Roving Gastronome: The Blog

This is something I have only rarely been. Other than getting out of New Mexico by securing admission in one of our nation’s more respectable universities, and then escaping from dysfunctional grad school in back-of-nowhere Indiana by moving to NYC, my get-up-and-go has been napping in a sunny corner.

Which isn’t terrible. Especially in New York, where everyone’s very ambitious. Just being around some of these people can be exhausting. “How do you pay your rent?” people wonder. Easy: I know how to cook for myself and never order takeout. “What are you doing for work?” they inquire. Oh, this and that. And, most abstractly, someone once asked me, “What are you?”

Because I’m not an artist. I’m not in a rock band. I’m not a writer, even though I get paid to write travel guides. I’m not a journalist, out to break a huge story. It’s quite clear I am not an Arabic linguist. I’m not, like almost everyone else I know in New York, harboring some desperate, burning dream that really makes me who I am even as I labor in soul-sucking anonymity.

I’m not saying my way is the right way, although I have on occasion felt pretty smug about my outlook. I suppose you could call the attitude neo-slacker, but I prefer to reference Hemingway’s journalist character in The Sun Also Rises, who on principle never appears to be working. In fact, though, this not-appearing-to-be-working thing has backfired a bit recently, and I did get an ulcer a couple of years ago, in part due to employment uncertainty. But overall, I do seem to get a bit more daily pleasure than a lot of people I know, and I haven’t had a what-am-I-doing-with-my-life crisis in quite a few years.

But why am I talking about this, and what does it have to do with food? It’s because I just read Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, by Julie Powell. This is a fucking fantastic book, based on Powell’s hilarious blog, in which she did cook every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I read the blog a few times during the course of the year, and admired Powell’s excellent use of obscenity. But she really pulls it together nicely in the book, with a great sense of narrative (involving the love lives of her friends, as well as her cooking travails) and some wonderful meditations on feeding people, terrible Republicans, and the delicious obscenity of marrow bones.

It’s one thing when someone makes it big, and it turns out they’re a bit wealthy and well connected, or they have some exotic background that happens to gibe with today’s cultural obsession, or their life was transformed by some harrowing experience on a very tall mountain. But when someone who’s been coooking insane things and writing a blog and living in Queens gets a very juicy book deal, well… You (I) can’t help but feel like I should’ve had more of a plan. Because I didn’t think the world was interested in people living in Queens, and now it turns out they are–but maybe they have only enough interest to support one Queens-dweller, and that slot’s been taken.

The genius of Julie Powell’s blog is that she had a goal. An insane and edifying one that hooked foodies like soap operas hook listless stay-at-home moms. This goal-achieving blog concept seems to have spread too: Twenty a Day, for instance, aspires to eat at a set list of cheap restaurants. And there was that guy who documented every single thing he ate for a year…I think he made a book out of that.

These are clever ideas, and I know I should get one in a similar vein (but not too similar–I can’t very well cook my way through Diana Kennedy anymore, now can I?). I would feel accomplished and purpose-driven. But. But. But. I like not having a plan, to some degree. I like seeing what turns up. Which might just be a cheap excuse for not wanting to give up my comfy Cape of Slack in which I drape myself daily.

But that reminds me of another thing to whine about: According to numerous newspaper stories (one in the NYT, most recently) everyone in New York is on drugs. Which essentially I have no objection to, but they’re using them to work! Prescription-grade speed, a little coke, Xanax to chill out–how am I supposed to compete with this kind of white-collar doping? I’m going to drink my glass of whine–ha, purely an accident–I mean wine and mull it over. If anyone has any suggestions for fabulous feats to be accomplished on this blog, please let me know. I’ll reply to your email in a very leisurely fashion.

I’m back. The good news is I ate insanely well, from Turkish rooftop chicken to Bulgarian yogurt-and-cucumber drink.

The bad news is that some creep stole my laptop (and, it appears, my Palm, so I can’t even retrieve my addresses) while I was away. As part of Operation You’ll Never Work in This Town Again, I’m posting his details here. He also owes Tamara $600 in back rent.

The perp:

Here’s his website. Seems like a nice enough guy, if not so savvy in his style choices.

