Holiday Lobstercide, In Two Parts

As you might have noticed, over the holidays I've allowed myself a nice, leisurely three weeks away from blogging. In my own defense: no, I have not taken three weeks off from everything else. Life has continued at its usual clip, with the added excitement of much packing and unpacking, present wrapping and unwrapping, plus a blizzard thrown in for good measure.

Instead of sitting at home with my feet up in front of a roaring fire on December 27 -- the night after the blizzard hit New York -- I was fighting an old man over an egg salad sandwich, one of the few items of food remaining in the British Airways terminal, which 36 hours after the first snow began to fall was beginning to resemble the Superdome. Then I was curled up around my duffel bag on the terminal floor, with a sock over my eyes as a makeshift sleep mask. But then again, once the plane finally took off I ended up spending the ensuing week in England, Bruges, and Paris, so I don't expect you to pity me.

Life would have gotten back to normal when I returned to a nearly snow-free New York on 1/3 were it not for my and The Viking's birthdays taking place back to back on the 11th and 12th of January. Frankly, I really don't consider 1/1 to be the start of my new year, because it's just impossible to turn over a new leaf with the prospect of further celebration staring you right in the face.

Anyway, now I'm back on the straight and narrow, and am making an effort to wean myself off a diet of triple cream cheese, foie gras, beer, butter, and pork everything in favor of fat free Greek yogurt, vegetable soups, and roasted fishes.

But getting back to the culinary excesses...

I'm a not usually a big lobster eater, but I happened cook with lobster twice in December, and in two dishes that I'm proud of.

The first dish was a lobster bisque, one which has been described to me in vivid and almost mythological terms by The Viking for most of the length of our relationship. As the story goes, The Viking journeyed far, far north in the British Isles in the dead of winter, to a place where it was dark 23 hours a day and bone-chilling winds blew off the North Sea, until he arrived at the family home of his friend The Scotsman. There the Scotsman's mother served them steaming, fragrant, buttery bowls of lobster bisque. "The best lobster bisque," I have been told. "In existence."

I attempted this bisque once before (I had asked The Scotsman's mother for the recipe) in December of 2008, and it was by all accounts a failure. It looked nice enough, exactly that inviting coral color that a lobster bisque should be, but was watery and insipid. I knew the instant that I tasted it that I had stopped the stock too soon -- the key to a great bisque turns out to be reducing your lobster stock down until it is ruddy and pungent.

This year, I decided it was time for a retry, and managed to produce a much better bowl of soup. I don't know that it reached the epic heights of the Scotsman's mother's creation, but I was satisfied with the result.


My second lobster experience came on Christmas Eve, which I spent at home with my family as I do every year. I knew I wanted to do something with lobster for dinner but couldn't find a recipe that exactly fit the bill. So, I came up with a pasta dish that combines tarragon, cream, and sherry -- all classic lobster pairings -- plus fennel, which I think gives the dish a fresh, interesting twist. It took me about three hours to make, start to finish.

Here's the thing about these two recipes: you absolutely need to start with whole, live lobsters. Not just fresh or frozen tails. To say nothing of the quality of the meat, you need the lobster bodies and shells to make the stock with, which is what gives the bisque and the creamy pasta sauce their powerful, permeating lobster flavor.

You tell people that you're making a lobster dish, yes, using live lobsters, and that yes, you're going to kill the lobsters, and they look at you like you're Charles Manson. The horror! How ghastly! I'll just about take this from vegans, who are apparently so troubled by the idea of harming innocent creatures that they have made a lifelong choice not to do so (although, they might consider moving out of the United States and to somewhere like Switzerland if that's their philosophy)...but my pork-loving, supermarket-chicken-eating, meataholic friends? Where do they think lamb loin comes from? What, exactly, does the ground veal in their Bolognese represent?

To my mind, if you're going to be a carnivore, I think it's only responsible to participate in the killing of your own food every so often. But that's just me.


Christmas Eve Lobster Pasta

Serves 6-8

4 1.5-lb lobsters
3 Tbsp olive oil
1/2 cup shallots, finely chopped
1/2 bulb fennel, chopped
1/2 bulb fennel, separated into individual leaves
3 Tbsp Cognac
2 sprigs Tarragon leaves, plus 1 Tbsp chopped Tarragon
2 cups white wine
4 Tbsp flour
4 Tbsp butter
1 cup cream
Splash sherry

1. Bring a pot of water to boil. Drop lobsters in one at a time, for 1-2 minutes each. Let lobsters cool and separate claws, bodies, and tails (reserving juices that escape). Return tails to boiling water for 7 minutes, then return claws for 10 minutes. Extract meat and chop into big chunks. Reserve shells, meat, and 1 cup of lobster water.

2. Heat olive oil in a large, heavy bottomed saucepan or small stock pot. Add shallots and fennel and saute over medium heat until soft. Add lobster shells and the accumulated juices, douse with Cognac, and ignite. Once the flames have burned out, add white wine, lobster water, and tarragon sprigs. Simmer until reduced to about 1 - 1.5 cups, around 1 hour. Strain in fine sieve and reserve.
4. Meanwhile, drop fennel leaves in boiling water for 5-7 minutes, until fork tender. Drain. Lay leaves flat on cookie sheet and brush with olive oil. Bake at 400 until leaves are golden colored and crisp. Remove from oven and reserve.
3. In a medium saucepan, heat butter over medium heat until foaming. Add flour and stir until paste forms, gradually whisking in lobster stock (and stirring continuously) until thick sauce is formed. Add in cream to desired consistency, then sherry, salt, and pepper to taste. Add lobster chunks and stir.

Serve over pasta (fettuccine or spaghetti), and top with caramelized fennel and chopped tarragon.

