Sassy Radish

Things they should tell you when you’re writing a book.

• You will spend three times as much time on it as you think you will. Plan accordingly.
• Life will happen as you fast-approach deadline and you have to juggle it.
• On Monday, you might this it’s Friday, and on Wednesday you might think it’s Monday. Days of the week will cease to have the same meaning they do for people with regular desk jobs.
• You will treat taking a shower as a major accomplishment. At times, you will skip it and not think twice on your decision. But when you do, you will pat yourself on the back if only inside your head.
• As for getting dressed, you might find yourself at 2 o’clock in the afternoon still in your pajamas. And you’ve been writing since 7 am. You might stay like this ‘til dinnertime and change into shorts and a tanktop before your husband comes home for dinner.
• Your idea of a nutritious meal will be peanut butter toast and coffee. Anything requiring chopping, stirring, kneading, and most importantly, clean up – are way too time consuming. Dishes with crumbs will pile up by your desk or on the coffee table.
• You will order more take-out than you care to admit to others. And it won’t be the cooking that you won’t have time for – but the clean up.
• You will develop that weird cramp in your shoulder which will switch sides on occasion, but will be mostly persistent in one pesky spot. Aleve and Advil will fail you. So will a chair massage in a local nail salon. You might even stop noticing it for awhile or accept it as the new phase your body has entered. Much like that one stray grey hair you found the other morning, but chose to pluck before it saw the light of day.
• You will ask for an extension. You will be granted an extension. You’ll feel terrible about because you’ve never, not once in your life, handed something in late.

Continue reading hake with olive oil, butter, and lemon.

There comes a time.

When there are only two weeks left to the deadline.

And so.

I must go deep into writing. Until it’s all done and handed in.

Continue reading chilled broccoli soup.

Let’s make this one short and sweet.

Yesterday, I gave you a tip about making homemade matzo meal – I’m still embarrassed about it. Sort of. I don’t want to presume that this is what everyone does and knows. But I also don’t want those who thought it was a great tip to feel insulted either in that I might have thought that this tip was sooooo beneath me, and just who do I think I am, etc., etc. I’ll stop with the internet equivalent of hand-wringing already and just move on. There are more important things on the docket.

Continue reading sweet potato patties croquettes.

It has been decided that wherever we happen to move after this apartment, our next home has to be within walking distance to a banh mi shop. I know it sounds like a trivial matter, but believe me – it’s not. Andrew agrees, and adds to it a list of foods that must be nearby and excellent: Thai, Indian (something we sorely lack!), Chinese and so on. Before he finishes, I add in Italian, a wine shop, a place we can get good prosciutto and cheese and oils and bread; oysters and bourbon (though not necessarily together), and root beer floats. There needs to be a good book store. And superlative baklava. These are all very important things. And to satisfy all those requirements, it’s pretty certain that we can’t move out of the neighborhood.

Thankfully, this is a conundrum that isn’t so pressing. Yet. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. For now, there’s another book project in the works and a wedding less than three months away.

Continue reading deconstructed banh mi.

This is what happens when you get an edited manuscript, while working on another book and planning a wedding all the while your wrist is in a brace for five weeks. You fall behind on work because typing with one hand takes more time. Crazy concept, right?

Writing, in and of itself, is an amazing, thrilling, scary, exhilirating process. Just not with one hand. Typing with one hand is just frustrating. You think of something great to say while you’re finishing sentence, and by the time you get to the end of that sentence, you can’t remember what you were thinking of. It’s a lot of spurts and stops, like going somewhere in a taxi in New York; suddenly the cabbie slams on the breaks and you’re hurled towards the windshield. And before you’ve had time to collect your breath (and your poor discombobulated internal organs), the cabbie is hits the gas pedal and you’re thrown in the way back. Writing with one hand is a bit like that – spastic and not particularly efficient.

Continue reading za’atar roasted cauliflower.

I was all ready to write about grapefruit cake until I realized it’s about one week to the Super Bowl. Suddenly, instead of homey cakes and cup of tea, I am craving wings, chili, and beer. Oh, and seven layer dip.

