Sassy Radish

It all started innocently enough over pedicures with one of my girlfriends. We were at our favorite place, tucked away in the West Village, having a girls’ Sunday. I had raved about the place to her in the past and wound up getting her and her mother addicted to the tiny place where the nail technicians meticulously transformed your feet from wintry paws to moisturized, groomed, sparkling, and, dare-I-say, sexy toes. Aside from my nearly-decade-long gratitude for their attention to my feet, I am a huge fanatic of their citrus tea, which they serve upon request.

It was over cups of this citrus tea, that my friend issued a challenge, or rather – suggested an idea for this blog. We deduced that the tea was probably citrus marmalade dissolved in hot water. It was simple – but strangely delicious, seductively fragranced, and highly addictive. “Why don’t you reverse-engineer it,” my friend said, “You’re pretty good at that sort of thing.”

Continue reading meyer lemon and blood orange marmalade.

Pesto and I had a bit of a rough start. I first tried it on a pizza and I didn’t like it. We were sitting in a North End pizzeria in Boston, on a middle-school trip, and a girl I thought was amazingly cool and knew all things worth knowing, ordered a pizza with pesto. I had no idea what it was, and was too shy to ask, not wanting to seem even less cool than I already was.

A few minutes later it arrived, golden and bubbling, studded with green, oily blobs of pesto. It was potent and garlicky-smelling, but it wasn’t calling out to me. My suspicions proved right – aside from not looking good, it also wasn’t very good. It tasted stale, rancid, and too oily. Looking back, I realize it wasn’t very good pesto, but back then I just thought pesto wasn’t for me. I didn’t know the difference between good and bad.

Continue reading pesto.

It’s not exactly an intuitive thing to think of slaw this time of year. And it would have totally slipped my mind were it not for last week’s Super Bowl party that my friends threw to mark the game. The big piece de resistance for the meal portion were pulled pork sandwiches and my girlfriend, Sharon, made sure to slow-roast the meat over twelve hours. My contribution, paltry this time around, was a simple slaw to complement the sweet tones of the pulled pork.

My initial thoughts turned to salads I typically gravitate to in the winter. Plates of bright citrus, bowls of hearty lacinato kale, mounds of sturdy escarole. But none of those went as well with pulled pork as a traditional slaw. And when I went on a grocery run, I noticed that while the greens were looking rather limp and sadder than usual, cabbage was sturdy and crisp, as if trying to tell me that I should, perhaps, give slaw a chance.

Continue reading cole slaw with wasabi-spiked mayo.

I realize that rice pudding isn’t about to win the sexiest dessert award anytime soon. It’s dull in color, lumpy in texture, and offers no enticing shape. It’s a lump of gooey rice sitting in your bowl quietly awaiting its fate. If there was a pageant for dessert, rice pudding would lose the swimsuit and the evening gown sections of the competition. It doesn’t sparkle or wow with its looks.

But it would nail the questions category, and when asked what issue is important to its cause, the rice pudding would surely rise to the occasion. It is, without question, my favorite winter dessert, snack, comfort treat. I eat it warm after dinner, with the steam rising from the bowl; I sneak spoonfuls of it at night, cold, straight from the fridge; I could build a lunch around it with some sliced pears and bananas and a steaming cup of Ceylon tea. I could easily write odes to rice pudding, and I might as well have done so just now.
Continue reading rice pudding with coconut milk.

I’ve always been a bit of a homebody, but only now is it becoming acceptable and even cool. I attribute this paradigm shift to age (not that I’m claiming to be old, not at all). As I get older, I enjoy puttering around my home more and more, and it’s finally become acceptable to say to friends, “We stayed in and made dinner on a Saturday night.” No one raises eye brows anymore, expecting you to regale them with a tale of an outing until four o’clock in the morning in the coolest lounge that has just opened – a lounge that doesn’t have a name or an entrance sign and has a password which you must tell to a faceless voice over the telephone nearby. Yes, we’ve all been there. I’m over it and I have been for some time.

Last night, over dinner during our monthly book club meetings, one of my friends was telling us of one such night, which is now an aberration in her life. “A party,” she said, “that started at 10pm. I barely made it. I mean, I really had to remind myself that I had to go.” We all nodded because at this stage in our lives, a party that starts at ten in the evening, is indeed quite late. We’d have to be out, having a late dinner to motivate ourselves to actually attend. If we’re at home in our pajamas – forget about it. It won’t happen.

Continue reading red lentil soup with lemon.

Were I not so bleary-eyed yesterday, I might be able to express my glee about this salad. But I slept poorly, woke up early, and skipped my morning coffee and sat at my desk all day without so much as a drop of caffeine. This morning treated me to a migraine and I decided to work from home where I can be in a dark and quiet room. But this salad is a revelation (it’s basically a kale Caesar salad if you think about it), and it’s going to be on regular rotation this winter. I’ve already made it three times in the span of ten days. I would have made more, but I ran out of lacinato kale. Not to worry, more is coming this week and I plan on making loads more of this come Thursday night for our book club dinner, which I’m hosting this time. But as for you, you must make it as soon as you possibly can. It’s not at all time-consuming and you’ll be amazed that you might start craving a salad this time of year. I can’t implore you enough – go now!

