Red Sauce

The Old Man and Scotch on the Rocks

The lemons were as big as grapefruit. They brought down some branches of the lemon tree so low that they touched the brown, Arizona desert leaving a round, soft indent in the sand.
“Do they taste sweeter than regular lemons, more tart?” I kept asking this, incessantly. The question itself was annoying me and my eagerness and earnest tone was cloying. Oy.
“They are lemons. They taste like lemons. Lemons aren’t sweet. Are you crazy?” my dad said. And that was the obvious answer.
My dad was showing me his garden, full of lemon trees, a fig tree, a nectarine tree and a few apple trees. In a corner was a smaller garden with peppers, tomatoes and zucchini.
He took me to Mrs. White’s in Phoenix and we bonded over the little things like the crushed and whole fennel in my grandfather, his father’s, Italian sausage and then we marveled at the uptight 'tude of my body building brother.
I haven’t been around here in a while, but I am going to post a previously posted and then deleted post I wrote about my dad.
Just visited the old guy in Arizona, home of wrinkled, tanned, turqoised Midwesterners and New Yorkers who go to the land of the sun to live our their last days. I fell in love with the Southwest and with my dad all over again.
So no matter what anyone thinks of this post (which I took down after someone that I relied on at the time told me it didn’t “do it” for her) this post was all about love. So fuck the player haters and upward and onward. Here's to cheating, stealing, tanned, wrinkled dads who live their life like they know it's going to end abruptly and ugly one day.

An Ode to Tokyo Rose

A while ago, maybe a couple years now, I worked on a book that involved interviewing people about how food influenced, intersected in their life. At one time, I interviewed a woman I will call Amaya for now, at Superfine in Dumbo. She grew up in Chicago and had a story about Tokyo Rose, who died today.
Here's Amaya's story.

Amaya and Tokyo Rose

*Amaya* met Tokyo Rose when she was 15. On a quiet, cool Chicago fall night, this woman who had come into her parent’s restaurant regularly and who had become friends with her family, suddenly had a story, a legendary one. But Amaya couldn’t tell anyone about it. Her father forbade that. It wasn’t until she was flipping through a Lucky Magazine when she was 30, feeling a bit lost in life, that she was able to choke out the Tokyo Rose story to an unknowing Mac Cosmetics employee.
Amaya grew up in a restaurant family. She bussed tables, cleaned the kitchen, scooped out Udon and spent a lot of time alone and with babysitters at home while her parents were working. One of her earliest memories was pushing over the plates and linens underneath the counter of her parent’s restaurant on Division Street in Chicago and making a place to lie down and sleep.
Her father used to cook for the royal family in Japan. But when he emigrated to Chicago he struggled and worked at Benihana’s and finally opened his own Japanese restaurant on Division Street and served sushi and udon before the masses caught on. The restaurant was modeled on the ramen shops in Japan, casual and packed with intensely fresh ingredients. With fresh noodles made and hung along the kitchen daily to dry, the smell of the flour burrowed into her nostrils and Amaya set off to shop with her father at the markets. She can truthfully say that she has seen a chicken run around with his neck cut off at a butcher shop in Chicago’s Southside.
She did her homework under the counter of the restaurant, slept under the counter on a heaping pile of tablecloths and watched people come in from all over the city for what was then an exotic cuisine. Her mother made sure to pack her sandwiches after she had an embarrassing moment trying to explain her bento box at a privatge school on Chicago’s North Side.
Besides packs of men and women from the Southside coming into the restaurant for chicken wings (they were barbecued and tangy, sweet and sour, crunchy—better than anything they could find on the South side) so did the city’s Japanese community.
“They were so quiet and intense,” Amaya says.
One night she was finally struck by the oddity of growing up in a restaurant.

