For our fourth wedding anniversary this past week, we went to L’Espalier to celebrate, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I hate dressing up to go to dinner.  Fancy dinners, yes, I like very much because I like to eat well and eating is something I do well.  But here on the east coast, there’s this expectation that if you go out for a “fine dining experience,” you are also expected to dress well, whereas in California, Joe and I could pop into a 1-or-2-star Michelin restaurant and I could wear nice trouser jeans, a cute top and heels, and that was the extent of “dress up:” clothes I normally own and will normally wear. The problem with “dressing up,” is that it feels exactly like that - like you’re supposed to rise to the occasion sartorially because you’re not normally an “up” person, although class-and-status-wise I’ve never felt like a ”down” person at fancy restaurants, but only begin to feel that way when forced to dress “up.” 

Behavior-wise, you can always tell who goes to nice restaurants on a regular basis and who doesn’t.  The people who eat at nice restaurants regularly behave like their normal selves, talk to the servers like normal people, ask normal questions about foods they’ve never heard before or wines they’ve never tasted.  People who don’t go to restaurants like this regularly - people who have to “dress up” - put on their “best manners” and get all quiet when reading the menu and are weirdly overly polite.  This is what happens to me when I have to “dress up” - I am wearing panty-hose and all of a sudden, I remember some arcane rule about not putting your elbows on the table because it’s rude, and then I feel like I can’t put my elbows on the table anymore and that, in the end, does take away from the eating experience. 

The other issue is that I have no preggo “dress up” clothes.  I tried to squeeze into a stretchy black wrap dress that night, and after 4 courses, felt like a sausage in a casing that was going to burst. 

The sartorial issue aside, the food was pretty good, and I was particularly happy with the juice pairings they offered me instead of wine pairings.  Now I am going to have to recreate the cherry-lime rickey they served so I can make it at home with my Top Ramen and mac n’ cheese. 

About half of my post-call days I have enough energy to cook, and about half of them, I just need to sleep and sleep and sleep.  Today, I am wishing I had Thanksgiving leftovers because the internet is covered in leftover recipes that are making me salivate.  But I’m too tired for cooking today.  For example: turkey tacos with cranberry salsa.  This sounds easy to make and better to inhale.  Also turkey white chili, which sounds perfect on these colder, wetter days.  Chez Pim has a chicken soup for the American soul that might be good with leftover turkey.  This agave-balsamic squash recipe sounds really good, if only I had some leftover butternut squash.  And this pork & pumpkin lemongrass curry is not turkey-specific, but dang, it sounds good.   

Joe finally figured out what he/we wanted to do with the yearly gift certificate to Williams-Sonoma that his mom gets us for Christmas (last year’s Christmas certificate) and we bought a meat grinder attachment to the Kitchen Aid mixer.  He bought some good chuck over the weekend, and we had home made, home-ground hamburgers that were very tasty and moist.  Home-ground meat barely has the chance to oxidize, so it tastes way better.  Maybe I should make a meatloaf today, in celebration of the new kitchen gadget.  Need a good meatloaf recipe, though.

I was at the grocery store buying toothpaste, and decided to take a detour through the food part of the store (ya’ know, like the actual store part, not just the Tylenol and deodorant isle) and came across some panko bread crumbs in the Asian foods section.  Which reminded me of this recipe that I really wanted to try out.  Which reminded me of how much I miss having a kitchen. My own kitchen.  Where I can fry Nutella wrapped in wonton wrappers or make icy cold gazpacho or attempt to make a riesling sorbet or just grill some goddamn chicken and steam some friggin’ broccoli and call it dinner.  Not having our own place yet is frustrating on many levels…I miss our demented cats (who are living with my mom), I miss having my own sheets, I hate only having one pair of sneakers available because the rest are in storage, but I really miss my rice cooker and my pans and my little cheese grater and my 9″ chef’s knife and my BevMo bottle opener.  Well, I miss the cats more than all of that stuff, but I do miss cooking and playing with food.

