(Other than clean out my closet)

Clearly, my summer was not marked by a daily routine of writing, cooking, and blogging. Sorry ’bout that, my friends.  But after a couple of crap summers in a row, we decided that this summer would be unstructured, beachy and fun…and boy, did we hit the mark. Peach picking, lemonade stands, lazy weeks up at the farm, festivals, county fairs and plenty of pool days. My gardens produced armloads of flowers. My kitchen turned out jams and pies and pickles and we’re approaching vegetarianism these days, eating produce in its many incarnations. There was a lot of squash casserole, tomato salads galore, corn in its native state. Grilled eggplant with goat cheese and mint. Fried zucchini and corn fritters. Tacos filled with cheesy squash, corn and chiles. The eating has been good.

Can I tell you about the ratatouille, though? I’ve had ratatouille before, many times. As a child, my mother served it baked in a yellow earthenware dish that didn’t get much love outside of ratatouille season. She served it with cheese melted on top, and it was good, but the big draw of ratatouille night at the Grays’ house was singing variations on “Rat-tat-tat-tat-too-eee” while drumming on the table to drive home the point.

As an adult, I’ve made, and been served, many incarnations of this classic dish, but honestly I never really understood what the fuss was about. It was vegetable stew, but not a dish inspiring rhapsody.

And then.

Then, I tried Francis Lam’s Weapons-Grade Ratatouille. Oh my. First, you have to read his piece. If not for the passion in his essay, I would have passed over the recipe. But he convinced me, as I’m hoping he’ll convince you, to get to the farmer’s market, buy the freshest, most lovingly grown tomatoes, eggplant and zucchini you can find, and set aside an afternoon to make ratatouille for some people you love.

I’d post the recipe, but part of the fun is reading how Francis Lam wrote the recipe.  And I am (was?) an intellectual property lawyer, after all.  So just follow the link to salon.com and read it there. You might choose to serve it with some crusty sourdough bread, and some great goat cheese, like we did. Mmmm.

And then I added a long wheat-colored sundress to the giveaway pile, a maxi-dress before we know what a maxi-dress was.  An old boyfriend bought it for me in Sausalito, and every time I wore it, I felt sort of artsy-fabulous.

Next up?  The classic black suit I wore to my second interview at Finnegan, where I practiced law a lifetime ago.  In my 3-inch pumps, suit, and pearls, I felt like an Amazon Katherine Hepburn.  I peppered the interview with sassy comments and knew that the job was mine.  I’m considering folding a note into the pocket of the pants to alert the next owner of the suit’s good karma.

It was about here, in my closet purge, that my eyes watered up.  A tear trickled out as I folded the sparkly top I bought for a dinner to celebrate the sale of Peter’s first company.   The perfect black tee shirt, that I wore with long-gone jeans on our first date.  A few threadbare flannel shirts lingering from the Stowe era.

I don’t attach a lot of emotion to material things.   I have a rich library of memories in my mind, and I don’t feel like I need souvenirs to access them.  One of the recurring fights in my marriage is about Peter’s pack-rat habits.   Why does he need a giant yellow plastic Fred Flintstone head filled with dried-out markers?  Or nasty yellowing tee-shirts from some late 90s trade show?  I don’t understand, but I’ve mellowed my stance over the years in the name of marital harmony.

But today’s closet cleaning really caught me off guard.  I feel like I closed the door on a big part of my life:  the twenty-something single girl, the ass-kicking lawyer.  I haven’t been that girl for a number of years, but somehow I still had all of her clothes.  I had a grand time living that chapter, and the finality of giving away this stuff was emotional in way that I never anticipated.

I was also caught off guard by the fact that I still had all of these clothes.  I mean, I knew I had them, but I never made the connection that I had no use for them anymore until today.  It is not about the fact that they don’t fit, which they don’t, but about the fact that I am living a different life now.

I kept a few things that are uncharacteristically sentimental for me.  The kimono-style robe I bought myself in San Fransisco, that represents an awkward teen realizing that she could be a beautiful woman.  A spectacular red cocktail dress with memories.  And the blue top I wore out on the date with Peter when it became clear to me that he was the one for me.

I am 36 years old.    And I’ve been living a most interesting life.   It is an act of faith to believe that what is to come is as fun as what has been…but I’m working to make it so.  And to make sure that I have something to wear.

Pork shoulder, like the devil himself, has many forms.  Pork butt.  Picnic.  Boston butt.  All pork shoulder.  Yes, there are technical differences, but they are all names for the same collagen and fat marbled hunk of meaty bliss from the shoulder/arm/neck region (but decidedly not butt) of Babe.  Buy it bone in, skin on, for happiest jig.

