a super big boy combo, and fifty-six years

alicia and i are utterly blessed to have been borne into the families that surround us. nearly two weeks ago she wrote a candid and emotional piece in memory of her grandfather, a man who i fast learned was the very thing i should strive to be in her life. he provided her with unmatched love. security. he was her rock. and the way she speaks of both he and her grandmother, the admiration of their marriage, is a thing so familiar, a thing i hold for my own grandparents as well.

only days ago my mom's parents celebrated the anniversary of their marriage. the story of how they met—a blind date at the original bob's big boy—epitomizes the core of their union. the commitment to follow through, beyond the nerves of a a set-up like a blind date, is at the heart of their remorse for not attending my recent graduation from emerson college. it was the first graduation of any kind, of all of their grandchildren, that they'd missed. and that alone, their remorse, meant more to me than having them present for the silly ceremony.

and today marks the anniversary of the wedding of my dad's parents.

six years ago this weekend all ten of their kids and spouses, and twenty-five grandchildren, were at lake george to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary. today makes fifty-six. it's a large family, and it's remarkable how well the family gets along. you'd think anytime the families gather it was a reunion of college friends, and not brothers and sisters. as a child, i looked to my nana and papa as though they were saints. they held this mythical sort of air in my mind, and it was unheard of in my subconscious to ever even dream of crossing either of them. i was no angel as a kid, but in their presence, i at least attempted—though not always successfully—to be nothing less. it's a testament to their union, and again, the endless love they've showered upon their family.

i cringe at cliché and sentiment, and i know how deeply i've delved in both here, but when it comes to family, you'll always get the underbelly of my coarse core. it's because of family that this blog exists—and is the reason i decided upon the strange and obscure title that people mistake to have to do with bellybuttons—and to this point, it's my family that have proven to be my most loyal readers. thanks for that, and with a guilty and unsatisfied conscience, i apologize for not better expressing my gratitude and appreciation for all that you've provided for me.

funnin' with food and wonder woman

i can't say i always heed to this, but you shouldn't be cooking food if you are taking it too seriously. there needs to be an appreciation for what you're doing. an understanding of how essential the act of eating is, and that cooking, as it has evolved, is a great reflection on the human mind. how man came to utilize heat as a means to prepare his food—and to then further manipulate the elements so as cooking became a science, and so too an art—is so tragically overlooked, despite it being so obvious a study to man's consciousness, or what fiction writers constantly seek to capture, the human condition.

so a couple weeks back, when i fired up the charcoals on the grill early in the afternoon to start charring vegetables, only to have the coals die by the time i needed to cook my fish and steaks, and so then cleaned the thing out only to build a new mound of coals, this time with my dad holding the lighter fluid, distracted and talking to alicia's stepfather, dousing the coals with ounce after ounce of the stuff in mid-conversation—which is when i bit my tongue so as not to cause a tiff between the two of us, despite knowing the label says to add only one and a half ounces per pound of coals, because he is my dad after all, and he knows best—and i slowly and carefully touched a match to the bottom of the pile like i always do, i was tested.

up until a couple years ago, i was still afraid to turn on a gas stove. the thought of the thing blowing up in my face, well, yeah. so when, before i knew what was happening, a fireball ballooned from the coals and snapped up my arm and toward my face, i thought i had it pretty bad. it's funny how trauma works, because in retrospect, i saw that fireball erupt in absolute slow motion. at first that kid in me came out and was simply awestruck, thinking something like a hushed, woah. but that didn't last long, and i snapped my arm away, shaking it over and over and over like it'd been swallowed by flames, though i wasn't on fire, and everyone else wasn't sure if they should be laughing or worried. because it was funny. and i deserved it, because up to then, i'd been bummed about having to restart my fire, and that's just not what it's about. so i singed a few dozen arm hairs? at least i snapped to.

and when alicia had an interview for a teaching position a couple days later, it was through food that i went about doing what i could to ease her nerves—though it's not like she ever needs it. sometimes i think i'm dating wonder woman. what the girl pulls off is inhuman. so as often as i can, i try and let her know this.

