appetizers & sides – Eat Me. Drink Me.

Posts Tagged ‘appetizers & sides’

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...

The Quarantine Diaries:
Classic Sauerkraut
with Caraway and Juniper

This morning, I managed to drink coffee without having heart palpitations afterwards. In these times of unpredictable anxiety attacks and unwanted solitude, it feels like a win. I seem to be on an every-other-day kind of rotation. One day will be unmanageable. I’ll feel short of breath and unable to concentrate. I can’t read, I can’t write, I can’t answer emails. The next will feel motivational. I’ll think about how to make the best of a bad hand and tackle projects with gusto that I’d normally let linger.

The trick, I’ve found, is to have an extensive grab bag of possible activities, which at any one time might help squelch the threatening upwell of panic. The other trick is that there’s really no trick. It’s a free-for-all of emotional management.

When things get really bad, the only thing I’m capable of doing is paint by numbers. A while ago, a friend sent me a link to a company that had a 50-50 chance of being an internet scam, but which I paid anyway to transform a photo I took into a paint by numbers. It took a solid three months for my canvas to arrive, at which point I was out of the temporary apartment (I thought it would be a good post-fire activity) and busy with settling back into the old apartment. I forgot about it until Corona Quarantine, but oh man, has the mind-numbing minutiae of applying tiny little brushstrokes of paint inside itty-bitty outlined blobs saved my mind from scarpering into an apocalyptic landscape.

The other trick is that there’s really no trick. It’s a free-for-all of emotional management.

When the paint by numbers has me breathing at a relatively regular rate again, I put on my headphones and have a free-flailing dance party in the living room, keeping my fingers crossed that my neighbors aren’t currently enjoying their balcony (which has a pretty clear view through my living room windows). » Continue reading this post...

Many Movies Means More Movie Snacks: Nori & Sesame Buttered Popcorn

Popcorn snack for the movies (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

How can I describe the way it feels when this movie marathon comes to an end, the way my fingers linger over the last ritual unpacking of the bag, the flinging of ticket stubs and loose papers onto the desk. The slow, deep gulps of water salving a week’s worth of harried dehydration, and how I sink down onto the couch to tally up the week’s report of good, bad, and indifferent.

It’s especially as the Berlinale whirls to its inevitable conclusion that I feel that I myself am in a film. I see with a cinematic eye. Even now, as I hunch over my desk to quickly jot this paragraph down, I see how the camera pans in on my fingers, the gentle, white glow of the laptop screen in the dark, the soft tap-tap-tap of my pointer finger on the keys as I think of what to write next. I bite my lip self-consciously to show the audience that I am thinking. The camera picks up the sound of the children in the adjacent apartment, laughing, and the clink of dinner dishes. The scene is set.

Popcorn for the Berlinale (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

The feeling is especially strong as I walk from place to place, which, in the past week and a half, has meant: from theater to theater. Then, my mind’s-eye-camera zooms out across Berlin’s blocky, boxy rows of apartment buildings, streets lined with naked trees rattling twiggy fingers in the wind. I hear the click of my boots on the concrete, catch the flick of my eyes upwards as I wait for the traffic signal to change. I reach into my bag and pull out my wallet, slipping the fat wad of tickets between my fingers to check where I’m going next and what time I need to be there. When you’re watching up to five films a day, it’s easy to lose track. » Continue reading this post...

Like Eating Clouds: Hummus Tehina

Hummus tahina recipe (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

All I can think about is the next time I will be in Tel Aviv, how I will walk along the hot stone streets where discount boutiques spill hangers of fur vests and dresses and leather onto the cracked asphalt, and how I will walk until my feet are sore and I can smell the salt in the air, the crackled breath of exhaling fish and sea scum, almost hear the bustle of the Port of Jaffa just around an invisible bend, and I will wait at the little window of the hummuseria, hands palming the worn counter, until a short, bald man pauses in between tying up plastic bags of hummus tubs and shouting orders and talking to a regular leaning in the doorway. I will order musabaha and take it down to the sunny bench in the roundabout, and as cars whisk past, unpack my plastic bag and lay its contents out like offerings on an altar: musabaha, green chilies in lemon juice and water, two warm, plush pitas scarred with char, raw white onion quartered and beading in the sun, a film of paper-thin skin clinging to its curve. And then I will eat. I will streak tears of pita through the silky mass of tahini, lemon, garlic, and chickpea, catching drops of golden olive oil and spice, flecks of flat-leaf parsley and paprika, and whole chickpeas. And then I will chase it all with a crunch of raw onion I know I will regret a few hours later, when my tongue is swollen and my mouth tight and stale.

But it won’t be in a few hours, it will be now, and I won’t care about consequences, just the gentle swipe of pita, the feel of satin in my mouth. Like eating clouds, said the friend of a friend who said Abu Hassan was the place to go. » Continue reading this post...