An Armchair Scientist Takes On The Hangover

Today, I have hangovers on the brain. Literally and figuratively.

Last night was The Scribe's birthday, and a group of us went to DBGB and gorged ourselves on thick, unctuous hamburgers, shoestring fries, and sausages. To drink, I had a martini and [an unnamed quantity of] beer -- all in all it wouldn't have been so bad were it not for the red wine-soaked dinner at Aureole the night before, which left my systems teetering on the brink of collapse.

And thus the situation that I find myself in today. It would all be fine and dandy if I could sit around feeling sorry for myself all day, eating junkfood, snoozing on the couch, watching House reruns, and getting better on my own time. Clearly that is not in the agenda, and I'll assume the same is true for most of you on any given Thursday in October. We lead busy lives, and we need to stay in fighting form.

So, I'm doing damage control. Just as there is a right and wrong way to roast a chicken, there is a right a wrong way to treat a hangover, and after years of experimentation I believe that I've found the winning formula. Let's be clear: there is absolutely no science or data of any kind to back up the following claims. Just one bon vivant's experiences.

First of all, hangovers are not just about the alcohol. Sometime you should try eating a big, rich meal loaded with butter and red meat and carbohydrates while drinking sugary, acidic non-alcoholic beverages and see how you feel the next day. Probably pretty hungover.

Think of it like this: after a night of intense drinking and dining your stomach is like a war zone, and the goal of your hangover treatment is to negotiate peace. Most people will tell you that the best solution is to eat greasy food: a bacony breakfast sandwich, Chipotle, a big, hulking bowl of pad thai. This is certainly what you feel like eating, but it's like sending another unit into combat. It's exactly the type of rationale that led you to say, "Sure, I'd love a nightcap!" And look how that turned out for you.

Without further ado, my hangover cure:

1. Tylenol and coffee: Tylenol dulls the pain, and the caffeine is going to be necessary to keep you alert thanks to the awful night of sleep that you just had (both alcohol and a full stomach keep you from getting into REM sleep, meaning that you aren't really getting your rest).

2. 2 liters of water: Dehydration is more than half your problem after a night on the town, so get a liter of water down the trap the next morning and then drink another liter throughout the day. And by water I mean water --not Gatorade, which is really high in sugar.

3. A 30 minute jog: Going for a slow, steady run raises your metabolism, which I personally believe "sweats out" the alcohol (so to speak), flushing your system and speeding the entire recovery process.

4. Vegetable juice: Yes, vegetable juice. Not a burger and fries. Vegetable juice is a mild, low sugar, high nutrient way to cleanse a system which needs a break in order to get itself back to normal. Ideally, I go to a juice bar and order the stuff fresh, but in a pinch I'll take V-8. Trust me on this -- if you can exert enough self control to pass on the pizza and stick to vegetable juice until dinner, you will be the better for it.

Is There Such A Thing As A Desk Potato?

Hi there. Long time no blog.

Things have gotten a little out of hand in recent weeks. I've fallen off the wagon -- the cooking wagon, that is -- so much so that I don't even have a kitchen-related photograph to show you today. Instead, I give you the view that I've been seeing a lot of lately: my desk at work. This is where the magic happens. Can't you tell?

Of course, I would be lying if I said that work has been the only thing keeping me from my chef's knife...

Usually on Saturdays I potter around in the kitchen. This is not a kitchen so much as a swanky hotel pool in Miami. The occasion: a bachelorette weekend. We spent the day reading Wolf Hall US Weekly and talking about Rahm Emmanuel's mayoral bid weddings.


And this? This is trouble.


This is the two laptop-sized pieces of Artichoke Basille pizza that I inhaled on the way to work on Sunday, in a frantic attempt to combat my hangover. A.K.A. double trouble.



These are gorgeous desserts about to leave the kitchen during a charity event at one of our restaurants on Sunday night. At least someone's been doing some cooking...

Listen, I'm not looking for pity here. I'm just pointing out that a busy schedule makes it difficult to take care of oneself properly; not taking care of oneself makes one feel exhausted; feeling exhausted makes it hard to care for oneself. And the vicious cycle goes on and on. Maybe I haven't been a couch potato lately but I've been the next worst thing, which is someone glued in front of a computer screen for many too many hours each day. Yes, a desk potato. And when not desk potatoing I've been spending my time consuming alcohol and animal fat in various forms.

And notice what isn't pictured above? Vegetables. Unless you count the ones swimming in grease and cheese on the pizza. Which I do not.

This calls to mind a New York Times article that I read last week about how you just can't get Americans to eat more vegetables. No matter what you do! Partly because they don't taste as good as, say, Twinkies, but they're also more expensive than Twinkies, and more time consuming to prepare and inferior in their shelf-life to the Twinkie. This makes them a very hard sell.

Even as someone who takes nutrition seriously, as you may have noticed, my enthusiasm for the CSA deliveries has waned in recent weeks. As it turns out getting odd quantities of strange vegetables at inconvenient times is not all that it's cracked up to be. I miss going to the greenmarket. I hate myself for putting Swiss Chard directly into the trash every single time. I'm annoyed at having to puzzle about what I could make that requires exactly three red onions, 5 baby turnips, and a head of bok choy. I don't always have the time, or at least the mental energy, to grapple with the multi-step process of preparing Jerusalem artichokes at the end of a long day. If it comes to that, I'd rather just eat a Twinkie. The CSA box is not for me.

I have to remind myself (and so do we all) that there are plenty of ways to incorporate vegetables into a meal without all that peeling, chopping, blanching, and roasting. Just a few of them:

1. An omelet and a green salad - If you have an extra vegetable or two lying about, omelets are a fantastic way to use them up. Just chop up the vegetables and saute them with some onions and garlic and they're a perfect filling. If you buy a head of Boston lettuce at the beginning of the week and keep it in the crisper drawer, you can shred a few leaves at a time into a simple salad in a matter of minutes.

