Author: zora

Ratatouille and Pirate Chefs

I was all set to write a gushing little commentary about Ratatouille starting with, “OMG! Go NOW!”

But then I realized you probably already have. I’m a little late to the table.

But I did see it last night at the Ziegfeld (largest movie theater in NYC), and laughed, cried, etc. So many brilliant details about kitchen life. They even make fun of “a revelation”–I am vindicated!

One offhand line stuck with me–a comment by the one woman cook at the restaurant, saying the kitchen staff is like a pirate crew.

Which now seems wildly obvious, but I don’t think it had occurred to me before. Now I see that the current obsession with life in the pro kitchen is just a subset of the larger “pirate renaissance” (Chuck Klosterman’s term) we’re enjoying at the moment. Anthony Bourdain is the culinary Jack Sparrow.

I guess I should start wearing an eye patch.

Cairo, Wahashtini!

Aw–all the goofy little details I like about Cairo, bundled up in one video:

(Khalid, was that what the hospital was like?!)

If you ever have the chance to see Hakim in concert, go! You haven’t lived until you’ve seen about 12 Egyptian dudes in ’80s-look jumpsuits doing full choreography for a screaming crowd…and that was just in Brooklyn. Can’t imagine in his hometown.

And this was the song that was all the rage on the streets:

Uh, it’s called “Grapes.” And the lyrics are something about, well, how sweet grapes are. And how the red ones are good, and so are the yellow ones. Is that dirty? No one, apparently, is sure, but everyone loves the song. I won’t blame you if you stop the video partway through, given the hideous quality–and you sort of get the point of the song anyway.

Summer Trip: The Food

About the time I was eating the most amazing mussels in the world, on the beach in Greece, I realized I should cut a teensy bit of slack to all those lazy food writers who overuse the phrase “a revelation” to describe whatever they’re eating. (I loathe this, for the record.)

I’m not saying the hand of God reached down and chucked me under the chin while I was eating, but I did have a moment of “a-ha” that was close to revelatory.

The next thought I had was: Maybe American food writers use “a revelation” so often because Americans have such awful food. In a cosmopolitan place like NYC, you can eat duck confit, medium-rare pork chops, assorted artisanal cheeses, and fresh veggies of all kinds, but very often you’re just eating a flawless simulacrum of the real thing…and probably paying a lot for it.

I use the prefix “art” to describe this, as in “an art pork chop.” Not at all to disparage the field of art or the process or art-making, but a food item that resembles food in every way but flavor may as well be an object placed on a plinth and lit with halogen bulbs. Then people can come peer at it and call it “cunning” in their critical reviews.

Because our food production system is so fucked up, and our palates so stunted by a relative lack of food tradition and our demand for cheap over tasty, we Americans eat art food all the time–and a lot of the time we don’t even know it.

It’s not till you eat a mussel that is briny and sexy like an oyster, but also sweet like a scallop, and sitting in a gorgeous translucent green shell that you realize exactly why people like mussels so much. It’s not till you eat a green fig off the tree that you realize what all the hype is about. And of course there’s always the “real tomato” issue.

So part of the problem I have with food writers having “revelations” all over the damn place is that they’re just showing exactly how little experience they have eating good food. If you’re having a revelation in print over some duck confit, it means you haven’t eaten good duck confit before. And shouldn’t that be just the barest qualification for getting paid to write about food?

Also, of course, food writers are always getting rapturous about their meals in France. Every food magazine every month has something about France–even Saveur, which is the most worldly of mags, and I admire them for it, still does the fallback “X region in France is amazing” story every couple of months.

I know France is great and all, but again, food writers are just revealing how un-stamped their passports are if all they’ve got to talk about is the charming village market and the authoritative French woman who prepares a revelatory lunch with her strong, assured hands.

Anyway, what I ate on my trip, which was soooo much more adventurous, and for which I was a million times better informed than even the most highly paid professionals:

1) Those motherf***ing mussels. We went back and had them a second time, and they weren’t as good–maybe they’d been overcooked, maybe they were not as fresh. It was good to know at least that Greeks in Eressos weren’t sitting around smugly eating mussels behind our backs every day.

2) Quick salt-cured sardines. Also in Greece, from a nice old lady in the village of Andissa. They were plump and succulent. A little obscene, like if you really did bite off your husband’s nice plump lip and ate it.