she was in a rush that morning, printing this and editing that on her resume, and needed breakfast. so i went to olivia's and picked up a couple wallaby yogurts, which she loves, and a pluot, which is a hybrid of an apricot and a plum, and some granola. in the bowl above, the granola sits at the bottom, sliced pluots fanned on top of that, which are hidden, and then the yogurt, which i had fun with and dotted with blueberries and a drizzle of honey and a small mound of more granola. you can see that plainly. it was easy, but a different way of making fruit and granola than the usual mix and match and pile it on that we eat every other day. my point is, i had fun with it. and it was the perfect way to send her off. the thing took thought, and she was touched that i'd taken that extra effort, which by nature calmed her nerves and i think helped set her up for an interview that was, despite her modesty, a cakewalk.

sure, take food seriously if that's your thing. but my whole point is when you have fun with the food, there's something different going on than what you get with the whole pretense of progressive, nouveau cuisine. and considering how far we've come since living in caves and hunting with spears, i'll take that any day.

because all the cool kids are doing it, a video!

running off my august 14th post and the outstanding in the field dinner, here's steph's latest episode of her web series, the tasty life. my arduous arugula picking didn't make final cut, but pay close attention and you'll catch my cameo...

a sfizi and a pisco sour

internet is still down, and this time i'm at a starbucks the size of a closet.

before i left boston, i worked at il casale, a brand new rustic italian restaurant in the boston suburb of belmont, which just a couple of years ago was still a dry town. we opened shop in the town's old firehouse, helmed by chef dante de magistris and his two brothers filippo and damian, and brought the town not only its first full bar, but with the success of his epynomous dante, the city chic approach to dining in a broken down, pretension-free and familial friendly package. so many of the dishes on dante's menu are replications and interpretations of what his nonna cooked for him and his brothers growing up. il casale itself means the farmhouse, or rural home. and to top the whole sentimental thing off, the boys grew up just around the corner. sort of too much just how perfect story is, right?

that's why when i saw this profile piece on the brothers and their father leon from the globe, i decided to share.

just after opening il casale, when buzz was building and every night we were on the lookout for the short, dark-haired type of a woman that could by any possible chance resemble the reaper of sorts who'd either seal the restaurant's fiscal fate like an angel or flatten it like a mythical giant—the globe's restaurant critic, devra first—leon's wife, and the woman the boys looked to like a saint, lost her battle with cancer and passed away. it was a crushing blow at such a pivotal time for the restaurant, and one couldn't help but wonder how in the world the boys would cope. there was an incredibly thick wave of sorrow that overcame the staff, a sense of what do we do now? so helpless, but wanting to help so badly—but it fast became apparent there was only one thing we could do. bear down and work our tails off. and suddenly the staff knew the menu inside and out, bottles of nebbiolo and wines from piemonte flew off the shelves, and the kitchen just worked it, plain and simple, like a perfected machine, in total unison.

i left for chicago soon after and one week into the move, had a message from the staff. my heart dropped, because i knew it only could have been one thing. dante was aiming for a three star review and i just had this sick, stomach-churning feeling they'd fallen well below the mark. but then i signed on to the globe's website and saw, below a picture of dante's fritto misto and the words "devra first," three and a half yellow pointed stars.

the review was titled "just like nonna used to make," and it sort of summed everything up perfectly. life works in the funniest ways. i'd never go as far to say that it was grace's passing that lifted the restaurant to a whole new level, high enough to earn devra first's highest ever rating with the exception of one other restaurant, but it's no stretch to say that somewhere, somehow, an angel was certainly watching over that old firehouse on leonard street.

aliments de confort

internet is down at home and am at the library. in lieu of this, a picture:

via leunig's bistro in burlington, vt... boeuf bourguignon in the foreground and roasted duck in the back.

comfort food.

as summer begins its descent

in yesterday's post i echoed michael pollan's fear that we're drifting too far from our rich food-labor past. it's a real challenge to cook in the kitchen once a day, let alone three times a day. and that's sad, isn't it? even today, i've been awake for several hours and rather than take the minimal energy to wash some fruit and mix it with yogurt, i continue to park it in front of the computer, still breakfastless and noon already passed. it's a lot of work to upkeep a kitchen.

but is it really?

after i published yesterday's post, i came across a blog featured by the la times that centered, wholly, on preserving foods. the blog, titled saving the season, epitomizes the very example i gave in the post on other ways to further close the void that's spread from farmer to consumer, and the little time we spend in the kitchen. again, cooking doesn't necessitate heat. preserving foods is just as productive, if not more so given the pliability preserved foods have over their lengthy shelf lives.

