Thought for Food

Nothing makes me feel Thirty quite like my newfound appreciation for neutrals. As a reformed hoochie mama, this is progress indeed.

Big Tymers, “Get Your Roll On” (via haygirlhay)

Let me tell you about Scott. He was the first guy I dated at Tulane. He was from some town in Florida. He wasn’t hot but he was cute, I guess, and more importantly, he was 21 and he had a brand-new Jeep Grand Cherokee with leather seats and he and his friends took me and my friends to the Red Room on Saturday nights. (And that’s all you need to know about the direction of my moral compass in the fall of 2000.)

You wouldn’t call Scott a conversationalist. I can’t recall one word that ever came out of his mouth. He lived in a frat house and it was as disgusting as every other frat house but occasionally I stayed over, sharing his tiny bed, and in the morning I would wake up, as you do. But Scott didn’t wake up. He wasn’t dead, he was just famous among his friends for his capacity to sleep 24 hours at a stretch, and fall asleep anywhere, under any conditions. I’m pretty sure it was a certified clinical condition so I won’t say anything more about it.

Anyway, I would amuse myself by poking around his room (c’mon, you would too) and when I discovered the bulk food he had from Sam’s Club in his closet, it was game over. I loaded up my handbag with 20 Mrs. Fields individually-wrapped microwaveable cookies, 6 microwaveable individual portions of Chef Boyardee meatballs and noodles, and all the microwaveable bags of extra-butter Orville Redenbacher’s I could stuff in my tight jeans. When I got back to my dorm, my suitemates and I feasted like kings. I did that a couple more times until we broke up in front of the library. There were no tears.

I said I can’t remember any word that ever came out of his mouth, but I can remember words that he silently mouthed while spastically waving his forearms in the driver’s seat of that Jeep: every word to this moterfuckin’ song. He pumped the bass, closed his eyes, and just felt the music. (You understand that he was white, yes?)

It’s funny the things you never forget.

I’ve got one resolution for the new year: stop worrying about things I cannot change. I do it obsessively and when it gets down to it, it’s a crutch. Enough.

(Source: aikana, via veronicalovesarchie)

A new Lego character designed for girls, one of five collectible “friends” with back-stories, not unlike American Girls. Lego has long tried to market to girls — unsuccessfully for the most part — and they say now that their thinking was too narrow. They assumed that “boys build, girls role-play” but after extensive “anthropological” research, they’re (finally) realizing that girls role-play and build, and boys built and role-play. The new sets for girls include dolls and blocks. (The article is really worth a read.)

I’ve told the story of a Christmas morning when I was about seven before. Dad gave me a Capsela set that included the signature connecting plastic pieces as well as a motor with wheels. I promptly built a car — and for the rest of the afternoon, one of the few Barbies I was allowed to own cruised around on it. 

Giving a Lego figure little boobs and a decidedly “feminine” job is dismaying, yes, but I’ve got to admit I’ve always been “a girl” through and through (despite my dad’s best efforts :) and I probably would have wanted her. For the record, I loved Capsela and had many sets, including one that could create a floating, motorized raft (so cool!), but it was always about telling a story. I loved Legos — my cousins (one female, one male) and I spent long weekends building complex ecosystems out of them — but my favorite part was always the interaction of people and the built environment.

Funny.

That’s a pretty apt description of what I do for a living.

When I was about five, my aunt Therese gave me what might be the world’s greatest gift for a child: a handmade book, starring me.

The book was written by Therese (on a typewriter!) with watercolor illustrations by her then-husband (I love how the kitty on my shirt mimics my mood throughout the book). It’s called The Little Girl With Altogether Too Many Names and it depicts a day in the life of Nora: hanging out at my grandparents’ house, going to Montessori, going to a birthday party, having one of my many temper tantrums, and finally, tucking into bed.

On the way, I pick up names: Tetrazinni for the lunch Grandma serves me, Tuscanini for the music my Montessori teacher plays during nap time, Subaru for the car Daddy picks me up in (the Toyota’s in the shop), Albermarle for the name of the street where the party is, Cake for the thing that drives me into sugar-overload and turns me into that dreaded preschool beast, the Werebaby!

Norinna Tetrazinni Toscanini Albermarle Cake, I insist my Daddy call me as he’s getting me ready for bed (I came out of the womb bossy).

But he gently suggests I drop a few names, and I do, storing them under my bed for safe-keeping.

My family and friends still call me by nicknames: Norm Coleman (long story), Nor, Norma Jean, Nora Leah, Sherm, Shermy, Sherm dog, Sherminator, Norichka, Norrita … and yes, even Norinna.

Once a girl with altogether too many names, always a girl with altogether too many names.

Summer camp dreams, right here. I was a Windjammer, then a Mariner, and eventually, a Windjammer counselor. I’ve slept on boats, jumped off boats, flipped boats, and beached boats. I’ve sailed sloops and keel boats and schooners — but there’s nothing like a Sunny.

(Source: whereisthecoool, via honestly-wtf)

This evening I represented Honest Buildings at a panel on “Innovative Business Models for Sustainable Value Creation” hosted by the Sustainability Practice Network and NYU Stern. See, that’s me! (For some reason I always snap myself before doing a presentation … nervous habit.)

My fellow panelists were super-inspiring: Ben is head farmer at Brooklyn Grange, a rooftop farm in Long Island City, and is opening another one in the Brooklyn Navy Yards in time for the next growing season; Cullen is VP for Wind Analytics, a company that assesses your property’s wind energy potential, and helps you tap into it; and Kathy, veteran “change-maker and trouble-maker,” is founder and president of Raising Change, a company that helps donors and nonprofits connect with each other and make a lasting difference. “Don’t be afraid to lean into your values,” she told us. A great mantra for socially responsible business, a great mantra for life.