Got My Aretha Back in a Banana Cone

I had a banana sorbet during lunch today. I also had some leftover (best in the world) mac and cheese and buttermilk fried chicken but the highlight was the walk along the park with a sorbet on a cone that I had seen and wondered about but suddenly fell in love with during a slow impromptu walk along Central Park.
Ciao Bella was out of my raspberry sorbet. And as I perused the options next to a trio of Upper East Side young ladies who lunch, who were clad in crisp Oxfords and khakis, I decided after I watched them opt for mint chocolate chip and hazelnut, I would go freaky on them and get the banana sorbet. While the beloved, but sadly absent today, raspberry sorbet tastes like the very essence of the lovely little bombs, (sidenote-favorite raspberry moment? Eating a carton of the lovelies on the Champs Elysees with three of my favorite people in the world—Framboise et al), the banana sorbet immediately reminded me of an overripe banana flambéed, carmelized and heated up, then frozen. Lovely. Made me want to make a sandwich of nutella, banana and Italian bread pressed and melted in my George Foreman tonight. I am all about indulging myself these days.
Funny how I have been eating better and enjoying eating, drinking, perusing the city but not feeling like sharing it at all.
Here we go, self-conscious blog moment. It’s the jumping the shark moment, isn’t it?
So soon?
Perhaps not. Maybe I just needed a break. And I needed a jolt of new, lovely and new.
I am in rediscovery mode, bitches. It's fall and I feel it again, as Lavern Baker would say.
I went through my CD collection and loaded all the R&B and soul I had all but neglected for nearly a year. Now, I am back and up to the challenge of listening to Aretha Franklin daily again. Praise her.
And I am off to the gym so I can eat a large piece of the apple pear pie I made this past Sunday.
I made the pie crust with just butter and added some sugar as some recipes suggested. But I fear the sugar made the crust less flaky than I would have hoped. I want flaky.
I am on a mission to find some lard, as Aretha blares in my headphones.

Apple Pear Pie

Crust:
1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1/2 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) chilled unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
3 tablespoons (or more) ice water

In the pie:
4 peeled pears
7 peeled apples
Cinnamon
Nutmeg
¼ cup brown sugar
A few pats of butter
Some salt

Mix flour, sugar, and salt together in bowl. Add butter and mix with fingers until coarse meal forms. Add 3 tablespoons water. Mix together just until moist clumps form, adding more water by 1/2 tablespoonfuls if dough is dry. Gather dough into ball; flatten into disk. Wrap in plastic; refrigerate 1 hour. (Can be made 2 days ahead. Keep chilled. Soften slightly at room temperature before rolling.)

Slice up pears and apples. In a large bowl, mix fruit with cinnamon, brown sugar, nutmeg and salt.

Roll out half the dough, place in buttered pie dish. Place fruit on crust. Roll out the rest of the dough and place it on top. Pinch bottom and top dough together.
Cook at 400 for about 45 minutes.

My Afternoon With a Whorey Pie

It's amazing that I went all summer without making pie. Until yesterday, that is. Late in the afternoon, I stood at my kitchen table and made a pie crust simply with flour, butter and salt. This came after much discussion about whether to use all butter, all Crisco or half and half. I went for the all butter. Butter is better. No doubt about it. And I agree with one of my consultants who said, "Crisco just scares me." Then I peeled a large bag of sweet peaches I bought in Greenpoint.
I cut up the peaches and placed them gingerly in the buttery pie crust with their striated red marks, perforated from their now missing pits, looking upwards. Topped it all off with a muddy mixture of sugar, butter and an egg. On top of that, I sprinkled cinnamon and nutmeg.
Then the double crusted bad boy went into the oven for nearly an hour. It’s true! Pies take a long time to cook.
But so does a late summer transformation…..
As Pascale Le Draoulec, a French author in search of the perfect American Pie in her book "American Pie: Slices of Life," says, "Pie just may be the madonna-whore of the dessert world." She explains that pie is both sensuous and maternal. Pie, the perfect whore.
The outcome of my own sensuous and maternal whorey peach pie was pretty excellent. Although, I would have liked the crust to be a tad bit flakier. My guess is that I manhandled it a bit too much when I formed it into a ball. And one consultant suggested I may not have let it rest long enough. It was only in the refrigerator for about 20 minutes.
This week, I am going to tackle more pie. Maybe this time, I will make the crust with lard.
Any suggestions?