at dante in cambridge, they'll soon be having their annual canning party where literally all day long they'll be drinking and eating and partying it up, but also canning hundreds and hundreds of the season's last harvest of san marzano tomatoes. san marzanos are known for their fiery flavor, rich in minerality and sweetness, thanks to the volcanic soil they first were cultivated from in italy, at the base of mt. vesuvius. the restaurant literally comes to a halt, over nothing more than this delicate, little red fodstuff.

loads and loads of tomatoes will be preserved that day, and as summer turns to fall and fall to winter, the restaurant will continue to feature the summer tomato on its menu. it's an escape from the wasteland of the freeze and the farmers' exclusive root vegetable cultivation. and, it's fool-proof quality control.

there's also the green briar jam kitchen on cape cod. if the recipes and methods on saving the season are too hard without hands on teaching, the green briar offers classes and workshops. and if you don't live near the boston area, then run a google search. find a class. find a farm. take a drive out to the country and knock on a farmer's door, and just see what happens. i bet you'd be amazed. but like anything, it's not all that difficult given a little patience and practice, which of course equates to the one thing we should all be doing more of: spending more and more time in the kitchen.

the great thing with a blog about preserving is that as the season's change, so too will the recipes and approaches to the preserving process. and i find it funny that saving the season is a blog out of los angeles, and not a city like chicago or boston or new york, where there's really no other choice but to save the season, given that seasons actually exist in those cities. but the writing is solid, and the writer has the credentials to back his work, and is just one extension of the old ways in what will hopefully be a repeated pattern and common theme as the world of food continues to evolve.

the pandemic that's plagued the kitchen

when i cook, it's an unrehearsed and impromptu series of miscalculated actions that eventually add up to a meal. i cook on a whim, picking things at random in the grocery aisles that give me that gut feeling of yeah, this'll work, and doing the same when i get home. if i'm marinating a protein, i open the fridge and wonder what might enhance and build upon what i've got. orange juice, mustard, soy sauce, chocolate. loose tea, even. i just go with it. like i said, unrehearsed and impromptu.

my favorite way to cook, if i have the time for it, is to braise. when i braise, i like using liquids that some people would probably find absolutely revolting. i might draw on inspiration from the classic recipe of a dish, utilizing technique and methods, but substituting for my own crazy ingredients—like i did last christmas when i made a short rib crostini for a family party or last june in cambridge when we had some friends over for a farewell dinner.

any traditional recipe for short ribs will have you start the beef off by browning it in the pan, followed by the vegetables—which will always call for a mirepoix—in the fat drippings from the beef, and then throwing it all together and topping the whole thing off with either chicken or beef stock, and a hearty red wine. this always makes one of my favorite meals, but i just can't bring myself to go at it this way. i was never diagnosed with a.d.h.d. as a kid, but i don't know, cuz i just can't handle going by the book. my mom jumps out of her skin when she touches cotton balls, and i do the same when following recipes. it's like bill murray in what about bob?, gill the goldfish hanging from his neck, just not able to get on that greyhound bus.

so instead, like bob, i liberate myself.

for those christmas crostinis i browned the beef in butter that i richened with duck fat and used leeks and parsnips and shallots as my flavor base. to braise, i poured in guava juice and a touch of ginger ale and, because it's just too hard to replace the richness of a stock, chicken stock. for whatever idiotic reason, i never took a picture of the final result—but for imagination's sake, i topped the beef off with a mint, pineapple and pomegranate salad, pineapple juice and honey that i reduced to a thick syrup, and crème fraîche. maybe i went overboard with the natural sweeteners on the thing, but that's where i always find myself. i love big flavors, especially those i can draw from fruits. and i either have an incredibly kind and thoughtful family that looked out for those gentle and oh so sensitive feelings i have, or they went over well, because everything was eaten, and seemingly happily so.

but, i wouldn't wish my way of thinking in the kitchen on anyone. there's no process to the way i work. it's simply just madness. but, the one thing i will say, is that it keeps me in there for a long, long time.