Goes by Christopher Dunivan, Topher Dunivan, Chris Dunivan, Christopher Rudolph Dunivan, and occasionally Christopher Whiteley. (He’s _not_ Chris Dunivan, mild-mannered and respectable web designer.)

Additionally, he’s a church organist, originally from Augusta, Ga. (Skidaway Island). He even likes to “romp n’ stomp for Jesus on [the organ] from time to time”. Further proof that Christians ain’t what they used to be.

In all fairness, he, semi-psychopathically, took the trouble to email me back and say it was the construction workers that he let in to use the bathroom who took the laptop. Never mind that a normal, non-guilty person would’ve felt bad about letting the construction workers in. And that my landlord, whom I trust, says the workers were never in my house. He also, semi-psychopathically, went to the trouble of leaving an envelope with a deposit slip and _no check_ at Tamara’s bank–like, what, they wouldn’t notice? And Tamara talked to an acquaintance of his who saw him using a laptop at a cafe during the time he lived in my house–though he’d had no computer when he was at Tamara’s.

Vile man. The charming officer of the 114th are on the case. Letters are being drafted to various Episcopal churches where he’s been a member, as well as to the American Guild of Organists. If anyone spots him in NYC, especially while he’s using my computer (last spotted in Chelsea), or perhaps while hooking (it’s been known to happen, apparently), please throw him to the ground and call the cops. His name is on file.

Last night, in anticipation of Oyster Fest 2005, we trundled down to that venerable NYC establishment, the Fulton Fish Market—which hasn’t yet relocated to the Bronx, apparently, despite the countless nostalgic column inches already dedicated to its impending demise. (July, maybe even September, was the estimated move date somebody gave us last night, with a shrug.) But good thing we got our asses down there anyway, because the Fulton Fish Market really is a hell of a lot more than a bunch of concrete open-sided buildings filled with styrofoam boxes of fish and ice.

Part of the thrill is that it’s the middle of the night (we aimed for 1am, but in fact most vendors don’t start selling till 2am), and we’re in this fantastic marriage of grim and glorious urbanity: a dark, sketchy two blocks under the rumbling FDR, where the asphalt has gone to seed and the only lighting is from the glaring fluorescent-lit concrete bunkers that house about half of the vendors. But immediately to the east is the Brooklyn Bridge, all aglimmer, with the Manhattan Bridge right behind; lights are twinkling off the dark, slippery river, and it feels incredibly calm and gorgeous—if you can screen out the armies of guys shouting, and trundling right toward you on those little pallet tractor things. (All you “warehouse club” shoppers: This is the real deal!)

And it’s a bad idea to gawp at the river view because these guys are also wielding sharp knives and hooks. Hooks like I’ve only ever seen in On the Waterfront. I thought this genius tool had been rendered extinct by shipping containers, so it warmed my heart to see there’s still some commerce in America that requires the loving, individual attention of a big guy’s meaty paw and a nasty sharp hook. One guy we passed was gesturing wildly with his hook in his hand; he apologized when he saw us tourists coming through, because we’re the types who might end up with a hook in the ear if we’re not careful.

The market is not a consumer-friendly place—there are no signs telling you where to park, and it seems impossible to get past a phalanx of refrigerated semis lined up to the north. There’s no cheery market agent, as at the Greenmarket, say, to ask for guidance. We parked in a seemingly random spot by some overpass pylon and hoped for the best.

But it is a surprisingly friendly place overall. It did help that one of our company was a bodacious, outgoing redhead who was genuinely fascinated with these guys’ work. When a sweatshop full of filet-ers noticed us peering into their little aisle workroom, they waved us in, encouraged us to squeeze down the little aisle between them (it was a disassembly line: guys on one side filleted, slipping the carcasses into silvery, squishy heaps at their feet, while guys on the other side skinned the filets) and stare and chat and take pictures. “You’ve had a couple beers?” the Mexican guy I talked to asked me, assuming, I guess, that the only people who would stumble in here at 1am would be drunkards with nothing better to do. No, darlin’, I’m drunk on the beauty of wholesale commerce, I wanted to say, as for once I was genuinely sober.

