdered cool drinks
1 roll of candy loaded with Vitamin C
2 cheese tubes
Coffee and tea

This week’s entry comes from Kristen Freeman, a senior at the University of South Carolina-Aiken. She’s working toward a degree in Science in Secondary Education in Mathematics. She submitted this piece as part of her Writing in the University English class.

Who knew peanut butter could taste so bad? Image courtesy of Flickr user newbirth35

How Hard Can P.B. Be?

By Kristen Freeman

November 28, 2007 will always be known to me as the day I had surgery. Due to a birth defect, my left kidney was enlarged and obstructed in two places. The surgery corrected this life-threatening issue.

The days that followed will live in my memory for other reasons—such as being the first time I ever spat out a peanut butter sandwich. I had a three-inch incision on the left side of my abdomen. After being allowed only clear liquids and intravenous vitamins and minerals for 48 hours, the only thing in my mind that would make me feel human again was a meal. And I thought anything would have tasted appetizing.

Two mornings after surgery, I received a lunch menu. I scanned the various choices. Three words caught my eye like a nurse with a needle: peanut butter sandwich. I quickly checked the box next to the listing and smiled with pleasure. Messing up a peanut butter sandwich is impossible, right?

As the hours passed, my hunger grew for a plain peanut butter sandwich. Finally, I heard the creaking wheels of the food cart coming down the hall. The only thought in my mind was how wonderful that peanut butter sandwich would be. My mouth began to water as the thought of lunch filled my mind. As the squeaking cart stopped in front of my door, I quickly sat up and cleared off the small table at my bedside. A delightful atmosphere filled the room as the hospital worker carried in the tray. My stomach growled louder as the food was within reaching distance. All I could think about was the peanut butter sandwich I was about to devour. The two pieces of white bread with the creamy goodness between them had finally arrived.

I hurriedly unwrapped my meal, anticipating the mouth-watering sandwich. I lifted the sandwich and took a large bite. As I began to chew, my hunger quickly subsided as the flavor hit my tongue. While I looked around the tray for a napkin, my mother, who had been by my side since arriving at the hospital, knew something was wrong by the expression that came upon my face. The napkin became home to the only bite of lunch I ate.

“Mom, that is the worst thing I have ever tasted,” I said as I rinsed my mouth out with juice. “It’s worse than the medicine,” a horrible liquid I had received just before entering the operating room.

My mother assured me that my intravenous pain killers and other medicines were the cause of the disgusting taste. To prove her wrong, I made her try it. She pulled off a small portion of the sandwich and began chewing. All of a sudden, the same disturbing look that had come over me consumed her. She quickly grabbed another napkin and spat out the bite, apologizing and admitting how horrible the meal tasted.

My appetite had disappeared like a doctor being paged. The most memorable meal of my life is one I couldn’t allow myself to eat.

Janik is a Madison-based freelance writer, author, and a producer at Wisconsin Public Radio. Her web site is erikajanik.net and she writes a blog called “Curious About Everything.”

A view of Stratford-upon-Avon, courtesy of Flickr user chemicalbrother

Fed by Thugs

By Erika Janik

My most memorable meal came from a deep and abiding lack of good food. I was in London, in Europe for the first time, as a 20-year-old taking a course on British politics for a month. We spent three weeks in a cheap hotel near Kensington Palace, eating breakfast every morning and dinner every night in the subterranean hotel restaurant known as the Zebra Club.

Every morning we descended into the basement to the sounds of techno and roving colored lights on the dance floor. The Zebra Club clearly took its “club” designation seriously, morning or night, though I never saw anyone dancing. Breakfast was cold toast, served angrily by a man who doubled as the front desk attendant by night. Coming off an all-night shift, he finished his day at 8 a.m. by shoving cheap slices of store-bought bread onto one of those toaster conveyor belts common to cafeterias. He glared at me, daring me take a slice that he had slammed down. Often, he missed the plate and the errant toast would skitter across the crumb-covered tablecloth and onto the floor.

Other breakfast options included stale wheat flakes, worse than the store brand my roommates and I bought to save money back home, and stewed prunes that only old people in children’s stories seemed to love. There was also a pitcher of warm whole milk that tasted incredibly thick and strange to someone who’d had only two percent or skim milk before. We washed all of this down with weak coffee and pitchers of orange-colored but orange-flavor-less juice.

