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.

Finding Fennel, Finding Home

"Oh my gad! Oh my gad!"
From ten feet away I could hear the familiar nasal tones of a native Chicagoan and it brought me back. Well, to be more exact, the nearly mulleted, high-browed, eyeshadowed Midwesterner brought my own nasal tones back for a bit, at least. Like déjà vu the accent just kicked in as if there was a plump, nearly purple Traverse City bing cherry pressed up against the back of my nasal passage. All I could do was chime in, “Oh my gad.” And yes, a smile and not a smirkcame from the woman. We in the Midwest know the art of self-deprecation. Oooeee, shure we do!
This leads me to sausage. There's sausage and then there's my grandfather's sausage. There's the delicate use of spice and then there's the bold use of fennel. I prefer fennel seeds in my sausage. Not that overwhelming abundance that can repulse. Nah, a refreshing handful to just lend some texture and earthiness to the pork. And my granfather’s sausage was amazing with a slightly loose grind, a sweet pork flavor (even in his hotter sausage) and a nutty note of fennel along with just the right salt and pepper. But every time he got applause for his sausage, he brushed it off. Even though he was from the old country, he adopted that Michigan self-deprecation.
It’s hard to find and it’s hard to forget.
As happens many times, when people die, so do their recipes.
So my dead grandfather took his sausage recipe with him. So there I am on a Saturday at an Italian deli in Windsor Terrace picking up subpar sausage minus fennel. But then I picked up some amazing, fluffy light freshly made cheese ravioli and truffle oil, still an obsession.
So my Saturday night, pre—Oh My Gad! dinner—consisted of subpar sausage, cheese ravioli and mushrooms in truffle oil.
A bit too hearty to be light on your feet and talking smack with a nasal-toned, highlighted, high-waisted nurse from Skokie, but you can’t always have what you want. But you can try to get close to it.
Next up--homemade sausage experimenting.

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.

Meatballs, Mariah Got Me Feeling Emotions

My mother brought food to the dinner table every night when I was a kid. She was a depressed, chain smoking, secret eating house of a woman, but the act of bringing plates of amazing breaded veal cutlets, delicate sweet sauces with meatballs and plates of breaded cauliflower to a red formica kitchen table with only one and sometimes two children there to eat it was her purest gesture of happiness. My other two brothers were already away at college for most of my dinners.
So, after she brought the pristine white plates filled with the steaming plates of food, perfectly made, she turned and made her way back up the pink carpeting hugging the steps that led to her master bedroom, where she laid on her bed and smoked cigarettes facing the windows to the backyard.
I sat at the table with a bounty in front of me appreciating her gesture more than I appreciated the glistening breaded meat, though that wasn’t so bad.
When she got divorced she was feeling less out of her element than in it, reveling in recipes that contained Campbell’s soup cans. It was an uncertain time.
This leads me to Mariah Carey.
Last year at this time I was preparing for a trip to South Africa. And while on that trip my friend Tracy and I rented a BMW and drove around Afffrica. And yes, we kept calling it Afffrica,
So, as I sit here and finish off the last of the meatballs I made last night--the meatballs my mother taught me how to make--I think about what I was doing last year and my mom and now Mariah. With so much change going on in my little insignificant life, I like to take a moment with a meatball and, in this case, Mariah. Again, uncertain times.
South Africans were listening to Mariah last summer. They were singing along with Maria as she sang, “We Belong Together.” As we all were last summer.
See, Mariah’s gesture in her singing technique is full of love but also a bit of crazy and obsessive. As my mother perfected the tender meatball that falls apart at the slightest touch of a fork’s tine, Mariah perfects the long note. As Sasha Frere-Jones pointed out in his definitive Mariah profile in April, Mariah has a “freakish vocal quality.” This comes from Mariah’s plenty. Some women don’t know how to handle what they got.
My mom made amazing meatballs.
Mariah carries a note over several beats of a song.
That’s how my mom and Mariah are examples of the superwomen of the world.
Praise them.

