This Week in Meals: Sleeper-Hit Eggplant Rice and Cult Mealoaf

I've already talked about my need for a regimented approach to meal planning in the interest of avoiding blood sugar tantrums and overall hunger-related life devastation.  With my schedule, this means making lots of food ahead of time and having it ready to re-heat/ tote to work at a moment's notice.

Fall is a great season for make-ahead food-- stews, casseroles and even kale salad actually taste better the second (or third) day. Where cooking in the Summer makes me feel kind of like a precious asshole (fresh heirloom tomatoes rotting on the counter because my plans changed), cooking ahead in the Fall makes me feel awesome and capable and prepared because the food is just hanging out in the fridge and it's already delicious!

I planned recipes on Saturday, shopped on Sunday, prepped (chopped and stored veggies, sorted ingredients into recipe bundles) on Tuesday morning and cooked on Wednesday and Thursday. Monday is the day from scheduling hell, so I ate chocolate zucchini cake from the Big Bear for dinner, and I'm not sorry. I'm a grownup!

Here's what I made:

Breakfast: Oatmeal. Green smoothies. Ezekiel bread with peanut butter. We have a thing going.

Lunch: Leftovers or this egg sandwich.

Dinner:

David Kinch's Eggplant Dirty Rice. The Amateur Gourmet made a big deal about this and he does not normally mess around, so I was bummed when I tasted it right out of the oven (it took 30 minutes to cook rather than the recommended 17) and it was meh. Then, I took a spoonful from the fridge the next morning and it was incredible-- really savory and complex and black-pepper spicy. This recipe is HUGE, so I divided into thirds. The first third fed the two of us, and I froze the other two portions separately to eat with poached fish in the next month.

Food 52's Rosemary Turkey Meatloaf. This meatloaf is approaching a cult-like status-- Rachel is obsessed. Jordy is obsessed. Rosalind is a vegan so she doesn't count. You know that yummy sweet topping that meatloaves have, and how you always with there were more? WITH THIS RECIPE THERE IS SO MUCH MORE TOPPING. Ftw. Again, we ate a third and I froze the rest in individual portions for sandwich purposes.

The chicken green curry recipe on the back of the Green Curry Paste bottle. Plus broccoli and red pepper. Half box chicken broth, one can lite coconut milk. Sautee a shallot and a jaleno pepper with fresh ginger before adding the chicken. Takes 30 minutes start to finish. Freezes great. Rachel reccomends serving this with rice noodles.

Sprouted Kitchen's Black Bean, Goat Cheese and Zucchini Enchiladas. Awesome awesome awesome. Don't change a thing.

A quick note:

You'll find that I use pre-made enchilada sauce and pre-made curry paste in two of these recipes. That is because I have a life and am not insane. Actually, I have spent 3+ hours making indonesian satay sauce by hand, but it was only marginally better than the stuff in the bottle. Since then, I decided to leave certain great pleasures to their respective experts. To whit-- dosas = Vimala's, yeast gravy= The Grit, matzoh ball soup = my mommy.

Pictures: What I See When I See You: Chet'la

I spent this Friday evening in the community garden with my friend Chet'la, chatting about all kind of things and snapping some pictures. 

It had been a while since Chet'la and I had caught up, and I was honestly more interested in talking to her than in photographing her, so when we reviewed the images, I warned her not to expect anything amazing. She said that just as long as I was feeding her dinner, she didn't mind how the photos turned out.

What she saw shocked her.

In the pictures, as in life, she is stunningly lovely. Calm, dignified, but also full of feist and spirit. 

Chet'la found the images incredibly interesting. She studied them as one might examine artifacts from another time or place. "Dude," I finally said. "Don't you realize that that's what people see when they look at you?"

Of course she didn't. 

None of us, except on really rare occasions, are very good at conceiving of ourselves in the same way others view us, right? 

This is one of my favorite things about photographing people: being able to hand them a photo and say, this what I see when I see you.

Good photos give people a chance to re-see themselves, just for moment, through the eyes of love.

I can't wait to show more and more of the wonderful people in my life what I see when I see them.

 It's remarkably beautiful, the view from here.

How to Cook Good Things Good: Salmon

Here's the truth about how I cook: I love recipes, but on weeknights I rarely follow them. Most of the time I just make something naturally tasty and healthy in a very simple way and leave it at that. Jo Robinson's new book, Eating on the Wild Side, is a great resource for foods to focus on. I also like Marion Nestle's What to Eat.

I've got a handful of staples in my wheelhouse, and once I find a way of cooking something that pleases me, I stick to it. A few sweet potatoes, divided into wedges and roasted. A bunch of kale. A beautiful piece of salmon, poached.