2. Frozen vegetables and (lean) hamburgers-- A shortage of time to cook usually means a shortage of time for planning, and a major issue with vegetables is that you really need to plan out in advance what you'll use and when so that they don't spoil and go to waste. This is why frozen vegetables are so clutch; not only are they already prepped, but they can stay in the freezer for months at a time if necessary. Frozen broccoli, green beans, and peas are some of my alternatives to fresh versions. Steam them with a little water on the stove and then saute them in a hot pan with olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic, and whatever spices catch your fancy. To go along with the vegetables, you can defrost individual hamburger patties as you need them.

3. If all else fails...V-8 and an energy bar -- It lacks the romance of my go-to 'no cook' dinner, a glass of red wine with cheese and crackers, but has the advantages of a) being something that you can probably buy at your local drugstore, b) not making you fall asleep within 25 minutes and c) generally leaving you feeling top notch the next morning.

This week, I'm aiming to get back in the swing of things. The Viking's dear friend The Vegetarian is visiting for the week with his family, which will give me the perfect excuse to spend some quality time in the kitchen with vegetables. Who knows, maybe I'll even keep the Swiss Chard around this time.

How Pizza Turned Into Jerusalem Artichoke Risotto (By Accident)

I get a lot of questions about my cooking habits. Questions, and general puzzlement, and facial expressions that seem to say, "But why did you make your own salsa? Did that really seem like the best use of an hour of your life?"

Well, first of all, I don't have children. That frees up lots of time and creative energy right there. Second of all, the cooking sometimes happens by accident.

Take Friday night. I called The Viking utterly exhausted from the work week, and the conversation went something like this:

The Viking: What are we doing for dinner tonight?

Me: I don't know. I'm exhausted. I'm definitely not cooking tonight. Definitely not.

The Viking: OK, well we should just order pizza. Go home, put your feet up, and we'll order a pizza.

Me: Perfect.

And then my thoughts went something like this:

I'll just stop by the grocery store for some paper towels and OJ, on my way home.

...Now that I'm at the grocery store, I might as well pick up a frozen pizza. That will be cheaper than ordering pizza.

...But frozen pizza is so unhealthy, and it's never any good. As long as I'm here I might as well buy a chicken to roast. That's barely cooking.

....Ugh, look at this industrial, mass-produced chicken. It's so disgusting. I cannot, in good conscience, buy and eat this chicken.

....Hey look, arborio rice! I could make risotto, I even have Parmesan and white wine and chicken stock in the fridge. I haven't made risotto in ages. I'll just make really easy risotto and be done with it.

...Actually, I have those Jerusalem artichokes too. I wonder how you cook a Jerusalem artichoke? I wonder if you can make Jerusalem artichoke risotto...?

Fast forward to 9 PM, at which point I was pureeing sauteed Jerusalem artichokes in a food processor and folding them into a risotto with herbs and pancetta.

It was my first experience with Jerusalem artichokes, which are neither artichokes nor are they from Jerusalem.



They're a tuber that looks like a cross between ginger and a massage tool and tastes like a cross between a mushroom and an artichoke. Pureed and mixed into the risotto they in fact did add an earthy compliment to the smokey pancetta and full-bodied Parmesan. All in all, it was a nice dish.

Nicer than an evening on the couch with a beer, a slice, and an episode of Mad Men? That's up for debate.

Cookware Detente: Or, The Only 8 Pots & Pans That You Really Need

I have a cookware problem.

It's not actually a cookware problem so much as a storage problem, but it manifests itself in cookware. Everywhere. You may have heard the stereotype of the twenty-something urban woman who keeps shoes in her oven; well, I keep a stand mixer in my bedroom closet. Pots and pans live on the dining room chairs, until we have guests, and then they vacation on top of our bed. Open up a sideboard drawer and you might find a pasta machine; look inside an end table and what should you see but an extra whisk (in case of whisking emergencies). This state of affairs irritates The Viking, but instead of speaking up he quietly retaliates by purchasing something along the lines of a spare set of bicycle wheels. Which I will then find stashed in the laundry closet. And so the arms race escalates.

When I bought all of these kitchen items, I think I honestly felt that each and every one of them would be useful -- nay, indespensable! Sure, I had enough good sense to avoid the belgian waffle maker and the fondue set, but I've ended up with several sizes of stock pot and skillet, five cookie sheets (curious, considering that I have but one oven), and an orange juicer the size of a toddler.

I've since realized that my cookware usage follows the 80-20 rule: 80 percent of my cooking involves 20 percent of my cookware. The remainder of that cooking could probably be accomplished without the additional cookware, given a little improvisation.

When it comes to pots & pans in particular, I really only use eight of them. Just eight. The list is below -- I hope it saves you much cash and conflict with your live-in loved one(s).




1. 6-Quart Enameled Cast Iron Dutch Oven: Indespensible for stews, soups, pasta sauces, and anything that needs to be transfered from the stovetop to the oven.



2. 2-Quart Saute Pan: For my last birthday my mother gave me a Mauviel copper saute pan, and it's the one "nice" pan that I own. The flat bottom and high sides mean the pan can handle everything from roasting fish to sauteing vegetables to creating a sauce. Copper, which conducts heat evenly and responds quickly to changes in stove temperature, makes even cooking a breeze.


3. 12-Quart Stock Pot: For any task too large to fit in the Dutch Oven. Also moonlights as champagne bucket, vase, lobster tank, and watering can.