Breakfast was also when we selected which of the two dinner options we wanted. Everything, meat or pasta (and those were the two options all three weeks), came covered in a viscous, metallic-tasting sauce that was either pale red or highlighter yellow. Potatoes, carrots, everything tasted like I imagined the metal filings at the hardware store would taste. Failure to clean your plate—and I failed most nights—often resulted in a menacing visit from the tattooed Eastern European chef who came to my side with a chef’s knife in each hand and a maniacal grin. I’m sure he thought he was being funny, but his thick accent, torn shirt, and inked pictures of knives, blood, and pirates covering his arms somehow failed to make me laugh. Instead, I kept a careful watch on the kitchen doors, feeling nauseous each time they even so much as fluttered. I think I lost ten pounds.

So it was with extreme relief that I checked out of my room for our class road trip through several English towns for the final week of class. Our first stop was Stratford-upon-Avon, where we stayed in a half-timbered hotel straight out of a storybook. We trooped down to the hotel restaurant for dinner and were greeted with platters of food served family-style: plates of potatoes, broccoli, carrots, lamb, beef, bread, and fruit.

Nervously, I placed a single brown potato on my plate to start. I cut it open and took a tentative bite. Three weeks of the Zebra Club had made me fearful of food; I never thought that would happen. The first bite was amazing. It was the most delicious potato I had ever eaten simply because it tasted of nothing but potato. A tear ran down my cheek before I could wipe it away. I looked anxiously around to see if anyone had noticed. I felt ridiculous at my joy over something so simple, but extreme hunger for something familiar and pure can do that to a person. I had no trouble cleaning my plate several times over that night. My unintentional diet was over. And eleven years on, that meal remains one of the most memorable of my life.

Greek avgolemono soup, courtesy of flickr user amainbucatarie

This month’s Inviting Writing series focused on food and dating. We got some great contributions: sweet stories, quirky stories, sad (but triumphant!) stories. Today’s entry, sweet but very tangy, comes from Christie Zgourides, who teaches college English, grows her own vegetables, cooks from a range of cuisines and travels to try even more new flavors.

After the jump, see her recipe for Greek soup, interpreted for the novice. “I pulled the battered, hand-written recipe card from my file,” she wrote when we asked for the recipe, “and realized I will have something of a task getting this into a form that someone can actually work from.” She did, though, and it looks like a worthy challenge.

Secret Soup Strategy

By Christie Zgourides

I had been dating a guy, George, for a while and his birthday was coming up. He was living many states away from his parents, and had been lamenting that he hadn’t had his mom’s Greek soup in some time. This was the early 1990s, before the Internet or Facebook, so all I had was directory assistance. As his last name was Zgourides, I thought, how many could there be in a small Texas town? I got his mom on the first call! She secretly sent me the recipes, and I made Avgolemono (Greek) Soup with the eggy foam, chicken served on the side, and a Greek salad. I had never seen Greek soup much less made his family’s rather tricky recipe. When he came over on his birthday, he stepped through the door, and without even saying hello, said, “I smell Greek soup!” He went into the kitchen and said quizzically, “this tastes just like my mom’s!” Then I handed him the envelope with his mom’s handwriting. He was shocked and delighted I had gone to the trouble to contact his mom and surprise him with his favorite soup!

The funny part was the recipe called for three lemons. I had no idea what size, and bought three “Texas-sized” lemons at the store because, well, his family is all from Texas. The soup was so lemony George was the only one who could eat it, and he was delighted because he said he didn’t have to add lemon—for the first time ever! He pronounced it better than his mother’s.

I topped it all off with a lemon and white checker-board cake. The man loves his lemons.

He has since said he should have had the sense that day to get married, and we finally did a few years (ahem) later. We have been married 13 years, and I have made Greek soup many times since—with far less lemon. So everyone else can eat it. :-) He adds lemon, but still says it is better than his mother’s.

When most restaurants serve Greek or Avgolemono Soup, it is without the egg foam on top. There is no way to accomplish that feat in a restaurant setting, however upscale. It simply has to be done at home. The wrong pan or a mistake in temperature ruins it. This is not a recipe for the beginner or faint of heart.

Here is the recipe for Avgolemono (Greek) Soup. Be forewarned: there are
as many “true Greek” recipes for this as there are Yiayias in Greece, and
everyone thinks their family’s version is correct.

