this is my daily toast

I have two homes in San Francisco, one in which I sleep and maintain a monastic silence; the other, which I go to, to escape the noise in my head that results from too much silence.

Luckily for me, the latter is one right, one left, and one more right turn away, a two-minute walk, or a 30 second scamper. I arrive often with a sigh. Or an exclamation, which is sometimes the same thing.

Crystal is usually behind the white kitchen counter, which is always remarkably pristine when she is behind it. Its ultra-clean blankness is particularly notable in contrast to mine, which is currently littered with: three books, not neatly stacked; one magazine, flipped open to the middle of an article; two cookbooks; my electricity bill; a tea cup stuffed with a bunch of cilantro, half of it snipped off—I'm keeping it hydrated; and a plate with crusty peanut butter remains. Tidiness is not a factor of self-sufficiency, but messiness can certainly reflect a lack thereof.

Today she is in the kitchen with a three-page letter in hand, a notebook with a bumper sticker that says “NO RAMEN NO LIFE,” and an open Mason jar filled halfway with an amber-colored liquid. When Jacob walks in later, he refers to it as a “healing potion” and asks if I need any, to which my heart says yes and my mouth says no.

“Jacob was feeling a little under the weather today,” Crystal says. 

The “healing potion” is a mint tea tonic laced with peach-chili jam, which was made in this very kitchen yesterday, after twelve hours of chopping, stewing, and sugaring many pounds of peaches. They are sipping this tea tonic slowly, prolonging its life with more hot water.

Jacob is scanning papers, an adequately monotonous task for this grey day, and I am staring out the window, my legs pulled up into my chest, while balancing precariously on a wooden stool.

“Jacob, you are a consolation to me,” I tell him.

“A constellation?” he says.

“A consolation, which is something that makes you feel better when you’re feeling bad,” I explain.

“I thought a consolation prize is what the loser gets,” he says.

“So that they feel better,” I say.

“I like constellation better,” he says.

“Ok, then you’re my constellation,” I concede.

Jacob and Crystal, in this house, on this day, are the perfect confluence of people in a place at a time. I feel small today, trivial, and they let me talk, and they ask questions, and they are witty, funny, and nourishing. They make no caustic remarks.

Later Crystal and I walk to Local Mission Market to buy some bread for the jam. We are both condiment people. While Crystal is deciding between the boules and baguettes, I stand silently in front of the bowl of olive bread samples, eating one doughy cube at a time.

“Bread makes everything better,” I tell Crystal. “I feel better when I’m eating bread.”

Back at the house, Crystal slices the bread and lubricates it with a stick of butter. She looks like she’s giving the bread a belly rub, which is how Crystal interacts with food—elegantly, easily, gently. I like watching Crystal move around the kitchen—always deliberately, never haphazardly—a true meditator. Sometimes she whistles and softly sings—always in a barely audible, quivering tone—while washing the dishes, or wiping down the counters, and I listen intently. Her demeanor is delicate, her mien beautiful. She is one of the most thoughtful people I know. I watch Crystal pour boiling water on a fork to clean it, and then she begins reorganizing her jars, as she often does, checking on the ingredients of each jar as if they were plants to be tended to, which makes sense, because she is a gardener.

“Mama Crystal,” Jacob and I joke. Mama Crystal, who takes care of us, who prepares two plates of toast strips, two corresponding bowls of jewel-toned jam. We eat.

  

this is how to start off the day in a classy way

 time & place
**Saturday morning, 11 AM by the Charles River.

 

the ingredients
-African masai cloths

-3 wine glasses

-10 solo cups

-prosecco

-red wine 

-au bon pain coffee

-tangerine juice

-prosciutto

-bresaola

-tuscan pane

-cinnamon rolls, 2 kinds

-baby carrots

-brie cheese

-honey goat cheese

-canteloupe spears

-red grapes

-tomato basil hummus

-milano cookies 

-pita bites

-freshly baked sweet potato biscuits

-homemade cornbread

-a full pecan pie

the picnic

**We rolled out of bed and onto the banks of the Charles river, food in tow. The first few hours of the weekend were spent sprawled on the grass, wining and dining in the sun. Cheap coffee, freshly sliced cold cuts, soft cheese melting under the heat, the creamy hummus slowly forming a crackly crust after our bellies were full and the food lay out untouched, looking like the gawdy plasticine ornamentation of a scene we had arranged. The broken pieces of bread scattered carelessly and the solo cups filled halfway with lukewarm coffee were the tokens of our happy langour.