Once you’ve procured your shoulder, the world of global cuisine beckons with ways to prepare it.  Every pork-eating culture I can think of has perfected at least one iteration of pork shoulder and placed it on an exulted pedestal for special occasions.  Sure, the shoulder’s size makes it practical for feasting, since you can feed quite a crew with most cuts. But it is the rich, tender, canvas-for-flavor fabulousness that has made it the darling of the masses.  Smoky pulled pork barbecue in the American south.  Bo ssam in Korea.  Garlic-studded pernil in Puerto Rico. Char Siu in China. Pebil, tinga, and, thanks be to god, carnitas, in Mexico.  Schwiesenbraten in Germany. Milk braised pork in Italy.  Stop me now.

With a little found time on my hands this past rainy weekend, I tried a new recipe brought to my attention by a fellow pork shoulder aficionada, Josie at One Kitchen, One Girl.  The recipes is several degrees derived from the famed BoSsam extravaganza recipe at Momofuku in NYC.  I tweaked it further to fit my own time frame,  and urge you to do the same.  Make some.  Soon.  And then you, too can share pork perfection with those you love.

One last thing:  I served the pork simply shredded alongside chipotle mashed sweet potatoes and a great sugar snap pea, cucumber and mint salad from this month’s Everyday Food.  Dinner was pretty silent.

Bo Ssam Pulled Porkiness

1 4-6 pound bone-in, skin-on pork shoulder roast

1/3 cup salt, plus 1 tablespoon salt

1/3 cup white sugar

1/4 cup brown sugar

Score the pork shoulder skin with several long slashes, cutting through the skin and fat but not into the meat.  Mix 1/3 cup salt with the white sugar, and pack this dry brine onto the pork, covering all surfaces as heavily as possible.  Stash the pork in an appropriately-sized bowl in the refrigerator overnight, covered.

In the morning, preheat the oven to 250 degrees.  Transfer pork to a roasting pan and cover tightly with foil, then slam the whole business into the oven.  Leave it there, undisturbed, while you go about your bidness for 6-10 hours.  At some point in the afternoon, take the foil off if you remember.  Consider leaving the kitchen vent running, though, as the porky smell can give a girl the vapors.

When you are closing in on dinner time, remove the pork from the oven, and crank the oven to 500.  Mix the final tablespoon of salt with the brown sugar.  Baste the pork with some of the rendered fat from the pan, then coat generously with the brown sugar mixture.  With the pork skin side up, return the pork uncovered to the oven for 10-15 minutes to melt the sugar and form a crisp crust.

Serve hot, shredded and maybe garnished with some scallions.  Hope for leftovers, which you can then tuck into soft buns with a little barbecue sauce.  Or pile atop some rice noodles with herbs and crisp radishes and dress with a little lime and fish sauce.  Or roll into tortillas with avocado slices and pickled red onions.  Or use to fill steamed bao.  Or just slowly pick at the pork in the dim light of the refrigerator bulb.  Go ahead.  It will be our little secret.

And, riding a wave of “my food is worth lots of money” confidence, I donated 3 months of seasonal fruit pies to another auction, where hopefully locavores with money will bid fast and furiously for flaky crust heaped with shiny fresh berries, bourbon-drenched peaches, or sweet fall apples.

Cooking for cash is a little different, I find, than making dinner for the family, or hosting a party for friends.  I feel a lot of pressure to make things perfect when people have paid, even just as a donation or a door fee.  After years of classes, catering, and even just gifting food to friends, I’ve learned that first, yeah, I am a pretty darn good cook.  But second, packaging is everything.  A paper plate of brownies covered in Saran wrap is rarely going to arouse the same mouth watering anticipation as oversized brownies individually wrapped in parchment and arranged in a pretty box.   Places like Marshalls or Tuesday Morning often have ceramic dishes for a couple of bucks that make a casserole delivered to new parents feel a lot more special, even if it is just chicken and pasta.

So I’m off to shop for ways to make my offerings say “Hey!  Thanks for supporting causes I care about!”   It is just one of many great things about food:  you can make it speak for you.

But the cooking and eating opportunities available after a run to the Asian market down the street from me are truly impressive.  The produce section was the early draw for me.   Produce takes up at least a quarter of this suburban-supermarket-sized establishment, bins overflowing with the fruit and vegetable staples of Korea, China, India, Thailand, the Carribean, Central America, Mexico, and points further.  Juicy pineapples, fragrant herbs and exotic mushrooms are all available at prices well below those found at my local Giant.  A crisp head of cauliflower for $1.59.  Scallions, 10 bunches for a dollar.  Kubocha squash for 59 cents a pound.  I can load a cart with a generous week’s worth of 5-a-day for around 30 dollars.

