Lusciousity

Steven called the other day to let me know that he had found a copy of “The Gourmet Cookbook” for $15 (translation: a real steal). I have found this to be a cookbook with easy to follow instructions that produce very tasty results. While some ingredients are sometimes difficult to find, Reichl (good interview on Salon with R. Reichl here) provides a directory of mom & pop stores across the US with local produce that offer mail services on their non-perishable goods. One example is a S. Florida favorite, Robert is Here who makes up some mean mango-based sauces.

Moral of the story: If you are looking for a good cookbook, The Gourmet Cookbook should be your first choice.

Last night a friend of mine and I ventured into the Omni Parker House Hotel bar in downtown Boston and ordered a Boston cream pie.  But this wasn’t just any Boston cream pie.  This was Boston cream pie from the kitchen that invented Boston cream pie.  This was the original.  It’s what they had in mind when they named the damn thing.  It was, in a word, delicious.

It was served as an entire mini cake, not just a slice of a big one.  It had the classic sponge cake filled with vanilla custard (except this sponge cake was moist and springy and the custard was absolutely perfect), then it was topped with chocolate and the edge was patted with chopped almonds.  The entire thing was garnished with berries, whipped cream, and both dark and white chocolate.

Luscious Luscious Luscious

This weekend I had a lovely visit from my sister.  Among our many hijinks, we decided to prepare a meal from Julia Child’s “The Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1″ which I have had for a while but never used.  And here is the menu we used:

Roast Chicken

Au Gratin Potatoes

Green Beans

Roasted Tomatoes

Fresh(ly purchased) Bread

Homemade Ice Cream

We used Julia’s wonderful advice for the first 4 items on the menu, and they were delicious.  Plus, if you’ve never had the pleasure of rubbing a chicken inside and out with several tablespoons of butter, rotating it in the oven with tongs, or basting it with yet more butter (this time mixed with oil!), then you need to jump on this, stat.  It was fun, and it was delicious.

Sounds like a must try (originally posted by Diego in the comments):

“Tried and true. You get tuna fish and make some TF Salad on whole wheat bread with greens=lunch. You pick up a pre-cooked whole chicken, flip a coin for who gets to peel the skin off and take it off the bone into usable chunks. The loser does the deed and places the contents into a tupperware (green) or ziploc (bag the environment!). The morning of, you make your TF sandie, then you grab a tupperware container, pile some greens in and top them with plucked chicken, throw in some olives, tomatoes (grape tomatoes are best) and whatever else you like, drizzle some olive oil and vinegar and pack some crackers and you’re good to go!”

Further thoughts later I hope, but here’s some books I had never heard of before yet cannot wait to read, as they were introduced by Vivian Gornick in her creative nonfiction how-to (or, more accurately, how you might) as examples of what writers of creative nonfiction can aspire to. These are all books of essays or memoirs that use the writer’s own life as primary subject material. As Gornick puts it, these books are remarkable because somehow, by detailing the experiences of the writer alone, they have the power to make each of us more aware our own one life on earth. With no further ado, get thee to a library and look up:

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (are you in love or just in lust? Oscar can tell you all about it)
Beryl Markham, West With the Night (knocked Papa Hemingway’s socks off)
Marguerite Duras, The Lover (she’s fifteen, he’s Chinese, sounds h-o-t)

W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (sounds depressing, but on the upside the title only looks like science fiction)

Loren Eisley, All the Strange Hours  and Agnes Smedley, Daughter of Earth (man it sucks to be poor in America, but it’s still your one life so you might as well learn something from it)

Also, have I plugged Donald Antrim’s The Afterlife recently? It’s amazing and heartbreaking, like David Sedaris without the funny.