4. 3-Quart Saucepan: For smaller jobs like hard boiling eggs, making sauces, cooking oatmeal, melting butter.


5. 12-Inch Cast Iron Skillet: Cast iron gets hotter and holds heat longer than stainless steel or copper, making it ideal for searing things (think: mushrooms, steaks, bacon). Great for tasks that start on the stovetop and finish in the oven.


6. 10-inch Non-Stick Skillet: Primarily for omelets, which we now eat one night a week because they are dirt cheap, mindless, and oh so delicious. Also handy to have available as a third skillet during big cooking projects.


7. Roasting Pan: Can be used on the stovetop or in the oven for any and all roast meats.



8. 2-Quart Pyrex Baking Dish: Useful as a second roasting pan for small meats (small poultry, pork tenderloin) or for gratins, roasted veggies, crumbles, brownies, cornbread, etc.

The Best Apple Pie You've Never Baked

The Viking always gives me a hard time about Labor Day. In America, unlike anywhere else in the world, we bookend summer with the two holiday weekends of Memorial Day and Labor Day. It’s all very neatly delineated: summer is over after the holiday weekend. That's it! It’s Tuesday, September 7, everybody out of the pool. Trade your white trousers for corduroys, put away the grill, close up the summer house. To those who did not grow up observing Labor Day, this exactitude of seasonal change (two weeks before the seasons technically change, no less) seems silly.

But the thing is, somehow fall always does manage to arrive right on cue. Yesterday morning on the way to the train station in East Hampton, it was 55 degrees, mist was rolling off the fields, and we stopped for three families of wild turkeys to cross the road. The light has changed. The air has become dry. The first apples, a half peck of Mackintoshes, arrived in this week's CSA box and I baked my first apple pie with them this weekend.

You probably know by now that I am not fond of New York summers. Maybe I'm doing something wrong but I don't like the sultry heat, the purposelessness, and most of all the Manhattanite diaspora that seems to occur each June through August. But fall! -- poignent, elegant, fall -- is my favorite time of year. It's a time for making stews, watching the leaves change, and take bracing, bare-sleeved runs in the crisp mornings.

Maybe this is why the delineating line of Labor Day has so much significance to me, far more than turning the corner from one calendar year into another on December 31. New Years always seems arbitrary, a dividing line between snow and gloom and...more snow and gloom. But Labor Day marks the transition between summer insouciance and fall industriousness. It's the start of the harvest.

Today feels like the right time for reflection and resolutions. Here are some of mine:

-Go to bed by 11 PM, not 1 AM, on weeknights
-Learn to bake the perfect bread
-Drink more water and less coffee
-When people introduce themselves to me, attempt to remember their names
-Finally begin training for that half marathon that I’ve been threatening to do
-Write handwritten thank-you notes
-Learn to sharpen my own kitchen knives

As I mentioned earlier, this weekend I celebrated the start of fall with a homemade apple pie.

Given that my father grew up on an apple farm, I've eaten a lot of apple pies in my day. Apple crisps, buckles, crumbles, tarts, and galettes too, but mostly pies. My grandmother was almost never without one in the house, and while I know that her pie apple of choice was the Mutsu, somehow no one has been able to track down her recipe. It definitely did not pass down to my father: when he made pies for us as kids, he used storebought crust and a simple filling of apples, sugar, and a little cinnamon. Those pies tasted wonderful to me because they were made by dad, but by the time I was a teenager I started looking for my own version.

Over the past decade I've tried every recipe I could get my hands on, and the one I use now is a slightly adapted version of one that I originally found in Saveur. It is the best apple pie I have ever eaten. And yes, you DO need to make the crust from scratch.

Classic Apple Pie

Serves 8

For the crust:
2 1/2 cups flour, sifted
2 tbsp. sugar, plus more for sprinkling
1 tsp. kosher salt
18 tbsp. very cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1 egg, lightly beaten

For the filling:
6 apples, preferably Mutsu, Bramley, or a mixture of Cortland and Granny Smith, peeled, cored, and cut into 1/4" pieces
3/4 cup sugar
3 tbsp. flour
2 tbsp. apple cider vinegar
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp. kosher salt
1/4 tsp. freshly ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp. freshly ground ginger

1. To make the crust: Combine flour, sugar, and salt. Add butter and work with hands until the flour resembles coarse meal flecked with pea-size pieces of butter. Continue to mix with hands, sprinkling in a total of 6–8 tbsp. of ice water one tablespoon at a time, until the dough begins to hold together. Transfer dough to a lightly floured surface, divide in half, and form 2 dough balls. Flatten each dough ball slightly to make a disk. Wrap disks in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour.

2. Heat oven to 425˚. Roll out each disk of dough on a lightly floured surface into 12" rounds. Fit 1 round of dough into a 9" pie plate.3. To make the filling: In a large bowl, combine apples, sugar, flour, vinegar, cinnamon, salt, ginger, and nutmeg. Transfer filling to the pie plate, brush edges of pastry with some of the egg, and top with remaining pastry round. Trim edges with a knife and crimp with your fingers. Brush top of pastry with remaining egg and sprinkle with a little sugar. Using a knife, make 4 slits in pastry top and poke with tines of a fork.

3. Transfer pie to oven and bake for 20 minutes. Reduce heat to 350˚ and continue baking until crust is golden brown and a knife inserted into one of the slits slides easily through apples, about 40 minutes more. Transfer to a rack and let cool for 2 hours before serving.

Reinventing The Loaf

Pictured above is the whole wheat focaccia that I made the other night. I give it a C-, tops.

Generally speaking, the bread that I bake is sub par. It's decent when eaten hot (all bread, I have come to learn, is decent while still hot) but as soon as it cools it turns into roofing tile. This "rustic" focaccia in particular struck me as something that Medieval peasants might have turned up their noses at. All in all, not really what I'm going for with the homemade bread thing.

