Roving Gastronome: The Blog

Thanksgiving in Savannah was lovely. I splurged on a heritage turkey from Heritage Foods, even though I didn’t have a chance to spy on the bird via webcam in the days leading up to his demise, which is one of the brilliant selling points of these birds. We at least savored the heartwarming stories of all the various farms–the assembled at Casa Bonaventura decided our turkey must’ve come from the gay one.

With the bird came a little information sheet listing the various heritage breeds and the characteristics of each. Figuring out which one ours might be would’ve required an LSAT-level logic grid, so I just turned the project over to Bob, who stuffed the 15-pound baby and popped him in the oven.

A few hours later, I came in and finished him up. After a lot of nervous poking, I decided this called for slicing off the legs, which were still oozing red, and leaving them in the oven while we put the rest of the completely done bird on the counter to wait. The result was perfectly done breast and leg. Duh. I don’t know why I haven’t done this before–maybe because the gap between done and not-done hasn’t ever been quite this drastic, and maybe because it seems like admitting failure. (Last night Peter and I were imagining a situation in which we would super-chill the breast meat with little ice packs, as a sort of handicap, before popping the bird in the oven. Less practical, but maybe more fun than the leg-severing strategy. And it would only work if you didn’t drink too many whiskey sours and forget to take the ice packs off.)

Anyway, the turkey was delicious. Although still not quite as delicious as turkey I’ve eaten in the Yucatan…but then everything tastes better when eaten in another country.

I also made some pies. Note to self: Make pie dough more than once a year, so I remember how to do it. Back in New Mexico, I was the Pie Queen. Seventeen years later, I still haven’t adapted to sea-level baking, and my crusts are hit or miss. I tried a new pie recipe, from the November issue of Saveur: buttermilk pie with cardamom. It was not like the delectable “Buttermilk Sky Pie” of Barton’s from Terrace Club, but more like a very light cheesecake. The cardamom made me think I should’ve waited till Christmas to make it (cardamom is linked to stollen in my mind), and the texture made me think I should’ve made a crumb crust. Actually, maybe next time I’ll just follow the recipe for the standard pie crust–that would be a wise move. Still, good to try something new.

My pie gut, I mean glut (oh, I didn’t mention–I made three: apple and mince also), plus the existing three pies (pumpkin, sweet potato, pecan), meant I spent all weekend eating not leftover turkey but extra pie: big slabs of mincemeat with whipped cream for breakfast, apple for lunch-dessert, buttermilk as an afternoon snack. As Peter and I were packing our snacks for the train, I was looking sadly at the remaining pies, which almost certainly would get tossed after we left. Bloated and sugar-saturated, I was still thinking, I could’ve saved one more slice…

Thanks to all who helped the noble cause!

…but maybe I should pay more attention to soccer.

I clicked on the headline Maradona ’sedated and recovering’. Not sure why, but I at least know who Maradona is, and if something awful had happened to him, it would be a sad day for the Argentines.

After the lede, we get this sentence:

The 46-year-old’s personal physician said his ill health was brought on by excessive smoking, drinking and eating.

Now that is a sportsman I can get behind! Way to go, Maradona.

I have to admit to a slight feeling of smugness when I say: I eat everything. I have never “watched” what I eat or otherwise been concerned with my health and weight, and I’m doing just fine, thank you. Maybe I’m lucky, but I also think moderation and cooking for myself does the trick. La la la–aren’t I great?

Oh, well, now I also have to admit: There was a little interlude of jeans-digging-painfully-into-my-burgeoning-gut this summer, but that seems to have disappeared. No thanks, though, to (OK, admitting more) about ten days of thinking maybe I should eat smaller portions and cut down on some of the desserts. And those were some incredibly depressing days–I did begin to understand how this fear of food has developed in so many people. It’s just the end of all pleasure as soon as you start looking at everything you put in your mouth in terms of where it might wind up bulging out on your body–midsection or butt? Or inner thighs, which are rubbing together in an unpleasant way?

Incidentally, the upshot of these ten days of vigilance and semi-abstinence is that I began to crave the strangest, junkiest things–whatever I could get from the office vending machine, frozen pizzas, Ho-Hos, you name it. For me, anyway, even thinking about “dieting” was very, very bad for me.

So, once I was through with that little thought experiment, I settled back into my usual habits, and now my pants fit again.

But perhaps what distracted me from my weight–and I guess I should be grateful for that–was another dietary issue altogether.

