Comfort Food – Eat Me. Drink Me.

Archive for the ‘Comfort Food’ Category

Summer Lunch: Thai Chicken Sandwich

Thai chicken sandwich (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Partly because it’s unbearably hot everywhere in New York and partly because I’ve been ridiculously busy, I haven’t really been cooking much, writing much, or even eating much. I’ve made pilgrimages to my favorites, Roberta’s and the Tortilleria, tried out new places like Taïm for falafels and the Shake Shack (more on that lovely experience later) for burgers and concretes, but for the most part, I’m living on ice pops, toast, and cold beer.

But since it’s only 88 today in Brooklyn and because I want to celebrate the lease I just signed, I decided to make a sandwich. A sandwich is very rarely inappropriate. There are sandwiches bursting with lettuce and avocados for summer or fresh paninis with tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil. For winter, there are concoctions of melted cheese and sweet onions. Olives, feta, roast beef, eggplant, actually anything can find a home between two slices of bread. Bread like a blanket. Bread like your mother’s arms or puppies or unexpected gifts. Bread the panacea.

I find a nub of cabbage in the fridge. I think it’s over a month old, but with the outer layer cut off, it’s still crisp and fresh inside. Cabbage, hardworking and versatile, resilient, maligned as famine food, but good in times of plenty, also. I dress it with tahini, peanut butter, soy sauce, and lime, drape it over two slices of toast and top with slivers of chicken breast. I wish I had better bread, but a sandwich is still good on Arnold’s whole wheat pre-sliced loaf, especially when the dressing is nutty, sweet, spicy, salty, and when there is cabbage to promise that under summer’s lethargy and sweat is something fresh and full of potential waiting to be revealed.

Thai Chicken Sandwich

1/4 of a green cabbage, slivered 1/2 carrot, ribboned 1 green onion, diced Generous splash of rice wine vinegar 1 tsp. » Continue reading this post...

Dips on Chips: Guacamole

A legitimate question: why have I never written about guacamole? Because seriously, I make great guac. I’m sitting at my desk right now, listening to sweet summer jams and munching on chips and guac. I know it’s a little early for lunch, but I’ve been up since seven working on a writing project and running errands, and I just couldn’t resist that plump little avocado nestled between the onions and garlic saying, Eat me, eat me, I’m so squishy and green!

My passion for guacamole emerged out of on incredibly uncomfortable social situation, which occurred a few summers ago when I was leading backpacking trips with Davidson College. At the end of each trip, the group would go to a Davidson employee’s house for dinner. I don’t even remember who the employee in question was – all I remember is that she was in her late forties and worked in some sort of office and that along with us, she had invited her daughters and her new boyfriend to the dinner as well. Her boyfriend, whose name was Jaun, was clearly at least ten years younger – they had met while Juan and company were renovating her office, or something like that. Her daughters clearly didn’t like Juan and kept rolling their eyes at each other every time their mother said something about him.

Which was often, since she only talked about Juan, clearly to mitigate her daughters’ disapproval. Juan didn’t say anything.

The dinner was something Mexican. Juan is a really good cook. [Insert history of Juan’s family.] Juan, Juan, Juan, Juan. [Daughters roll eyes. Backpacking participants smile awkwardly. Juan smiles awkwardly.] I made these enchiladas just like Juan’s mom used to make. [Shoveling food into mouth to keep from having to make a comment. Silence. Longer awkward silence. » Continue reading this post...

Good News for Your Sweet Tooth: Blueberry Crumble Pie

Lately, I just can’t seem to get enough sugar. I want pudding, bread with peanut butter and honey, chocolate granola, jam and butter, cheesecake, and Nutella on anything. (Speaking of Nutella, anyone manage to catch its most recent commercial, where a doting mother/consumer is touting it as a … health product?) The problem is this: I rarely crave sweet foods, and I happen to never crave them at the grocery store, so I never have sweet foods on hand to munch on when those cravings strike.

