Red Sauce

Taking the Plunge, Handing it to the Man

On the way home from listening to a discussion about food and food writing featuring Ruth Reichl, Anne Patchett, Jane and Michael Stern, and David Rakoff with a Leonard Lopate moderating, I kept repeating in my head this one idea that came up – How do I inhabit my own life? How do I enjoy life?
What we eat, why we eat it and the way we think about eating it tells so much about us that it is wise to take the time and think about that. Living an examined life, takes energy, time, patience and sustenance. And what that sustenance is makes a big old difference.
While last night’s discussion, which centered around Gourmet magazine’s literary supplement (“August Summer Reading” Digest) had many thought provoking lines and quotes---are fancy salts necessary or a sign of our increasingly evil society that is fetishizing food items? Is Curtis Barbecue in Vermont the best restaurant in America? And can I really live by the creed, buy American, buy local and eat organic as much as I should?--what I came away with was a) when miserable, I dress badly (white crop pants, red American Apparel shirt and flip flops? Man, I am in misery mode), b) Upper East Siders love to dress up and listen to people talk about food and sitting in a room surrounded by them made me feel like I was back in GP, c) I love Leonard Lopate on the radio but he comes off as a bit too cantankerous in person or maybe he had a bad night and d) big changes for me must involve living a more examined life and inhabiting it in the truest form I can.
So, my dear peeps, I am giving notice today at evil corporate media empire. I am taking the plunge, going freelance full time, baby. While I have a three month full time freelance gig to cushion the uncertainty that a full time freelance writing life can entail, I am excited to take the plunge and come November pad around my apartment in my underwear inhabiting an examined freelancers, worry-filled life.
I am a strong Sicilian American woman!! I am the modern Anna Magnani, people.
Keep on living. Happy Weekend!!

Bread and Butter

This is what it is all about -- A loaf of great crusty bread with cold sweet butter.

I Refuse to Smell the Roses

A trip to Trader Joe’s last night made me think that of the two kinds of people, those that like to make a "connection" or small talk with the people that they are making a transaction with (waiters, cashiers, salespeople) and those that would rather just make the transaction and move on, we need more of the latter.
First of all, I have never truly understood the appeal of Trader Joe’s. I know, it’s cheap, organic and they have containers of cookies for cheap and there is some cutesy shit going on like specials marked on chalkboards with clever slightly politically seeming messages. There is a cult surrounding this grocery store chain that I will never ever understand. There is even a web site that actually taste tests and rates its bottled sauces.
Since it’s peach season, and I am something of a peach fanatic (me and Ruth both, by the way), I don’t appreciate having to inspect my peaches through a dark shield. The peaches ("ripened") at Trader Joe’s, were in a plastic container with dark blue mesh over them. It’s hard to really see what you are buying. Why does Trader Joe’s not want you to see their produce? Instead it’s shrink wrapped or covered up. I gave up on the peaches finally.
At the 14th Street branch, the lines are always long and the shelves are bare. But isn’t that the case at every Trader Joe’s? And there are lots of NYU students standing agape at the shelves. And there are annoying couples deciding, arguing, cajoling, figuring what to put in their cart. And there are women in line making chit chat with each other. Ugh, it’s suburbia. I tore myself away from that years ago. I am cranky, always have been, never suited for the small talk unless I am shopping here, in my mom’s grocery store in Michigan.
Anyhow, this all brings me to William Grimes, former New York Times restaurant critic. When describing Bill Buford’s new book “Heat,” Grimes writes, “...he succumbs to what might be called the New Yorker fallacy, the belief that absolutely anything, if reported on in exhaustive detail and presented in glossy prose, will fascinate.”

Baby, You're a Freak Show Just Like Me

The sheen of puke is out today. So work is much more pleasant. It’s just an old reliable kind of maudlin, road to nowhere kind of feeling here at the house of corporate media. No “ramped up, what you got cookin’” kind of horribleness.
This had me thinking about past bosses.
One of my favorite bosses was a legendary literary agent in the East Village. She ran for Senate as a communist in the 60s and had pictures of herself with Fidel on her walls. When I was without a place to stay for a few weeks at the end of a summer, she found me a place with pink frilly bedsheets and pictures of mysterious apartment dweller with Lily Tomlin. The next place she found me was so infested with cockroaches, I attempted to shack up with anything that moved and that would take me. But that didn’t work out so well, so I went home to Michigan for a while. The sea of cockroaches undulating on the cat food and crawling up the walls of the huge, lovely Upper East Side abode were just too much for me.

Cold Pink Wine

The first time I met Mary Lou she held a bottle of cold, pink wine in her left hand. I opened the front door and she grabbed my head and pushed it into the side of her face.
“Oh, I have heard all about you,” she said and seemed to want to take my head away from me.
We ate breaded, fried veal cutlets and mashed potatoes and drank the pink wine that night. I was about eleven. It was nearly two years after my mother served my father divorce papers. And Mary Lou was one of her first new friends, post-divorce friends. The red and white kitchen lit up like it never had and it was the crash of a new life—the light of a huge presence.
When my mother was officially divorced, she was convinced to go to Pinky’s, one of those piano bars that divorcees and widows go to the minute they find themselves alone at a kitchen table. She went with a group of women she met at Leon’s beauty shop in Grosse Pointe Farms. On her first night, the forty and fiftysomething women left my mom there without a ride, in an attempt to get the divorcee who hadn’t had sex in lord knows how long laid. But she was just petrified.
These women became my family.

The Day Ruth Reichl Emailed Me Back

Trumpets did not sound and the light didn't shine around her silhouette. A slight disappointment. But I also didn't puke on myself. I nearly fell out in a panic attack-fueled pool of sweat but something held the sweat off a bit. So it only beaded up on my face as far as I can tell when I couldn't remember George Orwell's name. Then Ruth said "Huxley" after I said I couldn't remember the author of "Down and Out in Paris and London." But I knew she was wrong but couldn't correct the Ruth, the genius, the goddess, my career crush, as my friend Liz described her.

So when I got home and it dawned on me, the name "Orwell" popped into my head, I emailed the Ruth back and told her. I used the conde nast email guide my friend over at one of those girly magazines gave me and it worked!

I had a job interview and as far as those things go, it went ok. But, really, the most lovely thing to happen so far in my day is that in my inbox, there's an email that says "Ruth Reichl to me."