California Dreamin'

I love going to new restaurants and exploring food. But who doesn't? For every ten diners it seems there is at least one food blogger or gastro-community participant these days. And yes, I'm guilty of that as well (although this obviously isn't a food blog, unless it becomes one, which is unlikely because I'm probably too peevish and impatient to snap pictures of my food during a meal).

My relationship with food is one of deep and multi-faceted appreciation (I'm not sure it's a two-way street, but I'm willing to live with that). My food background is an amalgamation of sorts - weaned on Russian food (with southern influences like Romania, Georgia, etc), raised in the San Francisco Bay Area with a large dose of Chinese food (when I get a cold I have instinctual cravings for hot and sour soup). Then there was the college blip, with monotonous, low quality dining hall food that contributed nothing to my epicurean evolution. And now in New York, I go out often enough (and cook almost never) that my palette has been spoiled enough to use words like 'epicurean.'

I read the food press and certain restaurant blogs fairly regularly, and am in tune with the trendy styles and ingredients - morels, fiddlehead ferns, 'haute barnyard,' frying everything in sight, etc. Inevitably there are a million things I have yet to try, some of them classic and essential enough to be judged a crucial oversight. Until this past weekend I had never tried steak tartare. It wasn't really because I had just forgotten or certainly not because I had lacked the opportunity, but the idea of raw ground meat didn't quite appeal to my aesthetic sense. I know this makes no reasonable sense because I eat raw ground fish all the time. The reticence had to end with a visit to Blue Ribbon since one of their signature dishes is the steak tartare. I told my friend not to count on me for much more than a taste (just in case), but I probably ended up eating more than my fair share. The dish was perfect, with herbs and capers and home-made potato chips - I have hunger alarms going off in my brain as I write this. Illogical aesthetic aversion will not deter me in the future.

Well, that should probably be a conditional statement, depending on where you are and what aesthetics might have to do with possible health threats. My friend Hui is traveling in Southeast Asia right now, and as a fellow food lover she's reveling in exploring the authentic cuisines of Cambodia and Thailand (wish I could be there too). That enthusiasm has to be tempered by practical concerns, of course. No practical concerns necessary where I'm going for the weekend. Perhaps it's a childhood attachment, but despite all the great restaurants I go to in New York, the simple things just seem to taste better in California - the salads fresher, the herbs more aromatic. Whatever the reason, it's guaranteed to satisfy.

4th of July Edition

This was probably one of the most anticlimactic 4th of July holidays in recent memory. Not that anyone was expecting much since it fell on a Wednesday and it seems most everyone I know went to work on Tuesday and came back to work today. But clearly our nation's forefathers were scheming to put an even bigger damper on the day. And damp it was. Maybe this was a sign from those same forefathers (perched in the cosmos somewhere looking down on us) that not all was satisfactory with our fair nation.

Everyone knows that grilling and celebrating American independence are basically synonymous. I have no idea how this came about - perhaps grilling is somehow a step in the "pursuit of happiness" direction. In any case, this year I joined the fray. A friend of mine who recently moved in with her fiance on the upper east side invited a bunch of people to a barbecue on her building's terrace, so I made my over there with supplies from Fairway in tow. In the cab going crosstown (both cabs I took that day had crabby and chatty cabbies), the cabdriver was peeved that he smelled food because he was hungry and on his way home. He asked me whether I had gone all the way crosstown just to get groceries. As much as I love Fairway, that is really an absurd proposition. If I lived on the east side, with its lack of quality options, I would probably succumb to Fresh Direct and be deprived of the basic sensory experience of grocery shopping I so enjoy.

The terrace at my friends place is great (subsidized student housing is an amazing thing in Manhattan), so I definitely need to revisit when it's sunny. Just as we started grilling the rain starting coming down in fits and starts, so by the time any of our vittles were done we were quite soaked. After a few hours we retreated to the apartment to have tea and dessert (at this point I should have taken the pure satisfaction of this ritual and replicated it at home to the tune of a cheesy romantic comedy), but the second crucial mission of the 4th of July had not yet been fulfilled. Always gluttons for punishment, we trotted out to the building across the street and waited on the 34th floor rooftop for the fireworks to begin. When we got there it was hardly raining, but as we waited, the torrent really came down. What is it about fireworks that turns us into little kids? That experience never seems to get old, and after waiting a half hour in the rain the fireworks ended up having an enormous cloud of smoke in front of it, obstructing half the view. We didn't even stay to watch the grand finale, because by this point only about a third of the display was visible at all - the wide-eyed child in me was disappointed.