1 whole fryer or roasting chicken
Salt, pepper
1-2 tablespoons butter
2 celery ribs, chopped
1 cup rice (Rice may be cooked in the broth)*

3 eggs, separated
2 lemons, juiced

1. Place chicken in slow cooker with salt, pepper, butter, celery, and
water to cover. Cook on low for 6 to 8 hours or so. The goal is to cook the
chicken until it is falling off the bones and the broth is rich. Times may
vary depending upon size of chicken and slow cooker.

2. Cool. Remove chicken. Drain. Pour drained broth back into slow cooker.
Let stand overnight in refrigerator. Skim off fat next day. Strain broth.
This process should make about 6 cups of broth, and can be used for any
soup base. (Short-cut method: simmer chicken in a Dutch oven for an hour
or two. Remove chicken, strain broth, use same day. Short-cut method is
good, but broth is not as rich and will have more fat.)

3. Cook rice. Bring broth to a low boil in a heavy
Dutch oven.

4. While broth is heating, beat egg whites stiff in a small bowl.

5. Beat egg yolks till foamy in a larger bowl.

6. Add lemon juice to egg yolks and beat until mixed. Add rice to broth.

7. Combine stiff egg whites with yolks. Mix together slowly, using the low setting on mixer.

8. Add some hot broth to the egg mixture (to prevent curdling) and continue
beating slowing

9. Add mixture to broth and rice mixture, and barely stir into soup. There
should be foam on top of the soup.

10. Remove from heat and serve with crackers, de-boned chicken, and Greek
salad.

11. Let someone else clean the kitchen.

Yes, if you do this recipe correctly, you may well be juggling the rice
cooking in one pot, the broth in another, all while beating the eggs. Just
for one pot of soup. It is VERY EASY to get the temperature too high and
curdle the eggs. That is why a good quality, heavy pot is a must, to
control temperature.

*The original recipe called for cooking the rice in the broth, but my
mother-in-law, Katherine Zgourides, and I both decided the recipe turns out better if the rice
is cooked separately and then added to the broth.

A salmon dinner, perfect for Lent. Image courtesy of Flickr user Todd Kravos

Yesterday was Mardi Gras—that last hurrah before Lent. Traditionally Catholics are called to three practices during Lent: alms giving, prayer and fasting. The first two are generally satisfying to most people. The third not so much.

The tradition of the Lenten fast as we know it likely didn’t develop until the 4th century; there was a divergence of opinion on the nature and duration of the pre-Easter fast (as well as the very date of Easter itself) among authorities in the early Church. One locality might require fasting for all 40 days, another might call for a fast throughout the season of Lent but not on every day. Some required fasting only during Holy Week (the week before Easter), another only during Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday. The number 40 could refer to either the 40 days Moses led the Hebrews in the desert, the 40 days Christ fasted in the desert, or even the tradition that Jesus spent 40 hours in the tomb.

As for the fast itself, some in the early Church abstained from all meat, others were allowed to eat fish, others wouldn’t eat eggs or certain nuts, some ate just bread the whole time.

But back to us. One of the first pitfalls you encounter when fasting is falling into a morass of legalism. To satisfy the minimum requirements of the Church, Catholics fast on Ash Wednesday (that is, today) and Good Friday, and do not eat meat on Fridays during Lent. Sundays, being the day of the Resurrection, are always feast days, no matter what part of the liturgical year. Go crazy.

The Lenten fast consists of one full meal during the day, preferably at noon (no fair breaking it into two small meals with a long break), with the allowance of a collation (small meal) in the evening. The idea of the collation began sometime in the 9th century as a way to give sustenance to those who performed physical labor during the day. Unless filling the office printer twice in one day is manual labor, I’m not sure how most of us get away with that one. Oh, you’re also allowed to have coffee or another drink in the morning and perhaps a little bit of bread or a cracker to get you going. This is beginning to sound a little less like a fast, isn’t it? It reminds me of the scene from Seinfeld where a fasting Elaine asks Jerry if he has ever had to fast. “No, but once I didn’t have dinner until, like, nine o’clock. That was pretty tough.”

For those inclined to know exactly just what is and is not permitted, right down to the crumb, the Church has made it fairly easy. But there really isn’t a one-size-fits all when it comes to Lenten fasting. After all, vegetarians who subsist on a couple of salads a day could get by well within the letter of the law without breaking stride. And if you’re a one-meal-a-day person anyway, Lent can seem like a breeze—maybe even an indulgence.

Basically, good fasting consists of walking a line between health-endangering practices on one side and mere form on the other. Perhaps the best rule is this: If you feel as if you are cheating, you probably are.

