Two days, but somehow Sunday feels like forever ago.
Sunday was a gorgeous day. Bright. Sunny. It doesn’t say much to call it a gorgeous day though, since this is southern California. It’s gorgeous every day, which is why it’s hard to remember it. When there are no events, distinguishing features, all the days are the same. When every day is the same, they all run together. It’s hard to keep track of time.
Really, from any other day, Sunday was no different.
Except that it was.
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Anywhere else, sunshine is deceptive. You sense the sun in the bright blue sky through the window, only to step outside into the dead of winter. Sunshine in southern California, though, is true year-round to a 72 degree temperature. Sunshine always means warmth. Sometimes it means heat. Sometimes, so much heat, it burns.
No, the sun is not deceptive in southern California, but in Orange County on Sunday, the sun betrayed in a different way.
When I woke up Sunday morning, it was still so dark that we thought it was the middle of the night. It was so dark, I thought maybe it was still…yesterday. Had time stopped? Even just slowed down? No, it was already…today, autumn-dark at 6 AM, right on schedule, right on the never slowing, never ceasing seasonal non-stopwatch that ticks and turns in a universal vacuum. As I made my way meticulously around the apartment in the pre-dawn darkness, I did things that contradicted one another. I straightened up some papers on “my desk,” but pulled a few things out of the fridge so I wouldn’t forget them later. I was disoriented, even in a place in which I had spent so much time. Maybe the three fitful hours of sleep hadn’t been enough. Maybe I was having trouble accepting the reality of change.
I sighed, asked out loud if the change truly was inevitable in a whisper that no one heard.
As total darkness through the window started to dissolve into that eerie glow just before sunrise, I slipped back into bed for what I knew would be a last moment of bliss. Never before had I been so sensitive to the passage of time. I closed my eyes, unrealistically hopeful that maybe, time would stop.
Time didn’t stop. As I always say, you can’t fight time. You can fight Morris Day and The Time, but you can’t fight time. I woke up again for the second time on Sunday morning, not to the early darkness, but to a 9 am brightness that had pierced through the tiny cracks in the blinds. I let out a sigh that probably sounded like a breathy “fuck.” Today is – inevitably – today. Yesterday, last night, had already happened, and never before had 9th grade English been so applicable. The tense of “–ed” is past. Past. Passed. Whatever has passed never comes back.
When we surrendered to fully opening the blinds, the beauty of the day was overwhelming; I knew it was warm outside. If you were only watching, like I was, the branches sway against an impossibly blue sky through the window, even catching a glimpse of the kids running by in shorts down below on the perfectly paved street, you’d never guess – I looked at my calendar and was startled by the realization – that it was...already...almost…October.
How had it already become AlmostOctober? September is hanging on by a thread. What happened to August? July for that matter?
Summer had escaped and I hadn’t even noticed.
Autumn had crept in and I hadn't even noticed.
Signs of fall, as they always are every season, every year, for eternity, are there. For everyone else. Temperatures drop. Colors change. Individually, the physical indicators may be imperceptible, but taken together by all five senses, the impact is undeniable. In southern California, we don't have that full array of changes. There is only a decrease in the daylight hours, hardly a physical change, and day to day, hardly noticeable.
The southern California sun had deceived me. Shining so bright, the sun had blinded me to school busses on the street, candy aisles dressed up for Halloween, and hundreds of pictures of fall foods. As late as September, the sun felt so warm that even as its time in the sky ticked shorter and shorter toward the equinox, the intensity of the heat still felt like the solstice.
Even if I could fight time, the battle was already history.
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Sunday.
Really, from any other day, Sunday was no different.
Sunday was a gorgeous day. When we walked outside, arms laden with bags, it wasn't different from any other Sunday, the end of just another weekend. It still felt like summer but this time I noticed that the sun was slightly lower in the sky at 2 PM today than it was at 2 PM just a month ago. I couldn't decide whether to let the calendar register against the 80 degree summer air.
As we stood there outside, I could feel the light of the sunshine above, the heat radiating from the driveway below. It was warm. I didn't want to believe it was autumn. I didn't want to believe summer was over. I didn't want time to move.
I wanted to stay there, holding on, forever.
Fresh Fig Ice Cream That Lets Me Cling to Summer
Technically, figs are in season through late summer. However, in southern California, figs will cling to every last ray of summer sunshine, extending their season even into October. Though soft and sensitive, they just won't let go.
When I made this Fresh Fig Ice Cream, I think I pulled several recipes, culled the best elements from them, and combined them into whatever came out on the other side. Essentially, it's fig compote from David Lebovitz combined with a basic vanilla ice cream recipe (that doesn't use eggs).
The irony is, of course, that as much as I wish I could stop time, even slow it down, I could hardly wait for the figs to cook down into the compote, was impatient while it cooled, and the 12 hours to freeze the ice cream couldn't come fast enough.
Relationships require maintenance. While levels of required attention and affection vary across types of relationships – a romantic relationship in the early stage requires much more attention than, say, an online flirtationship – the requirement is usually about the same within each type. Incidentally, marriage and/or (the slash, depending on your opinion of “marriage”) family require the relationship maintenance equivalent of a Toyota. And/or an Alfa Romeo.
With friendships, though, maintenance needs vary almost as widely, if not more widely, than all the other relationships combined.
On the one end, you have your BFF who expects you to call the minute you wake up, pix msg your day's outfit so the two of you don't clash, meet her for lunch, hold her hand during her botox appointment, filter through boys' profiles, mix her a cocktail, be her wingman, hold her hair back, and all the while you have actually been on the phone giving her the minute-by-minute, as-it-happens breakdown of your day. All nineteen waking hours of the day. Every day. That's a high maintenance friendship.