This was still early, before the market really opened. Quite a lot happened in the hour we whiled away at the Paris Cafe bar (where everyone had been quick to direct us, natch), and when we came back, the bustle had doubled. It was short work to buy 200 oysters and 200 clams, then cart them back to the car, dodging pallet-tractors and hooks all the way. We took another quick stroll around before we left, to see a gigantic plum-red tuna being hacked apart, gold-pink snappers, shad roe (which looked like agglomerations of the lungs I’ve pulled out of quails) and lots of crabs, all rolling-eyed and foaming at the mouth out of panic. I pet some of the crabs on the head to calm them, but crustaceans don’t really respond to that the way mammals do—all the more reason to eat ‘em.

We’d seen all we could see (even the truck from Taverna Kyclades, the fish resto near my house, arriving; I have fresh respect for them), and the guys had gotten as much of an eyeful as they wanted. (“I’ve never really noticed Katie’s ass,” Peter said as we walked behind her and heard the whoops of praise from either side, “but in this setting, I somehow have a fresh appreciation for it.”) Oh, and we’d eaten a mysterious chicken-sandwich-in-a-plastic-bag—funny, there were no fishy foods on offer. So we got in the car and drove home, dropping Peter at Penn Station to catch his 3:15am train to Boston. I haven’t been up that late and roaming around without the aid of drugs since I can remember.

So now I know you can get 400 shellfish for little more than $100, and be generously and graciously complimented on your physique and charm by men in rubber bib overalls at 3am. But of course, this is all set to change, and we know that change is bad. The Fulton Fish Market is essential, the seafood hub for not just NYC but a lot of the Northeast, and its social value is measured precisely by the prime real estate, with its gorgeous river view, it sits on. When it gets shunted up to the Bronx, I imagine these guys will feel more than a bit marginalized. But who am I to say? Hunt’s Point will be indoors (it was pissing rain all last night), and air-conditioned. And it will be closer to my house. Throw in a bushel of crabs, and maybe I can handle a little change.

I just heard a little promo for my local station that just gave a me a little twinge of aaaawwww. This woman says why she likes New York City, after describing all the wacky people she saw on the blackout day in 2003: “I’ll never be bored, I’ll never be lonely, and I’ll never have to own a car.” Amen. But drat–I guess I’ll actually have to give money to public radio now.

I’m home, finally, back to the mudless world. The Bluebird is ready! Tomorrow I take her out for my very first spin! (Yes, Peter’s blogs have multiplied already. And he’s getting more hits on the bike one than I’ve ever gotten on this. Specialization is the answer, I suppose.)

Also, I get more seltzer tomorrow. Oh, Mr. Bubbles, my dream man. But he can’t build bikes.

Yesterday, March 1, was National Pig Day, it seems. Silly me–I thought that meant pork, so I ordered a BLT at the Time Inc caf (taking petty pleasure in saying “EXTRA MAYO, please!” right next to the woman who’d just order the Lite Tuna on wheat). But then I did a little googling, and it looks like they mean real, live pigs are to be celebrated on National Pig Day. I read about how smart and sensitive and cute they are. And I’m still hungry for bacon.

Which reminds me, the current issue of Saveur has an article titled something like “The Best Food in the World.” About bacon, of course. Recipes for bacon tempura, for bacon covered with brown sugar, you name it. The eds characterize bacon as “savior of sluggish breakfasts, benefactor of the midday meal [mmm, BLTs], daring animator of the dinner table….Mocker of diets, tempter of vegetarians,…furtive lagniappe for the cook savvy to have cooked a bit more of it than he or she, strictly speaking, needs.” Indeed.

In other great news, I got my first delivery from Mr. Bubbles, the last remaining seltzer delivery man in NYC. Yes, at $20 for 10 26 oz. bottles, plus tip to the guy who lugs the 70-pound crate up the stairs, it’s kind of an indulgence. Especially because I’m hardly at home any more. But I want there to be fizzy water there when I am there, right?