Another pitfall of fasting is to avoid the mortal sin of gluttony. At first you might think this would be easy. It doesn’t sound logical to be concerned with too much if you’re eating much less, but this is because of a misconception of what gluttony is. The Church defines it not as eating too much, but as having an inordinate preoccupation with food, and nothing causes us to think of food more than trying to avoid it. Suddenly every commercial is food-related, every meeting in the office has a box of donuts brought in by the devil. Our hearing becomes incredibly acute—we never noticed before just how many times the office microwave beeps during the average work day.

A third pitfall, and perhaps the most insidious, is the insistence of certain green-uniformed groups on selling cookies outside of Mass. Here we are torn between our command to charity, and our command to fasting. Fortunately the confessional is not far away.

As Lent approaches, I’ve become “Super Catholic.” Those of us who are “reverts” (lapsed Catholics who have come back to the fold with the zeal of a convert) typically make things difficult for ourselves, probably to make up for our misspent youth. Also our misspent pocket change—I’m the type who can hit the candy machine at work three or four times a day. This year I’m taking a page from the early Church. Fasting all 40 days, no meat on Fridays. I imagine I’ll be finishing up about the time that the first steaks of summer are hitting the grills in the back yards all around my neighborhood. That’s probably like running by a mattress store on the last mile of a marathon.

—By Erik Washam, Smithsonian magazine’s associate art director

Ed: For more on religious fasts and feasts, see past posts on Sukkot, Ramadan and Eid ul-Fitr.

Today’s story comes from Evelyn Kim, who lives in Berlin and writes about food and sustainability issues at the cleverly titled blog Edo Ergo Sum (I eat, therefore I am).

The Matzo Ball Blues

By Evelyn Kim

A bowl of matzo ball soup, courtesy of Flickr user imipolexg

There is that moment when you are dating someone and you realize that as much as you think the family accepts you…they don’t. I dated this man through college, after college, and for a time I was even engaged to him. But after we split up, I knew that no matter how many brises, weddings, or bar or bat mitzvahs I went to, I was never really part of the family. How did I know? It was the matzo ball.

I made really lousy matzo ball soup. The soup part was fairly easy, but those matzo balls! I could never get them to turn out right. They had the consistency of school paste and the density of doorstops. They were basically rubber balls in kosher clothing.

It was not for lack of trying. I received all sorts of advice. Trust me, I asked around. Moms, aunts, cousins, rabbanim, the Korean deli on 76th and 3rd—they all had their own methods: club soda, finely ground matzo meal, lard (Kosher food rules were clearly not part of the licensing exam for Korean deli owners in New York), whipped schmaltz, The Jewish Book of Why. None of them worked. I suspected that until I married the guy and converted to Judaism, Moses (or my boyfriend’s grandma) wouldn’t divulge the secret to light and fluffy matzo balls.

For years, I thought dumpling dilemma was due to my lack of culinary skills. Maybe I had the wrong matzo meal. Maybe the eggs were too old. Maybe God was punishing me for eating bacon for breakfast. Clearly, I thought, there was something wrong with me. Maybe the matzo ball and I were like Romeo and Juliet–star-crossed lovers that were only to end in tragedy.

After five years of dating, the guy and I split up. There were the usual reasons: arguments ending with “why aren’t you in therapy,” or “I really don’t care about your career.” But then there was his family: “Oh, I forgot. You’re not Jewish,” “This brisket is good, but not as good as fill-in-the blank,” and my favorite, “But you’re Korean.” Needless to say, I never did get the matzo ball recipe.

And I really didn’t think about the matzo ball—until about three months after we split up, when I sat alone at a deli and blubbered into my hot, steaming bowl of matzo ball soup. I really did miss him. I missed the relationship. I missed his neurotic over-analyzed family. I even missed the smelly shedding cat. And I still couldn’t make those stupid matzo balls.

I knew it was time. Time for the matzo ball showdown. With my self-esteem in the gutter, I trudged through the Safeway aisles. I was determined to make the ur-matzo ball, and nothing was going to stop me.

By 2 a.m., I was a hot, sticky mess. I had egg whites floating all over the place. I had almost exhausted my three-box supply of Manischewitz matzo meal. Little bits of chicken fat were clinging in my hair making me the first Asian with dreadlocks. And in my frustration, all I could think about was those stupid quenelles I mistakenly ordered when I first met his parents in college. Why did I order those pretentious, French fluff-balls?