I know enough about bread to know that my problem lies somewhere in the kneading and/or rising components; unfortunately, I do not know enough about bread to be able to fix it. Not even after I bought Jim Lahey's acclaimed book, My Bread, which has been hailed as an "idiot-proof" method for baking bread. Well, apparently a few idiots manage to slip through the cracks, because my bread still sucks.

And yet I have bread baking in my blood. My aunt and grandmother, both farmers' wives, made their own bread. It's a ritual that relies on experience, carefully honed technique, and attentiveness to the smallest of details, which makes it a skill much better handed down from generation to generation than read about in a book. I never learned it from my aunt or grandmother because I wasn't interested in cooking while either of them was still alive, and in the past few decades it has not been fashionable to take a young girl aside and force domestic skills upon her.

Thus, my roof tile quality bread. I've decided two things. First, I will press on, reinventing the wheel if necessary in pursuit of a bread making method that yields the desired results. You're likely to hear more about this in the coming months. Second, when I have children, they will be the only fifth graders who know how to make a flawless baguette.

Qu'est-ce Que C'est Dans Ma Boite Du CSA? Kale, Melon, Tomatoes, Beets, Purslane, Carrots, Peppers, Apricots, and Donut Peaches

Laziness begets laziness. This is the sort of thing that your mother used to tell you when you were 16 and spent your summer vacation sleeping until 11 AM, then relaxing for the rest of the day on a sun lounger, moving only to refill on lemonade and seek out additional gossip magazines. Just, you know, hypothetically speaking.

Let me tell you, your mother was on to something.

August arrived right on schedule this year, with the past 13 days having been the most phenomenally unproductive since...well...last August. Things are ghostly quiet in the office. The phones are silent, little red voicemail lights have gone dark, and email volume has whittled down to a small fraction of what it usually is. Back on the home front, life has progressed towards complete and total indolence. Of late, there has been a lot of couch time, movie watching, red wine, internet surfing, and sleeping.

And while this happens to be exactly the type of scenario that I dream about when life gets chaotic, a funny thing happens when it actually comes to pass: I don't like who I am. The less I have to do, the less I get done, and what started off as a little extra leisure time ends as full-on torpor.

My new found inertia has got me thinking about adaptation. Last Sunday the New York Times ran a story on a couple who decided to toss away all their possessions and live a simplified, debt-free life. The article talked about "hedonic adaptation," an official-sounding psychological term meaning that once you acquire the nice things you always wanted, you promptly get used to them and they stop seeming so nice anymore. So, you begin wanting even NICER things. This is known to many of us as "being a spoiled brat."

But it's a concept that applies to much more than just wealth. You'll notice that when you start eating too richly (think: a week's vacation in Italy; the entirety of the holiday season), before you know it that indulgent diet becomes merely the new normal. When you're getting 8 hours of sleep a night, you start wanting 10. It also explains why you'll sometimes hear retired people describe their cushy lives as being laced with untold stress and hurry: it's all relative, baby.

Luckily, the concept works in reverse, too. Just out of college many of my friends became i-banking analysts, and I marvelled at how they could possibly put up with a life where 19-hour work days were standard operating procedure. Their answer: "You just get used to it." It's what we do as humans. We adapt.

This is the best argument I've heard for living a life of virtue -- that breaking it is so much fun! If I'm going to adapt to my chosen lifestyle anyway, I'd rather adapt to being too disciplined than being too being lazy, right? If hedonic adaptation is to be believed, we'll all ultimately be happier if we live hectic lives punctuated by the occasional vacation; eat spartanly and indulge in the occasional feast; spend thriftily and every once in a while, blow it out.

You might be wondering how this applies to my CSA box. Well, in my period of sloth, there has not been a lot of cooking, photography, or writing (or working out, or clean laundry, for that matter), so I don't have much to offer you today. Most of what I did in the kitchen over the past week could have been done by a well-trained monkey.

I cut up the green peppers and purslane and mixed them with store bought lettuce and radishes to create a green salad, tossed with lemon-rosemary vinaigrette.



I cut the apricots in half, put them in a roasting pan, sprinkled them with brown sugar, and stuck them under the broiler for 5-10 minutes (until browned and juicy). I used them to top vanilla ice cream, and which would have been a beautiful photo if I had managed to take it.

The beets I roasted, chopped, and mixed with feta, basil, and balsamic vinegar to create a light salad.




The tomatoes got the same treatment as the beets, but weren't photographed.

The kale and carrots went into that kale and white bean stew that I made once before, which I took to work for lunch all week.

No Ifs, Ands, Or Halibuts

Meet Exhibit A: the red snapper that I bought for dinner with my brother and his wife this past weekend. Unbeknownst to me at the time, red snapper populations are at very low levels due to overfishing and it's best not to eat them. Note Red's expression here: bored, annoyed, put-upon. Watching, judging. All this, and I haven't even done a terrible job at grilling him yet.

The trouble with eating is that almost anything you put in your mouth these days is problematic in one way or another. If the food isn't unhealthy (artery-hardening; cancer-causing; diabetes-inducing), it's unethically grown (cruelly raised; brutally slaughtered), grown or processed in an environmentally harmful way (water-intensive; petroleum-guzzling; toxic in its byproducts), or unsustainably hunted (devastating to wild populations).

After I read all of Michael Pollan's books last year, it appeared that in order to eat with a clean conscience I should stick to a diet of barnacles, forest weeds, pond scum, and wild fish.