Don’t put your fingers in your eyeballs after chopping up jalapeño and habanero peppers. I made the mistake of trying to remove my contacts after chopping up a pile of chiles, and I am in the worse pain of my life. My nose also burns where I scratched it with one pinky nail tainted with pepper oil.

We are in the process of buying an apartment in Cambridge! Go us! Or rather, go Joe, since he’s the one who has been dealing with P&S paperwork and loan originators and all this financial hoo-ha of grown-up life. I merely nod my head and smile, and try to be encouraging when I can. I went to a “Now That You’re Gonna Get A Paycheck And You Owe A Shitload of Loans” talk yesterday at school, and I’m still trying to figure out how to best pay back my loans. I owe the government the equivalent of a small horse farm in Kentucky, and the finance guy at yesterday’s lecture referred to us (i.e. soon-to-be residents) as “the absolute cheapest source of highly skilled, professionalized labor in the country” and, not to rub salt into the wounds, he also added, “I would never, ever do what you guys do.”

I got my schedule for next year. I kind of knew how hard I’d be working next year, but it didn’t hit me until I saw the mind-boggling complexity of our residency schedule. I will be q4 call for 11 months of the year (which means I’ll be working overnight in the every fourth night), fortunately with 1 day off a week (theoretically). Oh well. There were other annoyances with my schedule that I spent the better half of this week agonizing about, but at least, I don’t think I’m going to die, and at least I don’t think my career is gonna blow up just because I ended up getting six weeks of ER instead of four.

These last three weeks of classes are basically on how to save lives and not kill patients on the wards and survive intern year. I keep on thinking that these classes are going to be extremely helpful, but it’s not helpful when the attending giving one of the lectures thinks that you, dear intern, by the end of his lecture should be able to diagnosis a congenital heart problem by placing three fingertips on an infant’s chest. I even labeled a notebook “Everything You Need To Know For Intern Year!” in anticipation of the great stuff I’d be writing down and learning this week, but I think those expectations have been lowered considerably.

Since coming back from Guatemala, I have re-kindled my affair with Giada De Laurentiis on the Food Network. I’m making a berry strata tonight.

It was cold and rainy on Monday, and I ended up making gazpacho. Not exactly a rainy day type of soup, but after a couple of days resting in the refrigerator with the flavors melding together, it was perfect for lunch today (and it’s finally sunny again.) There are a gazillion ways to make gazpacho, and I really wanted to make this one with quinoa, but we ran out.

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Lemons were on sale, so I bought 20 lemons and made a lemon confit shortbread tart this weekend and brought it to Sunday brunch.  This was my first foray into baking, so it all very new to me.  Sadly, I don’t have a picture of it (damn nef files and Aperture…there’s something broken with the exporting), but the pictures weren’t that exciting anyway.  If I make anything with lemons again, I know I’ll have to let the peels sit in the sugar for longer than the 30 minutes to 2 hours the recipe recommended to get them fully candied.  And use less peel.  Joe proceeded to make lemon sorbet with the remaining lemons, and that came out great.  Joe and I are going to have a bake-off one day, to see who will reign supreme in the baking arena.  I think he might win, though, since he’s been baking for ages now (how can you beat a guy who owns a recipe book entitled  500 Best Muffins Recipes) and has a love for baked goods that is unmatched by anyone I know.  Plus, I hate to measure ingredients…I’ll do it, but I don’t like it.
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I think I like football, kind of, but I’ll have to call my mom for the postgame analysis.  I think I like it less for the actual nature of the sport and skill and more for the strategy and how they fan players out to do the dirty work of a so-called “play.”  We used TiVo to fast-forward through most of the Superbowl XLIKKTMCC (those darn letters make it sound so Greco-Roman and Historical, don’t it?) and watch some of those defensive smooshes happen.  Also, I was interested in the commercials, but somehow, this year’s commercials just didn’t do it for me.  Except for the Snickers one and the Emerald Nuts with Robert Goulet one.  And I drank half a Coors Light.  I think this is as close as I can come to enjoying this American tradition (they should just package Superbowl Sunday and the Fourth of July and Memorial Day weekend into a week-long American party holiday — it would be like the American equivalent of Chinese New Year’s in China.)