SPN hosts free events like this once a month — they’re excellent networking opportunities. Sign up!

Squid as madeleine

Reading the “I foraged with Rene Redzepi” article in the food issue of the New Yorker, I was reminded that I never posted about our last, glorious meal in France. It was at Le Chateaubriand in Paris, a two-year-old restaurant that trails Redzepi’s Noma — generally considered the greatest restaurant in the world — by just six spots on S. Pellegrino’s illustrious list.

I’m not sure how much foraging Le Chateaubriand’s Inaki Aizpitarte does personally (judging from The Selby’s documentation of his urbane day-to-day, not much), but the two chefs are similar in their approach to native European ingredients and cuisines. I haven’t dined at Noma (YET) but I know that Redzepi’s guiding culinary star is Nordic, while for Aizpitarte, it is probably Basque, the region that straddles Spain and France from which he hails.

When I was 13, I spent a month in Vitoria-Gasteiz, the capital of Basque country. It sits between Madrid and San Sebastian. I lived with a well-to-do host family in a high-rise double-apartment. I went to a Catholic school where every class was in Spanish, except English, which I excelled at, and Basque, which I did not. (To date, that remains my only experience with a uniform.) The family had two full-time nannies, one part-time cook, and two little girls, ages six and eight, who were always dressed in immaculate matching clothing from Italy or France. The six-year-old was an eager-to-please treat, the eight-year-old a spoiled terror.

I remember the month as a period of non-stop jaw-dropping taste awakenings, beginning with a four- or maybe six-hour Sunday lunch where my host-father and -mother held court in the back room of a restaurant, ordering dozens of dishes and entertaining a dozen friends who came and went. It was one of the few times I — and, for that matter, my host-sisters — spent much time with the host-parents. Usually we had lunch in the kitchen with the nannies (the small TV tuned to MTV Europe), and a late dinner of torta and other odds and ends in the informal dining room, again with the nannies. (I will forever associate Jamiroquai’s “Virtual Insanity” video with Spain.)

Among the unforgettable foods that I first experienced in Vitoria are croquetas, fried balls of silky potato-cheese puree studded with jambon that were so good I stared them down in their place at the center of the table, counting down the minutes until it was no longer impolite to swipe another; morcilla corcida, its thin casing exploding into a fragrant pillow of rice and blood that I had to dare myself to taste for the first time, but not the second and third and tenth time; and the bowl of squid in its own ink that every Sunday the family’s matriarch — the host-mother’s mother — ordered up to her apartment, a grand and lonely place that was separated from ours by a locked door. (Although she skipped the weekly restaurant festivities in favor of solitude, she still donned a trim Chanel suit.)

I was never offered a taste of that squid — I was lucky if I got so much of a dismissive shrug out of the grandmother — but I got a peek and a sniff of them and was not disgusted so much as curious. If blood and rice could taste so good, why not squid and ink?

When the first course was placed before me at Le Chateubriand I was transported instantly to that apartment in the sky. Squid in ink, reimagined with summer squash, fruity tomatoes, and an unknown foraged green — and yet the smell! Yes, that is it, exactly, I thought, and then I said, “I wonder if the chef’s grandmother ate squid in ink on Sundays, too?”

I bet she did.

This is a very long way of saying that our meal at Le Chateubriand was one of those that stimulates the memory as much as it does the taste buds and olfactory glands. It was casual and fun — we waited in a queue for about an hour, making conversation with the drunk Danish chef in front of us, drinking champagne, watching Chef Aizpitarte run in and out of the restaurant like a spaniel on speed, and ogling the obscenely chic crowd dressed for the kick-off of Paris Fashion Week — but it was also very serious. 

Aizpitarte offers just one menu every night and he prices it reasonably (less than 60 euro). He puts forth a series of well-thought-out juxtapositions — strawberries and bluefish, ice cream and foraged greens, mushrooms and chocolate, the sudden appearance of the Indian spice mix supari at the end of the meal — and they are, for the most part, exquisite. (He failed to convince me that we ought to start slathering our best dark chocolate on mushrooms, but we can’t win ‘em all.)

I was thrilled by the boldness of the flavors — and sometimes, by their restraint — but I’ve got to admit it was when Aizpitarte cranked up some obscure disco song for a midnight dance break in the kitchen that he really won me over.

M. and I spent the evening with delighted smiles never far from our lips: we felt lucky to be there, closing out such an extraordinary trip with such a wildly inventive and unusual meal, the big, booming fireworks display before they put the circus animals to bed. 

Below, the photos I took and the menu descriptions, directly translated from the French with a little help from Google….

I like funky wine, and this had funk to rival the funkiest.

I didn’t take photos of the amuses bouche but this peacock plate with gougères was too pretty to pass up.

The famous squid in ink.

Saint-Jean de Luz bluefish, turnips, radish, strawberries.

Veal, “knife” (the French word is couteau??), cod liver.

Not pictured: Buttermilk, herbs, hazelnut butter.

Mushrooms, Tannea extra-bitter chocolate, Alpine lovage.

Mint ice cream, foraged greens.

After-dinner palette cleanser: strawberries rolled in a supari-inspired spice mixture.

…but everything turned out terrific in the end (well, ok, this is far from the end but you know what I mean).

Love is not a zero sum game. Our capacity for love is infinite. And I can’t wait to see these fantastic people (in my city!) in just 24 days.