3) Pigeon in Cairo. I’ve already mentioned it, but that was truly, truly delectable. (And not a single bite of birdshot–there’s an urban legend in the city that all the pigeon comes from the shooting club, and friend-of-a-friend broke a tooth on birdshot once.) The pigeon gets stuffed with rice or freekeh (cracked green wheat), then it gets simmered for a while to cook the stuffing, and then it gets plopped down in a searing hot pan, to crisp up the skin. The broth from the simmering is served on the side in a mug, and it’s incredibly peppery and delicious. I would drink just the broth, but the resto has a policy that you also must order pigeon–but once you do, it’s all-you-can-drink broth.

4) Malta plums in Turkey. Not that these were the world’s most delicious fruit–just that I’d never had them before, and they were sweet and fascinating. They’re the color of apricots and have big, slippery seeds in the center, and they’re outrageously sticky. In the same day, I also got to sample some fresh chickpeas. Cool-looking, but enh.

5) Olive-oil-stewed sea beans, served cold, at Ciya in Istanbul. Every time, this restaurant has something delightful. They were still a little crispy-bouncy in texture, and the sort of salty you know comes from the inside rather than being added in the kitchen. (Incidentally, this is why Mediterranean fish are so delicious, claimed the fish grill man at our resto in Eressos.)

6) Ayran in Syria and Turkey. I’ve had it a lot before, but it’s always remarkable just how thirst-quenching salty, watered-down yogurt can be.

7) The world’s sweetest yogurt in Ayvalik, Turkey. We were eating a basic little lunch while waiting for the ferry, and I saw the guys at the next table had big plates of homemade yogurt. We got some for ourselves, and it was dairy-product heaven–light, not heavy like Greek strained stuff, and sweet-sour, and with a nice crusty layer of cream on top. Costa in Greece insisted it was because the Turks put sugar in everything–or at least used grape must to start the souring process. Which is interesting on its own. (On a separate dairy-product topic, I saw rennet for sale in a grocery store in Ayvalik–made by the major milk producer, and in a little bottle, right there next to the premade cheese. Great that there’s an assumption your average shopper would make cheese at home.)

8) Everything in Syria.

9) Apricots right off the tree in Greece, and even a few cherries. The local cherries (some we actually paid for, from the fruit stand) were exactly the sort of thing that make people say “a revelation.” They just kept tasting and tasting and tasting and tasting.

10) Best. Beans. Ever. in Istanbul. Fittingly, the name of the restaurant was ‘bean.’ At first, we ordered only one serving, and the waiter looked nervous. After I’d had a couple spoonfuls of Peter’s, and ordered my own, he looked relieved. Order and balance were restored. These beans were perfectly tender, just so they gave a bit when you bit into them, but held their shape. And they were swimming in this tomato-ish sauce that can only be described as pure umami. I have no idea what the magic ingredient was, but it did make me realize I hadn’t eaten pork in many, many weeks. Because that kind of tastiness I associate with pork bits, and here, they’d managed to get it by other means.

11) Assorted other things: kalkan (turbot) in Istanbul, baklava in Istanbul, borek in Istanbul, ice cream in Istanbul. Oh, and did I mention the man selling sardines, who had a beautiful silvery pile, but also a bucket of live ones, and periodically he’d grab a live one and throw it down on top of the silvery mound, where it would jump and thrash, as if to say, “These fish are soooo fresh…” Maybe a little sadistic, but a genius sales technique (right up there with the bra vendors I saw on the street in Cairo, tossing the biggest bras up in the air like pizza dough).

**For the record, Peter and I decided we’re against Turkey getting into the EU. Sure, some people might be a little less poor, or something. But it will inevitably make food worse, as produce-starved northerners demand Turkey’s farms yield bigger and more stuff. Currently, tomatoes are sweeter and cucumbers are crispier than anywhere but Syria, and I don’t want that to get fucked up by greenhouses. (Egypt, incidentally, has started using greenhouses–retarded, considering the one thing Egypt doesn’t lack is sun and dry weather. The tomatoes now suck.) Also, Turkey is already perfectly functional in other respects: you can drink the water, and you can even buy train tickets online. They don’t need the damn EU.

That is all. Must go eat breakfast/lunch. Probably no revelations to be had, alas.

I Got Crabs–Twice!

(For pics, see my Flickr page.)

Turns out Peter and I didn’t have to travel halfway around the world to slurp up the milk of human kindness–we just had to take the three-hour train trip to Baltimore.