An Idiot’s Guide to Missing a Flight: Favosalata

There’s a feeling on late summer evenings where the air is like silk or a warm, salty pool of water, and you can’t tell where your skin ends and everything else begins. It’s especially lovely slicing through the city on my little red Hercules bike, the whipping wind more like a caress against bare skin. It’s the feeling of absolute freedom, a briefly endless moment where nothing matters but sensation.

I’d give anything for that feeling now. But I’m in an airplane, just jutting over a cusp of land and leaving Germany behind. The air has that strange quality of being both clammy and dry, singing my nose as I breathe it in. But it’s more than the air, it’s how I feel – shoulders tensed, brain a whirl of jostling pulses. I’m not sure which hysteria to tip into – should I cry or laugh – at the absurdity of the situation I find myself in.

For the first time, I’ve missed a flight. An international one, no less. But what a surreal experience, without frantic or rush – until the fateful moment when my brain clicked and realized what it had done.

Wine, garlic, and yellow split peas (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

As a meticulous planner, I checked my ticket – multiple times – checked my passport, checked my route to the airport. I wrote out a list: when to set my alarm, when to to leave the apartment, when I’d arrive at the airport. And yet, while my brain registered that my flight took off at 7 a.m., my brain also registered that I had to be at the airport at 7 a.m. Clearly, two completely contradictory pieces of information – that my brain held in tandem, without realizing how impossible it was.

So I missed my flight and am on a new flight trying to start my now significantly more expensive trip. » Continue reading this post...

A Thanksgiving Love Letter: Mrs. Burns’s Cranberry Relish

Cranberry and orange relish (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

It’s nearly here! My very favorite holiday: Thanksgiving. For me, Thanksgiving is like Christmas without all the strings attached. You don’t have to wonder if the present you bought is heartfelt enough or of sufficient monetary value, there are no last minute stocking stuffers to stock up on, no crazy shopping sprees or crazily decked-out stores to suffer through. There are a lot of things I love about Christmas, and there seems to be a theme to the things I don’t.

If Christmas can sometimes feel like it’s about maximizing the value of what you can get out of it, Thanksgiving is about giving out of the plenty you already have.

A bowl of winter oranges (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Fresh cranberries and oranges (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Growing up, our Thanksgiving table welcomed others in. There was always enough food, always enough chairs for a few extra relatives, family friends, my parents’ international students with homes too far away. And every Thanksgiving, we’d crowd around the long dining room table set with the best dishes and laden with food like jewels: a crisp, brown bird in center stage, rich stuffing made from torn breadcrumbs and chestnuts, fresh cranberry relish and hot rolls, green beans spiked with toasted almonds, maple-glazed carrots, sweet potatoes dotted with flamed marshmallows, and creamy mashed potatoes and gravy made from turkey drippings. For dessert, there were pumpkin and apple pies, fresh from the oven and still warm to the touch.

Mrs. Burns's cranberry relish (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Cranberry relish on orange paté (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

What also made an appearance at our table every year were a few dried beans. Before we could dive into that indulgent spread, we had to throw our beans into a pot and say what we were thankful for. One thankful thing per bean. When you’re an angsty teenager, having to publicly admit to being thankful for anything is the worst. I dreaded that show of gushy emotion. Also, it always made me cry. » Continue reading this post...

My Green Thumb: Fried Green Tomatoes with Sriracha Remoulade

I don’t have much of a green thumb. In fact, I think if my thumb were a color, it’d be a sickly ash brown, mottled with spots and covered with voracious aphids. All of the plants in my apartment are in various stages of death – it’s like they’re living, but unwillingly. Is it because I go for too long without watering them and then overwater in an effusive shower of liquid affection? Maybe. Is it because I’ve put the sun-seeking plants in the shadows and the shadow creepers right on the window sill? Could be. Not even the cactus is thriving. And that’s saying something.

Sliced green tomatoes (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Green tomatoes ready to be fried (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Fried green tomatoes (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Alongside waking up with the sun every morning and reading the New York Times on my balcony with a cup of coffee, growing plants and gardening is something I’ve always associated with being grown up. I have no balcony, I live in a country where even the weekend NYT edition costs over 25 euros, and there is no sunshine in Berlin between the months of September and May. How am I supposed to be a grown up? All I have left of my childhood vision of what being an adult is, is that cup of coffee slowly chilling on top of a stack of taxes and bills I have to pay myself.

A stack of fried green tomatoes (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

This summer, I decided to take my future into my own hands and do some urban gardening. I may not have had a balcony, but I did have a French balcony (a euphemism for a long window) with a planter full of dirt. So I planted tomatoes. I started them from seed in tiny cardboard cups on a cake plate in front of the window. I watered them every evening and watched as gentle sprouts peeked out of the dirt and sweetly unfurled their furry little leaves. » 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...