A New York State of Mind

The story I am about to tell starts on an up note and ends in a bit of a fart, to be completely blunt. Here is how it went.

I went to New York for a job interview. I was bright eyed and not at all bushy tailed. Actually, I was pretty well-groomed. I was really intent on landing the job in question, I had spent an entire week on preparing for the interview (instead of writing my dissertation. Oops), and tossing and turning all night because I am just compulsive like that.

I arrived in New York with a Boston chip on my shoulder. While I usually have an ok time in NY, I am very happy to get home to Boston – clean, unsmelly, comfortable Boston. Well, this time was a little different. This time, I walked the streets constantly trying the city on for size and summing up, trying to decide if I could live there, for real. This time was different in that I loved it.

The Hudson

I don’t know what changed. I loved New York best when I was walking around the city by myself, most of the time with very little idea of where I am. I loved all the shops and all the little (and big) streets, the amazing food, and the people. Aaah, the people. I, for one, don’t need strangers to smile and say hello to me. It weirds me out.

Well, if this preamble hasn’t been foreshadowing enough, let me cut this short by saying that the whole job business crashed and burned (no, I am pretty sure I did not get the job. No, I do not know what/who I am going to be if/when I grow up). Herein lies the fart of this story. It has got to be the peak of irony that the moment I become completely excited about moving to New York is the moment where my chances to do so fall through. I don’t get it. Bah.

I do have some awesome food to remember New York by, however. Kalustyan’s was the result of lone city wanderings, carried out on approximately 5 hours of sleep after closing down a couple of bars the night (ok, morning) before.

The little Middle Eastern spice shop is packed to the gills. There is practically no air left inside. It’s filled with spices and ingredients I have only read about and never seen. Huge raisins in clear glass bins, teas made of barely distressed whole tea leaves, and something like twenty different sugars. OMG. There is a teeny café upstairs with just three tables lining the window.

Even the salt n pepa shakers were adorable. Film-covered, worn, and beaten, yes, but adorable and antiquey, like they came over from the old country along with the owner/cook.

I ordered a baba ganoush sandwich and kibbe, sat by the window for a couple of hours reading another rationing of Jane Austen (Persuasion, this time), thinking about the city and trying not to think about the next couple of months. It was serene. The sandwich was amazing. Such unremarkable ingredients (pale tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, ordinary pita) blended into the best wrap I have ever had, ever. Home made hot sauce of incredible depth and complexity of taste drowned the anemic tomatoes and spilled onto the smoky, creamy baba ganoush and cooling, crunchy lettuce. It was by far the best baba ganoush I have ever had.


The kibbe was warm and moist, like a little fatty meat foil to the creamy baba ganoush sandwich. It was perfect and perfectly New York.

I may have missed my goal of relocating this time around, but I hope to my way over there eventually. Luckily, Boston is a pretty close second. I am happy here, for now.


P.S. HTML has gotten the best of me yet again. Sorry that the font looks weird. I ran out of patience while trying to fix it.

One of Those Nights

Every once in a while I have one of those meals that sticks with me. I don’t mean on the seat of my pants or the front of my shirt. I mean in my memory and subconscious as an event. A meal that sticks out as a true experience, one to be savored slowly and for years to come over and over again. an experience perfectly balanced and refined, fun and comfortable, masterfully executed and obviously, wonderful to eat. I recently had another meal that fits that description. Unfortunately, this one was a four hour flight away from my house.

Vail is not only the best place to ski in this country (in my honest and uninformed opinion) it is also one of the best places to eat. The number and caliber of restaurants in what could otherwise be a dinky ski village is dizzying. The meal of note I speak of was at Osaki's.

Osaki’s is absolutely teeny. The fact that the servers can maneuver at all makes one wonder how masterful they are on the slopes. Run by a husband and wife, Osaki's is so far beyond the spicy tuna roll that it’s almost laughable (they do have the standard sushi joint staples of course and they are wonderful, but they are not the reason I am writing this).

The proper way to enjoy Osaki’s and push the chef to exercise his imagination is to make a reservation and request omakase ahead of time, giving him the opportunity to pull together the practically unheard of ingredients that will soon come together into a meal you will remember for a long time, even after you stop grinning about it.

There were a number of things about this meal that I found striking. First and foremost, I saw (and ate) freshly grated wasabi. I was certain that I would live a long and unfulfilled life never experiencing real wasabi. I find that a lot of people are aware of the fact that the ubiquitous bright green paste included on all sushi platters in this country is little more than reconstituted colored horseradish. It is not wasabi. Real wasabi is a stout (and rather expensive) root that is not widely grown in this country.

