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Cornucopia: Thai Pumpkin Curry

Roasted pumpkin seeds (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Berlin seems to have taken a step back to acknowledge my favorite season. Walking through the streets, there’s the slow, steady fall of leaves. In my neighborhood, they are the yellow of barely ripe bananas and small like babies’ palms. There’s a chill in the air that makes you want to snuggle deeper into your coat and your scarf, and the wind blows past the old brewery, wafting the lingering yeasty apple smell of fermenting beer through Neukölln.

The bins in the Turkish grocery stores along Karl-Marx Str. and the rogue Russian grocery on the corner are full of apples, root vegetables, and piles of pumpkins. Fall has always made me feel like building a cornucopia, a shrine to beautiful burnished things, crisp fallen leaves and chestnuts, acorns and other nuts, colorful squashes that look like warty witches’ noses, frost-edged sunflower leaves, apples with matte pink and green skins, tiny beveled pumpkins.

Garden-grown pumpkin (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

A few weeks or so ago, I was given a pumpkin, homegrown, heavy and green-skinned. It has been my table decoration for weeks, next to the wicker basket of fruit, the pitcher cum vase from the flea market that never seems to be full of flowers, the tea cup full of sugar – reminding me on my harried travels here and there that no matter how much there is to do, there’s really no rush; a pumpkin will wait for you.

I love that in the midst of the chill of fall, the quickening dark as winter comes closer, nature presents some of her most brilliant colors. That’s some sort of a reminder too. The inside of a pumpkin glows like two halves of sunshine. It’s so enticing, you almost want to eat it raw. But the pumpkin likes to wait, and to convince it to open up to you, you must promise it your time. » Continue reading this post...

Seven Second Lunch: Chickpea Salad with Dill and Red Onions

chickpea salad (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Sometimes, you don’t want to stop watching television on the internet at the same time as you want something delicious to eat. You’re lying on your bed, foetally-curled into a blanket, thinking about how far away the kitchen is, how arduous the effort to open the drawer and draw out the knives. You want someone to magically turn up at your door with a tin of cookies. You want the delivery guy you didn’t order to end up at your apartment and not realize he dropped a fragrant tikka masala off at the wrong door. You want someone to cook for you. You want a maid. And that is almost certainly something that you are not going to get.

Some days, you just want so many things. And while most things you may want, might just be out of your reach, some are not. Lunch is not. Especially when you’ve got a not-completely-empty pantry and the knowledge that lemons and garlic and shredded parmesan can make you feel like all of your dreams really have come true.

It might not be a maid, but a can of chickpeas could save your life. Or at least give you the strength to hit the play button on the next episode, while you lie, foetally-curled up in bed, snuggling a bowl of fresh chickpea salad, soothed by the verdant smell of dill.

dill-icious (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

» 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...

Life’s a Little Brighter with Citrus: Grapefruit and Olive Oil Pound Cake

Grapefruit and olive oil pound cake (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

A dull, gray day. The kind where you pour a glass of wine at 5 in the afternoon and then decide to bake a cake. The kind where you want nothing to do with leaving your apartment, but know that walking home from the grocery store clutching a pot of basil to your nose is everything.

I don’t bake often, so when I feel the urge to turn on the oven, it’s a big deal. What it usually means is that there’s a funk coming on. I try to stave those off. No one likes a funk.

So I call my brother to come bake a cake with me and keep me company. I put on a pair of shoes and go to the grocery store. Please don’t ask what I was wearing. Just know that it involved things that should never be worn in public, much less worn in public together. I picked up some baking goods and a few things to make Thai curry, because there’s nothing that staves off a funk better than curry and cake. At home, I pour myself a glass of just-this-side-of-salad-dressing wine that’s been hanging out in the fridge for two weeks, throw some music on, and start to cook. I’m feeling better already.

Pound cake batter (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Grapefruit glaze (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

My brother says, “Is this going to be a blog post?”

“Yes,” I reply.

“Are you going to write down all the witty things I say?”

“Probably.”

“You’re going to write this conversation down aren’t you?”

“Verbatim.”

There’s not much else to say, really. This isn’t a story about witty quips. It’s a story about how the physical act of cooking, of chopping vegetables and beating eggs, measuring, smelling, tasting – is the best way I know to stave off panic.

Drizzled with grapefruit glaze (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Perhaps our stress is stored inside our hands and not our heads. » Continue reading this post...

In Sickness: Chicken Noodle Soup

I feel terrible. Like I’ve been run over by a gaggle of marauding geese with nothing better to do than peck out my throat for fun.

I have become fixated on the thought of soup.