Some of these items are imported from Costa Rica, Peru and where ever it is that durian grows.  The vast majority, though, comes from Pennsylvania, according to the twist ties on my broccoli rabe ($1 a bunch!) and the stickers on the spaghetti squash.  My family leans locavorian, so that feels good.  I wish for more organic items, but ultimately I have to weigh the benefits of the volumes and volumes of conventional produce that my family eats against the prohibitive cost of eating the same volume, organically grown.  In the winter, when the CSA is dormant and farmer’s markets are populated by Olive Ladies and Bread Guys, the Asian market produce wins out.

Once I’m there, having selected a few stalks of lemongrass and some fresh galanga to make tom yum soup, I get to delve deeper into the store.   The noodle aisle is spectacular, with every size, shape and millable grain represented.  I select from three widths of pad thai noodles in their crinkly wrappers, then reach for a sheaf of soba noodles in its delicate floral paper band.    Behind me is a wall of pan-Asian condiments, labels in Korean or Thai but with USDA-mandated translations overwrapped helpfully on top.  The back of the store houses a pretty decent fish counter.  I select a healthy-looking red snapper from the iced bins and hand it to the Salvadorean fishmonger, who expertly scales, guts, and filets it for me.    Seaweed is available in any permutation you like for broth or nori roll making.   Then comes a mind-boggling array of rice.  Rabbit.   Korean-cut short ribs.  Black chicken.   And a technicolor aisle of Asian snack foods that my kids find captivating.

Then, there’s the dreaded dried fish aisle…the source of the smell that permeates the market.  This post’s title is a bit far-reaching; I have yet to truly be inspired by the wall of silvery dried seafood.  I have gotten used to the smell over the years I have been shopping there, though, so there is some joy in that.  And just past the dried seafood is a killer selection of prepared foods.  Dumplings, marinated meats, salads, sashimi, all so much fresher and brighter than the pallid roasted chickens and mayonnaise-laden salads available at the Safeway.

I do cook a lot of Asian food, mostly because my family loves it, but also because of the amazing ingredients I can buy down the street.  But I find ingredients for a globe’s worth of cuisines there…green beans and shallots for a quick saute side dish, sweet potatoes to mash with chipotle chiles and serve with grilled lamb, fruits for my kids’ lunchboxes.   It really is a joyful place for me.

For NoVA readers:  H-Mart, with several locations including my beloved at Lee Highway and Gallows Road.

Peeling off the layers of outwear in preparation for a week of crisp spring weather, the sourdough doughnuts and nachos that warmed me through the dregs of winter have settled onto my hips and into the space beneath my chin.  Right-o.

With the season of tank tops soon approaching, I’m recommitting to moderation in all things.  And so, more salads, more walks, and maybe a little hot yoga.  If you are feeling the same, consider my favorite non-summer salad of spinach, roasted beets, walnuts, chicken, and a buttermilk dressing.  Bursting with superfood nutrition and low in saturated fat, and full of sweet-salty, crunchy-chewy, soft-crisp contrast, I’m hoping it will remind me how good it tastes to eat wholesome, healthful food.

Menu for the first spring-like week in a long, long time:

Monday:  Clean out the fridge night

Tuesday:  Spinach salad with grilled chicken, beets, and toasted walnuts

Wednesday:  Chana masala, curry roasted cauliflower, raita, rice, and onion kulcha

Thursday:  Orange and avocado salad and black bean quesadillas

Friday:  Stir fried pork and mushrooms in garlic sauce, steamed bok choy, rice

So this weekend I gathered my own family to pass along some of these hard-won skills.  We had dinner in front of the TV-a rare occurrence-and watched speed skating, cheering on Orange Pants against Blue Pants, and Red Pants over Gold Pants.  We ate decadent nachos and drank margaritas poured into snow-packed pint glasses.   I’m not sure if it was the kids’ excitement or the jumbo margaritas, but even my sports-phobic husband got into the spirit and may have even teared up when Hannah Kearney brought it home for the U.S. in a rocket-hot moguls run.

But let us return to those nachos.  My word.  The cupboard was still a little bare from the infamous snowstorm, but I was able to cobble together a most delicious meal from the odds and ends lurking about.  I began by whirring up some black bean dip out of a drained, rinsed 32 ounce can of black beans, 4 ounces of cream cheese, a teaspoon of ground ancho chile, a few slivered scallions, a clove of garlic, and some salt.  Buzz food proccesor, done.  I dolloped the beans on tortilla chips and sprinkled with a mix of grated cheddar and monterey jack.  10 minutes in the oven at 375, while I used the food pro again (when watching Olympics in Canada, utilize Canadian terms for kitchen appliances…so goes the adage, right?) to make a fresh pico de gallo out of a pint of grape tomatoes, an onion, some cilantro, and a squeeze of lime.  I squished up a couple avocados with more lime, cilantro and salt, pulled the nachos out of the oven, and a new generation of Olympic rituals was born.