Peach Pie

Pie Crust:

2 Cups all-purpose unbleached flour
1/4 tsp. salt
1 cup cold unsalted butter
5 tbs. cold water

Cut the butter into little pieces. Dump the flour and salt into a bowl of and mix. Add the butter and cut it in with a fork until the batter becomes pebbly. Add the water, adding it a little at a time to make sure you have the right amount.
Press dough together gently into a ball. Do not overhandle.
Place plastic wrap over dough and let it rest in refrigerator for at least an hour.
Roll out dough with floured rolling pin on floured surface. Place dough in pie pan and cut off excess. Gently roll excess into a ball and roll out again. This is the top layer. Place top layer over peach mixture.

Peach mixture:
5 1/2 cups peaches, cut and peeled.
cinnamon
nutmeg
one egg
1/2 cup sugar
2 tbs. flour
1/2 cup butter

Place peaches center side up on bottom. Pour cinnamon and nutmeg over mixture. Mix together egg, sugar, flour and butter. Pour this over the peaches. Top the pie with the top crust.

Bake at 450 for 15 minutes. Then turn down oven to 350 and bake for about 35 more minutes.

A Pig, A Potato and a Work Out

Bacon can be misunderstood. I don’t know how much bacon Jackie Warner of “Work Out” eats but probably not much.
But eating bacon and cakes from Black Hound bakery brought over by the lovely Judy McGuire and watching “Work Out” helped make my Tuesday night fly by. And when the summer is waning and the week is dragging and like Loverboy, you are just working for the weekend, it’s nice to have a Tuesday night fly by.
Yeah, that's a pig up there--that is bacon before it's dead and cut up for you. Just reminding all of y'all. We are eating living beings.
I made my regular potatoes Anna with a variation of some added bacon—potatoes, onions, garlic, olive oil, salt, pepper, parmesan cheese, the last of my truffle oil and I added some bacon from Oscar’s in Upstate New York. I made some New York Strip steaks bought at Whole Foods and cooked a bit too much. And I made some asparagus and garlic bread.
Sidenote---I experienced a dumbass sighting at the Whole Foods meat counter who was insistent and bitchy about wanted to buy local. He should have waited one day and bought his dumbass strip steaks from the farmers market. He thought Buffalo New York Strip meant it was from Buffalo, New York and then got bitchy when he realized there was no “local” beef at Whole Foods. He kept asking where Coleman Farms was. I kept saying Colorado and he would not listen to me. Did he think chicks didn't know? Did he think I, myself did not dabble in trying to buy local? He does not know me!! People need to do some research. I commend his passion, but get out of the way. You are wasting my time. Buffalo is an animal, dumbass!
So, we all sat down on my green couch—the big Greek, Judy and I and watched Jackie Warner turn flab into fab for one woman. And we watched Zen really come out of her shell. Um, this made up shell Zen was in, is fascinating only that it is made up. They made up some kind of self-esteem issues for this woman, a trainer at Jackie’s gym, who they said was distraught and out of shape, but was neither of those things in reality. But the big gay trainer totally set her straight on her hike up a mountain. Oh, Joy! She’s better now. And she is going to lose those two pounds she gained when she was mysteriously distraught.