**It is the desperate hunger of young adulthood that encourages one to eat cheaply (e.g. Milano's, Tropicana) and simultaneously galvanizes our most hedonistic and epicurean urges; the former makes the latter seem all the more wild and indulgent (e.g. prosciutto, bresaola, champagne, wine glasses).

bresaola
**The household that I lived with while studying in Italy served food that look suspiciously like that of a hospice ward.  On a second thought, it was probably worse. The frozen tuna and corn pizza, the nightly chocolate pudding cups, and the hot dogs would have seemed like the makings of a great farce had they been conjured up in my imagination – they were not. Then one night Leonardo brought home a parchment paper packet of dark red, thinly-sliced meat, and despite my aversion towards meat, my desperate hunger prevailed and I tried a few slices atop a bed of arugula, with grated parmesan cheese, olive oil, and a squeeze of lemon juice. The bresaola – diaphanous sheets of dry-cured lean beef - was salty and light, without any toughness. When meat is dry-cured, the umami flavors become concentrated as the glutamic acid rises, as in the making of cheese. In this transformation of flavor, the meat takes on new, sweeter aromas (which is why prosciutto is so often paired with melon). Bresaola, to me, is a saving food, and the memory I have of it incited a surprised joy when Jonathan, upon arrival to the picnic, set out a parchment paper packet, similar to the one Leo brought home that night. Bresaola and honey goat cheese on white bread - salty, creamy, chewy, curiously sweet, and slightly tangy. Nothing tasted better that morning.

to-do
Drink champagne. 
Make mimosa.
Sip your coffee. 
Lick your fingers.
Shoot the shit.
Lay your head down.

 

**The sun ducked in and out. Danny couldn't decide whether to keep his shirt on or off.
  

**Even the decisive relinquishing of our routines can sometimes feel like wrestling a pacifier from a baby's mouth. But life is not a clock that winds itself down into the dark. Under that sun, in that timeless space, I was so content among friends and food, and the clarity of what I value most in life became so tangible, so physical, and so present, that it was easy for a few hours – and so pleasurable – to forget all the urgencies that lay beyond our immediate grasp.

**It is with a huge sigh of relief that we shed our winter coats and slip into our summer skins.

this is the bringing forth of banana bread

*It’s the kind of smell that indicates there might be fruit flies nearby—the sickly sweet odor of over-ripeness you at once want to embrace, at least until the undertones of rot and flesh become apparent. Then the odor becomes too much for you—too permeating, really—and you want to push it away. But when I was greeted with this smell after returning to our kitchen after a weeklong vacation in New York, I was overjoyed. This is the smell I had been waiting for, for nearly two weeks: the smell of ripe bananas.

*Banana bread requires one of two personality traits: patience or forgetfulness. The forgetful opportunist finds blackened bananas hidden behind the fruit bowl—bananas she forgot to eat a week ago—and decides that the only way to prevent wastefulness is to make banana bread. The banana bread-lover, whose heart is intently set on making—and then consuming—only the most delicious banana bread—must be patient, and let day after day pass as yellow-green skin accumulates brown speckled patches. And she, the banana bread-lover, knows when the bananas are ready by smell, look, and touch. All of these carry pitches that are fine-tuned with time, and when the bananas are ready, they are bursting and buzzing with good vibrations.



*In describing how the experience of hunger refined the precision and specificity of her cravings, Gabrielle Hamilton writes in her memoir, Blood, Bones, and Butter, “Each craving became fanatically particular. Hunger was not general, ever, for just something, anything to eat. My hunger grew so specific I could name ever corner and fold of it. Salty, warm, brothy, starchy, fatty, sweet, clean and crunchy, crisp and watery, and so on.” As someone who loves the raw materials of cooking as much as the experience of eating, I know the exact flavors and textures I want to taste in my mouth. Banana bread is such a classic and basic quickbread that to me, it is essentially a blank canvas. There are endless recipe variations and no one perfect formulation because everyone likes a different kind of banana bread. I like my banana bread dense and moist—almost like bread pudding—with a little texture but not too crumbly. I like the overwhelming taste of bananas—so much that I want my bread to taste purely of bananas, and not of vanilla extract or cinnamon. But I want to encounter chocolate and nuts while eating—accents that complement but do not disturb—and I like my banana bread to sit heavily in my mouth and my stomach. I like spreading honey and butter on top, so my banana bread cannot be too sweet, and I like slicing it thickly, so it must hold together well—nothing fluffy or airy for me.