I’ve made lots of food to share: broccoli cheese soup, and Mimi’s Minestrone, sourdough bread and chocolate chip cookies.  And Sunday morning, to fuel the herd for a day of deep-powder sledding, I made sourdough doughnuts.  By far the best homemade doughnut attempt to date, these were crunchy on the outside, light in the inside, and complex in addition to sweet.  I made mine with an established wild yeast sourdough starter, but the original blog post includes a quick overnight sourdough sponge made with commercial yeast.

Yes, we are all a little twitchy about our regularly scheduled life falling to the wayside for a week or so.  But the doughnuts kind of make it all worth it.

There is a ritual, of course.   I gather a few aggressively flagged cookbooks, check the open tabs on the kitchen laptop (shorthand for “to try” at my house) and peruse the weekly specials at 5 different grocery stores.  I check the calendar to see who will be where at dinnertime.  And I peek in the fridge and pantry to see if anything is glaring at me, pouting as neglected foodstuffs tend to do.

Then I draft.  Generally, there are several drafts of the menu and accompanying grocery list, as I realize that we’re too heavy on the cheese or that some salads are in order.  I do a lot of prep at night, after the kids go to bed, so midweek complicated dishes aren’t out of the question.

We eat according to the menu plan at least 80 percent of the time.  The ingredients are in the house, there is no 5 o’clock panic about what to make, and I’m able, for example, to make extra marinara for the pasta on Tuesday to stash in the fridge for pizza on Friday.  It saves us money, both on bare-fridge-based takeout, and on produce saved from a slow decay while awaiting its dinner destiny.

But for me, it is a half hour a week that I can unabashedly obsess about food…and that, to me, is an end in itself.

Just because, here’s my menu for the next few days:

Sunday:  Gorgonzola burgers, oven fries, kale slaw with peanut dressing (yeah, the kale guilt did me in)

Monday:  Marinated grilled shrimp salad with grapefruit, avocado, and spinach, sourdough bread

Tuesday:  Orange bourbon chicken with cornbread crust, napa mango slaw, steamed green beans

Wednesday:  Kung pao shrimp, Szechuan eggplant, rice

Thursday: Short order eggs, sweet potato hash, fruit salad

*The pleasures of grocery shopping are a post in and of themselves

When I was an eighth grader at R.J. Grey Junior High, I won the home ec award.  And was mortified.

Loving food, and being good at its preparation, was downright embarrassing to my 13-year-old American female self.  Food was the path to fat, and being fat was to be avoided at all costs.  Plus, food was domestic and bodily, not worldly and intellectual, as I sought to be.   As I continued to grow and mature, my conflicted relationship with food continued to be…conflicted.  I hosted multi-course dinner parties as a teenager, with pretty sophisticated food, and took great pride in my cooking skills.  But at the same time, I was reticent to really commit; I didn’t really like to talk food with people, and I often claimed not to eat what I cooked.  Which was a lie.

Off I went to college, where I found myself making (bad) homemade bread and staying in to watch the newly-hatched Food Network.  Emeril, on that black-and-white studio kitchen with a half-moon over his shoulder, already irritating me with his bizzarre malapropisms, but opening my mind to cooking with pork fat and love.  Caprial’s Kitchen, on PBS, I believe, through which Caprial Pence vastly improved my knife skills and introduced me to pacific northwest cuisine.  But still, food remained a guilty pleasure, not something to talk about in polite company, and certainly not with boys.  I was that girl, ordering a salad on a first date.

I indulged in a blissfully misspent early twenties, bouncing from coast to coast, and spending my meager food pennies on the ingredients for curried lentil soup and pasta puttanesca rather than ramen.   Learning about the warmth of bringing friends together for a homecooked meal.  I absolutely realized that food was my calling, yet I vacillated, resisting the call.  I applied to professional cooking school programs then talked myself out of enrolling, worried that life in a kitchen would expose my unseemly food obsession.  As if I were still fooling anyone at all.

Next came a safe move, to law school, followed by a half-decade of keeping the same nights-and-weekends hours as a chef.  The pay was better, but the passion wasn’t there.  And then came kids.  And cancer. And realization that a life without passion is not much of a life at all.

And as I traveled my own path, our culture was undergoing its own food evolution.   After eating to live for so long, having reduced meal prep to grab-nuke-eat for almost two generations, America began living to eat.  Led by Saint Alice and her merry band of California cuisine pioneers in the 70’s, and egged on by Food Network, by food bloggers, by the rise in artisanally-produced everything, the rebirth of farmer’s markets…food is cool, now.   Lucky me!  Just as I am steeling myself to reject what I perceived as a culturally constructed bias against food as the subject of discourse, food becomes the subject of discourse.  And I can just hop on the bandwagon.

So here we are.  Love & Onions is the on-line hub for this next chapter in my life, in which I cook and write and blog and teach and proudly feed the people I love.  Pull up a chair, please, and grab a fork.