A distinct childhood memory of mine is ramen. When lunchtime rolled around on sleepy Sunday afternoons, my dad would make us ramen noodles from those packets of noodles that you can buy in bulk (i.e. 48 packs for $4.99). Except he always threw in a few veggies and bits of leftover meat or egg to make it less of the cheap-carbohydrate-fest that ramen noodles represent. When my dad bought me a coffee pot for my college dorm, he pointed out that I could use it to make ramen noodles and very lovingly reminisced about all tasty midnight snacks you could make with hot water and an illegal kitchen appliance in the dorms.

The Top Ramen Modified-For-Health-and-Quality Snack (serves 2)

• 1 packet ramen noodles, chicken-flavored (preferably a brand actually Made In China)
• water
• near-old veggies (in this case, 3 baby bok choy, half a carrot, 2 mushrooms from my mushroom log, but anything will do)
• 1 egg or several slices of left-over meat (my dad always used left-over slices of pork or chicken…whatever you’ve got. These days, though, I’m going egg-only since my meat consumption has dropped almost to nil)
• soy sauce, hot sauce or any other condiment you want to flavor your broth.

1. Put the water on to boil. I like broth, so usually I use 2-2.5 cups, approximately. I dunno, I never measure. While the water is boiling, chop up your veggies, and throw away any parts of the veggies that look wilted or old.

2. When the water starts boiling, throw in the block of ramen, and let it sit for 1 minute. Then add half of the condiments that come inside the ramen package. These condiments are usually the chicken-flavored-MSG mixtures that are not good for you, so I advise against using the whole package. You can also add your own flavoring with soy sauce or chili sauce, or whatever else you like; typically, I add just a quick splash of soy sauce and a teaspoon or so of chili sauce (I like it la). Stir that in, and let the noodles soak up the liquid, and bring the heat down to a nice rolling boil.

3. Crack an egg into the pot. You can let it just sit and poach, or you can stir it around in the broth to make an “egg drop” kind of soup.

4. Add chopped up veggies and meat, until cooked. Let the broth cook for an additional 2-4 minutes until the egg is cooked. Serve. You can eat it straight out of the pot (as I am prone to do) or be proper about it, and dish it into a bowl.

And just to let you know, this modified ramen snack is not an original recipe, since just about everyone I know who knows how to eat ramen eats it this way.

I should just stop buying cookbooks because 75% of the time, I rely on this woman for my recipes, and this time, I tried roasted parsnips.

I’ve never had parsnips before, and apparently, we’re at the end of the season for this root vegetable. Joe said they taste like carrots. Since I’m a fan of carrots, I was willing to give parsnips a shot.

The recipe calls for a horseradish-butter-chive dressing, and since I didn’t have any horseradish, I improvised with a combination of wasabi powder and sour cream. True wasabi is made from the wasabi plant, which is a kind of Japanese horseradish, but most American brands of wasabi powder are actually made from horseradish. So after making about a half-teaspoon of the wasabi paste, I blended that in with some nonfat sour cream. (Yes, I’m going nonfat these days, since my cooking habits + little-exercise habits are starting to collide.) Then you add the chives and parsley.

I must say, it was very tasty, except next time, I think I can eat the roasted parsnips with salt and pepper alone, without any dressing. They are that flavorful and that yummy. And yes, they taste like carrots, except, a little less sweet, which is great in my mind.

I made butter pecan ice cream from this recipe.

It turned out ridiculously rich and sweet and delicious, although I had to make some modifications. I’ve only caramelized sugar once before, so when I added the milk to the melted butter-sugar mixture, I didn’t expect the whole wad of sugar to harden into caramel! It slowly melted and dissolved into the warm milk, though, but I was worried it wouldn’t completely dissolve, so I added another 1/2 c of sugar (more than the recipe called for!) Secondly, we ran out of brown sugar, so about half of the sugar was white sugar — in retrospect, I should have added molasses to the white sugar to give it more flavor. Then, when I toasted the pecans, I sprinkled them with fleur-de-sel rather than plain ol’ salt, which gave them more depth and nutty punch. The ice cream hadn’t completely hardened by the time Joe took this picture, but I expect that it will firm up today, making it that much creamier and yummier. I’ve never made a custard ice cream before, but I highly recommend it if you aren’t afraid of egg yolks and cholesterol.