Right around this time of year, I face the perennial problem of how to eat more greens while most everything I see at the farmers’ market is brown. I think because it’s been so bitterly cold outside (six degrees out yesterday morning!) I’m turned off by traditional salads with crunchy lettuce and the usual out-of-season salad accouterments – the last thing I want on my place something cold. I want greens that’s chewy, almost meaty, with a strong, nutty bite and a toothsome quality. Give me something I can sink my teeth into!

Continue reading tuscan kale salad with pecorino.

Maybe I got a little ahead of myself. I had intended for us to be fully unpacked and settled in five days. I thought, if we apply ourselves, we can get it all done in no time, like magic. But settling into a place doesn’t work that way. For one, you discover you need things. Things like shelves and shelf dividers and wall-mounting hooks. Things that help you organize, and if anyone from the Container Store executive team is reading this, we could really use one of your stores in our hood. Of course, the downside to that would mean that I would never, and I mean never, leave it – and Andrew have to explain to people that his girlfriend got lost somewhere between the Elfa shelving units and the kitchen stackables. It would be a sad tale of love and loss. I’d quickly become a cautionary tale, or an urban legend – or both!

Secondly, in the process of unpacking, you discover that there are things you no longer need, things you want to give away, things you want to sell. And so these things, until you find a proper place for them, sit in the middle of you living room/bedroom/hallway shamelessly staring at you as if to say, “You, you who no longer wants me, how could you do this to me? How could you just discard me?” Such is the state of things at the apartment.

Continue reading cauliflower soup with parmesan and harissa.

And so there was the move. It was quick and seamless (is it possible to sing praises to your movers, because I want to!) and the whole thing took less that three hours from the moment the movers got to Andrew’s place to the moment when he handed them the check and tip and we shut the door. It’s official – we can finally can call one central space home, instead of referring to our respective apartments as our “weekend place” and our “city place”. It sounds very bourgeois and fancy, but it was a major pain in the neck constantly to be living our of a bag, unsure if a particular item was here or there. Never mind the cost of New York real estate – boggles the mind.

We unpacked a bunch of boxes on the first day, and around five o’clock were so exhausted we could barely move. We ordered Thai take-out and watched taped episodes of the Daily Show. It felt like heaven, somehow, amidst the clutter and the disarray – it felt so good to be under one roof. And so for the last few days we’ve been trying to settle in – and so far, it’s been really easy and smooth. We rearranged some furniture and it was a lot easier than I thought it would be. It’ll take some time, but we’re on our way. I can finally start cooking in earnest again (hard to do with lots of travel, packing, guests, etc.) and I can’t wait. So this here little dish is from a few weeks back, when I knew I was going to be too busy to cook and develop new recipes, I tucked it away for a day like today. It was inspired by one of our neighborhood restaurants – and the dish I had there has lingered on my mind for quite some time.

Continue reading pasta with brown butter, kabocha and sage.

How did you ring in the New Year? Was it calm and quiet with you and just a few friends or your significant other? Or was it decadent and festive, a Manhattan in one hand and a caviar blini in the other? Me – I chopped off a piece of my finger while making lasagna, and were it not for Andrew stepping in and making the lasagna by himself (with me looking on), we would have shown up to our friends’ party one dish short. It all worked out in the end, trauma aside, even though I now type with nine fingers, while the injured digit rests all bandaged up. It really isn’t so horrible (I’m such a drama queen), but being that it’s my worst cooking injury to date, naturally I’m a little unnerved by it.

So coming off of a busy December, we plunge head on into a full January. 2011, I expect great things of you! There are changes abound, all of them good, but I’m because I’m a creature of habit, because I don’t seek out change on my own (a haircut, or new nail polish doesn’t count) I am, a tiny bit, laced with fear. In the last month since I hinted at some news, I got many emails guessing what these news might be. Suffice to say, they ran the gamut of typical things people “announce”. Well, I’ve kept you wondering long enough. So here goes.

Continue reading rutabaga mash.

As I write this, my heart is somewhere in Vermont, where Andrew and I spent Thanksgiving week with his family and friends in a cozy house replete with bananagrams, a thousand piece puzzle, naps, and snow. It was perfection and neither one of us wanted to return to New York where lately I’ve been feeling a beat or two behind. We ate, rested, laughed. We watched quite a bit of football. There was a mishap with a golf cart that got stuck on the field. And everything about our trip left us grateful for having amazing family and friends. We’d go back in a heartbeat.

This post took me a whole week to write. A whole week, people! A Sisyphean task! I’ve been writing distractedly lately, and it’s been really hard to get my mind focused and honed on this wee space here. There are changes in the air; changes I will write about more clearly soon, but they have been on my mind in a singular, all-consuming way.

Continue reading chana masala.