I started crying all over again. What was wrong with me? Maybe I didn’t deserve to know the secret of the matzo ball. Maybe I didn’t deserve to be part of his family. They probably never liked me. That matzo ball was like Proust’s madeleine—but from hell—a constant reminder of a failed past. In my self-pity, I didn’t realize the answer was right in front of me. That stupid quenelle. If I made matzo balls like quenelles, they would be the perfect consistency. I picked up my pathetic puffy-faced self, and went back for more supplies. At 4:30 a.m., I had my soup. I did it myself. I had conquered the matzo ball. I was going to be O.K.

Matzo Balls

Schmaltz (rendered chicken fat) is the way to go here. You can also use duck or goose fat (it’s delicious). I suppose you could use butter, but the taste and texture might be off. And please, don’t use margarine. I tried cooking the dumplings both in chicken stock and in water. Chicken stock is tasty, but it will color your dumplings yellow. Either way, your tummy will thank you.

4 large eggs, separated

1/4 c. schmaltz (rendered chicken fat), room temperature

2 tbs. Italian (flat-leaf) parsley, minced

1/2 tsp. salt (kosher or sea salt)

freshly ground pepper

2/3 c. unsalted matzo meal

1.     In a medium bowl, thoroughly blend egg yolks, schmaltz, parsley and salt.  In another medium bowl, with clean beaters, beat egg whites until it holds stiff peaks. Gently fold egg whites into the egg yolk mixture, alternating with matzo meal, in 3 additions, respectively. Cover and chill until firm, about 2 hours (overnight is fine).

2.     Bring a large pot of salted water or stock to a boil. Using moistened hands (the mixture WILL stick), form mixture into balls, about 1 1/4 inch in diameter. When all the balls have been formed, drop matzo balls into boiling water. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until cooked through, about 30 minutes, turning balls over once.

3.     Drain and serve immediately with chicken soup of your choice.

The story comes from Judy Martin, who works for a medical device manufacturer and lives in Cupertino, California. She writes a blog called Tastemonials.

Winner Winner Chicken Dinner

by Judy Martin

Grilled chicken made for a memorable meal. Image courtesy of Flickr user Izik

My husband and I were cruising down Highway 101 to Santa Barbara to visit my son during his sophomore year in college. About halfway there, the cell phone rang. It was my son. “Mom, I won’t be here when you arrive. I need to go on this beach camping trip.”

What! We’re driving seven hours for a visit and he won’t be there? “There’s this girl…” he continued. “There’s a group of us going and she’ll be there. I really want the chance to get to know her better. It’s only one night and I promise I’ll be back for lunch tomorrow.”

Sigh. We agreed to meet for lunch on Saturday. And true to his word, Matt arrived in time for lunch with a report on the previous night’s adventures. He related how they let most of the air out of the tires of our Honda Accord and drove on the beach trying to find the campers, and how the car almost washed into the sea as the tide came in. They had the car towed out of the sand several times and still never found the group with the camping gear. Would you tell this story to your parents?

But they did find the girls. Since they had no camping gear, they went to a friend’s apartment for the night. Fortunately, my son was in possession of the food for the trip. So around midnight, he cooked dinner for everyone and had the opportunity to talk to “the girl.” He was elated.

After lunch, Matt headed out for errands and hopefully some studying (?), and we went to the beach for the afternoon. Shortly after we parted ways, the cell phone rang. It was Matt again. There was hesitation on the line. “The girl,” he reported, was apparently impressed by his cooking the previous night and had invited him to make her dinner tonight. She requested the same dinner again—his secret grilled chicken recipe (marinated in Kraft Italian dressing, he later admits), grilled onions, garlic bread and beer. Remember, this is college.

Now, my son is a master at pleasing the parents. So I knew this was a real dilemma for him to consider ditching us again. This must be important for him to risk our displeasure after we’ve made the long drive to visit. He wouldn’t do this without careful consideration. With a disappointed sigh and a slightly threatening tone I told him, “go make this girl dinner. And she’d better be a winner.”

And was she? You bet she was! Was his dinner? I have no idea—I hadn’t eaten his cooking since his eighth grade Home Arts class. But she saw something in him or his cooking—enough to pique her interest and prompt her to invite him to cook dinner for her that night, their first real date.

Eight years later that special girl, who matured into an amazing woman, married my son. Now twelve years after that first grilled chicken dinner date, she is the mother of my adorable grandson. I have never regretted that I said “go” and he chose her over me for that dinner date. In the end, we were all winners.