before the release of julie and julia a couple weeks ago, the nytimes magazine ran a lengthy piece titled "out of the kitchen, onto the couch" written by michael pollan, who has single handedly not only lifted the country's food iq, but helped give rise to the buy local, your farmer is your neighbor movement. in it, pollan questions the amount of time we spend in the kitchen, especially in lieu of the food boom on tv. ordinary people, who twenty years ago had to put in near seventy hour work weeks to make a comfortable living cooking food, are now hot, celebrity commodities. even in the picture above you can see a giada de laurentiis cookbook that alicia and her roommates displayed in their kitchen, giada a commodity of the instigator of this whole thing, the food network. so we sit for hours watching paula dean work her southern charm and budding chefs haul it in the kitchen on top chef, but yet, pollan asks, the average person doesn't even spend thirty minutes a day in his or her own kitchen? it's a matter of blatant hypocrisy.

in the season premiere of mad man last night, after receiving a long-awaited promotion, a character calls his wife and to celebrate, asks her to make a reservation—no request, just a surprise, he says. dining out, here, is a cause for absolute celebration. both of my parents have told me that eating out was a rare occasion growing up, and these are two people who grew up on opposite ends of the country. but neither of them would be afraid to tell you that raising me and my brothers, we ate out with consistent frequency—though the difference is, and this rings true for the character's wife in mad men as well, my mom did spend several days a week in the kitchen, cooking a dinner that would be ready when my dad came home from work in the evening. so what's happened? why are we becoming so obsessed with food, literally raising the thing on so high a pedestal as to make it a phenomenon, that we worship those who cook and study it, yet fail to do the same ourselves? why is that we shell out our money at the restaurants of the celebrity chef, rather than attempt to emulate what it is they practice?

where did the days of home pickling go? the passing of summers spent in the kitchen between parent and child preserving fresh berries? cooking is not a thing that requires heat and a plate and a set table. our conception of cooking has drastically narrowed, and we've forgotten what it is to feed off the land we've been given. our focus is far too manufactured, manipulated over time via media and advertising and the passed and continued phenomena of food. is it so absurd to purchase a juicer, and not even an electronic one, but a classic, prism shaped juicer, so that when coming home with those oranges from the farmers' market one might make fresh. squeezed. orange juice?

my time in the kitchen is spent as a nutjob. i work with a one-track mind, always thinking several steps ahead, the intent to hone in on how best to heighten the flavors of what i'm working with. and this, by nature, takes a lot of time. i don't do this to follow what i preach, nor what michael pollan says, because i think it might, and should, be the next wave of the food phenomenon. rather, i do it because it's instinctual. it's the nature of the thing. i simply cannot help myself.

i'm all for whole foods. i feel comfortable buying my meat and seafood and produce there, and trust it to be organic and local as succinctly labeled. but there is a brand new whole foods in lincoln park that we shop at, and the thing is huge. there is an espresso bar next to a beer bar up front and by the cheese and wine, there is a small cafe where someone is always on hand to pour flights that are paired, fittingly enough and if you so choose, with cheese. there's also an extremely large food court, with far more than just the signature whole foods pay-by-the-pound spread, which explains why the market itself is so large. there's a culinary rainbow of foods to choose from that literally equates to whole-foods-fast-food. and doesn't that seem so wrong that the sound of it doesn't even make any natural sense? near the close of his article, michael pollan is told that takeout from supermarkets is the wave of the future. well, the arrival has begun.

we're in danger of being even further removed from the creation of our own food. but the danger in this will never be apparent, because given the increasing speed of the world, the ease of what's been presented to us is just too much to pass on. fast food is so passé , but food courts in organic supermarkets that make food fast? sign me up, right?!?

michael pollan calls for an exorcism of sorts of julia child, the american cook who learned the ways of doing so from scratch, in the home, and how approachable she made it all seem. and the thing is, it is approachable. and it's also doable. i'd love to see a movement away from the ease of buying prepared food, away from the hype and glamour of the celebrity chef, and back to my father's parents who for several summers moved their family to a new york farm. back to my mother's parents who plucked the oranges from their three trees and poured the squeezed juice at the breakfast table, then offered a large paper bag full of more of the fruit for us to take home.

my methods might be unrehearsed and impractical, but nothing i do ever brings me closer to the process of raising and maintaining our foodstuff. we all care about longevity and health, so shouldn't the food we eat be treated with the same delicacy and care we give to our bodies? despite their status, i bet if you ask the celebrity chef this same question, they'd hands down agree. the difference is, given their ability to do so, it's time to start doing something about it.