Turkey Meatballs and Sports Bras

The subway windows are an unflattering reflective surface. They bubble you up. They puff up your face, your cheeks, the skin underneath your eyes, your chin. So, it’s 8 a.m and I look up at the reflective glass across from me and I have this puffy face, and I am all gray on my way to work.
And even when the air conditioning is blasting in this tin can, I find myself dripping sweat and then finally I get a seat and this is when I am at first relieved but then horrifyingly check out my reflection and now I feel puffy and gray and realize I am having a bad hair day.
My new freelance gig is full of runners and athletes. So most of them either literally run to work in their sports bras and tiny shorts or they ride their fancy bikes in and come in camouflaged in their lycra shirts and shorts and wraparound glasses and helmets. There are showers on every floor of the townhouse the office is housed in. They shower and sit in their chairs with the same tank top and skirt they wore the day before. The thing that changes daily is the sports gear, not the office gear. Priorities.
I have been riding my bike in but today with a little drizzle and the odd desire to wear jeans to work, I decide to subway in.
But what makes me smile a puffy subway smile is that I remember that in my bag I have one large turkey meatball sitting in red sauce and next to it some (Good 'n Plenty recipe) mac and cheese. My belly will thank me later, even if it protrudes a bit more in the afternoon.

Turkey meatballs

1 lb. organic ground turkey (dark meat)
1 chopped onion
1 clove of garlic
1 egg
Grated Parmesan Cheese
Dried basil
Breadcrumbs
Milk

Mix all ingredients together using enough milk to make the meatballs barely hold together when you form them.
Bake in oven at 400 for about ten minutes. Place in red sauce cooking over medium to low heat on stove. Cook for about 15 to 20 minutes longer.
Serve with pasta or potatoes.

Big Muffins, Big Hills, Big Crab Cake

Against a brick wall they sat in their tight shirts and their tight shorts and their clicky clacky clipped shoes. In the early afternoon on a Saturday or Sunday at the Runcible Spoon in Nyack you will see at least one hundred of them, cyclists, drinking iced coffee, eating huge (albeit spongy) muffins and pouring cool brightly colored smoothies down their throats.
The Runcible Spoon is about a 25 mile ride from the George W Bridge in Manhattan through farm country and rolling suburban hill country. It’s lovely, but someone has to learn to make a better muffin there. After riding 30 miles there I was happy to have a huge muffin and a smoothie. But during my 30 plus miles back to my Brooklyn apartment, I unfortunately still felt that huge, dense, meatloaf textured-apple crumb muffin sitting at the bottom of my belly. I wonder if the sinewy cyclists are just used to this or only eat half a muffin at “the Spoon.”
But I didn’t puke. I loved me the crazy gearheads. Will go back next weekend.

My Biceps Have Potatoes In Them, Too

“I felt those potatoes in there.”
Aah, Jackie Warner has a way with words and a sly smile. The potatoes she was talking about by the way were the tiny oblong biceps that are housed in one of her client’s arms. Warner, no doubt, was just pumping up the client’s self esteem and being a little flirty.
Last night, on “Work Out,” it was abundantly clear that Jackie Warner is the anti-Antin (as in Jonathan from "Blowout" fame.} Swirling all around her and her striated naked abs is drama and drama queens, yet she floats through it all, wiping the crazy smooth with one sly smile and a smooth stride across her gym’s immaculate wood floor. With buff, long arms and a hair with just so much spike, Jackie’s calmness and subdued attitude is the such the opposite of Antin that I wonder if I can even keep my attention going sometimes. Her laid back, naïve Midwestern persona even makes the show a little sentimental. But things pick up when Jackie’s jealous Cuban girlfriend (uh, is she playing that or is it real?) gets in front of the camera. Last night, she ripped up a picture of a woman Jackie was off to train. Jackie just smiled a little and looked down at the Cuban’s clunky, high heeled boots. That darn fiery Cuban, she is no doubt thinking.
Finally, I caught Jody Watley working out. Poor Jodie. She seems like she is on something. Or should be on something. There is this weird goofy smile plastered on her face as she does some kind of reverse sideways lunge. That lunge looked perilously bad and not right for many reasons. I assumed Jody didn’t think the proper forward lunge was pretty.
It’s rare I find a television show this addicting. But I am hooked. Well, I also must confess my love for Wife Swap. And part of my love for "Work Out" may also stem from the fact that way back in the day, I was once an aerobics instructor. Another day for that tale.
Back to the potatoes comment, though. This makes me want to think up other names for muscles. The zucchini (triceps). The squash (quadriceps). The celery (abs). hmmm.
For the viewing, I decided on a simple chicken and spinach pasta meal. Some protein, some good for you carbs. Jackie would be proud.

