North America – Eat Me. Drink Me.

Archive for the ‘North America’ Category

A Pennsylvania Fall:
Tuna Salad Croquettes

In Berlin, if you blink too fast you’ll miss fall. For the last ten years, I’ve stubbornly insisted that fall is my favorite season. But this year, as I celebrate my decennial in this city, I will finally give up the fight and align myself with team summer. In part, it’s because I recently spent two weeks in my ancestral homeland remembering what a glorious fall is supposed to feel like. The days are still slow-baked with sunshine, but there’s a breeze that tugs against it as night falls. The late-September leaves are just starting to dip-dye orange and red and yellow. It’s sweater weather. It’s decorative gourd season. I have no feelings about pumpkin spice, but maybe I’ve just been away too long.

At the apple harvest festival, held each year in Adams County, Pennsylvania, I reanimated a twenty-year old memory. There were the vats of apple butter being stirred, the Boy Scouts selling hot apple cider. The chainsaw carving demonstration, the craft stands, the antique hand-cranked machine that makes friendship bracelets. The apple fritter, scooped fresh from a bubbling vat of oil and dusted with powdered sugar, so hot it’s hard not to burn your tongue. I grew up in apple growing country, and it has spoiled me for the supermarket. Outside Gettysburg, there’s an orchard market that always provided our autumn apples – they’d have big wooden crates piled high with different varieties, some standard, some heirloom, and we’d fill a big paper bag with them, plus maybe a pumpkin or two and whatever late summer fruits were still coming off the trees. Mom’s apple pie is the best apple pie, but the secret is Hollabaugh’s apples.

The apple fritter, scooped fresh from a bubbling vat of oil and dusted with powdered sugar, so hot it’s hard not to burn your tongue. » Continue reading this post...

A Tale of Two Beaches

The Baltic stretches out to the horizon placid and pink from the reflection of the early morning sky. There is only a bank of cloud to the west, still heavy and purplish with night, but the eastern sun is quickly burning the sky above the ocean blue and white. I stand at the water’s edge; my bare skin prickles against the chill. I breathe in deeply and walk into the water.

The ice of it sucks my breath away, and today it’s all me propelling my body forwards and under. Gone are the greenish, churning waves of the last few days that slapped up against my belly and chest and made short work of getting in. But also gone is the wall of seagrass torn from the ocean floor and hurled against my legs and into every seam of my swimsuit. The water today is clear. I can see all the way to the neat, rippled rows of sand beneath my feet.

Finally, I’m up to my neck. The horizon is nothing but a scar. At my feet, mitosis; an underwater tumbleweed splits apart, and one half of it is a crab, its back the color of salad leaves left to wilt in the fridge. It scuttles in half circles around my feet and warily, carefully, we dance.

Ten minutes. That’s how long we stay in the water. It’s one minute for every degree Celsius that your body can take before it begins to cool too far, and the water here is fifteen degrees. So ten minutes is safe. Still, my wet skin prickles with goosebumps as it meets the salt-soaked air. The water is only at knee height when a reddish bloom catches my eye. Pulsing furiously and too fast for comfort, a jellyfish red as washed-out bricks shows us his tangled underbelly. » Continue reading this post...

It Means Soul – A Night at Alma

Vichyssoise with feta, apple, and poblano (photo courtesy of alma cocina latina)

Honeycomb (photo courtesy of alma cocina latina)

I don’t see my family as often as I’d like. One brother lives in Berlin with me, but the other is in Orlando; one set of parents is in Baltimore, the other in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. There’s always Christmas, that whirlwind holiday in which we flit up and down the highway between homes, squeezing in visits with old friends and last-minute trips to the store for stocking stuffers. But in part because we all live so spread out, and because there’s so much else happening around the holidays, we make an effort to see each other throughout the year, to vacation together – a cruise through the balmy, blue Caribbean, a week sampling all the baklava in Greece, or renting a house on a sound in Maine.

Growing up, my nuclear family lived far from our extended families. Back then, my mom’s family was concentrated in Florida, my dad’s in southern Germany. We were in rural Pennsylvania. But we were always traveling to see family, spending Christmases in Orlando or summers on the Swabian Jura – or taking everyone, aunts and uncles and cousins to Tuscany to spend a week in one of those big, rambling terra cotta villas (German family) or to the smoky, barbecue-filled backwoods of North Carolina (American family). For me, family has always been something you travel for and with.