It’s funny to me that in our relationship, I am the one with the football affectation. I insist on watching games, and I even downloaded one of those apps on my phone that tells me what the score it, in case I can’t watch the game in person. Andrew on the other hand, flips through geeky weather magazines while the game ensues and watches the game out of the corner of his eyes. This year, however, the Super Bowl is particularly important to us because our home team, the New England Patriots (now, don’t y’all Pats haters be hatin’) are going to square off against the New York Giants. The last time that happened, Pats suffered an abysmal loss, having totally fallen apart in the second half. Hopefully, that won’t happen again.

Continue reading seven layer dip.

Let’s not beat around the bush. Everywhere you look these first few weeks of January, you’re going to see a lot of soup. Because, it’s the New Year – which means a new leaf, new resolutions, new plans. I guess that also means soup? I’m not complaining; soup is one of my favorite things to eat. Let there be soup, I say!

I, for one, don’t have any resolutions this year. Not one. There’s plenty already to keep me busy and I want to focus on things already in motion: a wedding this summer, a book in the making, and something else I can hopefully tell you soon about (and no, it’s not a baby). But it’s very, very good, I promise.

Continue reading parsnip leek soup.

You might have heard we had a snowstorm here in the Northeast. Actually that storm came to us from the west where it fell upon Denver, among other places. It’s not so unusual for Denver to get snow this time of year. But it is highly unusual for New York City to have pre-Halloween snow. Snow that sticks and accumulates. We’re not used to it here in the Northeast.

Andrew and I braved the weather and went out in the morning for brunch. After nine days of being apart, we wanted to spend some time together so we braved the weather – the storm wasn’t due for hours. We walked over to the Clover Club, our favorite neighborhood spot for brunch, weaving and bobbing between the streets, and ordered our food: both of us were craving lamb burgers. I so rarely order meat these days, I get so excited when I’m craving it. And believe me, that lamb burger was the best thing I ate that day. It hit the spot, that’s for sure.

Continue reading butternut squash and pear soup with garam masala.

This here, to me, is the epitome of a Russian summer. A cold borscht on a hot summer night. Pull up a chair, stir some sour cream into it, and taste how refreshing beets can be. The tang of sour cream, the crunch of the cucumber, the grassiness of dill – that’s the stuff you remember years later and it makes your mouth water just thinking about it, and your stomach growls audibly. You grow both giddy and slightly melancholy just thinking about it.

I had a good childhood in Russia – a wholesome, leave-it-to-Beaver-whole-milk childhood. It stands at a stark contrast to what people might imagine a Soviet childhood to be – and mine was a good as they get full of books, walks in the forests, fishing in the rivers, and gazing at the stars. Summers were idyllic in particular – I spent them at my grandmother’s: a lot of time outside, hours foraging for berries and mushrooms, dipping my toes into cool lakes (I couldn’t swim back then), scratching itchy mosquito bites, and icing bruises and scrapes – the childhood that was simple and minimalist, yet lacked nothing. Bill Cosby had this stand-up bit back in the day, when he would talk about his childhood and how his parents would give him a stick and would tell him to go play in the back yard. And there he would be, sitting in an empty backyard, dirt all around him, digging a hole in the ground with his stick, happy as happy can be. That was me, happy to be outside and dig a hole with a stick. Happy to find wild strawberries and bring them home in a basket to have them for dessert sprinkled with sugar and dotted with golden-hewed cream so thick you could stand a spoon in it.

Continue reading cold borscht – chilled beet soup.

Come tomorrow, I suspect many of you will be firing up your grills and having a celebratory cookout. I have one thing to say to all of you planning on doing this – I am extremely jealous. We, urban dwellers, try as we might to boast that city living is the way to go, are actually quite jealous of all the backyard fun everyone else is having. Which is probably why New Yorkers love to invite themselves over to summer houses, suburban havens, and anyone in the tri-state area lucky enough to own a grill (there are some lucky balcony owners out there).

This Fourth of July, Andrew, Russell, and I will be grill-less, but that won’t stop us from celebrating in as much style as we possibly can, with fried chicken, corn on the cob, and blueberry cobbler. Really, we’re just trying to make our friends with grills jealous (far fetched as that may be). When life does not give us grill, we deep-fry instead.

Continue reading roasted salsa.