Breaded Chicken

Organic free-range chicken breast (not only tastier than the other kind, but as humane as it can get here)
A dollop of whole grain mustard
Olive Oil
Breadcrumbs
Tb. Lemon juice
Grated parmesan cheese
Salt and pepper to taste

Mix together olive oil, mustard, lemon juice and place on a plate. On another plate pour our a handful of breadcrumbs and grate some parmesan over them.
Dip chicken in olive oil mixture on both sides and then coat in bread crumb mixture.

Bake at 425 for about 20 minutes.

Me, My Mullet and Some Eggplant Cakes

The mullet on Saturday really gave me a start. I went for a long, solo bike ride Saturday morning, got my mullet and hair colored. Well it wasn’t a mullet until after I got my hair cut.
I have finally come to terms with the fact that I basically have unruly curly and sometimes wavy hair. I used to blow dry it, iron it – anything to make my thick hair go straight and thin.
But no more. Nope, I rarely blow dry. Well, on occasion, I do. But I decided a couple of years ago to just get a haircut that would comply with my curly locks.
But for some odd reason the woman that cuts my wondrous locks decided to blow dry them Saturday. And what did I end up with when all was said and done? A mullet. It’s true, I was walking around Nolita with a mullet and my nice friend or maybe not so nice, didn’t even mention it over a beer at Milano’s.
I went home and made eggplant cakes, potatoes and corn. All of these ingredients I bought at the farmers market. And I ate my lovely meal and worried I had a mullet. But then I washed and didn’t blow dry the next day. No mullet. Whoo!! It’s the little things.

Eggplant Cakes:

Ingredients:

One fresh Eggplant cut up and driven of any bitters
One onion
Two cloves of garlic
Handful of grated parmesan cheese
I cup or more Fresh breadcrumbs
1 beaten egg

What to do:

Blend all ingredients, minus the cheese and breadcrumbs and egg, in a cuisinart. Blend mixture in a bowl with cheese and breadcrumbs (use your instinct on the breadcrumbs. These should be not so bogged down by breadcrumbs but something like a veggie burger consistency).
Form into patties and cook at 425 for twenty minutes.

The Life of a Sexy Ass Guido

The life of a sexy ass guido is not an uncomplicated one. I beg and I borrow this a bit, but when it says so much by saying so little, I have to take it.
I met a man that looked like Donald O'Connor in a yellow jersey and I am just now recovering from the whole experience.
He is standing there in his fancy yellow lycra cycling jersey, puffing out around his flat belly, and he is sporting a slight but constant smile on his face and he is asking me if I “ever met anyone at these things.” "One of these things" is an organized bike ride through a New York cycling club.
I can’t get his face out of my head. It’s sitting there like the last chip in a bowl or not the last chip in the bowl because that is usually the most desired chip. No, his face is sitting there stuck in that place in my brain where things stick and become a vision all around you even if you are looking at the 7-11 on 23rd off Park Avenue like the last girl standing at the high school dance. But I never went to high school dances, but still, there is that girl standing there and this guy, the guy with the yellow lycra thinking he is all Lance Armstrong studly standing there, grinning.
“Have you ever met anyone special or interesting at these rides?” he asked again after I said, “Huh?” the first time he asked.
The man looks a bit like Donald O’Connor but O’Connor would for sure be nicer, kinder, gentler and not in dire need of a post-divorce fling with a chick in her own lycra jersey. And he might sing and dance and be friends with someone like Gene Kelly.
This Donald O’Connor man may even be obsessed. Yes, he seems obsessed. He bought a $2,000 Serotta bike and got professionally sized for another $500 and he is sporting all this cycling gear, Look clips, Cannondale socks, Pearl Izumi cycling shorts and he is constantly smiling. No, he is grinning. He is suave. No, he thinks he is suave.