My Eras Tour
ICYMI - I recently had a piece posted in The theme was “guilty pleasures” and of course I wrote about food. I hope you’ll check it out.
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“You need to write about this,” my friend MB says, as we compare notes on the craziness of opening day at a new high-end grocery store in our neighborhood.
“It was like a Taylor Swift concert,” I say (JK - I’ve never been to one, but I am looking forward to the Eras movie).
I went to the new grocery store because I needed a few hard-to-find ingredients for a dinner I was hosting the next night. I was not disappointed. Amidst the party-like atmosphere, after I worked my way through throngs of eager shoppers with disposable income, I easily found the Moscatel vinegar and guajillo chiles I needed for Peach and Chile Galette With Pistachio Frangipane. And then my oven broke.
In the wee hours, where you will often find me ruminating instead of sleeping, I thought about that grocery store and about how much our relationship to food has changed in my lifetime. Flavor profiles are much more complex now and the demand for easily accessible ingredients has grown. You can find za’atar almost anywhere and grocery stores like the one I visited are truly world food emporiums.
What used to be called “ethnic” groceries seem to have mostly disappeared and I fear this loss has impacted the livelihoods of many immigrant families. The remaining small groceries feature high-end versions of both hyper-local and world food.
Decluttering our office files this past weekend put me in a nostalgic mood. There’s nothing like seeing kids’ reports cards and drawings and Frequent Flyer cards from now-defunct airlines to make one appreciate the bittersweet passage of time.
Instead of counting sheep, I was trying to remember recent meals I had made, so I could select a recipe to share in the The Best Thing I Cooked This Week section of this post. Weirdly, I couldn’t actually remember anything I’d cooked, much less the best thing.
Then I remembered a dish I’d been referring to as ‘80s Chicken.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big fan of Eat Your Books, a subscription-based cookbook indexing tool that enables you to easily upload all of the cookbooks you own onto your bookshelf (I have several hundred, both print and Kindle. Wish me luck deciding which ones will come to Portugal). In the search bar, you can input ingredients and it will give you recipe options from your bookshelf.
My vast cookbook collection reflects how cooking and cookbooks have changed. Though I have Julia Child’s canon, the Joy of Cooking, and other oldies, my cookbook “eras” begin with The Moosewood Cookbook. Riveted by a recipe I saw for carob brownies (remember carob??) in the Washington Post, it’s the first cookbook I ever purchased.
I was trying to use up the last of our CSA farm produce before the next delivery came in. I typed summer squash, peppers, and carrots into the Eat Your Books search engine, adding the chicken that was in the freezer. The most promising result was Chicken Monterey from the Silver Palate Cookbook, that sometimes over-the-top foodie Bible of the 1980s (when we’d moved on from carob and alfalfa sprouts), known for the iconic Chicken Marbella . If you don’t know about Chicken Marbella, which stands the test of time, you definitely should click on that link. I gifted you the recipe).
Chicken Monterey was not the best thing I cooked this week, but it got the job done, using up all my tired produce. It was kind of boring and one-note, even after I substituted fresh basil and fresh rosemary for parsley and dried rosemary.
I stepped into my Indian era several times during the week. Most notably, I attended a concert commemorating the 50th anniversary of John McLaughlin, Zakir Hussein, and Shakti, opened by banjo whiz Bela Fleck, who I last saw perform in India in the mid-to-late ‘80s.
What an incredible show! (This video does not do it justice, but you should watch it anyway.)
I was transported back to the years I lived in India and the years when I discovered jazz, coincidentally in Monterey, where I lived for a few years but never ate anything resembling that chicken. Monterey is where I discovered Mexican food, squid, and ate pesto for the first time.
John McLaughlin is 81 now and Zakir Hussein is in his ‘70s. After two hours of vigorous playing, the group, which performs seated on the floor, had a little trouble standing up (don’t we all?). But they came back for a rousing encore and got down and up again, no doubt buoyed by the enthusiastic crowd.
The previous night was my birthday, and we went out for a delicious Indian-fusion meal. The restaurant (Rasai in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood) must have known that figs were on my mind. Among the delicious things we ate were koftas in a fig cream sauce.
My entree into Indian cooking, in fact my entree into cooking, came after a 1977 trip to the United Nations with my mother. We purchased the UN Women’s Guild cookbook and learned how to make Tandoori Chicken.
At some point in the early years of establishing my life, post-college, I was given that book. Pastichio and moussaka were elegant and cheap in those years when I had no money.
Fast forward to my early years married to a man I met in Southeast Asia, who made delicious shrimp with cilantro pesto, goi cuon, and som tum and then my early years as a mother, when I dealt with my domestic confinement by going on culinary adventures.
Thank you for saving me, Claudia Roden. Thank you for coming into my life, Yotam Ottolenghi.
These days I don’t need such complexity.
I’m grateful that Alison Roman, Ali Slagle, Diana Henry, Renee Erickson, and Joshua McFadden keep things interesting and that Eric Kim, Meera Sodha, Naz Deravian, Bricia Lopez, Yasmin Khan, Adeena Sussman, and so many more talented people let me travel the world without spending the entire day in the kitchen.
Even Yotam Ottolenghi has a book called Simple.
The Best Thing I Cooked Last Week
Israeli-Spiced Tomatoes, Yogurt Sauce, and Chickpeas
I’m experimenting with a regular publication day, so that you can expect new posts to drop on Fridays.
Today is Wednesday. I haven’t cooked much yet this week, especially since I got my dates confused. Last night, we drove across town to meet visiting friends at a delicious Szechuan restaurant only to discover that the meeting is supposed to be next week.
D’oh!
Joshua McFadden’s Six Seasons is a book I regularly turn to for inspiration, particularly at times when produce is excitingly at its peak.
I brought his delicious tomato chickpea salad to an impromptu Labor Day dinner party last week and it was a big hit.
Sorry I forgot to take a photo.
More sleeping, less ruminating I guess.
“I felt she found my cookbooks, and read each one out loud.”
I, too, have the Moosewood Cookbook. And made those darned carob brownies. Yes, I ride the food trends. There was an unfortunate period in the late 70s with balsamic vinegar finding its way into almost everything. Now I’m working my way through a big jar of kimchi.