I found this in my parent’s scanner tonight:

It’s a picture of my dad as an infant in the 1940’s.  Dressed as a girl, complete with girly pigtails and bracelets.  “But I’m still really cute,” my dad said, and then added as offense, “well, you looked like a boy when you were a baby.”  Apparently, his parents dressed him as a girl well into toddler-hood to prevent evil spirits from snatching away their only male child.  This apparently has had no effect on his gender-orientation or psyche, which is unfortunate, because instead of accessorizing with smart bracelets, he now accessorizes with cell phones hung around his neck on lanyards.  He even has a little puffy pastel action figure attached to his cell phone that serves doubly as a wipe-cloth for the screen.

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It’s been really warm here on the east coast.  I brought a heavy wool jacket, which was replaced with an identical wool jacket at one of my interviews — all the applicants hung up their jackets on a coat rack, and it looked like an Anne Klein petite black wool coat sale.  When I pulled the last wool coat off the rack, put it on, and put my hands in the pockets, and pulled out a wadded Kleenex and pair of gloves that weren’t mine, I realized a switcheroo had been made.  Someone has my coat!  It doesn’t matter, though, because this one is basically the same, I think.  But I realized this might be a good game for a swap party: bring articles of clothing you don’t want, hang ‘em up, then blindfold everyone and pick. 

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The one thing about the east coast that I miss is Dunkin’ Donuts.  Arguably, they have the best donuts (or should I say doughnuts?) and plain straight-up coffee in the world.  I had a French crueller and Boston creme today.  Tomorrow I will have an Old Fashioned and a chocolate dipped.  Yum.  You can’t find them anywhere on the west coast.  And while you could get your Starbucks mocha-frappa-woo-woo almost anywhere, why bother with their charred nasty liquid masquerading as coffee when you can have the plain stuff, straight up, beans roasted to near perfection, heated to the right temperature?  And the sugar-overloaded tasteless nothings that Krispy Kreme serves up do not stand a chance next to the doughy-sweet goodness of a Dunkin’ Donut.  Indeed, Dunkin’ Donuts, please please please never go out of business, because you are a childhood delight (delite?) of mine, and while I promise to eat locally and organically more often than not, I will always have a nice, warm, doughy donut hole in my heart where Dunkin’ Donuts ought to be.

I had another un-inspired dinner last night: salad-from-a-bag and a bowl of cereal.

It’s good cereal, though. Very fruity and crunchy and filling, although after reading the box, I got a little bit of the rage:

How can you be “96% organic”? Only in the U.S., where everyone has hopped onto the organic bandwagon, can you suddenly make a concept like organic into an entity ridiculously quantified and percentage-ized. The USDA regulations on what can be certifiably organic are strange at best and horrifying at the worst when you think about what it has done to the meaning of “organic” (which has always been ill-defined.) There is a 554 page document on the USDA National Organic website that tries to define the term “organic:”

Organic Products labeled or represented as “organic” must contain, by weight (excluding water and salt), at least 95 percent organically produced raw or processed agricultural product. The organic ingredients must be produced using production and handling practices pursuant to subpart C. Up to 5 percent of the ingredients may be nonagricultural substances (consistent with the National List) and, if not commercially available in organic form pursuant to section 205.201, nonorganic agricultural products and ingredients in minor amounts (hereinafter referred to as minor ingredients) (spices, flavors, colorings, oils, vitamins, minerals, accessory nutrients, incidental food additives). The nonorganic ingredients must not be produced using excluded methods, sewage sludge, or ionizing radiation.

Seriously, this stuff gives me the rage! I’m all for my cereal being organic and contributing to world peace and healthy oceans (which this cereal purportedly does, if you read the side of the box…yay, world peace and happy marine wildlife!) but somehow being “96% organic” implies a whole lotta USDA hoops one had to jump through in order to get this enticing, marketing-friendly “organic” stamp on one’s cereal box. And maybe that 4% implies the cane sugar in my cereal was processed at the same plant that processes sewage sludge.