i hope this doesn't tread on sentiment, but i'm a cancer after all

moving is tough. alicia and i both have now made multiple moves spanning massive distances, and you'd think with that it'd be something we're a bit more accustomed to. not the case. especially when not one of us, but both of us, have made this move with absolutely no job, job prospect, or even grad program to cling to like with our previous moves. we've been in chicago now for forty-five days and have somehow managed to keep our depleting bank accounts afloat, but the job market, something we thought our advanced degrees and expensive education kept us immune to, is literally bone dry. we're responding to those job posts—and asking along the way why in the world i'm applying to be a teacher's assistant at an elementary school when i've never had the desire to teach elementary school—but they're just not responding back. what black hole has opened up in this world that sucks up all these jobs?

this isn't how we drew it all up.

but, things are turning around. after i wrote the piece on stephanie izard's wandering goat dinner, i was lucky enough to get my hands on her contact info, and rolled the dice and sent her what i'd written. the night of her dinner she'd mentioned the need to bring on somebody to handle her online media work, which was just the slight opening of a door that i needed. she loved the piece, and really did need somebody to help her out, and after meeting over lunch, i was the newest member of team stephanie. and it's been unreal ever since.

i tagged along a couple weeks ago to kinnikinnick farm in caledonia, il, which was a little over an hour from the city and deep in the heart of the illinois country. steph was the guest chef for a $200 per head, seventy-five guest dinner hosted by outstanding in the field. i'd never heard of outstanding in the field, but steph was all about it, and so too were the cooks helping her out. it's an organization based in my home state, outside of santa cruz, that packs up an old bus every year and tours the country from late spring to early fall, stopping at farms along the way and setting up shop with one long, white cloth covered table. and like i said, it's not cheap to take a seat at this thing. but at each stop, a guest chef cooks the dinner, creating the menu around the produce and product of the farm. it's a very free lovin', flower child kind of idea—and i fell for it immediatly.

just a few days before i was an out-of-work-mfa-holding-usc-alum-living-in-chicago-with-few-friends who had started the very thing i despised: a blog. but, it got me somewhere. on the farm that day, it got me in steph's makeshift kitchen, chuck taylor clad and sweating through my tee shirt while i picked the stems from five pounds of arugula. it took me five hours, and i cursed myself every five minutes at the pile of arugula that seemed to grow rather than diminish with every handful of leaves i plucked—and at the end of the night my five hour stem picking was playfully toasted to by the chefs—but i felt, however dysfunctional of one it might have been, at home.

that's the five-hour-arugula tossed with julienned kohlrabi, sitting on top of steph's braised goat. arugula picking has gotta be my natural calling—just at a slower pace than the next guy.

and look how the food showcases the farm and the season. heirloom tomatoes and a basil emulsion wait to be finished by the sweet onion soup steph made.

and goat cheese and pine nut covered beets.

and aged wood feeding the flame under kinnikinnick farm's chicken.

and sausages made by steph's sous dave with new potatoes and mustard greens picked at the farm with watermelon radishes and ground lamb.

i came home wreaking of smoke from the farm's huge fire pit—my jeans covered in grease and dirt—but i was a heck of a happy guy. there was no money for this, nor will there be for what i'm doing with steph. but she's providing me with the very thing i wrote about hoping to find last month. the thing i hoped i'd find by forking out the cash for her goat dinner. the thing i'd left behind in boston that had taken me so long to unravel: a chance to get behind the backside of this city's food culture.

since then, alicia's been offered jobs at two different colleges and i've been working on content for stephanie's website that'll be finished any day now. it's not what i envisioned when we made the move here, and i'm still not dropping money in the bank, but i'd be an idiot if i didn't say that things are looking up.

a homecoming for the kid who left chicago

the family is here, and it's my dad's first time back in one of his old home towns since he finished high school and packed up a car and drove it cross country to california, where he'd fatefully meet my mother. so needless to say, this is a nice moment. that's why i wanted to cap their first morning off at the green city market. we're gonna have a backyard cookout this weekend, so it'll be a challenge i'll throw at mom and dad to help find the food we'll cook for that. always a fun, impromptu thing to do. and if you didn't know, this week has been national farmers' market week, and green city is throwing a latin fest to bring in their last market day of the week for festivities. we're missing a latin taste as i write this, but they're scheduled to have latin dancers and the flare and pizzaz of latin food for the big chicago crowd. something pops doesn't know, and with his love for latin cuisine, will be a cool surprise. he hasn't stopped talking about rick bayless as it is...