So, Walter is everything you could hope for in a seltzer delivery guy (no leering, people–it’s just water!)–he’s kinda burly, he’s really into what he does, he has a Bronx-y accent, and he starts telling you tales about all his other customers. Like the mid-80s Italian couple around the corner who have a huge garden, and the guy makes his own grappa. And the managing editor of Time magazine. And all the other food writers around the city. I feel like I’ve been initiated into some secret club. Made all the more secretive by the fact that Walter has a habit of saying, “…if you get what I’m saying” after almost every sentence, so that everything he says sounds like some cryptic double entendre that I should be picking up on. Ohhhh. Right. Fizzy water.

Totally unrelated to food, but just to clarify, in case anyone was harboring any delusions: Pretty much everyone who has anything to do with Roving Gastronome is a total dork. Peter and I are so dorky, we volunteered to have our pictures taken for Bike Month NYC promotional posters. If I can’t be Miss Subways, this is the next best thing…

Huh. They are safety orange. Peter said this, but I didn’t believe him. I was still living in “saffron” fantasyland.

I think because I was riding my bike, I had this automatic anxious response to the color. “Construction ahead. Bridge closed. Detour this way. Your life will start to suck very soon,” is the subconscious message that color sends to my brain. And I couldn’t turn it off, even though I biked all the way across the park–every time I saw a fresh cluster of them, I thought, “Damn, I’m going to be so late.”

This is perhaps the first time in my life I’ve thought something might be better if I weren’t riding my bike.

Last week, as I was stuffing the world’s best snack, the banh mi, the Vietnamese sandwich specifically from the dark little hole under the Manhattan bridge that’s open only five hours a day, down my gullet in a frenzied urge to maximize the sweet-hot-crispy-gooey-meaty-veggie taste sensation, I was also contemplating how it is that I’m chronically late.

I never used to be this way. I used to be the one standing on street corners, looking at my watch tick past the hour mark. I used to arrive early for important events, so I’d be all calm and prepared. Now I don’t even have a watch—except for that green flower one, which I try not to wear to important events, as it undermines my credibility—and that might be part of the problem.

I also blame the year I spent in Cairo, where time is a bit looser. Not to trade in third-world stereotypes, but when it’s hot out and you have to push past 18 million people to get where you’re going, well, your friends will understand if you show up at 6:30 instead of 5. And there’s some tea or mango juice or a cold beer to drink wherever you go, so it’s not like they’ll be put out by waiting.

When I moved to NYC in 1998, straight from Cairo, most of my friends were people I had known in Egypt, so we just continued our blasé ways: call someone up, say you’ll meet them somewhere like the Sudanese-hooker bar later that evening, then sit back to read the paper or take a nap until the sun sets. I knew deep down that this wasn’t the way real people socialize in this city—non-Cairo types were always trying to make dates with me a month in advance. But I resisted that planning, trying to hold on to the sloppy spontaneity of Egypt, and part of the resistance was to treat hard-and-fast appointments very casually.

In the category of hard-and-fast appointments, I had also discovered a year or so before that it didn’t matter much if you missed your plane. You just show up, look a little wild-eyed and frazzled and apologetic, and they put you on the next flight. [Disclaimer: It’s not quite so true anymore—there’s now a risk of getting charged a change fee.] This opened up a very dangerous door, as I absolutely hate arriving at the airport too early, because there’s nothing good to eat (except now at LaGuardia they have those Artisanal cheese plates at Au Bon Pain), and the hum and fluorescent lights are just too grim. My dream mark, which I’ve hit only a couple of times, is to sashay straight out of security and up to the gate, where they’re just finishing boarding and no one is in line. (I know, I know—if you miss the plane, then you’re at the airport several hours early for your next flight…but somehow there’s this petty satisfaction of bucking the system that makes up for it.)

So I started to let things like packing the night before slip. And then I discovered that the people at my salary job didn’t care when I showed up, as long as shit got done. But then I had to basically fire someone for not showing up in time to get his shit done, so I had to start setting a better example. About that time, not coincidentally, I quit and started freelancing. And I got some jobs that involved going to Mexico, where there’s no sense leaving your current pleasurable situation just to get to another one at an abstract hour — which, again not coincidentally, is also my school of thought. And I got a lot of friends who also don’t have regular day jobs or fixed schedules or the wrath of the boss hanging over them if they’re late.

