smitten kitchen

My first day back to work after New Years started with my laptop flat lining, having to clean the office pantry microwave after my oatmeal blew up in it, finding myself completely and frantically over my head in a new bit of work I personally requested the week before and a wind-tunneled trip to the new Apple store to gaze at the shiny brightness. In short, I had hoped to be gently eased into 2008, but since that wasn’t in the cards for me, I ended it with a dinner of French Toast. What? Tell me that you’re not jealous.

But you know what else I did, you know, in my maple syrup haze? I completed one half of one of my smittenkitchen new years resolutions! See that over there in the sidebar? Yup, that would be a cooking or kitchen Tip of the Day from little old me. (Hat tip to problogdesign.com for spelling this method out so clearly!) I’ve got a few kinks to work out–like an RSS feed for that category, as I’ve realized these aren’t working–but as I populate the archives, you should start seeing bits of information I’ve picked up over the years spit out to you in bytes. Comments are open, so if you find my Buttermilk Recipe, for example, to be totally off its rocker, feel free to tell me so. It wouldn’t be the first time.

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If there is one thing that Alex has shown me the light of over the course of our relationship–but fortunately, there are many, including ribs, pickles, bourbon and skiing–it’s the consummate beauty of a vacation that entails absolutely nothing. No water skiing, no scuba diving, no afternoon of shopping, no conga lines: just hours upon hours on the beach, tearing through one book at a time. Can you imagine how awful this must be after months of doing things and being ‘on’ and producing things of value for other people in exchange for earning a living? I’ll tell you, it’s a big adjustment.

Day one is always a little bewildering; we find ourselves saying “Wow, a whole week?” “Seven DAYS of this?” and “What will we do with ourselves?” a lot. Day two we start settling into the beach life–barefoot, sunscreened, our winter coats looking ridiculous hanging in the room’s closet–and make some dents in our books. By day three, however, we’re pretty used to it all: the bluest–aqua, really–ocean we have ever seen, silky white sand, absurd 3 p.m. cocktails called the Tropicolada and the uncanny ability to take a long post-cocktail nap despite having slept 10 hours the night before, and this is where everything descents into a haze. Without a singular event or laughable attempt at productivity that will serve as a demarcation between the days, we tend to blink twice and its day seven. We wonder how our families are doing. We ponder what plans we have made for the weekend we return.

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A small miracle happened in our apartment this week: we paid someone to clean it, and seriously, you could lick the floors [but of course, really shouldn’t for a reason that rhymes with Shmatatouille, not that I really want to get into it].

I have spent too much of my adult life trapped in this faux-Buddhist state of thou shalt clean thy own messes; it’s good for you, I reasoned. Cleaning should be a Zen experience. Please, stop laughing. Quit it.

Needless to say, at some point between work and more work, errands and, I don’t know, waking up on Saturday mornings with a desire to leave the apartment and not scrub the edges of it, our little penthouse turned into a place we were not exactly proud of. And when you are as obsessive as I am, this is a very bad thing. I’d look around the apartment before I left each morning and sigh; this is not what I wanted for us, and come home too tired to do anything but sigh at it again.

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burrowed blueberries
baked for an eternity
demolished quickly

i like mine busy
onion, celery, pickles
we crunch, contemplate

red smoky spicy
joy, the broiler and i have
found pork chop heaven

from silver palates
summer pasta salad for
the ages, also: me

eggplant gift, curry
craving, watery and dull
better luck next time

artichoke obsessed
i cannot count the ways, but
just added one more

I’ve gotten behind again, and daunted by the task of catching up on six recipes at once, I have resorted to Poetry 101. Turns out, writing Haiku is addictive. Soon, I’ll be speaking less and choosing my words carefully, and Alex will demand of all of you, “Who is she and what did you do with my Debbie?”

[Oh, and for the love of all that is tasty, if you’re actually looking for some solid food-gazing poetry, this is a far more eloquent place to start.]

Have a great weekend! I hope to reemerge in a day or so with some completely over-the-top birthday decadence.

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Have you ever eaten, like, a lot of cabbage over a few week period? I mean, a lot a lot. More cabbage than most people eat in two years, a lot. Well, thank goodness my cabbage-patching was not for nothing as my second NPR Kitchen Window column is up today about, you guessed it, coleslaw. (The first one, in March, was about Russian Zakuski.)

I have to admit that I am particularly pleased with these recipes, though I know that it is silly that it should warrant a confessional. On this site, I have published a couple coleslaw variations over the last year (an Indian-spiced, updated classic, and a green onion version), but I knew there was so much more out there. This article forced me to attack some of the ideas I have had brewing, though I simply can’t condone eating them in the frequency and quantity that we have.

Recipes on NPR include:

• Blue Cheese Coleslaw
• Napa Cabbage and Sesame Seed Slaw
• Spicy Radicchio Slaw with Pecans
• Pickled Coleslaw (a.k.a. my take on Zabar’s Health Salad I promised you way back when)

May your coleslaws never lack luster again!

Elsewhere: Coleslaw: You Could be a Star

Update, wholly unrelated: You know you have truly *arrived* (I kid) when your hosting service emails you to tell you that you’re getting too fat and they had to air lift you to another server. I’m not sure if anyone else would have noticed, but load times have been very sluggish lately, and this site has been down more than once, not including the time Alex and I decided it would be fun to delete it altogether. I am hoping this will be the end of the problems. And now, back to the roughage!