Travelin’ fools that we are, we popped down there Saturday to attend a wedding. Food and transport geeks that we are, Peter charted a path that involved light rail and crab cakes before the wedding.

The light rail train was pulling away as we reached the tracks, which meant we had to abandon that plan and take a taxi, where our chatty driver said he wasn’t so into Faidley’s, but he always swore by G&M on Nursery Road. His only complaint was that it was a long drive, and by the time he ended up delivering all the crab cakes that his friends had ordered, “My own crab cake done got cold!” he declared, hitting his steering wheel for emphasis of the cruel paradox. I discreetly wrote down the name of the place while he was talking.

In we marched to Faidley’s, on the back side of Lexington Market. These crab cakes are so fucking tremendously life-changing that we’ve even ordered them for delivery to NYC–at horrific expense, as you might imagine. But eating at Faidley’s is really part of the experience. There’s the crab-cake part, but there’s also a whole seafood market part, and a huge raw bar. I don’t know why, but I love to see “normal” people eating stuff like oysters, lobster and crabs. Once upon a time, these weren’t luxury food–they were just the things people scooped out of the ocean they happened to be living by. So it seems only right to enjoy them standing up, with a can of Natty Boh and a squeeze-bottle of hot sauce.

But first: the crab cakes. To do a side-by-side comparison, we ordered a pure lump one and a backfin one–the backfin is smaller bits of more shredded meat, and five bucks cheaper. I think I liked it a little better, as you could get a whole bite of mixed texture, whereas the lump was so big and lumpy that you wound up with only one lump of crab on your fork.

But the taste–if you haven’t eaten these things, true Maryland crab cakes in the state of Maryland, well, do it now. They are sweet and buttery and purely crabby. Nowhere outside Maryland seems to get this, and chefs are always ruining perfectly good crab by putting their own “signature touch” on crab cakes. Bullshit–Maryland already did its “signature touch” and anyone else should get their grubby little hands off. Crab cakes should get DOC status.

Anyway: We also ordered, because we could, a soft-shell crab sandwich. I also love anything called a “sandwich” which is really just said item balanced on a couple of pieces of white bread. There was a little lettuce here as well, but that’s beside the point. And the point was a whole crab, battered and fried–looking perfectly lifelike except for the tasty little crust he was encased in.

The guys next to us at the long stand-up bar tables had ordered sandwiches as well. One guy picked his up to eye level, peered at it with a triumphant glare, and said, “I’m gonna eat you!” The fried crab’s pinchers poked out of each side of the white bread, helpless in their batter. Soon, he made good on his promise.

Then we proceeded a few steps to the raw bar and ordered up just half a dozen clams and oysters. The clams set me off on a terrible memory hunt–I swear I ate the most amazingly sweet and delicious clams sometime in the last six months, making me realize what all the fuss was about. I can’t remember where, or in what form. These clams were not the most sensational, nor were the oysters, but they were ridiculously fat. And they tasted great with beer. (The raw bar was out of soda, so we had to drink beer–really.)

We wandered out the far side of Lexington Market, past slabs of steaks, piles of snickerdoodles, rows of cakes, and even a nice stack of pig ears.

Then we hopped our light rail out to BWI airport–the wedding was at the neaby Ramada. The tremors of the light rail are good for digestion, I think.

The next morning, we woke up a little hungover, and hungry. The Ramada’s breakfast service looked unappealing, and in the course of the previous night’s revelry–in between Peter’s cop friends dancing to Meatloaf and Abba in equal measure–we got confirmation that G&M was the shit, and it was only “one exit away” from our hotel. (Ah, the charms of rural navigation…)

In the cab on the way to G&M, we of course talked about crab cakes. Our driver–like everyone else we’d asked–absolutely loved G&M, and got a little misty-eyed about it. “Oh, Sunday’s the best day for eating crab! Well, actually, crab cakes are good any day, of course–but on Sunday you really have time to enjoy them.” And here’s where the kindness really started to flow: Turned out we were in the cab of a woman whose mother had been a champion cook (her funeral lasted three hours, due to people standing up and praising her coleslaw), and she wasn’t so bad herself. She figured that yes, we could make crab cakes ourselves. So on the way to G&M, Amelia told us her technique. Not much goes into a quality crab cake, but just about the time she hit parsley flakes (“they’re only in there to make it look nice, really”) I realized I would certainly forget one essential ingredient.