The root in the picture is from Oregon. The piece you see was quoted at a price of $40-50. Here is a short pop quiz on wasabi root preparation. In accordance with tradition Traditionally, the root is ground and peeled on a a) metal grater, b) ceramic grater, c) the chef’s 5 o’clock shadow, or d) a shark skin grater. Contrary to your first instinct, the answer is not c. The answer is actually d, of all things. Wasabi root is traditionally finely grated on shark skin stretched over a slightly curved piece of wood. The skin ( I got to touch it!) is shockingly sharp and rough, almost as though it were studded with teeny industrial diamonds.


Next on the rarities list were real live yuzu lemons. I have never seen an actual yuzu before. I have seen the juice in stores, I know that it is used as the base for ponzu sauce, but I have never actually seen a yuzu fruit. There are a number of varieties of yuzu lemons, all small and knobby looking citrus fruit, some green, some yellow, full of little seeds. The taste is markedly acidic but much more flavorful and nuanced than straight lemon juice. It is floral and complex, like a more self-involved and less orange-tasting Meyer lemon. Combined with the sweet lobster meat, the yuzu lemon flavor will not be easily forgotten.

Broiled lobster tail with yuzu and yuzu-based sauce

Here are the rest of the dishes we had that night. While each of them warrants a couple of paragraphs of descriptions, explanations, and reactions, I will let the pictures speak for themselves. I am still thinking about this meal.

Tempura – crab claw, sea urchin in seaweed with really crisp minty/basil-like leaf; shiitake mushroom and something else

Sweet shrimp, scallops, ginko nut, mountain peach, shallot shavings

Trio of tunas with fresh wasabi

Golden eye red snapper, Red snapper, fluke with black caviar

Torched kobe with radish sprouts
Unagi (fresh water eel) – with yuzu zest or green tea salt

House made mochi – red bean, green tea, raspberry (too sweet and acrid-tasting)

Looking over it all now, I cannot believe that I managed to eat it all. Although leaving anything behind on the plate was simply out of the question, practically against my religion.

Things You Can Learn from Cheetos

The following is a cross post from my sciency blog. For whatever reason, I felt the need to expound upon my love of Cheetos (which I have already done once).

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I like to eat healthfully, generally make sure that my food is indeed made out of food and not supremely processed, over-salted and preserved food-like substances. I love lentils and brown rice and have put away a fair amount of tofu in my time.

But then there are Cheetos. I cannot explain my love for Cheetos. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. Maybe it started at the vending machine in high school which provided my daily kick of the neon orange glow sticks. I got hooked. They are so good in such a bad way.

The last time I splurged on the dietary horror that is a bag of Cheetos, I did what I have long since trained myself not to do – I looked at the ingredient list. Oy vey. If I brought Cheetos to inorganic chemistry class in college, maybe I wouldn’t have gotten a C – they would have been a great cheat sheet.

I want to know what all that chemical garbage is doing in my food. Why is it there? What role does it serve? The internet came to the rescue of this miniature chemistry lesson.

The following is the (almost) complete ingredient list from a bag of Cheetos, annotated by yours truly:

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Enriched corn meal, with all usual vitamin supplements

Vegetable oil

Salt – the third ingredient on the list – no wonder I love Cheetos.

Maltodextrin – polysaccharide produced from starch (rice, corn or potato); easily digestible and absorbed as easily as glucose.

Sugar

Monosodium glutamate – an amino acid that acts as a potent flavor enhancer. MSG triggers the umami taste receptors, making food taste more savory.

Autolyzed yeast extract – often contains free glutamic acids and is, for that reason, used as a supplement to MSG. “…consists of concentrations of yeast cells that are allowed to die and break up, so that the yeasts’ digestive enzymes break their proteins down into simpler compounds.”

Citric acid – Used for tart flavor and as an antioxidant.

Artificial color – apparently, neon orange doesn’t come easily – Cheetos are colored by no fewer than four food dyes

Partially hydrogenated soybean and cottonseed oil

Hydrolyzed soy protein – ”...Soy protein is used for emulsification and texturizing. Specific applications include adhesives, asphalts, resins, cleaning materials, cosmetics, inks, pleather, paints, paper coatings, pesticides/fungicides, plastics, polyesters and textile fibres.” Ok, I am sure that soy protein isn’t as scary as that passage just made it sound, but it sure does give a girl pause.

“Cheddar cheese” – I am sorry, I couldn’t help putting cheese in quotation marks.

Whey – “Whey proteins primarily consist of α-lactalbumin and β-lactoglobulin. Depending on the method of manufacture, whey may also contain glycomacropeptides (GMP).”

Onion powder

Whey protein concentrate – often used in body-building supplements, this is basically pure, milk-derived bioactive protein. Why it is included in my most favorite of bright orange “foods,” I can’t seem to figure out. It doesn’t sound terribly sinister, so I will forgive its inclusion.

Corn syrup solids – sweetener and thickener, dried corn syrup consisting mostly of dextrose. “Corn syrup contains no nutritional value other than calories, promotes tooth decay, and is used mainly in foods with little intrinsic nutritional value.”