Now, a few new books on fish and fishing have hit the shelves and spawned (pun intended) interesting reviews by the likes of Sam Sifton and Elizabeth Kolbert in the New York Times and New Yorker respectively. To make a long story short, it appears that wild fish are off the "safe" list too.

I recommend reading the reviews for the full story, but here's the summary version:

1. The history of commercial fishery is one of progressively working our way though various fish species once thought too numerous to be harmed, fishing them to the brink of extinction, and then moving on to the next one.

2. At the current time we've all but obliterated wild populations of most any fish you can think to eat -- this is surprising given that fish are one of few things which Americans are encouraged to eat more of.

3. Farmed fish isn't necessarily a solution, because farmed fish are fed wild fish (is this not mind-bogglingly backward?), and the farms themselves often pollute natural fish populations/habitats.
Unfortunately none of the authors goes so far as to suggest a solution to this sad state of affairs, they just leave you feeling like a nasty, awful, greedy person for eating fish.

But a little additional research revealed that there are certain species that you can eat with a relatively guilt-free conscience. The Monterrey Bay Aquarium puts out a pocket-size Seafood Watch Guide (in fact, a separate guide for each region of the USA) to make seafood buying decisions easy (or, as easy as they can be given that you still need to distinguish between US-farmed and Central America-farmed tilapia). They also have a handy iPhone app.



Consulting my regional Seafood Watch Guide revealed that one of the things that I am encouraged to eat is wild Pacific halibut. This brings me to Exhibit B: pictured above is last night's dinner, a 6 ounce portion of broiled wild halibut, served with a homemade organic zucchini salsa verde and roasted organic new potatoes.

I'm pretty sure that we got through the meal without committing any major moral offenses.

Furthermore, the zucchini salsa verde is from the August issue of Bon Appetit and is highly recommended -- you can find the recipe here.

BYOL: Curried Chicken Salad

Today is a big day. It's the day that I pass my curried chicken salad recipe on to you.

Curried chicken salad has a special place in my heart because it was one of four foods that I made on loop from August 2006 to the spring of 2008. At the time I was making $24,000 -- per annum -- as an editorial assistant at a magazine. In order to live in Manhattan on that budget I had to impose WWII style rationing, alotting an average of just $10 a day for food and drink. New Yorkers can spend more than that each day on coffee alone. To meet my budget, soda, gum, desserts, storebought coffee, and bottled water were eliminated as needless extravagances; snacks were considered a special treat; dinner date invitations were accepted as a matter of principle. A girl needs to eat, as the saying goes. Indeed.

Most of my breakfasts, lunches, and dinners during that time were cooked from scratch. Aside from curried chicken salad, the other three foods I made consistently during this period were this dish (or variations thereof), pastel omelets, and a recipe that I have dubbed Poverty Chili. The Viking happens to love Poverty Chili, much in the same way that Marie Antoinette loved her Norman Hamlet.

I look back on this (admittedly, deeply bourgeois) flirtation-with-poverty period of life with particular fondness, choosing to celebrate my own plucky self-reliance and conveniently forget about the wide, soft safety net laid by parents who would never have let anything truly nasty happen to their only daughter.

In my memories, I was a Dickensian heroine in fingerless gloves, rifling through trash bins and peering from the cold into warm, glowing shop windows. I specifically remember walking by Pierre Marcolini Chocolates on Park Avenue one January day and having an immense, otherworldy, primeval craving for one of the $7 hot chocolates that they serve there. After some mental anguish I finally allowed myself to buy a cup, and still remember sipping it, warm, thick, and silky, as I made my way down 57th street in a state of elation.

Now that I have virtually free reign with the food and wine budget, sensory experiences on this level rarely happen for me. When they do, they tend to involve a lot more than a $7 hot chocolate. That's truly a shame, and ought to serve as a lesson about the value of a little deprivation.

Back to the curried chicken salad. When I was in college I frequently bought the dish from a cafe called Atticus, which is where I got the idea to make it for myself in the first place. Not only did I love the taste of it, but it embodied the Holy Trinity of poverty foods: cheap, healthy, and quick to prepare.



What makes this curried chicken salad recipe so special, you may ask? Okay, it's not exactly the formula for Coke, but I did play around with a lot of different curried chicken salad recipes before I came up with what I deem to be the perfect version. It's based off a recipe that I originally found in a 2002 issue of Gourmet.

Curried chicken salads tend to have fruit and/or nuts in them, most frequently grapes and walnuts. I immensely dislike mixing fruit with meat (besides apples with pork), plus grapes and walnuts are expensive, so they were eliminated right off the bat.



However, you'll need to keep a sweet element in the dressing to counterbalance the earthy, musky flavor of the curry powder. I love Cross & Blackwell's Major Grey's Chutney for this (partly for the way it tastes, mostly for the winsome association with English Colonialism), but you can substitute 1 teaspoon of honey if that's what you have on hand. The touch of sweetness brings an otherwise flat dressing to life.

Then there's the nutrition factor. I substitute fat free Greek yogurt (in all its improbable thickness and creaminess) and low fat mayonnaise in the place of full-fat mayo. I use only white meat chicken. Even the curry powder itself has health credentials -- curry is a spice combination made from turmeric, cumin, allspice, cinnamon, etc, many of which are known to boost immunity, decrease inflammation, and soothe the digestive system.



As for the recipe's ease and simplicity, that mainly comes down to how the chicken is prepared. Listen, simmering boneless, skinless chicken breasts in broth and water is not something they're going to teach you to do at the Cordon Bleu. I'm not going to vouch for the culinary merits, but I can tell you that it's a fuss-free way to cut out all the unpleasantness of a hot oven, dirty dishes, and having to trim and debone a chicken carcass.