Enrique Limardo plating the first course (photo courtesy of alma cocina latina)

Food orders in the kitchen (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Sous-vide duck magret with apple-jalapenño puree (photo courtesy of alma cocina latina)

Just recently, I spent a long weekend in Prague with my mom, stepdad, brothers, and grandpa. My favorite part of our trip – besides long evenings spent playing cards with the lights turned low and the electric fans whirring to combat the heat – was the meal we ate at Field, a Michelin-starred restaurant close to the old Jewish quarter. We ordered the wine pairing and sat beneath the ominous mounted farm-equipment for three hours, just talking and eating and toasting. » Continue reading this post...

Walking is the Only Way –
San Francisco

Burritos in the Mission, San Francisco (Eat Me. Drink Me.) - Photo courtesy of Amy Lee

La Palma burritos, Mission, San Francisco (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

The moment I stepped off the train at Mission and 24th Street and everything smelled like tacos, I knew I was going to like this place. San Francisco hooked me quickly, and hard. Walking down the street that first afternoon, I felt like I was back in the Brooklyn of my memory with its riot of Mexican eateries, its music and colors and windows full of cheap baked goods. Here a hipster bagel spot, there a brewery in stainless steel, and the sidewalks full of people out and about for who knows what reason on a Thursday afternoon, all clutching iced coffees despite the cool spring air not quite dispelled in even the sunniest sidewalk patches.

But coming from Berlin’s last wet, winter thrust, even the feeble sunshine felt like a blanket, open and spread out on the lawn, bedecked with a picnic lunch and maybe even a bottle or two of wine.

Here’s what I didn’t do in San Francisco: I didn’t ride the cable cars, I didn’t see the painted ladies or walk down Lombard Street. I didn’t go to Fisherman’s Wharf. I didn’t have oysters.

What I did do in San Francisco was walk. I had been told, upon arrival, that public transportation was inefficient and probably wouldn’t take me anywhere I wanted to go. Maybe it was the jet lag, but I didn’t question the edict, and by the time I found out that there are, in fact, opportunities for getting around that don’t involve blistered feet or ordering a car, it was too late, the damage had been done. In my mind, San Francisco was a city of walking only.

At the SF MoMa (Eat Me. Drink Me.) - Photo courtesy of Amy Lee

Croissants from Tartine, San Francisco (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

On my very first day, I walked sixteen miles from the Mission nearly all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. I meandered, watching the city change from neighborhood to neighborhood without ever really knowing where I was and with nothing more to guide me than a vague pull north. » Continue reading this post...

For all the Lobster in Maine

How much lobster is too much lobster? In Maine, the answer seems to be, there is no such thing. There, it is possible to eat a lobster roll for both lunch and dinner, to ceaselessly crack into the thick red hull of a crustaceous claw and swipe its soft, white meat through melted butter. You can cook your own live lobster, you can order it in chowders and stews, baked into pot pies, have it whole, halved, beheaded, even gnaw on frozen chunks nestled into butter-flavored ice cream – though I don’t know that it’s a combination I can recommend. You can have lobster any way you want it, and you can have it every day. And I did.

Lobster roll with mayo (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

I love Maine, love its rolling mountains and crashing cold waves, the glacier-scraped rocks thick with barnacles and crushed shells, the way the low tide leaves vast patches of kelp exposed to the sun until the evening brings the salty water crashing up the shore. In late summer, I love the tenacious wild blueberry bushes full of tiny fruit that never hit the bottom of the bucket until the belly’s full, and the gentle, sweet smell of balsam fir that perfumes the forest and every Bar Harbor gift shop.

A pile of live lobsters (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Sunset on Mt. Desert Island, Maine (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Our house in Maine was on a sound, and I’d wake in the mornings to sun streaming in the windows across the water. From the back deck, you could catch brief bright flashes of harbor seals’ heads as they flicked up out of the ocean in play. Once, we canoed out to where we saw them in the water, navigating close enough that we could make out each quivering whisker and their alert eyes, wet and black as midnight pools.

A platter of lobsters (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Lobster roll in Bar Harbor (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Fresh boiled lobsters (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Sweet corn on the grill (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

On the Fourth of July, we spent the day in Bar Harbor, staking down a small patch of green at the waterfront for first-row firework seats. » Continue reading this post...