We popped out at G&M, and arranged for Amelia to pick us up in half an hour to take us to the train station.

In that half-hour, we conducted serious comparison studies on the subject of Maryland Crab Cakes. We were not distracted by the fact that G&M made no indication from the outside that it even sold crab cakes.

Nor were we distracted by the baklava and Greek salads and massive list of sub sandwiches on the menu. (The owners appeared to be from the northernmost island in the Dodecanese, for the record.) After all, “crab cake” can only ever take up one line on a menu. There’s no real variant, except at Faidley’s, where they come in lump and backfin. Amelia had suggested the clam strips as well, but there was a glitch in our order, and we never got them.

G&M’s crab cakes were a different breed. Where Faidley’s stood up straight and tall, G&M’s slumped messily over the white roll they were served on. Faidley’s has a shameless butteriness, and maybe even a touch of sugar; and you can taste the mustard they put in the mix. G&M’s tasted like crab and nothing else. They were bound together with an almost souffle-like egg mixture, dotted with little flecks of Old Bay seasoning. I don’t know if they were better than Faidley’s, but they were fucking tasty.

We also were able to do right by Tamara, who’d been consumed by bitterness the day before when we SMS’d a pic of our Faidley’s spread. Faidley’s is closed on Sundays, but G&M was wide open, and happen to pack a to-go box with half a dozen of the guys–half a dozen because it didn’t seem worth packing just one or two in styrofoam with cold packs. (“There’s mayonnaise in them,” the counter girl told me sternly when I implied I might carry them home unrefrigerated.)

On the way out, a woman in the parking lot spied our box. “You can really get those to go?” she asked, wistfully. She stroked her chin, clearly doing the math. (Crab cakes are pricey–$12 for an 8 oz. delight. You do our math–and add a good $45 for cab fare.) “I live in Virginia now,” she said, “and boy, do I miss these.” Peter allowed how he was in the same boat, living in New York. “But in New York,” she pointed out, “at least you’ve got a lot of other stuff to choose from–pizza, Chinese food, hot dogs, corned-beef sandwiches…” We got a little sad imagining culinary life in Virginia, especially if you don’t like barbecue much, as this woman said. “I love seafood–that’s all I want!” she sighed as we got in the cab.

Amelia cheered us right back up. While we were eating, she’d been writing down her recipe for us. Of course no real amounts, but that goes without saying.

Here’s what goes in a quality crab cake, per a kindhearted taxi driver in Anne Arundel County: 1 lb. lump crab (“MD only”), “1 egg raw,” bread crumbs or crackers, Old Bay seasoning, mustard, mayo, baking powder, parsley flakes. Bake at 450 degrees.

But what to do if we had problems? Oh, there was Amelia’s name and phone number at the bottom, so we could call if we were confused.

Peter and I got out of the cab blinking back tears, toting our little box of G&M wonders and smiling like idiots. We took those crab cakes straight over to Tamara’s, and she forgave us for being so mean to her via cellphone the day before. See, New Yorkers can be sweet and kind too.

(For pics, see my Flickr page.)

Kabab Cafe Reopening!

Hooray! Ali is getting back in action as of tomorrow, Saturday, 7/7/07. Unfortunately I, like probably everyone else in the US, have to go to a wedding, so I won’t be there to check it out myself.

Thanks to meddlesome fire inspectors, Ali has had to totally revamp his kitchen. I’m very curious what the new menu will involve… Please, someone go and report back! I won’t be able to go until at least Tuesday.

Cairo: The Wrap-Up

Looking through all my pics has made me a little sniffy and nostalgic. Photos are sneaky that way–that’s exactly how I got talked into going back to Burning Man.

Come to think of it, Cairo is sort of like Burning Man–lots of dust, everyone wants to talk to you, and a lot of people want to have sex with you. And seriously–some of the getups are amazing. Also some scary crowd-control issues.

But enough belabored metaphor. What I like in the end is that people there are happy, and they’re ready to make you laugh too.

Part of my attitude readjustment re: Cairo came from reading an excellent book: Max Rodenbeck’s Cairo: The City Victorious. It’s a broad history as well as commentary on contemporary life. Somehow, reading that Cairenes were exceptionally proud of how they completely ripped off the king of Mali or somesuch, many many centuries ago, made me feel better about all the tedious little shopping scams you encounter today.