*I set to work in the kitchen with only basic ratios in mind. I peel and mash the ripe bananas, I pull out my green olive oil and drink it from a spoon before pouring it into the batter. I add in blue cornmeal and almond flour because I like their gritty tastes, and then some chocolate chips and pecans. My banana bread is a product of both my desires and whatever sits in my pantry. The dumping and the mixing and the mashing—it is all a slow rhythm that feels loose and indulgent. I do a crossword puzzle while it bakes, and in the last ten minutes before the bread is done, I start making espresso on the stovetop, heating up some milk alongside. Then, when it is all done—the bread cooled, the espresso ready and poured into a bowl, I sit and eat my banana bread with a fork and slurp my café au lait like soup. Nothing—absolutely nothing—is more luxurious than this.

this is going to be a cold summer

*It's been awhile, but I'm back in California with a kitchen—a place where i can be creative—and that makes me really happy, even though it is cold out in the middle of May. I came home for the sunshine (among other things), and the weather gods are really letting me down.

*Still, I've been enjoying myself, relishing the fact that I don't have to eat dining hall dorm-food.

*Saturday morning breakfast was English muffins with avocado+jam; sunflower seed butter + bananas.

*I also made dinner for my entire family last night, which included roasted broccoli + cauliflower, baked tofu, and this dense chewy cornbread, among other things.

*Let's talk about this cornbread, which is not really typical cornbread—but it is one of my favorite breads as of late. It's made mostly from rice + oats + cornmeal, and I've been eating it at every meal. It's delicious and I can't get enough of it.

this is the sweet memory of warm Irish bread

*Though I am not even remotely Irish, the Irish culture holds a special place in my heart. I spent two of my high school summers in Northern Ireland (as distinguished from the Republic of Ireland). I lived in small towns: the first summer, in a farm town called Fivemiletown, which is famous for their cheese and is called Fivemiletown because it is located approximately five miles from the nearest town; and the second summer, in a small town called Dromore, about half an hour outside of Belfast.



*Of all things in Northern Ireland, I remember the people the most—their thick, friendly accents, the way they joked and teased and made you feel at home, the crazy pranks they would pull—I remember that the most and I miss that. But I also remember the lush green landscape and the plushy grass and most of all, U remember the enchanted forests, which were like the forests of storybooks. I'm not sure whether it was the types of plants and trees that were growing or the way the sunlight shone through the branches and brambles, but those forests began to convince me that perhaps elfin creatures and leprechauns did exist. At least I could understand why Irish folklore was so full of magic and woodland life.



*I remember the food too. Irish food isn't known for being particularly refined or delicate, but I remember it being good. The first summer I was there, I was introduced to McVities digestives, jaffa cakes, timtams, and hobnobs, which we ate all day with black tea. We ate butter with everything, and I remember hating butter-tuna sandwiches, which were so strange to me. Portions were huge and filling, and we really did eat a lot of potatoes. The two things I remember most though about Irish cuisine were the Banoffee Pie and the Ulster Fry.

*Up until I went to Northern Ireland, I had never eaten any kind of pie with fruit in it. The only pie i enjoyed was pumpkin pie. Growing up, any kind of cooked fruit or fruit dessert grossed me out, so I wouldn't touch it—and to this very day, I still hesitate to eat either. But the banoffee pie —oh banoffee pie—it was an exception to the rule, and it tasted good. A McVities digestives crust —crushed, with butter—a thick layer of dulce de leche, bananas, whipped cream, and more McVities crumbled on top. perfect.

*Then you have the Ulster Fry: a monster of a breakfast, in which all components of the Fry are fried in bacon fat, rendered by the obscene amount of bacon that is fried first before the rest of the breakfast. Then you have the mushrooms and the ham and the potato bread and the eggs. then the baked beans and the soda bread and the tomatoes. It was worth the heart attack.




*Funny enough, I never did remember eating what we call "Irish soda bread" in America while i was in Northern Ireland. The version of soda bread that we ate in the morning was fried in the pan, so I guess it was more of a farl, or skillet scone. Still, in my mind, I'd like to think that "Irish soda bread" has its roots in Ireland and Northern Ireland, places with which I am connected, and in that way, when I eat soda bread, I can flicker through memories of the past. The best kind of food is memorable food, food tied strongly to emotions and people and moments.

*So this morning, upon waking up, I ran into the kitchen and made this Irish soda bread. mainly, I wanted to be able to eat freshly-baked bread for breakfast, which is a luxury I can enjoy only when I have the time (I'm on spring break) and when I'm at home (ditto). Whole wheat flour, oat bran, buttermilk, and baking soda were mixed together, then rolled into a ball, flattened, slashed, and baked. By 9 am I was happily eating two thick slices of this warm bread—I could barely wait 10 minutes to let it cool. Spread with goat cheese butter and a whole lot of honey, it was perfect and crumbly and warm. My favorite kind of freshly baked bread is the kind without much yeast or gluten (which makes for better toast), so this soda bread was just right. I had a cup of milk tea alongside.