Without getting into specifics, let’s just say I take a little something daily to prevent the arrival of Roving Gastronomettes or Roving Gastronomitos. That little something also has the benefit of giving me dewy, smooth skin–the sort I should’ve been entitled to as soon as I stopped being a teenager, but for some reason just never got around to arriving on its own. Presto–a magic pill, and I am no longer looking at myself aghast in the mirror in the morning before I grab the concealer.

In recent years, however, even though my skin texture could be mistaken for a French woman’s in some light, it has taken to getting unattractively blotchy when I spend even four minutes in the sun. By the end of my Greece sojourn last summer, I looked a bit like I had been standing by during that terrible mishap at the self-tanner factory (the one that maybe also hit Lindsay Lohan?)–though fortunately I’d been wearing my safety goggles.

Like any disfigurement, I’m sure it looked worse to me than anyone else, but I decided I needed to adjust my daily treatments. So I started on a new formulation that held some promise of an even skin tone, though certainly no guarantee. One large perk, however (sensitive boys, block your ears): my period would dwindle away to next to nothing! Hooray! Oh, and the packaging was much cooler.

But then came the pendulum, swinging back the other way. Within a month, my skin texture was an utter fiasco–I felt like I was back in high school or worse, that year in Cairo when everything was just like being in high school again.

Then I remembered something a friend had mentioned, about how dairy products really made her skin break out.

I subsist on dairy products–they are my go-to protein source. This summer I ate either feta or yogurt or both every single day, and in my normal routine I eat milk for breakfast, maybe a grilled-cheese sandwich for lunch or a cheesy omelet, and then when I don’t know what else to put in the salad, I put in some Parmesan or little grated Cheddar bits. Cheese keeps forever in the fridge, and it’s available in amazing variety. Yogurt is good for the gut. Milk just hits the spot on certain occasions. Cream spruces up some dishes in a lovely way. And butter–I think I must be made of butter by now.

But I tried going without for a week, and, lo, my skin returned to normal. Then I ate a slice of pizza with a dollop of fresh ricotta, and woke up with a massive bump on my chin.

So. Vanity or gluttony? Do I give up a major part of my diet in exchange for the convenience of no period and the social confidence that comes with a flawless complexion?

I fretted for about a month, thinking maybe I was wrong, or my body would adjust. Making little mental negotiations like, well, if I give up butter, I guess that just means more opportunities for duck fat? And I _guess_ I prefer the intensity of fruit sorbets…

But that month was a pretty long time (frankly, I didn’t realize I was so vain in the first place), and it’s not like I really stayed on the wagon in the first place. I just could not face a life of placing food in ‘yes’ and ‘nooooooo!’ categories.

So just a few weeks ago, I switched back to the original anti-kid, anti-pimple, pro-blotch formulation.

You can read this two ways: I have zero will power and restraint. Or I’m fabulously deep–surface beauty doesn’t matter to me in the least, darlings.

Naturally, I agree with the latter interpretation. I’ll just buy a much bigger hat for next summer–and eat a lot of ice cream.

Still not the lovely sea urchin ones (have to get those off Peter’s computer), but over on Fotaq, there’s a little indication of what we did all day, every day. (And if you squint at the background, you can kind of get an idea of what a nice place it is.)

The back story to all these goofy pictures is this: Around Day 4 of our sojourn in Skala Eressou, Peter’s dad started getting a little concerned about how much we were eating, and, specifically, how much we were ordering at dinner every night. In the grand scheme of things, half a grilled fish going uneaten is no great crime, but I could certainly empathize with Charlie as Peter would flag down the waiter for the fourth time and say, “Aaaaand we’ll have a plate of the…” (but in Greek).

When there are 17 people around a big long table, and everyone’s saying, “How ’bout some lamb chops? Some macaronia? More tzatziki!” it can get out of hand pretty easily, and it did always fill me with an abstract anxiety. People, we need a PLAN, I felt like saying, but by then it was already too late, and the random ordering had begun. In truth, we rarely ended up with way too much food, but there was a certain haphazardness to the meals that maybe could’ve been averted.

Part of the problem is that you never realize, until you’re in the middle of it, the flaw of ordering a variety of dishes to match the number of people at the table. Because then the dishes come, and really, there’s never going to be enough taramosalata on that plate to feed 20 people, and you realize this just as the taramosalata has started around the table in precisely the opposite direction from you. So, you give it up for lost and keep your eye on the next thing the waiter’s setting down.