Another thing I enjoyed immensely was going to the Souq al-Gumaa (Friday Market), which is this mass of shopping insanity that takes place weekly in the southern cemetery area. As our de facto tour guide, Anna, described it, the line between what’s for sale and what’s trash is pretty arbitrary–there will be some old woman presiding over a blanket covered with broken telephones, used-up ballpoint pens and one shoe. The other shoe may very well be in the trash pile that’s just a few feet away.

Beyond the random junk-sellers is the animal market–where it was sad to see desert foxes in cages, but hilarious to see people excited about buying fluffy white Persian cats–and also a long row of the dustiest antiques you’ll ever see. And that sort-of road winds up in a section selling nothing but toilets. The overpasses are soaring overhead, the din is shocking, and the crowds are so oppressive it’s not clear how anyone actually buys anything–you’re basically forced to walk at a slow shuffle, or else be trampled. Nonetheless, Anna came away with three pairs of great vintage sunglasses, and I nearly expired from the heat. It was everything to hate about Cairo, but also everything to love.

As a place to do guidebook research, it was surprisingly not too difficult. Perhaps half the information I was given will turn out to have been absolutely made up on the spot–but I did my part.

One interesting detail was how quickly I was picked out as “the Lonely Planet person.” When I was checking out hotels, I genuinely was looking for a place where Peter and I would bunk down for a while, so when I said, “I’m just looking now–my husband’s coming next week,” I was not lying. And in that case, it made perfect sense that I didn’t have any luggage with me. But nonetheless, at least five hotel guys said, “You’re the Lonely Planet person, aren’t you?” and then proceeded to shower me with tea and sodas. I have never had anyone call me out as a guidebook writer before–either because people in Mexico don’t care that much, or don’t have a keen enough eye for a disheveled person with a pen in one hand and a compulsive need to pick up business cards.

And incidentally, the fact that guys guessed I was specifically from Lonely Planet was based not on extra-cunning detective work on their part, but the fact that, in Egypt anyway, “Lonely Planet” is right up there with Kleenex or Xerox. (LP marketing should be doing high-fives at this point. Other publishers are gnashing their teeth in despair.) For once, I could see how being a guidebook author is actually sort of close to being a celebrity, in the way that Mr. Killing Batteries depicts his glamorous lifestyle.

One last note about the Cairo trip, and I’m sure you’ve all been wondering: I was only mildly sick, for about a day. I only count sick as incapacitated and unable to leave the hotel room–I spent this one day lying around thinking I might throw up, but never did. Other days I did have a few, um, urgent moments and some discomfort, but overall nothing akin to the gastrointestinal devastation I experienced ten years ago.

But unless you think Cairo has somehow improved its hygiene or generally become less of an assault on the system (my nausea could have just as well been from the heat and dehydration as from food), think again: The very next day, Peter was felled by vicious vomiting that actually required drugs to make him stop. Also, two other visitors I met there required IV drips because they’d gotten so ill.

Sigh. That’s just never going to make the tourists excited to come. Perhaps if you’re carried around in an air-conditioned litter and fed only sterilized grapes? I guess that’s what tour buses are, essentially–and that’s no way to see the world. Wading into the Souq al-Gumaa, sucking pigeon meat from the little leg bones, being invited to weddings by random people on the street–I’m willing to suffer a little incapacitation for that.

F**king Delicious!

Aw, what the heck–why not post it here? Tamara and I recorded this demo last September. For some reason, we are still not yet TV stars, conquering the media world and personally tearing Rachael Ray limb from limb.

(I do feel obliged to point out that I was not asked to copy edit the final cut. Alas. But the end result is still fabulous.)

(Follow-up on Gurhan: We tried to track him down on this recent Turkey trip, as he hadn’t been answering our emails. We found out that he had gone back to working for the Turkish army and had been transferred to Iraq. Crap. Incidentally, his previous job had been translating The Economist for the army. I suspect the US army doesn’t read The Economist.)

The Debut of the One-Ass Kitchen!

OMG! Tamara has been sitting on a blog domain for years, and now there’s something on it: Check out the One-Ass Kitchen!

It’s nice that she has done this, because I’ve pretty much stopped covering our Sunday Night Dinners, since they all go so swimmingly and don’t really yield the sort of dramatic stories that our early cooking ventures did. But trust me, they’re still a good time.

Also, I highly recommend watching this–it’s the demo we did for our so-far-undiscovered-genius TV show last fall. Good music!