The other day, the pain was particularly bad, and not only bad, it was specific. I wanted pie. I wanted pie bad.

Anette and I had just finished making a delightful lunch out of nothing (as usual), and I mentioned my craving. She said, “I have some frozen blueberries,” and in a flash I realized I could make pie. Or I could make something almost like pie.

I want to share this recipe with you because it was so ridiculously easy. We whipped it together in about ten minutes and then just sat back and relaxed while pie magic happened in the oven. So if you, too, find yourself pie-less, you can change the facts of your life with things you probably have somewhere. » Continue reading this post...

Totally Bizarre Thing I’m Kind of Obsessed with Right Now

Mozzarella with butter (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Mozzarella with butter. Not mozzarella and butter. Mozzarella made with butter. It sounds gross, I know. It even looks gross. And eaten cold, um, well, it’s butter. Which is kind of gross.

But melted together on a pita or bagel or pile of potatoes, it’s amazingly delicious. Melted mozzarella is the stuff dreams are made of – it’s the cornerstone of pizza and cheese sticks and anything requiring gooey, stringy, hot cheese. And melted butter makes everything especially bad for you, which is a euphemism for extremely delicious. As the saying goes, more is more. Skeptics be damned, mozzarella and butter is not too much of a good thing.

My mother and I found this interesting specimen at an Italian deli on Grand St. (and corner of…Mulberry?), where they also sell the most phenomenal Sicilian Black Pepper Cheese and excellent prosciutto and whose next door neighbor is a charming, wonderful, amazing pasta shop where is made the most charming, wonderful, and amazing pasta (pumpkin ravioli! black pepper and cheese tortellini! tomato basil linguine!). We are curious people. And buy weird food – just because we can. And what is weirder than mozzarella with a chunk of butter cradled inside?

The last time we were at the shop, we opted for the traditional mozz, but after we had made our purchase, we overheard a pregnant lady raving about the mozzarella with butter. At the time, I remember someone remarking, “Oh, trust the pregnant lady, they eat a lot.” But in retrospect, mozzarella and butter strikes me as just the sort of pregnant lady craving everyone disparages. I’m thinking pickles and peanut butter. Together.

Although, maybe mozzarella and butter is like that too. But in a good way.

Anyway, anyway, anyway. I just got sort of excited about it right now – I made a “pizza” for dinner with pita, butterella, oregano, jalapeño, sundried tomato, and salami slivers which was just great. » Continue reading this post...

The Simple Life (Sans Paris Hilton)

Avocado and sardine toasts (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Today it is raining. Sheets of fine mist slant through my gray Brooklyn sky and I watch it comfortably curled in my desk chair, writing poetry, drinking coffee, reading Buglakov’s The Master and Margarita, where Satan has just finished throwing a rager. I light candles and take a bath, paint my toenails, watch Jesus Christ Superstar, write more poetry, listen to rain dribble against my air conditioning unit with metallic thwacks.

When I wake up this morning, I find this comment from my mother on my facebook status: I didn’t want to get out of bed this morning. All I could think was how the cold has reduced my world to a very small space, and all I do in that space is eat.

Of course, she has no way of knowing that it will be cold in Brooklyn again, that it will rain in Brooklyn, that I, too, won’t want to leave my space – or my space heater. But I consider it good advice, and I eat.

In the cold, on this day, I want nothing complex. I don’t want to cook. I want toast – and then to stick my hands in the toaster after I pull my bread out. I want salty sardines in olive oil and avocado. Sicilian black pepper cheese. Salt. Pepper. And then I want to go back to my desk, surrounded by candles and light, read about the devil, and listen to rain.

Sardine and butter toast (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

» Continue reading this post...