Curried Chicken Salad
Adapted From Gourmet Magazine

Serves 5

2 cups chicken broth
1 1/2 lb skinless boneless chicken breast
1/2 c. light mayonnaise
1/3 c. Greek yogurt
5 teaspoons curry powder
1 Tablespoon lime juice
1 -2 Tablespoons Major Gray's Chutney (to taste)
1 medium red onion, finely chopped
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
5 whole wheat pitas
Romaine lettuce (optional

1. Bring chicken broth and 4 cups water to a simmer.
2. Add chicken and simmer, uncovered, 6 minutes. Remove pan from heat and cover, then let stand until chicken is cooked through, about 15 minutes. Transfer chicken to a plate, cool and chop into 1/2-inch pieces.
3. Whisk together mayonnaise, yogurt, curry, lime juice, chutney, salt, and pepper in a large bowl.
4. Add chicken, and onion and stir gently to combine.
5. Each morning, cut a pita in half an stuff with chicken salad and lettuce.

A Case Of The Mondays: Or, Food Trends That I Hate

Good morning, friends, and Happy Monday.

I write that with sarcasm, because Monday mornings are horrific. Monday mornings in general, and this one in particular. I think of them as a small reenactment of what birth must have been like: there you were just minding your own business and dozing off in your cozy, quiet womb when all of a sudden you're grabbed by the ears and yanked into bright lights, noise, and chaos. Hello there, world! Now please put me back where I came from.

I'm in a mood today, people, which means that I'll be using this space to complain about something.

(Ed. Note: Yes, I am aware that today is the first day of summer and could instead be an opportunity for a gushing, optimistic post about the joys of summer produce. Unfortunately, simply too grouchy to write such a post.)

Last month, you indulged me in an extended rant against "small plates" format restaurant menus. This morning, I got to thinking about what other trends in food (from restaurant to store-bought to recipes in popular magazines) really get me going. Here's what I've come up with:

Pork/Bacon Mania: Among a certain type of food-obsessed New Yorker, a cult has sprung up around an infatuation with all things pig. These are the people who noisily and frequently proclaim just how much they love pork, as if that's something really sassy and contrarian. "Anything's better with bacon!" As if they just discovered it. Chefs passive-aggressively compete with each other to see who can create a menu with the most disproportionate and borderline disgusting use of pork (this was tied between David Chang and Ryan Skeen, at last tally). I'm not in disagreement that pork is delicious, but that's just it, no one is in disagreement that pork is delicious. Not even people who are Kosher. Or probably vegetarians.

One Ingredient, Multiple Ways: For instance, an appetizer consisting of "Leeks Three Ways," in which you get something like a leek soup, a plain grilled leek, and a leek panna cotta. I can't tell whether this practice was created by Top Chef or if the show just spread it, like a pathogen, to people who had no business cooking this way. Whatever the case may be, it represents the trend towards focus on pure, single ingredients entering its Mannerist phase. It is to 2010 what deconstruction was to 2005. I look forward to the time when I can get leeks just ONE way -- GOOD.

Extreme Locavorism: I'm all in favor of supporting area farmers (coughCSAcough), but this whole thing has gotten out of hand. Forget about buying your ingredients from farms in Connecticut, New Jersey, and the Hudson Valley, if you really cared about reforming our food system you would actually be able to see your food source from the kitchen. There are now entire commercial growing operations in Brooklyn; I've heard rumors of people setting up rooftop farms in Manhattan. One of these days I fully expect to walk up to a restaurant and see a sous chef outside milking a goat tied to a bicycle rack.

Artisanal Cocktails: Everybody and their mom now employs a "mixologist" charged with whipping up a list of "signature cocktails," each containing eleven different ingredients and priced at around $14 a pop. That's actually a bargain because these drinks involve, variously, strange Asian citrus fruits, a small-batch whiskey that The Mixologist made in his Williamsburg basement, some rare flower that The Mixologist harvests annually from the Peruvian Altiplano, and ice hand-carved by specially trained seals from a glacier in Antarctica. The ingredients must be gently mixed, filtered, lit on fire, and blessed with an incantation, the dying words of a Cherokee medicine man spoken only to The Mixologist. But I ask you, in all seriousness: is anything really better than a cold, bone-dry martini?

Anything That Involves Quotation Marks: It's become fashionable to produce food that's a "take" on other food. For instance, a "BLT," which is probably nothing like a BLT. It's probably sous-vide pork belly with freeze dried lettuce and tomato jam. Likewise, "Chicken and Dumplings" isn't Chicken and Dumplings at all, it's dumpling dough in the shape of a chicken breast alongside chicken liver pate in the shape of dumplings. Apparently all the good dishes have already been taken, so chefs have decided to get cheeky on us. I do not approve.

Gluten-Free Foods: It's positively amazing how celiac disease (not to be confused with celeriac, which is a root vegetable) has spread throughout the population of America like wildfire in the past two years. Gluten-free foods are EVERYWHERE, with those naturally containing no gluten proclaiming so proudly on the label and those that do, like bread, or donuts, doing their best to get rid of it. The line of thinking here is that it must be a rare allergic reaction to gluten that is making you fat and bloated, not the 3,000 calories of pasta that you eat every night. I know a good gluten-free food: vegetables. Eat them, and then go for a run.

Well, that's about it for now. These are the things in the world of food that I wish would go back where they came from. Please feel free to join me in my Monday morning grouchiness, and add your own food trend annoyances below.

Ding, Dong The Cleanse Is Dead

HUZZAH! 'Tis I, back from Juicecleanseland, finally revived and able to apply fingers to keyboard and report my findings.

If you've ever competed on the pageant circuit, or been trapped in a mineshaft, you might have some insight into what the past three days have been like for me. Here's a brief overview.