But some of those friends, including Peter, my co-banh-mi eater last week, do manage to show up places on time, even while projecting a completely lax attitude. So it made sense that it was Peter who pointed out, while my mouth was full of crispy, anise-spiked Vietnamese sausage coated in mayo, that maybe the city clerk office closes at 3pm, and it was 2:45 just then (we’d barely made the cut-off on the sandwiches—they run out pretty early in the afternoon).

We were going to the city clerk so Peter could make an honest woman of me—that is, get me health insurance by making me his domestic partner. Which is legit because, if you think about it, all the meals we’ve cooked together over the years constitute a pretty good definition of domestic partnership, and should be included under the law.

But City Hall is pretty close to the Vietnamese sandwich place, so it made no sense to go down there and not get sandwiches. And since the sandwiches run out early, we had to go get them first, which involved a long line because they can only make five at a time in their little toaster oven. And then we had to eat them while they were still hot. And then we looked at Peter’s watch.

While we were walking double-quick over to City Hall, wiping crumbs off our shirts and slurping the rest or our iced coffees, Peter explained his time attitude to me: the only way he could justify his no-work, seemingly lazy (OK, really lazy) lifestyle to other people was if he at least showed up to places on time.

I’d been overreaching, I realized. Totally exploiting my position. Worse, I’d been feeling guilty about being late and stressing out over it — spending my whole subway ride concocting excuses, and being secretly happy if something did go wrong, because then I could honestly say there’d been problems with the train. I vowed to turn over a new leaf, to wear a watch and make allowances for the train being held up, and not be afraid of arriving somewhere early.

But then we got to the city clerk’s, and found it was open until 3:45. Nooooo problem. Or mafeesh mishkila, as you’d say in Egypt. Immediate setback to my resolution, of course.

I was 20 minutes late for my copy editing job this morning. But I ate a really nice breakfast (leftover sticky toffee pudding, and Aaron’s coffee with lots of half-and-half) and packed myself a good lunch of leftover soup that I took the time to grate a little extra cheese on top of, for better nuking later. And when I got here, my boss wasn’t here yet to see that I was late. See how this all happens? I may have no willpower at all, but I’m the best-fed freelancer in the land.

So, two follow-ups to the fable of the country mouse and the city mouse—wait, three.

1) Aimless wandering in a strange city with people with different agendas drives me insane because it reminds me of high school, when we drove around and around saying, “What do you want to do?” “I dunno—what do you want to do?” Extra pointless because it was Albuquerque in the 1980s—there wasn’t anything to do anyhow. And we all knew we’d just end up back at the Burger King parking lot.

In fact, Jeff’s tale of his worst date ever brought to mind a (far, far tamer) terrible date, not the worst because I’m assuming I’m blocking out that one. This was in high school, when I finally went out with my junior-year crush object, whom I had boldly alerted to my existence with a cheesy French Club–issued valentine-o-gram. We were pretty much strangers, and I was totally shocked that he’d agreed to go out with me, and awestruck by his hotness (red hair, glasses, kinda arty), so we just did this same “What do you want to do?” “I don’t know…” exchange for several hours, and then I drove home. Excruciating. Oh look—Google says this unfortunate date of mine is married and lives in Portland, Me., and makes toy monsters. I guess the lack of activity drove him out of town too.

2) Something cool that would have saved us from wandering around Seattle: generative or algorithmic psychogeography, which is grad-student-speak for walking according to an algorithm, such as first left, second right, first right, repeat, and seeing what you run into. Genius. But to be honest, I read about this (to be even more honest, in the Utne Reader at my brother’s house) before our Seattle slog—but I was too tired to implement it by the time we really needed help. Next time, next time…

Hey, maybe I could apply this to shopping and cooking: first left, first aisle section, second row, etc. Then come home and cook something with what you got? Or broader scale: must buy something in the second store on every block…I hope I run into the store that sells grasshoppers! (More on that later.)

3) I looked up the real country mouse/city mouse fable to remind myself of the ending: Oh yeah: Country mouse returns to a steady, boring diet of barley because he likes it better than cheese, brown sugar and prunes and the constant fear of a cat and a mousetrap. People are teaching their kids this?! Freakin’ weak.