garlic is more important than most other things

Joe and I took MegaBus to New York City for the weekend of his birthday. I got "arguably the best garlic in the known universe" as my souvenir. I think I'm planning on roasting it and spreading it on bread. Yum.

french (in action!), happy birthday to me.

I'm starting my 23rd year by adding more French to my life.

Since acquiring a set of French in Action DVDs, I've been meaning to start actually watching them rather than letting them languish on my bedside table. For those not in the know, French in Action is a series of 52 (?) episodes made by a professor at Yale as a tool for French instruction.

They sometimes are hilariously dated (made in 1986, they are my age!) yet also right on the mark. In episode two, which I watched today, the main character, Mireille looks somewhat dismayed that her friends are eating lunch at ELEVEN. Quelle horreur!! Also, there's a romance, a mysterious suited man following people around, and parts where the professor teaching the class walks out of his classroom and into the action. Awesome. And Mireille's outfit is really cute (red high-waisted skirt, white shirt cut low in the back).

One thing I found weird about this episode was that Mireille shook hands with two of her male friends rather than exchanging bisous. Especially since she knew their names and seemed to be in the same social group as they were. I got made fun of anytime I tried to shake hands with anyone in France.  Hmmph.

garlic! butter!

Last night I made bagna cauda, which sounds like the most disgusting thing ever on paper but it actually amazing. Try it.



Recipe:

8 (LARGE) cloves of garlic (chopped up)
6 tablespoons of butter
.5 cup olive oil
1 tin of anchovies
some cayenne pepper
some black pepper
some lemon juice

In a small cast-iron pan, simmer the garlic in olive oil for a minute, add the butter and anchovies, and then let that all hang out on low heat for 15 minutes. The anchovies and garlic will basically disintegrate.  Just before eating, add some cayenne, some pepper, and some lemon juice. Use as dip for raw vegetables and bread.

proper salad procedure

On Thursday, not only did I get cookbook part one (The Classic Italian Cookbook) in the mail, but also Joe and I went to Lombardi's on 534 Butternut Street to try to add more authentic Italian food to our pantry. We left with arborio rice, prosciutto, and capers in salt (plus some impulse buys of sesame bars and coffee soda), but sadly didn't really have the bank to buy some of the more exciting things there (homemade pasta, a variety of cheeses, authentic balsamic vinegar, etc). On the bright side, that might inspire me to make my own pasta.





So, salad: not as easy as you think. Here are the basic guidelines (from The Classic Italian Cookbook):

1. Never put anything other than salt, olive oil, and wine vinegar on salad (unless feeling edgy in which case you can maybe add some pepper, and even go so far as to substitute lemon juice for vinegar).
2. You have to intuitively know how much of each thing to add.
3. Mixing the salt, oil, and vinegar before adding them to the salad is forbidden.
4. If the leaves of the salad are wet before/while you add the salt-oil-vinegar you have ruined everything.
5. First, you sprinkle the salad with salt (but not too much salt, because if you have too much salt you have ruined everything).
6. Second, you add the olive oil. It has to be olive oil. Enough to give the leaves a "surface gloss" (if you add too much it will pool, make the salad soggy, and ruin everything).
7. Third, add the vinegar. But not too much. Be careful. "A few drops too much will ruin a salad."
8. Mix it and SERVE IMMEDIATELY (or all is lost and it's probably soggy and ruined).

I think mine turned out pretty well.





I got a single white eggplant in my CSA Thursday and decided to veer off from the cookbook's suggestions and instead to make this eggplant bruschetta recipe, which basically is the best thing ever. I skipped the parsley (because I didn't have any) and just used a ton of basil. 


We had that for the antipasti-type course, then some soup (tuscan soup? inspired from this recipe but tinkered with - I added a big can of tomatoes with juice instead of the tomato paste, which I'm pretty sure makes for an indisputably superior soup) for the primo course. I'm trying to work on the authenticity, but after the first two courses both Joe and I were too full to even consider eating more.

Hello Italy!