Day one was challenging, but the real low point was day two. I woke up feeling like I had anvils tied to my limbs. The Scribe and I stood across from each other in the half-dark kitchen, drinking our lukewarm-water-and-lemon "morning tonics" and glaring at each other with a mix of blame, fear, and resignation. By halfway through Core Fusion Cardio, I started having an out of body experience as my mind wandered to my happy place, which happens to be the bottom of a wine glass. I can't prove anything, but I know that I saw the clock tick backwards for a period of minutes, and I'll swear that the instructor started shouting orders in German.

Work was a comedy. All non-essential thought and movement were removed from my routine. Unable to focus on anything substantive, I took to obsessively reading the BluePrintCleanse website for guidance and reassurance about exactly what this would do for me and when I could expect things to get better. The site told me that the cleanse would actually improve my concentration and energy. LIES!! What other lies did the BluePrintCleanse have in store for me?? Was it really even romaine/parsley/kale/celery juice I was drinking, or was it perhaps the pureed souls of failed juice cleansers?

The worst part of each day, and especially day two, was 4 PM - 9 PM. Nightfall. This was when the rage came out, the bargaining, the panic. This was the point at which I was exhausted by cravings for foods I couldn't have, and embittered by the contrast between my usual dinner and the green juice that I'd be downing for the THIRD time since sunrise.

My energy did pick up on day three, along with my concentration and my will to live, which was probably due in equal parts to my body adjusting to the new regimen and my mind knowing it would all soon be over. By yesterday afternoon, I had resigned myself to the steady ticker of verboten foods marching through my head, and no longer had enough fight left in me to care.

Today I feel energetic. More so than pre-cleanse? Hard to tell. I think I'm firmer in the abs and I definitely have the smug, virtuous glow enjoyed only by people with self-imposed dietary restrictions.

But the biggest benefit to the cleanse was [cue Chariots of Fire theme] what I learned about myself. It's astonishing how much of my day-to-day joy is derived from food and drink: preparing it, consuming it, sharing it with friends. It is my entertainment, my creativity, and my comfort. Replacing food with vegan juice drinks made me a shadow of my former self.

The payoff: I was reminded of the delicate balance between hunger and satiety, and how much more often we tip too far in the direction of over-fullness. It's okay to be hungry sometimes. In fact, it's great. This morning, for the first time in months, I bounced out of bed and made a real breakfast (the BPC website told us we could "begin to introduce fruit" the first day after the cleanse but we at no point seriously considered that advice). The Scribe and I sat at our breakfast table with the sun streaming in on us, slowly and quietly devouring pastel omelets with tomato and carmelized onion, half a whole-wheat bagel, pineapple, and coffee. I was shocked at how little it took for me to become full, and how satisfied I felt. And what could be better than that?

Ok, it's time to close this sad chapter on cleansing. Let's move on to happier things. I'm off to pour myself a glass of wine and enjoy the bowl of Kuku Wa Nazi pictured above...because I can.

How To Lose Your Mind In Three Days Or Less

The fault is entirely mine.

It was my idea to do the juice fast. I even talked the Scribe into it, who was minding his own business until I decided that I couldn't leave well enough alone.

But in my defense, the BluePrint Mind + Body Cleanse isn't just any juice fast. It promises total mental and physical renewal, courtesy of a three-day regimen comprised of drinking six custom-engineered super juices per day, eating exactly nothing, and attending special workout classes. The grand finale is a full-body massage at a snooty spa on Central Park South on the third and final night.

It would be like going to Canyon Ranch only cheaper and more convenient, I told the Scribe, who was clearly skeptical but I knew harbored a weakness for anything that promised enhanced ab definition. Eventually he capitulated, and we signed on for a Monday start.

Why was I so set on doing this? Boredom? Maybe. The steady approach of beach season? Partly. But given how much of my mental and physical energy I devote to food, I was fascinated to see what it would feel like to give it up for three whole days. According to the BluePrintCleanse website, I eat far too much animal fat and gluten and not enough fiber. I don't drink enough water. I drink too much wine. I'm short on vitamins and long on toxins. My nutrition is in crisis -- to a juice faddist, at least.

Maybe that's going a bit too far, but there's still something appealing about the idea of giving the whole system a spring cleaning. When I close my eyes I picture streams of purified water, green tea, and vegetable juice coursing through my blood vessels and flushing out the "toxins," whatever those look like, probably like the cast of Celebrity Fit Club. After all is said and done I might emerge on the other side of this looking like one of the blue people from Avatar. Or least like an aerobics instructor.

The Scribe and I began our wellness journey yesterday morning, in a class called "Core Fusion" that left us unable to rise from a seated position unaided for the rest of the day. From there I went to the office and began to put the juices to work.

There are plenty of calories in the juices (by plenty I mean exactly 1,250 per day, so enough to avoid crippling headaches and blackouts), but they're loaded with things like lettuces and parsley and cucumber. Trust me, there's a reason why romaine juice doesn't have a spot on the supermarket shelf next to OJ. Never before have I gotten so little pleasure from taking calories into my body.

My body is in cleanse mode, but my mind wants no part of it. A partial list of foods I've been craving that are not allowed on the BluePrintCleanse: coffee, mango, a hot bagel with cream cheese, pad thai, cigarettes, lamb stew, coffee, vegetable dumplings, mojitos, eggs benedict, DID I MENTION COFFEE?, a dirty martini, cheese and crackers, pasta bolognese, and chocolate cake.

We're only about halfway through so I'm not going to pass any judgments just yet. So far, I have only questions: Will I gradually become less hungry? Less angry? More energetic? How can I be worse at Core Fusion than all the middle-aged women in the class? And most importantly, how is it physically possible that I am peeing so much?