Ingredient – A Quick Shout-Out to Semolina

Semolina flour (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

A few months ago, when I was about to move to New York, I decided to clean out my parents’ pantry of all the things that had been sitting on the shelves for years (not hyperbole) and would most likely be doomed to sit there for many more. I snatched some canned jellies, pickles, pastes, pates, spices, curds, and pastas, knowing they would never be missed. I’ve been slowly working my way through my parents’ pantry here in Brooklyn, and I’m often grateful for that swiped can of anchovies (sorry, mom, I know you would have probably used those) or am inspired by a bag of chocolate pasta I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to buy. Sometimes the food has been sitting around so long it’s already stale – I’ve eaten some disappointing packets of oatmeal, slurped stale Ramen soup, and given away old-tasting pretzels to my less discerning roommates. But so far, the best find from the pantry has been semolina flour.

I had never eaten semolina flour before yesterday. My roommate and I had gone to a kegger in Williamsburg with free Kombucha and free Sixpoint beer, and by the time we left we were feeling hungry and tired after long days. In the mood for a movie and comfort food. I remembered a recipe from last month’s Bon Appétit that I had wanted to try – deep fried eggs with sriracha remoulade, which sounded like the bastion of comfort food: warm, soft-boiled eggs, mayonnaise, spice, pickles, and fried goodness. So I picked up a six-pack of Sierra Nevada at the corner Bodega and made small talk with the owner, who was feeling glum about spending his Friday night stuck under fluorescent lights.

Back at the apartment, I found my neighbor on the couch and told her she was going to have to stay for deep fried eggs even though she had work to do. » Continue reading this post...

On the Insides of Eggs (a poem!?)

The perfection of four egg halves, which had previously been

two whole eggs, broken open on whole grain toast, hummus,

cilantro, the sting of salt, pepper, hidden red chiles. The morning,

expansive, deceptive winter sunlight warming inside the windows.

I’ll clean them soon, I think, and return to my book – a cataclysmic look

at the apocalypse and a world of rats. I eat my eggs. The three men

with whom I share this space are somewhere behind their closed doors,

and I am alone with the contested floral carpet, the drum set,

the hookah still set up with last night’s coal. I remember the eggs

before I broke them, mysterious and round, one brown, stolen

from my roommate, the other white, the last of my own eggs.

One egg cracked the second it hit boiling water, a filament of space

furrowing inside the shell. But broken open, on the whole grain toast

with the hummus, the cilantro, the salt, I can’t tell which egg is which,

and each bright yolk reveals itself the same. » Continue reading this post...

Better With Butter: Aunt Lynda’s Corn Puddin’

Mountainous mashed potatoes (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

The first thing I said when I woke up this morning was: “No more butter. Please don’t make me eat any more butter.” And then, because there was nothing else to eat for breakfast, I stuck a square of macaroni and cheese topped with a dollop of tomato puddin’ in the microwave.

If you’re unfamiliar with tomato puddin’, let me enlighten you on how it’s made. Two cans of chopped tomatoes are mashed with five pieces of white bread and one cup – yes, one cup of sugar. This concoction is then baked until all the natural health benefits of the tomatoes have been removed. Also good to know is that according to my family, this dish counts as a vegetable. Just some trivia.

Christmas in my family is predominantly loud. This year, though the pair of almost-octogenarians presided over only two braches of the family tree – my mother, father, me, my two brothers, my aunt, her husband, her two daughters, one daughter’s husband, his two children, her three children, and a dog – the decibel level was impressive. Everybody’s stories needed to be told at the same time, their recipes recounted in maniacal tones. The children seemed unable to have as much fun if someone wasn’t screaming and the camera’s shutter clicked so often the room began to resemble a disco rave.

I love my family very much. But I am a quiet person, and it takes a little time adjusting to the chaos of the (almost) entire Cohen clan. Fighting passionately about the rules of Mexican Train dominoes, telling the story (again) about that embarrassing thing you did at your baptism (like poop your baptismal dress) when you were a few months old, or belittle other family members’ sports teams as creatively as possible. It’s very Norman Rockwell, but a little louder and with less pastel. » Continue reading this post...