Since reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma ([TOD]…yes, I know, I know, I’m one of those yuppie dippy types, but I enjoy Michael Pollan’s writing), I’ve become really worried about how I can strike a good balance between the way I eat now and how to eat sustainably. I clearly can’t buy a demi-cow at some free-range grass-fed steer ranch in Sonoma County — I just don’t have that kind of time, or that kind of cash, to devote to marinating a side of beef and storing the rest in my walk-in deep freezer. Nor can I be very selective: when there’s a free noon conference lunch (not sponsored by a pharmaceutical company, of course), I will eat that free lunch. It’s the only food I might see for 12 hours that doesn’t come from the hospital cafeteria coated in grill grease. Even the local farmer’s market poses some practicality issues — I can’t spare every Saturday morning to do my grocery shopping, particularly if I’m on call that weekend. Even the vegetable box — the boxes of veggies that they will deliver to you on a weekly or monthly subscription basis from a local organic farm — poses a huge dilemma since I cook for one person, and the boxes provide far more produce than one person can eat. What do I do in the face of all this? I guess I will continue to buy my only 96% organic cereal at my local neighborhood market and feel the rage.

I was flipping channels while folding laundry, and saw part of a cooking show where they made some sort of pear dessert. I improvised for the portion of the show I didn’t see: pears baked in brown sugar with mascarpone cheese and toasted walnuts.

2 small-to-medium sized Bartlett pears
1 c brown sugar
several tbsp water
1/2 c mascarpone cheese
1 tbsp honey
2 tbsp crushed walnuts
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Farenheit. Peel pear skin off, slice pears in half. Scoop out center of each pear half with a spoon, and trim the stems and butt off of each pear.

2. Spread the brown sugar into a small baking dish, then lay the pears center down into the sugar. Add several tbsp of water to make the sugar bed a little bit moist. Bake in oven for 30 minutes, occassionally basting the pears with the brown sugar syrup.

3. Bake the walnuts for 5 minutes on a cookie sheet until toasty.

4. Mascarpone cheese topping: mix the cheese with the honey, and add just a drop of milk in it to make it easier to mash up.

5. When pears are ready, serve two pear halves with some brown sugar syrup in each bowl, and top with a dollop of cheese-honey topping and walnuts.

I should get a camera so I can take photos, but with the amount of sugar this dessert has in it, I guarantee that it is extraordinarily tasty.

Every weekend, there is a brief and nerdy PBS frenzy in our house — Joe and I like to watch This Old House (gotta love the Boston accents) and I have to watch Jacques Pepin: Fast Food My Way. Then I have to go buy the ingredients and try my hand at making whatever floats my boat, sans recipe. Why waste $30 on the cookbook when I need that money to go buy a truffle? Plus, if you are continually tasting your food as you cook it, you don’t really need a recipe book — you just need more salt, or another clove of garlic, or just a smidgen more honey.

The problem is, the three local grocery stores I go to do not normally stock salt cod, smoked trout, or quail. Where do I find these things? I suppose I could trek down to the Embarcadero Farmer’s Market every Saturday, but I hate getting smothered between Tory Burch extra-large totes and people vying for $50/lb New York cheddar. Recently, I made the quail with raita that Jacques so joyously prepared, except I had to substitute quail with chicken because there was no quail to be found at Safeway or even Whole Foods, and it was very dull. I need quail! And salt cod to make my bacalao!

Another thing that has me obsessed: King crab. The ugly crabs you see people risking their lives for on the Discovery channel’s The Deadliest Catch (yes, we watch a lot of ridiculous television). Joe and I had a piece of it for the first time up in Seattle, and I will never go back to regular ol’ Dungeoness. This is good stuff.

So, I have to admit, I really, really love cooking. And eating. I hope someone will rent me to cook for them, because there are so many more things I need to cook and eat before I start my “real” job next year.