This approach makes cooking daily much more approachable-- no directions to follow, no extra ingredients to assemble. All I need to do is master the technique once, and I can use it indefinitely.

Poaching is a great fallback for salmon because it's forgiving, deliciously silky, and takes 10 minutes from the start to finish. You can roast salmon, you can pan sear it, you can make it into burgers. I've done all those things. But this is my fave; I never get tired of it.

Steps:

1. Set a large, shallow pan on the stove, adding  2 C water,  1/2 C white wine and a teaspoon of salt. You don't need to add anything else, but this time I also threw in a twist of lemon rind a sprig of parsley. Peppercorns, cloves, caraway seeds, garlic, orange rind or other fresh herbs would also be great. Up to you.

2.  Bring the liquid to a simmer and place the salmon in the pan. You might have to cut it into two piece to make it fit. It's ok if it's not totally submerged. Cover the pan.

3. Let the salmon cook for five minutes. Remove to a platter (I usually use a pancake flipper).

That's it. Now you can eat. A dollop of yogurt or a drizzle of good olive oil is yummy, but if you've got good fish, it's gonna taste great.

Best Ever: Back to School Haircut Edition

It's the first week of school, ya'll. And that's... a thing that is happening.  I love meeting my new students, love sharing ideas about writing and reading, love my colleagues. But I love summer too. I love my arts and crafts. I love the farmer's market. And I love sleep.

I realized today that Wednesday marked my 23rd First Day of School. As a kid, that meant my best friend Rachel and I got to go to lunch at Red Lobster and order virgin strawberry daiquiris and cheddar bay biscuits and crab alfredo and my mom gave us each a new chapter book. Often we wore matching outfits on this occasion.

These days, I've got my own, grown-person first day of school tricks up my sleeve:

1. When walking to class, fire up Rihanna's seminal album Good Girl Gone Bad. Put the title song on repeat.
2. Eat whatever I want while I get adjusted to a crazy new schedule (two cheeseburgers in one week!).
3. New shoes.
4. New colorful pens and new notebooks.
5. New haircut.

So yesterday, I headed over to my favorite salon, Fiddleheads.

 I like Fiddleheads because it is lovely and airy and full of light, for sure.

And because it's located in my favorite DC neighborhood, beautiful Bloomingdale.

But I'm most excited by the fact that they employ cool people who cut hair like real makers. They approach the task with a sense of purpose, as a way of creating something cool in the world. Erica and I had an awesome time talking about blogs and crafty things and aesthetics and how fun it is to make things with our hands. She even told me about how she bartered a haircut for some beautiful jewelry from La Reunion.  Jealous.

I left thinking about how Makerness, as a category, can apply to anyone, so long as they approach it with care, attention and pride. If the details matter beyond the details themselves. There's a great TED called "We Are All Makers".  It's a great thing to think about at the beginning of a new school year.

Madesmith's great article on branding points out that emotional value is a huge part of how we decide to spend money. Emotional value is also what means that any of us, in anything that we do, can be makers.

I love the atmosphere at Fiddleheads. I love, love, love my haircut. But it's the Makerness of the place that I'm most excited about-- the freshness and possibility that it makes me feel The idea that everything is an act of creation, no matter how small. Even the ritual of crab alfredo and chapter books. Even grading a paper. Even walking to class.

Now that's a good way to start the school year.

A Few Things I'm Excited About (Beach Week Edition): corn cakes, bonfire perfume, donated ideas, japanese persimmon cloth and a plea for well-cooked babies!

Olo Fragrance's new scent, Palo Santo, is the number one Things I Would Like to Smell today. I do not much like flowery stuff (rose is a notable exception), so this woody blend really appeals.  I found it at the very hip Accident and Artifact in SF. I also love Olo's Victory Wolf, which really does smells like someone's hair after a night around a bonfire. Stop laughing at me.

I'm impressed: rather than donating finite goods, Toyota donated their efficiency system to a Harlem soup kitchen. The resulting changes allowed the charity to help a great many more people. I love the idea of donating ideas rather than materials. It feels less like charity and more like cooperation.

I made these corn cakes for dinner last night and now we can't stop brainstorming different ways to eat them. Current thoughts: with caviar and creme fraiche, with ricotta, maple syrup and berries, with crumbled bacon mixed into the batter (duh).

Fabric obsession: Japenese Kakishubu, dyed with fermented persimmon juice. According to Hickorees, it's antibacterial? Someone please convince to me that I do not have the time or skill to attempt this on my own.