And just like that, your dinner is ruined, because you’re having to strategize at the dinner table like the last-born in a Mormon family. “Portion panic,” as I believe Jessika dubbed it, sets in, and before you know it you’re hoarding and reaching, and sneaking the last bites of things, and slipping french fries under your plate for later (actually, I just thought of that now, but it’s kind of a good idea) and so on.

So, anyway, Charlie I guess saw this happening–plus the occasional unfinished fish–and tried to do something about it. But of course that backfired, because if you lean over to Peter and say, “Hey, don’t overorder,” of course Peter’s just going to roll his eyes and keep doing what he’s doing. It’s too late.

The overordering thing reached fever pitch the day of our wedding. After our super-express 40-minute speed-read ceremony, we all traipsed down the hill to the little meze joint we’d talked into opening in the afternoon just to feed us a little snicky-snack and a little ouzo.

But you can’t very well tell a Greek restaurateur, “We’ll be coming from a wedding,” and expect him to undercater, or even sensibly cater. And he didn’t grossly over-cater, but there was an almost comically endless stream of little plates arriving at the table–to the point where Charlie started saying, “Stop! Phot, make him stop!” And he did, briefly, stop the flow of skordalia, beets, deep-fried meatballs, super-funky bastirma, sausage bits, cold white beans, succulent little zucchini wedges…but then we realized, WHY would you want to go and do an idiotic thing like that? (It helped that we’d been drinking the raki, briefly mistaken for water by my mother, for a little bit.)

Yes, there was some tragic food waste that afternoon. You can’t save the soul of every little meatball–you just have to focus on the ones you have been able to help.

So, then, after Charlie went home, Peter and Andrew briefly tried to heed his cautionary words. And that’s how we got these photos.

Tamara writes:

Yesterday I got up, smelled the lamb fat, brewed some coffee, and sat down with a cup to drink while staring at the computer screen. I went to see what was in the plastic bag next to the computer….. (food someone had forgotten, perhaps?) and discovered….

The head. Smiling at me with its blind little milky eyes.

Ooh. Dear me.

View a few here:

www.ofoto.com

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The squeamish (Jeff?) might want to skip the last two pics, which involve the lamb head. It’s kind of an abrupt transition from pic 11 to pic 12 if you’re in slideshow mode.

That was the official name of the wedding party Peter and Amy threw for Amy’s friend Martha and her newly betrothed, Hakan. We never really ascertained whether the Turks got the whole joke, but none of them seemed offended that we were fixated on their not eating pork.

So that was one good sign. The others were: a gorgeous sunny day; a bigger lamb (about 60 lbs, was it?; the increase in weight was all in the meat, not bone); and me not really having to do anything but show up and take a symbolic turn at the spit. This was all Peter’s baby this time. Tamara, once again the quintessential hostess, graciously opened her home to an Ottoman horde…of wonderfully polite and attractive young men, all cohorts of Hakan’s from various restaurants. Really, I haven’t been to a party with so many men in years–I really had begun to believe the statistics about NYC being 95% single, well-dressed, slutty women in their 30s.

But that’s beside the point–let me emphasize that Tamara had never met any of these people, and she was still incredibly game to once again have her front terrace coated in lamb grease.

When I arrived, Peter had already put our little friend on his spit–he chopped off the head this time, which made it a little easier to balance the carcass. He’d also added a bunch of red wine to the marinade, and was brushing it on the meat with big bunches of mint and rosemary.

Another improvement: actual charcoal. The back of the 20-lb. bag assures us that “this is the charcoal our ancestors used,” and I certainly felt a moment of primal bliss, sitting there in the still-weak, barely-spring sun, slowly cranking away as the scent of melting fat and crisping skin wafted over me. Perhaps later I would go draw a lamb on a cave wall…

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Hakan had donned Tamara’s flowery apron and was rapidly plating up huge vats of hummus and tzatziki (sorry, cacik if you’re Turkish), drizzling them all in olive oil so they looked about as inviting as a swimming pool on a 90-degree day. He’d also brought some great Turkish bread, and had whipped up one of those mysteriously delicious Turkish salads of cucumber and tomato that somehow ends up being, as they say, so much more than the sum of its parts.

Soon night had fallen, huge Big Gulp-size cups of raki had been swilled, and the meze platters had been fairly devoured. To the soundtrack of heartfelt Turkish pop music, that warm hubbub of a party in full swing had developed: Happily mingling were, among others, a Turkish filmmaker, a Russian hairdresser, and the sort of fabulously articulate 13-year-old girl that makes you suspect you’ve never had it so together. Peter shone his Mag lite on the lamb and deemed it done.