America and the Americans: Pineapple Mai Tai

Everyone I’ve told about the cruise I went on in early January has asked me if I’ve read David Foster Wallace’s essay on cruising1. Yes, I have. And no, I don’t think there’s a cruise in the world that DFW would have enjoyed. It’s a tacky business, but in the best possible way. It’s like going to Oktoberfest in a dirndl and braids: You have to give yourself over to it. To the glitter and feathers at the evening show, the white pants and silk shirts, the poolside piña coladas, overpriced bingo games, the awkward audience involvement. You have to love it. And in return, it will love you back.

Meyer's Dark Rum and Añejo rum (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

One of my favorite games has always been to pretend I’m someone else, to slip into another voice, another life. In fact, I was a theater kid long before I hit the stage. My grandma used to tell me how I’d stand in front of the mirror and practice crying, just so I’d be ready when real waterworks came in handy.

On a cruise, I get to pretend my life is always cocktails in the evening sun, that I’m in the habit of wearing cute skirts and high heels and bright red lipstick to dinner, that I keep my nails manicured and enjoy small-talk with strangers. I go to the sauna and to the gym and carry around a sparkling gold clutch as if I had anything more to keep track of than my little blue sea pass. There’s no internet to remind me of my responsibilities – or of my real life. All I can do is immerse myself in this alternate world. Yes, DFW, it’s a show. But if I’m already in it, I may as well live it up.

The ocean at Cozumel (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Pineapple Mai Tai Recipe (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

I spent a lot of time observing other people on the cruise, seeing small kindnesses in the buffet line and considerate gestures – and also moments of casual disregard for the crew’s constant service and hard work. » Continue reading this post...

Welcome to the Windy City: Girl & the Goat’s Magic Beans

Girl & the Goat green beans (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Chicago is the fittest city I’ve ever been to. Everyone’s always jogging around, decked out in fancy-pants sporting gear and neon sneakers or running shirtless along the beach. Which, by the way, I didn’t know Chicago had. I guess that’s what you get for growing up on the East Coast.

It’s amazing that everyone is so incredibly healthy, because Chicago also has incredible food. Maybe the Chicagoans have picked up on the trick of compensating for good eating with good workouts, a trick I seem to be unable to learn.

I went to Chicago to meet up with two old, fabulous friends. Emma, Amy, and I met in 2007 in Australia while studying abroad and somehow, somewhere down the line became traveling pals. We’ve been to St. Croix, Las Vegas, New York – and now Chicago, a place none of us lives in and that isn’t really close to anything. But as I was going to a wedding in Ann Arbor, Michigan anyway, and Chicago is just around the corner, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to explore a part of the country I’ve never been to before and reunite my favorite traveling trio.

For me, friendship has never been about how often you see people, but what it’s like when you do. When the three of us get together, it’s as if all the time that’s elapsed between our last visit and the present has consolidated, sucked into some black hole. We don’t waste time with small talk, but pick up the conversation right where it left off.

A view from the architectural boat tour (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Chicago from the river (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

As much as we talked, we ate. We sampled extra tender pork loin with peppers and bone marrow salad at The Purple Pig, freshly-prepared sandwiches at Publican Quality Meats, and more donuts than I’d care to admit from Glazed & Infused. » Continue reading this post...

Oh, the Weather Outside is Frightful: Dark & Stormy Cocktails

Dark & Stormy (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Please forgive me if I’ve already started humming Christmas carols… I get the feeling that in Berlin, the weather goes from summer to winter without even a nod to my favorite season. This is not a city that does chunky sweaters and burnt sienna trees. It’s a city that does all leaves/no leaves. Tank top/parka.

And you wonder why this isn’t a country that has apple or pumpkin pie. They don’t even have a season for it. What do you expect?

Not so long ago I was in Bermuda. Now there’s another night/day contrast we can talk about. A brilliant, beating sun, pink sand, water so blue it seemed unreal. A perpetual sunburn on my skin, cold drinks on the deck of a ship. Somebody please remind me why I left.

Beach in Bermuda (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

While you can’t always take the island sunshine with you, there are some tokens of the beach that fit in a small bag. Gosling Black Seal Rum and ginger beer for one.

Dark & Stormies are simple, highball cocktails made with ginger beer and Gosling’s rum. And apparently yes, to make real Dark & Stormies you do need Gosling’s, as the drink is trademarked by the company, whose base is in Bermuda. It stands to reason then, that along with the Rum Swizzle, the Dark & Stormy is Bermuda’s national drink.

A Dark & Stormy is a beautiful drink. Sparkling, golden ginger beer topped with a jigger of rum that floats above the soda like a storm cloud. » Continue reading this post...