smitten kitchen

My husband and I have different packing personalities. First, I need a clean apartment, you know, before I wreck sections of it at a time. Then I need to go through every single thing we own before any of it gets packed and determine whether it should stay or does it need to go. I cannot stand the thought of moving, well, useless baggage to a new and supposedly clean slate of an apartment. Then each box has to have a separate topic; if desk stuff gets in with book stuff, I get itchy and start pacing the floor. How does Alex pack? Oh, he puts stuff in boxes until everything’s packed. I probably don’t need to tell you who is better at getting the job done.

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Given that I can say, without pausing or so much as batting an eyelash, that artichokes are my favorite food on earth, it’s kind of a bummer that they’re so woefully underrepresented here. Sure, there are Artichoke Ravioli, a quick Potato and Artichoke Tortilla, a a scooped heart filled with fresh cranberry beans, a gratin and some crostini in which they play a supporting role, but when you love them as much as I do, this is not enough. Nothing ever is.

Artichoke season can’t come soon enough for people like me, even if the best we usually get are cross-country, battered and overpriced visitors. It is never enough to deter me, and neither were these downright busted looking ones I saw at the store yesterday for a reduced price. I pounced on them, as even with shoddy leaves, their hearts are in the right place, that is, center and endlessly delicious.

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Last Valentine’s Day, Alex and I had dinner at Prune. Alex wore my favorite suit of his and brought a giant bouquet of roses and a gift, because he’s spoil-me-rotten like that. We had the most decadent meal, but I couldn’t help but go home with the nagging feeling that I had ordered from the wrong side of the menu. You see, chef Gabrielle Hamilton’s menus are an editorial delight, and on Valentine’s Day she went to town with an especially charmingly bipolar one.

The Lovers’ Menu from which we ordered had all sorts of rich and spectacular foods, including homemade chocolate kisses (with tissue paper messages) dolloped out by a friend of mine who was working there as a pastry chef at the time. But the other side, the Cynics’ menu–with its Broken Vinaigrette, Whore’s (Puttanesca) Pasta, Cold Shoulder of Pork and Coffee and Cigarettes, oh and at half the price–well, it was evident that the bitter folks were having more fun. Really, it’s not the first time. Because my Valentine and I have a sense of humor (and also due to my inherent dislike of Special Romantical Menus in general) I couldn’t resist my own recreation of a Not Really Cynic’s Menu Thursday night: Pasta Puttanesca and a Bitter Salad with Broken Artichoke Hearts.

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Last month, en route to a cousin’s baby shower in Connecticut, my mother, sister and I realized that we needed a new envelope for the card we’d brought and swung into a strip shopping mall which housed a crafts store. I ran in to buy one, and found myself smack dab in front of something so mind-blowingly awesome, it took me nearly a minute to remember to breathe: as if I couldn’t love her any more, Martha Stewart apparently has a line of crafts products, and people, if there are two things I’m powerless in the face of, it’s a rack that contains not one, not two, but eleven different types of crafts glue and their doyenne. That I walked out of the store that day with not a single MSC product is nothing but a testament to my refuse-to-overstuff-my-tiny-apartment willpower, but it’s been three weeks now, and still, almost every other worth that breathlessly escapes my lips sounds like MonkeyPartyinaBox! or PaperBagPuppetKit! I am nothing if not a sensible, level-headed individual.

Monday, the mailroom guy arrived at my desk with the Biggest Box in the Whole world, and people, it was from Martha Stewart Freaking Crafts Dot Com. I shit you not. I briefly worried that I had in fact lost what was left of my mind and ordered a Leaf Wood Stamp 1 whilst drunk or something. (Hey, some people drunk-dial exes, perhaps drunk-buying multi-colored Evening Terrace Decorative Adhesive could be my thing. Can you imagine what a riot it would be to tell this story at a party?) I mean, this really crossed my mind, and left me so panicked that I went to see if I had an account, or old emails confirming an order, but retrieved nothing. So I IM-ed Alex and confessed that I thought I might be placing orders on MarthaStewartCrafts.com in my sleep, and why couldn’t I just be a normal girl and sleep-shop for Manolos? And do you know what knee-weakening sweet nothing he whispered into my monitor? Do you?

“That’s box one of two.”

Hummuna. Did I score well or what?

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Sometimes I’m worried that I might be boring you guys. Yes, yes, being plagued by feelings of dullness and inadequacy, how very tired of me. But, let’s take some of the themes we have here; artichokes, beans, arugula, salad, bread and the most repetitive one of all: I ate something somewhere, and had to have it again ASAP so I tried to make it myself. Today, we’ve got all of them bundled into one. I try to say to myself, Deb, not everyone is infatuated by artichokes, arugula, beans and salads and every single way you can think of eating them either separately or together. I try to rationalize, although it’s not my strong suit. But then I imagine a world without people who get as excited as I do about artichokes! arugula! beans! and it makes me terrifically sad. Thus today I present to you: Artichoke, Cranberry Bean and Arugula Salad, or seriously the best thing I’ve gotten to eat twice in a week in way too long.

We went out to dinner at really-you-must-go-there Dressler in Williamsburg on Saturday night with our most newly-married friends. Alex and Steve had leaden cocktails and I, well you know, I did that thing you do with your married female friends where you make sure they’ve ordered something with alcohol? Or you’ll start with the irresponsible rumor-mongering? Oh, I know this because it happens to me like every freaking day and people, there is always wine in my hand. We’re all caught up now? Onwards, then.

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