When the carcass was brought out to the front table where Hakan was standing ready with a knife (and still his flowery apron), there was a surge like you feel at a concert when the lights first go up. The Turks were rushing the stage! Hakan was a blur with the knife, doling out huge tender hunks of meat–stringy, like pulled pork on the outside, pink and succulent on the inside–onto red and blue sectional plates, a strange refined touch in the midst of the ancestral feasting. Such glee filled the crowd, such a glow filled everyone’s eyes. (If there were vegetarians glowering, I certainly didn’t see them.)

After the lamb–which was even better than our New Year’s effort mostly because there was heaps more of it–the party continued, but at a more relaxed pace: the climax of the evening had passed, the anticipation was over.

With the encouragement of Hakan and others, the intestines were thrown on the grill, along with the head and some other bits. (The tongue was unfortunately forgotten in the fridge. Peter had pushed the bounds of his own squeamishness–who knew he had them?–helping to cut it out: “It’s just one more step from there to war crimes,” he said later with a small shudder. Does this mean Americans will never hack each other up with machetes because we buy all our meat shrink-wrapped? Does this mean I should be thanking the industrial meat machine? Oh dear…)

There was a wedding cake shaped like a fez, made by Amy (again, no idea if the Turkish guests thought this was funny–but they seemed to like it). There was lying on the sofa, digesting. Oh, and there was Hakan stuffing huge handfuls of kataif pastry in people’s mouths–so it wasn’t like it got completely placid and mellow after we’d spent ourself on the meat.

By the time the last guest left, the temperature had dropped back into the upper 30s, but the warmth of the brief spring afternoon was still there–in my big stuffed belly. Ah, barbecue, bringer of peace!

Oh yeah–there was another lamb roast over the weekend. As soon as I regain my appetite, I’ll get to the details. In the meantime, I’m going ascetic with a diet of miso broth for the next few days. Months of steady gluttony are finally beginning to take their toll.

The New Year’s meat-fest reaps dividends:

Last week I’m on the Chinatown bus from DC to NYC, and this guy starts chatting me up. My flimsy magazine is not barrier enough to conversation. I’m absolutely terrible at extricating myself from these things. I can’t say no, or as Adrienne, Queen of Reno, puts it, “kill someone’s mojo.” Especially when there’s no bathroom to run off to. But he seems nice enough, and he does dangle some interesting conversational tidbits about how he used to party with Krush Groove and stuff.

But the ride wears on—there’s rush-hour traffic well past Baltimore—and he’s getting more flirtatious, borderline leering. Talking about how he wants a woman to share his life with. How he’d like to see me “get loose” in Miami. How I caught his eye when I first got on the bus.

And it’s already clear this guy is not my dream man: “I’d like to take you out on a date. Have you ever been to Tavern on the Green?” he coos suavely.

No, I haven’t, and I have zero desire to go, and I can’t think of a more terrible idea for a date—all glitz, no substance. This place seats many hundreds, and specializes in rubber chicken and corporate Christmas parties. The kind of place you go if you want to impress someone with your money but have absolutely no sense of good food.

By now the bus is completely dark—I certainly can’t go back to reading my magazine now. The only thing I can do is feign sleep, but I don’t want to close my eyes with this guy around.

So my strategy to cool his affections while still remaining polite is to emphasize our dissimilarities. What are my turnoffs? he asks. Guys who brag about their money—he’s been talking about the Ferrari he’s going to buy. (Remember, we’re on the Chinatown bus, roundtrip NYC-DC for $30.) I don’t “work hard and play hard” (his claim)—I work not very much and play pretty well.

Finally, the greatest opportunity of all arises: “What did you do for New Year’s?” he asks.

We-ell. You saw the bloody pictures. Poor guy had mentioned early on that he’s a vegetarian. Mwa-ha-ha. I tell him all about buying the lamb, and the fur on its head, and the little chopped-off legs—and of course how delicious it all was. He did keep up his end of the conversation after that, but the dinner invitation was not repeated.

If the carcasses on a spit hadn’t worked, I had only one more piece of ammo (as yet untested, but I suspect it’ll weed out the wrong kind of guy): I was wearing my new thong underwear that said “Live Poultry – Fresh Killed.”

More shots of the great New Year’s roasting roundup, at Snapfish. Highlights: the exciting buildup to the blessed event, including construction of the croquembouche, in funny hats.

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