*As i was about to put my plate into the sink and clean up, I had to cut myself another slice—and eat it with almond butter and bananas—which, like this version of soda bread, may not be so genuinely and natively Irish—but is so good and satisfying that it is worth it after all.

this is southern comfort

*For awhile, I thought I was going through a serious "soul food" and "southern cooking" phase. My roommate gently reminded me that I am generally not a fan of hush puppies, grits, fried chicken, and gravy. At first, I insisted that despite not loving any of the foods on that list, I was still smitten with southern cooking. Slowly, I began to realize that it was not so much a love affair with southern cooking as it was a desperate craving for chili and cornbread—two foods that i do love and that I happen to associate with the south.

*Since this chili cook-off and this meal at the co-op, I have been dreaming about making chili and cornbread, mulling over the various kinds of cornbread (sweet vs. savory; cakey vs. coarse; northern vs. southern) and chilis I could make. Of course, coming home for spring break and finally having a kitchen to work in meant that I was going to put all this dreaming to rest and satisfy my craving.

*This sunday night dinner was the result. I knew I wanted a very hearty and simple southern cornbread (100% cornmeal)—not the sweet, cakey kind that is served in New England. The skillet cornbread i made ended up being a great chili-topper, but I'm not satisfied with the recipe, which means cornbread round 2 will be coming up soon. I think I will add some flour next time to make it either 50% or 75% cornmeal, instead of 100% cornmeal, and just a tablespoon more of honey.

*The chili was just right though. I rarely ever work from recipes, and this chili was no exception. I knew I wanted a smoky and spicy chipotle chili—a vegetarian chili with mainly beans and a very deep flavor. So this chili ended up being a mix of onions, bay leaves, red peppers, garlic, tomatoes, carrots, cumin, chipotle chili powder, cocoa powder, garam masala spice, molasses, pinto beans, kidney beans, and black beans. It was good, really good. Next time I make chili I may add some peanut or almond butter to add another dimension to the flavor profile, but overall I was very satisfied with this.

this is Saturday morning

*The best way to spend a cold Saturday morning: huddled in the warmth of a cozy wooden room with good food (homemade whole-wheat toast, homemade preserves, fresh butter, a cup of drip coffee with homemade almond milk at Hi-Rise Bread Company), a good friend, and a good book (Vera: The Art and Life of an Icon by Susan Seid - a wonderful, colorful style and design book about the life and work of Vera Neumann).

*Woman cannot live on bread alone... because she also needs a lot of butter and jam to go with the bread.

*I'm not going to lie and pretend that I didn't bring my own peanut butter so that I could eat peanut butter, butter, & jam toast.

this is the fall flavor that never fades

*vegan pumpkin banana bread with walnuts
*spread with strawberry jam, taken with coffee = cozy afternoon snack

this is the start of a new year

*menu
homemade everything

*meats: rack of lamb // bacon // smoked salmon
*eggs: prosciutto and spinach frittata (with sour cream, freshly grated parmesan) // mushroom onion spinach omelette
*breads: whole wheat molasses bread // english muffin white bread // sour cream coffee cake
*sides: bean and tomato salad (cilantro honey lemon vinaigrette) // roasted herbed potatoes (thyme, italian seasoning) // cranberry almond ginger spiced granola (with sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, candied ginger, maple syrup)
*extras: yogurt // bananas // blueberries // assorted chocolates (Florentine Majani chocolates, candy cane kisses)
*condiments: homemade nutella with whole roasted hazelnuts // strawberry jam // chive cream cheese // butter // Tuscan olio nuovo // balsamic vinegar // almond butter // parmesan cheese
*drinks: orange juice // milk // coffee // tea


**i don't have many pictures because i was cooking the entire time

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marella - thank you for the sweet compliments. so kind of you.

heather - the key to the bbq broccoli slaw is the mayonnaise and letting it marinate for a good 20 minutes. otherwise the broccoli retains a very raw taste (which I don't like). i am loving the international recipes on your blog. i am so fascinated by foreign cuisine.

this is a Naomi burger

*On the last day of 2010, my sister requested a hamburger.

*The makings of a Naomi burger, 100% homemade, from top to bottom:
(1) sesame hamburger buns (flour, milk, butter, water, sugar, salt, yeast, egg yolk wash)
(2) california avocado
(3) caramelized onions
(4) bbq broccoli & carrot slaw (broccoli, carrot, homemade bbq sauce = ketchup, honey, apple cider vinegar, dijon mustard, chili powder, paprika, japanese mayonnaise, pepper)
(5) hand-formed beef patty

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Note: By the grace of God, I received a midnight delivery a few nights ago with my laptop computer + cameras. So thankful.

Megan - for the chocolate torte base, I followed this cake base recipe (didn't use her mousse though). I didn't use recipes for the nutella mousse or the peppermint creme, but I could try to write them out and send them to you if you'd like!

this is my daily bread

* bread platter in Rome