And not just any soup, but the most comforting kind you can imagine – chicken noodle soup. When you are sick, there is nothing nicer than broad egg noodles slumped inside a broth made from the last life-juice of a chicken’s bones. A tinge of garlic, a tingle of ginger – and if you find a bone or two, well, “parts is parts,” as my great grandmother used to say. » Continue reading this post...

Sugar in a Burnt Pan: Tangerine-Rosemary Cocktails

Hot nectarines (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

“Look at these cocktails,” I say to my brother and hold up the magazine. The picture is pool-blue with a bright orange cocktail smack in the center.

“I’m driving,” he says, so at a red light, I hold it up again to show him the grilled flatbread on the other side of the double page spread.

“This is what I want my life to be like,” I say, and he says, “You just showed me that page,” and I say, “I thought you were driving.”

A few days later, his girlfriend comes to visit, and we decide to make the drinks. My brother has been learning to tend and carts his bar guide and herb books around from place to place. Of course, he’s left his brand new bar set at the other house, and we’re not sure what to use for a muddler other than a pestle, the top half of which has disappeared somewhere, the broken-off bottom still drooped in the mortar like a fat, marble bulb.

The recipe calls for tangerine halves to be dipped in raw sugar and grilled over fresh sprigs of rosemary. After I’d melted the siding off the house from a grease-fire fueled grill, we think we’ll give that a rest and caramelize the nectarine halves in a skillet on the stove. The store is out of tangerines.

Adding tonic (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

I forget that sugar burns. I forget that a hot grill is different from a hot skillet, and as soon as the nectarine slices hit the skillet and the hot, crisping leaves of rosemary, a waft of thick steam rises, pure and white, and suddenly the room is filled with the fragrance of Christmas and that thick, white smoke, which, after I remember to turn on the fan above the stove, looks just like Santa Claus’ beard getting sucked up into the vent. » Continue reading this post...

Cooking the Russian Way: Vegetarian Pelmeny & Cauliflower Fritters with Onion Sauce

Vegetarian Pelmeny & Cauliflower Fritters with Onion Sauce (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

I’ve been cleaning out my room in the ancestral home, sorting through old clothes and bad books, school reports and chemistry notes, rock collections and hardware odds and ends to determine what’s worth storing and what can make the trip to the great green Goodwill in the sky. In the process, I’ve realized that I’ve made quite the habit of collecting old cookbooks – complete with yellowed pages, ripped binding, and strange drawings.

And yet, I love to think of all the hands that have held a cookbook before it gets to me. I love the way old recipes reflect the culture in which they were written as much as the taste of the times. Since I’d just been to St. Petersburg, I paused during my cleaning frenzy before the spine of a book covered with torn paper, Cooking the Russian Way by Musia Soper and straight out of 1961. The book opened stiffly, its browned pages smelling like a dusty library.

Cooking the Russian Way (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Inside, I found the kinds of hearty meals to see you through a cold Russian winter, where rich broths, sour cream, potatoes, cream sauces, butter, and fried onions abounded. These aren’t the kinds of recipes that are featured in your newest food magazine, but the basics handed down from mother to daughter for generations. They’re written for housewives who already know how to cook and who are feeding a family of four. The ingredient list rarely tops ten items and more often runs something like that in this recipe for “Potatoes Stuffed with Meat”: Potatoes, tomatoes, butter, egg, minced meat, sour cream, flour, chopped dill, salt, and pepper.

The book is filled with fascinating recipes, like that for “Moscow Rassolink,” a salted cucumber soup made with ox kidneys, sorrel, soup vegetables, and sour cream. Or “Egg And Wine Sauce” made with eggs, white wine, lemon juice, and castor sugar. » Continue reading this post...

How to Make Your Co-Workers Jealous, the Salad Edition: Roasted Sweet Potato and Salmon Salad

Roasted sweet potato and salmon salad (Eat Me. Drink Me)

Pre-packaged salad sucks. I know, because I work in a part of town where the lunch options are neither pretty nor cheap and very rarely healthy. A pre-packaged salad from the grocery store looks sad with its already wilting lettuce, mealy tomatoes, uniformly cubed cheese, and waxy kernels of corn recently freed from a canned prison. And a good-looking salad from that organic café down the street will set you back a whole 10€. So I’ve taken to bringing my own salad to work.

I think we often get stuck in a salad-is-boring state of mind. It’s just lettuce and vegetables. But a finely crafted salad can be as interesting as any other entrée. What about a salad that balances fruits and nuts, pecans and sweet pear with tangy blue cheese – or a salad that substitutes stale bread for lettuce, but is softened with olive oil and feta and tomato. Or what about a salad made from strips of bologna, spiced up with cracked kernels of black pepper and pepperoncini?

And even if you don’t have much to stuff your salad with, you surely have the ingredients on hand to create myriad salad dressings. » Continue reading this post...