Food Habits

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The Orange and the Green

January 19, 2010 in Food Habits, Orange and Green | No comments

There are some instances where the combination of orange and green doesn’t work so well—like Northern Ireland—but when it comes to food, it’s hard to go wrong when you put the two together. Take a dark leafy green and introduce it to an orange-fleshed vegetable and you have a vegetable powerhouse. Nutritional benefits aside (and there are many—dark leafy greens and orange-fleshed vegetables are the Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of superfoods), they just taste really good together. And they look pretty on the plate next to each other, making them the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie of superfoods.

And they just so happen to be in season during winter, the season of resolution. If you’re searching around for dietary alternatives to holiday excesses like salami-and-cheese cracker sandwiches washed down with a bottle of wine, look to the orange and the green. Even if you cook them in cream and butter, it’s hard not to feel virtuous and healthy when these two are on your plate, in the same way a Prius might ease your guilt about driving the two blocks to the store.

There are endless ways to combine these two, but in the following posts I present some of my favorites. First up: The Classic.

The Celery Stalks at Midnight

November 22, 2009 in Dinner out, Food Habits | 4 comments

Those who know me know that I don’t like olives or cilantro. But there are also a few (a lot, my friend LKA would insist) other things I don’t like. First among these is celery. Let’s just say that regular celery is as unpleasant a prospect to me as the thought of vampire-enslaved zombie celery is to the highstrung cat Chester in the Bunnicula books.

While I will grudgingly dice a rib or two to make a mirepoix, I otherwise steer well clear of celery. And since discovering that Suzanne Goin, as revealed in her cookbook Sunday Suppers at Lucques, sometimes substitutes fennel for celery in a mirepoix, I have happily abandoned celery and its ribs all together.

Recently at a restaurant in Portland, the kind that only has two seatings a night and serves a six-course fixed menu, I was faced with an escarole salad that had celery in it. Maybe, I thought, escarole has some magical property that makes celery taste good.

It doesn’t.

So I ate the rest of the salad and left a neat pile of celery on the side of my plate. A perfectly logical course of action, except in the eyes of my fellow diners.

“You’re not eating your celery,” said G.

“I don’t like celery,” I said.

“How could you not like celery?” asked C.

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Olives in Cilantro Sauce

November 16, 2009 in Food Habits | 3 comments

When I was growing up, we had a rule at the dinner table: You had to at least try everything on your plate. If you didn’t like it, you didn’t have to eat it, but you had to taste it first. This led to the theatrical display of taking a bite while holding your drink to your mouth, so you wouldn’t have to actually taste whatever it was you didn’t want to eat (in my case, English peas; in my sister’s case, green beans). I wasn’t even that picky of an eater, although I can’t say that at the time my mother’s cooking was that adventurous. We ate the standard American fare (with a Southern twist) of the 1970s and 1980s: pot roast, fried chicken, spaghetti, spanish rice, baked chicken, taco night, broccoli with cheese, and double-stuffed potatoes.

In high school I became a vegetarian—the ultimate expression of picky eating—and by the time I grew out of it in my mid-twenties (thank you, France), I was ready to eat just about anything. Lamb brains, sweetbreads, Brussels sprouts, fresh peas, sweet potatoes, venison, braised goat shoulder, kale, kale, and more kale. Anything except a short list of foods that I cannot, will not eat on a train, in the rain, here or there or anywhere. Of course, in the spirit of the old dinner table rule I still (nobly, bravely) take a taste if served one of these offending flavors because it is true that your taste buds are changing all the time and you never know, you might like it.

That philosophy is the reason I often find myself in a nice restaurant, politely spitting out an olive into my napkin. I don’t like olives and I’m not ashamed to admit it. For some reason, my dislike of olives is a regular source of amazement and disbelief among my friends. “How could you not like olives? You, of all people?” they gasp. Or, from those who have known me for a while, “Oh yeah, I forgot you don’t like olives. It’s so weird.”

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On and Off the List

August 4, 2009 in Food Habits | 4 comments

My friend LKA keeps a running list referred to as The Coma List. Everyone should have one. This is the list of foods that a friend or family member should bring to your bedside if you are ever in a coma. Only the foods on the list have the power to bring you back to consciousness. For a long time the primary items on LKA’s list were two notable chicken sandwiches found in San Francisco:
The Bi-Rite Market’s original chicken sandwich, circa 2000, and the chicken sandwich found at the SF MOMA café.

It only takes one bad bite to get an item crossed off the list.

What exactly made the Bi-Rite sandwich so special has been lost to the mists of time; all I can remember is that she took it off the list around 2003 or 2004 because she had one and it was too dry. It only takes one bad bite to get an item crossed off the list. The SF MOMA café chicken sandwich was a chicken breast on focaccia with arugula and onion jam. The key to the sandwich was the cutting of the chicken breast into two or three slices, rather than leaving it as one thick piece, which often leads to the specter that haunts all chicken sandwiches: dryness.

LKA was in town last weekend and took a trip to SF MOMA to check out the Robert Frank show and also to check in with the chicken sandwich. Was it still good enough for the list?

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