And the cooking project begins! Joe cooked the first official Italian meal for dinner yesterday. Chard two ways (Swiss chard stalks gratinéed with Parmesan cheese AND boiled Swiss chard salad) and some angel hair pasta with basil-garlic-butter sauce.  We didn't have any of our fancy (used, bought second-hand from Amazon Marketplace) Italian cookbooks yet, so the chard recipes came from here and the pasta was improvised.

After getting the cookbook (pictured below) and reading selected parts, I remembered what our Swedish-Italian couchsurfing host Mattia told us and what we'd observed in Rome: usually in Italy one doesn't put all of the food on one plate, but rather has a structured order of primo, secondo, contorni with maybe some others thrown in. Basically, this means that we're supposed to eat our pasta/rice dish first, our meat/poultry/fish second, and vegetable third. So, we need to work on it.




Today, I made a sort-of-panino for lunch. I made bread (that was supposed to be focaccia, but I started it last night and then got too tired to wait up late to bake it so it got a bit weird overnight in the fridge), chopped three of the billion pieces of summer squash that we have, an onion and clove of garlic, too.

I then fried the thinly chopped onions in butter (!) on medium heat in our biggest cast-iron pan, threw in the garlic when the onions were getting translucent, then when that was getting a bit browned, I added the squash and turned the heat up to high.



When that was tender (and saturated with butter), I put it in the sandwich with some parmesan cheese. Optimal deliciousness!



For Italian cooking purposes, I bought The Classic Italian Cookbook and More Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan (available in more expensive form in one volume but my grad school income doesn't permit me to buy books like that....). She's supposed to be the best!

Buffalo! Niagara Falls! Graduate School!

Niagara Falls: it's down there.



Also, we got into two places that are usually closed to the public. An old theatre in which we got a grand tour (and a history of the carpet from 1920 to today), and Buffalo Central Station. When we got to the station we saw a bunch of cars outside and the gate open. We walked in, acted like we belonged, spent 20 minutes wandering around and taking photos, and then got kicked out by a heavily mustached construction guy (but nicely!).



Fall semester of graduate school started Monday.

My summer class on visual communications trained me to see all of the different symbols around me. I've been walking around Newhouse and some of the graphic representations are hilarious. Case in point: this trash bin for throwing away feminine products (yes, I am the creepy person in the next stall taking photos of symbols and graffiti in the bathrooms). Seriously, what is going on here? I understand the tube with the female symbol, but what about the pointy things? Bobby pins? Hair clips? Why would I throw hair accessories away in a bathroom trash bin? Please explain.

a new direction

Around the World in 270(ish) Days

Problem: Because I am no longer in Europe, with easy access to low-budget airlines and high-speed trains, city and country hopping is much more difficult for me now (though, to give Syracuse its due, I can get on a train or bus and easily get to New York City, Toronto, Niagara Falls, or Chicago [if I'm willing to brave a 13+ hour ride]). Still, I really want to travel.

Solution: Instead of going to different countries, make those countries come to me. Specifically, in edible form.

For my next nine months in Syracuse (starting in September), the plan is to explore the cuisine of a different country each month (as authentically as possible) on my graduate student budget. Ideally, this means cooking and eating traditional cuisine of that country for every meal in the way that it would normally be eaten. Practically, well, we'll see how it goes (relevant note: I'm taking 15 credit hours in graduate coursework this semester).

Italy is the country of choice for September, and afterward the tentative lineup is a country in South America (potentially Chile), a country in Northern Africa (potentially Tunisia), Russia, India, a Scandinavian country (Sweden? Norway?), Japan, Lebanon or Syria, and France. This could all change (for instance, I really want to do a month of Ethiopian food, but am intimidated at the prospect of making injera bread)! Countries will be chosen based on the desire to eat that sort of food, and the ease of obtaining and authentic(ish) cookbook (in English) for the cuisine.

So, that's that.

Coming soon: commentary on the relative ease/difficulty of making gnocchi and polenta, trying to use my CSA vegetables in an Italian context, determining what kinds of (homemade) sauces work with specific shapes of pasta (and I promise that Joe and I won't just go out and buy 60 cans of Wegman's Brand Ragu and 60 packets of dollar pasta and call it a day).