Natural flavor – huh?

Buttermilk solids – analogous to dried milk as far as food additives are concerned. “Buttermilk is the liquid remaining from the cream after the butter has been removed from the churn. (This buttermilk should not be confused with the fluid buttermilk sold to consumers, a cultured lowfat milk that resembles buttermilk.)”

Garlic powder

Disodium phosphate – “Disodium phosphate is a sodium salt of orthophosphoric acid and is used as an antioxidant synergist, stabiliser and buffering agent in food. It is also used as an emulsifier in the manufacture of pasteurised processed cheese. Disodium phosphate is added to powdered milk to prevent gelation.” Note: harmful if ingested in quantity. Oooook, limiting Cheeto intake starting…. Now.

Sodium diacetate – basically vinegar in solid form, this additive is used as an antimicrobial/preservative and to add a tangy flavor to foods.

Sodium caseinate – milk protein conjugate used as a binder, emulsifier, or thickener, likely used in the “cheese” in Cheetos.

Lactic acid – ”...fermented from lactose (milk sugar), most commercially used lactic acid is derived by using bacteria such as Bacillus acidilacti, Lactobacillus delbueckii or Lactobacillus bulgaricus to ferment carbohydrates from nondairy sources such as cornstarch, potatoes and molasses. usually either as a pH adjusting ingredient, or as a preservative (either as antioxidant or for control of pathogenic micro-organisms).”

Disodium inosinate – disodium salt of inosinic acid. That clarifies everything, huh? Used in concert with MSG to trigger the umami taste receptors.

Disodium guanylate – “… often added to foods in conjunction with disodium inosinate; the combination is known as disodium 5’-ribonucleotides. Disodium guanylate is produced from dried fish or dried seaweed and is often added to instant noodles, potato chips and snacks, savoury rice, tinned vegetables, cured meats, packet soup. ...The food additives disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate are useful only in synergy with MSG-containing ingredients, and provide a likely indicator of the presence of MSG in a product.”

Nonfat milk solids

Sodium citrate – sodium salt of citric acid, added for tartness and to balance pH.

Carrageenan – obtained from seaweed, indigestible large protein used as a thickening, stabilizing and gelling agent.

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Whew.

What I found most interesting in this chemical roster is the amount of MSG and MSG analogs – no fewer than four separate chemicals to trigger that sought-after umami flavor. Cheetos also contain a fair number and preservatives and stabilizers, all chemicals with natural derivations, but chemicals nonetheless.

My conclusion? You probably won’t die from eating a bag (or eight) of Cheetos every once in a while, perhaps it’s best not to make a habit of it.

A Calming Effect

The most complicated and seemingly stressful undertakings can sometimes calm me down. It is the strangest thing. Most people, when embroiled in writing a dissertation, 18,000 blogs and doing lord knows what else, don’t think that making a massively involved dinner on a Friday after a full day of work is a particularly bright idea. Luckily, I never said I was bright.

There I was, having lived through a full day of procrastination, writer’s block, and lack of productivity, running manically from grocery store to liquor store to prepare a Spanish-themed dinner for the awesomeness that is my friend Kanchan. Kanchan was kind enough to give me a wonderful Spanish cookbook for my birthday, a Spanish equivalent of the Italian Silver Spoon. The ginormous and gorgeous book is filled with recipes that have quickly become house specials for me. Dates stuffed with almonds and wrapped in bacon? Umm, yea.

Really though, the dinner was all about paella, the most Spanish of all Spanish dishes. Here’s the thing with paella. It’s a bit of a pain in the ass. It involves all kinds of stocks and infusions and just, issues. I totally punked out of making the cookbook version of the paella, which boasted no less than two pages of directions (in small font), and opted instead for a recipe I pulled off Epicurious.


Still, it was a production, but one that I found calming me half way through the procedure. I started breathing a little slower and panicking a little less (still cursing just as much though. The cursing doesn’t seem subject to change). Even though my pan wasn’t the right size, even though I read snow peas when the recipe quite clearly stated sugar snap peas, even though I bought some Chernobyl-sized clams that refused to open even after extended cooking, instead of the little dainty clams I was meant to buy... Despite all that I felt more collected than I had the entire day.


Out of the oven the paella came, fragrant with saffron, shellfish and smoky spice from the chorizo and smoked paprika. It was great. We put as big a dent as two people could into a giant pan full of rice and seafood. We finished with some traditional crème caramel (the caramel portion of which may stay with my stove top forever. Caramel is a persistent bugger), poured the last of the second bottle of white wine for the evening and sat back. Because it hurt. Miraculously, I was calm and collected, having just run about like a chicken with my head cut off two hours prior. I don’t know if it was the bottom of the second bottle of wine, the cooking or the company, but I felt so much better. Stress can't compete with such a roster of pleasures.