Lemons Love Like No Other

When the lights went off and the lightning cracked, the waitress was scared.
“Ew, that was scary,” she said and you know if she were home in her apartment somewhere she would have turned her lights off and huddled in a corner. But waitresses have to at least seem like they are in control. So her little scared mouse moment actually threw me off. Something was really wrong here.
But again, at Mary’s Fish Camp, most anything can be forgiven. (Yes, again for the steamed lemon pudding and some fish.) Here’s a recipe posting that Willow (still pregnant) found that may be similar to Mary’s. Mary’s instead opts for the most luscious and creamy creme fraiche topping.
They served me lemons!! With my fish. This excited me to no end. I wondered then if there are some fish that people deem improper to serve lemons with. But I got the flounder and it came with a large wedge of lemon, a pile of asparagus, some mushrooms and a panko breadcrumb topping. It was lovely and fresh, and flaky and lemony, thanks to the wedge.
We also got Mary’s addictive and greasy (but greasy in a good way) shoestring fries and corn on the cob. I appreciate a restaurant that takes the time to undress a corn completely—taking all the nasty corn string off it. Mary’s did not do this. So at the bottom of the bowl, pile of nasty strings.
Somehow the whole night felt like some kind of disjointed mess. The steamed lemon pudding was right on. But the cracking lightning, the scared waitress and the wet bowl of string, an anomaly and not so indicative of our nice table with the three blondes next to us who just bought shirts at Pink and who were interested in our very insane discussion about how this amazing pudding got to be the way it is. Was it that the flour rested on top? Or is it all through and the heavier ingredients just settle to make a crust? These are the matters of life that count. Do the heavy things rise up or fall to the bottom and who can handle them either way?
And nothing, nothing just kind of happens. I mean after a night of perfectly cooked fish and perfectly steamed lemon pudding with a tedious discussion about the makings of said pudding, I know nothing in life just happens. Love, flirtations, an illicit, evil tryst are delicate matters. Both can’t just happen. They are shaped, cooked, if you will for moments on end, moment after moment all tied together with method and process.
Pudding has to be prodded, tempted into shape with boiling and stirring and measuring and timing. The texture, just the right firmness, suppleness, all taken into account. Then right when you are supposedly on your way home, it just sort of happens? No, things just don’t cook that way. They take longer. It’s more subtle. There are details. You find yourself with a mouthful of lemon pudding and you are like, what the fuck? I love lemon pudding. Whose lemon pudding is this? Not mine? Mine is taken. But go ahead, have some. It just kind of happened.
Nope, someone took care with that lemon pudding. Someone made that shit happen.
Willow and I got our own lemon pudding last night. Because sometimes sharing is just gross and a little dessert may not be enough for two people. Sometimes you need your own. We took the mature route and you know being mature is not about sharing and then laughing it off the next day. Nope, being mature is just about knowing what is yours and keeping your pants on.
I went home to not sleep a wink and to wake up and ride my bike like the wind. These are the times of the Gods.

Hot August Nights to Come, Onions on Top

Julys tend to slip by. Not unnoticed but it’s just a month that cushions June and August. June is full of summer promise, blue skies and temperate heat. And then August is hot, humid, wet air pressing up against clogged up pores and sweaty backs of knees.
July has been eventful for me, but still feels buttressed by more interesting weather months, in both food terms (June berries, August corn) and life terms. (Note: first time usage of “buttress” or “buttressed.” New freelance job is making me smarter.)
So, as August nears, I look back to August pasts and a steak that held a future. It was a shared steak and fries. A late night at a crowded restaurant. I was drunk. I was in Brooklyn and one steak was to sate us both for the night.
At one point there was this squinting of the eyes across from me. And the hands came up near the face. They were in claws and there was this description then of me as she assumed I was in high school. And that we would have been friends. No, not friends, we would have known each other—nodded and liked each other from afar.
Next came the steak, charred with perfect black grid marks criss-crossed over and under looking so stereotypical that I fear the chef burned them with a Bunsen burner. Roasted shitake mushrooms, sweaty and rubbery sat on top of the meat. Some strands of carmelised onions were draped over the whole thing, the sweet brown rings smiled. Then there were cheery salads in round white cups at our separate corners of the table.
There was a lot of loud chewing. Mouth open, agape, entire body’s energy focused on inappropriate, smacking and chewing and finger lifting of long, fat pieces of lettuce shoved into the mouth by a forefinger and then strands of onions held up long and dropped on the tongue and slowly sucked in. She did this wearing a tight black t-shirt that read New York in red letters across it. And so much talk and then a take back.
“No, we might not have been friends,” she said.
It’s what a meal can do to a previously hungry stomach, I thought. It can take it all back and for me, it can make none of it even matter.
The most important lesson that night was that sweet onions on top of a nicely charred steak is perfection, a sweet and salt masterpiece.