File under Not Surprised: a new peer-reviewed study has established substantive linkage between induced or augmented labor (often through i.v pitocin) and the instance of autism. My doctor parents point out that we really don't understand how the stronger contractions caused by pitocin affect the amount of oxygen baby receives, so this makes intuitive sense. Obviously more research is needed, but this is worth a lot more investigation than the ass-hatted (and failed) attempts to connect autism to vaccines (see jennymccarthybodycount.com). Also worth a read: Jodi the Doula's discussion of why even "natural" induction is usually a bad idea, and we should just let babies cook as long as they want.

Food: Canning Sour Cherry Jam

The best books for kids (or maybe ever) are the Little House on the Prairie series, and the best parts of all of those books are about food. Do not try to convince me otherwise.

I am particularly fond of the chapters devoted to "putting food by" for a long hard winter. Like the time Laura's family killed a whole pig and spent the day boiling its hide and playing soccer with its bladder and roasting its tail as a crispy and delicious treat and oh my god nothing has ever sounded so fun to me in my entire life.

Well, maybe seeing Taylor Swift live in concert. But the day after that, driving back to DC, blasting Fearless with four pounds of sour cherries riding shotgun was pretty great, too.

I am not particularly good at making jam. It takes patience and an eye for detail, neither of which I really have.

I used a recipe from Marisa McClellan's fantastic website Food in Jars, as I almost always do when I make jam or pickle. The recipes are easy to follow, low-sugar and safety-focused.

Taking the jars from the water bath feels like magic every time. They make this pinging sound as they cool, and that's how you know they've sealed. Then they keep for a year or more on your shelf! Sadly, there is no crispy and delicious tail to roast.

Or a hide to de-bristle. But there is toast!

And enough jars to dole out as little gifts through the end of the year.

 I'd never had sour cherry before, it has a really nice cherry-pie flavor, brighter, more aromatic and a little more bitter than dark cherries.

  

Man, I can't wait till the hipsters in Bloomingdale start up the pig bladder soccer league. Until then, I'm going to pickle some okra.

Handicrafts: Bestfriend engagement photos

Between the ages of seven and fourteen I attended one of those schools where kids make guacamole to learn about math. We called our teachers by their first names, and sex-ed in the seventh grade involved building found-object models of the reproductive system and talking about how "different kinds of sex are right for different kinds of people".

Although that school never saw me learn my multiplication tables (or how to read an analog clock, or write in cursive), it taught me how to sew, knit, bake meringues, use a hacksaw in a marginally safe fashion, batik with hot wax and dissect a dogfish. And it gave me Rachel.

We have no idea when we decided that we were best friends, but it must have happened pretty quickly because neither of us can remember referring to the other as anything else. Long after most people abandoned the label, or the idea, of having one best friend, we've held onto it. At some point the words melted together into a single moniker-- bestfriend--which is decidedly different, we agree, from best friend. That's how we introduce one another, as though everyone will understand the 22 years of weight that the word carries. "This is my bestfriend". Just like one might say, "this is my uncle" or, "this is my plumber". 

Rachel and I  have had to learn the hard way, again and again, that a friendship is something you make, just like meringues. And what to do when things fall flat. And how to move past (not resolve) a fight. And how to live through another person's annoying growing pains.

 I laugh more with Rachel than with almost any other human being the world, but when we'd have play dates as little kids, our parents would often find us ensconced in my room, not talking, reading side by side. "Don't you want to do something?", they'd ask, "your time's almost up!". We knew even then that we were doing something: we were in middle of one of the most important projects of our lives. Making bestfriends. And we're still at it. 

Rachel recently became engaged to a man who miraculously gets our bestfriendness. He's unintmidated by our inside jokes, happy to split a pint of ice cream with us when he's admitted into our inner sanctum, and has already offered to be there for me when I've needed him in a pinch.

I knew right away that I wanted to take engagement photos of them. To make something that marked the moment. 

Mostly, they humored me very nicely.

We grabbed lunch at Union Market before heading over to the National Arboretum, where the lilacs and crepe myrtle were supposed to be in bloom.

 

They kind of weren't blooming at all, but we still had a great time and got some great shots, mostly because I was bossy and made them do all kinds of poses they didn't want to do.

On scale of 1-10, I'd give them a 6 for obedience.

It helped that they are truly excellent at making one another laugh.

Rachel got a rash from the grass but I'm not at all sorry about it. I HAD A VISION.

When I texted Rachel to ask if I could include these pictures on my blog, she responded "Sure. Just as long as I can make fun of you for having a public blog". Fair enough!

Rachel has always been a number one supporter of all my projects, even when it means that she must suffer for my art.

I can't wait to be there for her and Jan as they embark upon this amazing, lifetime project of their own.

Mazel tov, guys. May you go from strength to strength.