This Saturday, we mulliganned and once again planned an evening around a viewing of Little Miss Sunshine, but this time with advance tickets in hand when we showed up at theatre. Success! And we must have had some good karma left over from our Duff experience, because this movie rocked our worlds AND we got great seats. I highly recommend it, as it is the most hilarious tragicomic meditation on family life and the meaning of success that is ever likely to grace the screen. Also, it has inspired me to try to start a list of movies that have a climactic talent show scene. LMS’s is worth the price of admission alone: everyone in the theatre laughed for 15 solid minutes. Just when you thought your gut was bust, it busted you up again. Think of Marcus in About a Boy stepping up to the mike to sing “Killing Me Softly” but ten times more poignant and surprising. And funny. Plus, for the Proustians in the reading audience, we have a new hero in Steve Carrell’s two-wrist bandaged erstwhile preeminent scholar.

Oh the glories of late capitalist wine supply! Tonight, D and I availed ourselves of the many fine wines available at prices that fit within even the graduate student budget. To kick off our fine Friday evening, we tasted a variety of tasty Italian creations at the BR Wine Warehouse, and then took our favorite, plus a rosé that makes us slightly less suspicious of trends reported by the New York times, to a meeting of the Wild Bunch. Three bottles and countless albums of quality music later, we are happy to report that wine and good company are the best Friday night health foods any doctor could prescribe. So here is your prescription: bottoms up and blog away!

What did I tell you? As the New York Times reports, this new crowd of savvy consumers aren’t even old enough to be called tweens, yet there are entire emerging consumer markets to serve their every whim. This article entitled “Fashion Aims Young” chronicles the rise of eight year olds who proclaim that they will only wear Seven jeans and plan their outfits with all the care of someone well, three, four, five times their age. Besides the fact that all of this costs an insane amount of money (which, let’s face, their parents can probably afford)? One of the shopowners quoted says it quite well: ““You get this idea that there is a kind of lost innocence,” Ms. Guzman of Cookie said. “It’s not so much that there is now a little-girl’s version of adult clothes as that the gap is diminishing between what’s meant for children and what’s intended for their elders. I find that a little sad.” Indeed. For those of you who read my personal blog, you might not think my mom did me any favors by letting me run around for years in courdoroy overalls and t-shirts, but I know that in the final analysis that I was a happy little kid who cared not a whit about fashion. I had time to read all the books I checked out from the library because I didn’t spend an hour dressing to go to the library. There is indeed a time and a place to care about one’s appearance, but should it really be the third grade? Granted, the little girls profiled in the article have names like Ondine and Maisy, so they probably need all the help at school they can get. Still, the whole reason that ads for designer clothes are being targeted to younger and younger girls is because somebody realized they could make more money if they taught girls to judge themselves by their appearance sooner, and that’s just not luscious.

There is something luscious about the English language.  Finding the right word, the exact word, that you need is a truly satisfying experience.  I admit that I don’t always use the best word for the job, but knowing the English language’s potential for aptness makes me feel good.

That is why I’m disturbed by a trend I’ve noticed lately.  More and more I hear people use the word “notoriety” in reference to a person’s fame.  Not only have I witnessed this among friends, but this morning I read it in a quotation used in the New York Times.  This has to stop.  While this usage is partially correct, it misses the key descriptive quality of the word: the person is famous for something bad.  Discussing fame is pretty standard, but add the sinister edge of notoriety and you delve into the, well, frankly, interesting side of humanity (at least when you’re looking for a nice dose of schadenfreude, like watching Tom Cruise’s notoriety leave him with an unrenewed contract).

The point is that English has the word to describe what you want to say.  Find it.  Use it.  You won’t always get it right, but please, at least try.  Otherwise you may not notice the luscious side of the words you use.

From the halls of the not so luscious: preparing a pack

• lunch AND
• dinner

3 out of 7 days a week. Alas, grad school classes that start at 7pm require this student to eat a quick dinner on the run on top of the already standard leftovers for lunch at work.

How can you help: Please submit your recommendations of luscious meals that pack well in the comments section below. I will cook, rate and review all reasonable submissions.
Regards, - D