'First They Say They Want You'

I was really good at sitting still and being quiet as a child. I could stand or sit and be quiet for hours and used to do this until someone would notice.
But time is relative to age. When you are a child, ten minutes is obnoxiously long. So I could definitely stand and be quiet for, I would say, 20 minutes, and no one noticed. I could sit, though, for hours before anyone noticed.
It only came in handy for school musicals where I had to stand and mouth the words since Ms. Chistener thought I had a horrible singing voice. (But she forever turned me onto Neil Diamond.)
Otherwise, it has come in handy at corporate media job. I sit still and don’t do much here. My job was stripped from me by sheen of puke when he started on and attacked my Latwonda. So even though I used to edit, write and command a general piece of corporate media’s web site, in the last few months, I sat still. Sounds nice, right? But it was maddening, soul sucking, crazy driving, horribleness. So I no longer sit still. Instead, I walk away.
All this had me thinking of previous bosses. Here’s my rundown:
1) Racist editor at hometown suburban paper. I got fired for calling my hometown racist in a column where I reminisced about Donna Red. Donna, are you out there?
2) Lou Grant-type editor at wire service in Chicago. He was mean, gruff and insensitive but the best journalist I ever worked for. I learned more from Zimbo than I could have learned from anyone anywhere. He made me tell a woman her husband died on my last day. It was for the man’s obit.
3) Naked literary agent doyenne. She was lovely and smart and an old East Village activist relic a la Bella Abzug-. Her 75 year old boyfriend used to hit on me, rub my back, my arms, once brushed up against the boobies when no one else was around. I had to quit.
4) Evil Brooklyn Paper Editor brought in from New Hampshire who hated women. Got fired with another reporter the same day for no reason that we can think of, except for we knew Brooklyn better than he did and corrected him a few times.
5) Crazy corporate media boss caught sending porn to fellow reporter. I volunteered for a lay off and received a sweet deal.
6) Nice, gentle Woody Allen-esque editor at big city paper. He really wanted to be a filmmaker. He tried to kiss me after dinner one night.
7) Lovely Latwonda, my office spouse, soul mate, pizza partner and one of the funniest, smartest, most pleasant bosses I have ever had. She left after she broke her water in the office and off we were to the hospital so she could deliver bouncing baby girl. She’s not coming back to corporate media job.
8) Sheen of Puke – the repulsive man who sent me into a freelance world, full of uncertainty but also promise.

In between of course, there was a fitness guru with frizzed hair and spandex at Vic Tanny and a crazy creepy woman at a photo booth in Detroit.

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!!

Christmas in July Represents a Crisis

My mom told me she was making pignolata this morning. It can only mean she is trying work something out in her head. It’s not a bad thing. But pignolata making is her usual stress reliever at Christmas, since it's a Sicilian Christmas dessert. When she told me over the phone she was making it, I knew it would be a quick call so she could get back to the rolling and the frying.
About two weeks before Christmas, against the laundry room wall standing upright in a neat line the packed, lumpy, grease-stained heavy brown bags usually stand. These are the initial signs of Christmas at my mother’s house. In the bags, tiny balls of fried dough are left overnight to drain themselves of the oil.
These are my mother’s babies. And they are the bane of existence for her as well, or at least she moans about the little fried dough balls for weeks. They represent a Sicilian American tradition of suffering over pleasure during the holiday season for my mother. There couldn't be Christmas without it.
Pignolata, like her red sauce and like her meat balls and even her sfingi, are created under a flurry of idealism and anger and reticence and tradition. She invites over my cousins and aunts for the traditional two day preparation of the pignolata but she regrets their company the whole time, though she needs them.
Important family discussions in my family include who makes the most delicate sauce, the best lasagna, the softest meatballs. There is no argument about the pignolata. That is my mother’s territory and crowning glory. No one’s is better and she knows this, it’s her pride, her joy. And we can easily argue that her red sauce and meatballs are the best, too. But that’s another matter.
The final step of the honeycombed Sicilian desserts is to package them and give them as gifts. But who gets the gift and who deserves them is just as important as the labor-intensive process to making the dessert.
The fact she is making these in July to freeze them for Christmas leaves me a little speechless. She is getting older, slower. And she is working out some of life’s changes, she said.
It’s a controversial topic. I am not even going to give you her recipe. Everyone makes it different and everyone argues as to the proper method.
I am going to delve into it at the proper time - December. This just worries me now in July what this means for Christmas.