they'll be here for a few days and in the meantime, i'm finishing the second part of "the tale of the fisherman's revert." enjoy this august saturday, and savor the summer. it'll be over before we know it.

the tale of the fisherman's revert, part one of two

great seafood can be had pretty much anywhere, but there's just something about the catch in boston. it's an area shrouded in nautical history, home to legal sea foods—the premiere seafood empire in the states—and synonymous with that ooey-gooey, piping hot and oh-so-smooth dish, new england clam chowder. when european ships first entered new england waters, stories returned to the high courts that cod were so plentiful that the art to a catch consisted of dropping a big enough basket, weighted so to sink, into the ocean. it was then, after a moment's passing, when the basket was returned to the deck, that it'd be full to the brim of flipping, flopping codfish. and these are big fish we're talking about. it's documented throughout history that off the new england coast, fishermen hauled in codfish the size of men. five and six foot cods, weighing upwards of two hundred pounds. that arctic cod that you eat now—it was tossed over board, and rarely tops more than twenty-four inches. this stuff, was the stuff of legend.

but a lot has changed. the business of catching fish, at one time the cause for much of new england's wealth, and what some say is the sole reason for the united states' existence today, is now a business of diminishing potential. environmentalists, who for years and years have long been at odds with fishermen over the depletion of species and fisheries, are now calling many fishermen their allies. and it's a ripple that's spread far beyond the sea. i can't even count how many times i'd be in the kitchen at work and hear something to the extent of, enjoy the tuna now, cuz there won't be any of it left in twenty years. the humane society published a report that correlates to this and yet, it's all kitchen speak and back burner news, and fish and seafood continue to dominate menus everywhere, both fine dining and not. word just is not reaching the world fast enough, and certainly not with enough emphasis.
the humane society's report says that 70% of the world's fish species are either fully exploited or depleted. take a moment to really think about that number. seventy percent. it's mind blowing. and with the uncontrolled practice of farm raised fish, and the affects these modified and controlled fish have on their wild counterparts, where some farm raised fish have even been released to the wild, scientists just have no idea if true, pure bred wild fish will even exist much longer, let alone ever.

and with the depletion of fisheries comes the depletion of business. where for so long fishermen have been at odds not only with the very environmentalists who are—via their conservation push—in fact attempting to save the future of the fishery business, fishermen have also been at odds with the government. when sanctions come down—and often they come down hard and defy the simplest of logic, that without their catch, the fishermen have no means to earn an income and support a family—business is near hopeless. it's a catch 22. save the fish, but the fishermen burn. save the fishermen, and the fish disappear. but centuries ago, a fisherman was a very different thing.

think of the small villages along the amalfi coast in italy, where cod was dried and salted and called baccalà, and done so out of necessity. where in these small villages, the catch was sold to the people of the town. a concept, ironically enough, not so different from the very slowlocalsustainablefood movement that continues to sweep over the country like a boulder rolling down a hill. a movement that for some, has, and nobody can deny this, become a tremendous marketing monster, and a legit business opportunity for farmers everywhere. it's almost like starting over—something like retro agriculture. and that's why, when alicia and i were in the moving truck, starting out on route 90, with the boston skyline growing smaller and smaller in the driver side mirror, and npr was featuring a segment on something called the cape ann fresh catch csf, i started to listen very, very closely...

olivia's is this many

olivia's market is celebrating its fifth birthday today.

we fast fell in love with our across the street neighbor, with its focus on seasonal produce, organic products, wine and beer, and a diverse selection of both domestic and imported cheeses, as well as a solid deli counter that offers san daniele prosciutto, jamón ibérico, and even house made pâtés. they're offering a discount to ring in the big five, as well as a modest sidewalk shindig with a boar's head dog cart and give-away balloons. i opened the windows early this morning, and it's been nothing but the jingle of dog chains and the sing-song of kids in strollers bouncing off our empty apartment walls on this gorgeous sunny sunday ever since.

happy birthday, neighbor.