I've had my fair share of high maintenance friendships over my lifetime. Saying "my fair share" makes it sound as if high maintenance friendships were a bad thing; not necessarily, though I have, on occasion, wondered how long I could maintain (wait, is this how guys feel about girls?). High maintenance, by definition, simply means that it requires a lot of constant, consistent work. You can't let it go. If a short period of time goes by without so much as a "hello," there will have to be the inevitable catch up over Asian chicken salad with dressing on the side for lunch. As life and work force you to reschedule then postpone then reschedule again, The Catch Up Lunch just looms larger and longer with a backlog of "stuff." You start to dread The Catch Up Lunch because it's going to also take coffee and dessert and three hours of shopping to get through 12 weeks' worth of every single teeny tiny little thing that has happened from getting the best massage evar at a spa in Monterey to the distastrophe of Memorial Day weekend, in chronological order.
Of course, Twitter and Facebook are making high maintenance relationships obsolete. Or far too easily frenetic. Can't tell which.
On the other end of the friendship maintenance scale, you have your Ryan. My Ryan and I have been friends ever since I took his breath away at an ice cream social first semester of freshman year at Cal. Over the many, many, (goddamitweareold) many years we've been friends, we have never lived in the same city, spent more than half a day at a time together, or called each other on a regular, frequent basis. However, when Ryan and I do find the time for lunch or a cocktail or a late night phone call, it's easy. There is no long, drawn out Catch Up, no wasting time with mutual information exchange. We do get the obligatory "Married?" "No." "Kids?" "No, or at least none that I know of" out of the way, but then it's either simply conversation for the sake of the conversation that seems to perfectly pick up where last we left off 4 months ago or, as is more often the case as of late, my sobbing unintelligibly about my shattered heart. I know that if I needed to, I could speed (up the I-5 for 6 hours!) up to San Francisco to escape for a few days and Ryan would let me torture him with my post break-up hysterics and bloggers' hygiene.
Ryan and I have a low maintenance friendship. It's not better than a high maintenance friendship, nor is it worse. Just different.
Low maintenance relationship is sort of what I need right now. Come to my rescue in crisis. No need to explain where I've been, what I've been doing, who I've been doing (oops, did I blog that out loud?). No questions. Just jumping right back into the conversation, picking up, as it were, where we left off.
So, let’s try this again, shall we? Our low maintenance, low pressure, stress-free blog relationship? It's been a while, so I'm just easing into it with a simple starter...
(Even Healthier) Hummus Makes: enough. Can be multiplied. In multiples. Of numbers.
Most recipes for hummus include tahini, a sesame paste. There is nothing inherently wrong with tahini except that all the oil that collects at the top of the jar freaks me out, so I don't use it. I realize sesame oil is a healthy plant oil, but you know what they say: oil is oil. Besides, tahini is expensive, and last I checked, I can hardly afford a $700 billion bailout, let alone a jar of tahini.
1 can of garbanzo beans (you can soak and cook dried beans, but...why?) 1 clove garlic 1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil juice from ½ lemon ½ tsp salt, plus more to taste handful of chopped fresh parsley paprika to taste (optional)
Drain bean juice from garbanzo beans. Just the idea of bean juice is gross enough, but now I've had to type it out. Twice. Gross.
Process garlic clove in a food processor until it looks finely chopped. It seems weird to waste all that small electrical appliance energy on a single clove of garlic when you could chop it more finely by hand, but you have to use the food processor eventually, and besides, you won't lose any garlic essence during transfer from cutting board via knife.
Add the can of garbanzo beans to the garlic clove in the food processor, sans bean juice (that's also sans can for any of the noobs in the back row) along with olive oil, lemon juice, and salt.
Process until the garbanzo beans are pureed to the consistency you want. For a smoother consistency, puree longer, and add (a little at a time) more lemon juice and/or olive oil. But be careful: oil is oil.
Add parsley at the end and pulse until parsley is just chopped, salt (if necessary) and paprika to taste.
Garnish with a drizzle of oilve oil, additional paprika, and serve with toasted pita wedges or chips (my choice).
[mousing over an individual picture will tell you what it is; clicking will go directly to that post]
For painfully obvious reasons (or is it "obviously painful?") I will be foregoing the hot girl-on-grill action this third and last of the three biggest grilling weekends of the year. A tragedy, really, with all the burgers, steaks, and ribs that have been taunting me. Incidentally, for the 20,000+ posts on TasteSpotting, there aren't that many burgers. Of the ones we have, these are the most popular as determined by my top secret voodoo algorithm.
But even if I weren't already planning to squeeze various combinations of blogging, formatting, styling, working, writing, strategizing, and pseudocoding into the commercial breaks during college football game day, I'd still skip the thrill of the grill because...why? Why start grilling now? I already missed out on the first two of the three biggest grilling weekends of the year: Memorial Day weekend, which is the official unofficial kickoff to the equally officially unofficial Grilling Season, and the 4th of July. Last time I checked the food bloggie handbook (which, admittedly, wasn't all too recent), missing out on grilling weekends is cardinal sin. Seeking atonement with a single weekend, and at the end of the season at that, isn't going to get me off the fast track to Semi-homemade Hell. I am a perfectionist anyway. A reliable, compulsively consistent, detail-oriented freak of a perfectionist, and if I'm going to skip a season, I'm going to skip it All. The. Way. No summer! No grilling!
Speaking of cardinal sins, I am led by free association to scarlet...and though I could wear a giant scarlet letter A on my chest for foodblogger adulteration (somehow, that doesn't seem to be the right word), it will be a big fat O - that's "oh," not "zero," mind you - for The Ohio State. I won't be grilling burgers to watch college football, but will be making that equally all-American college game day food...
Banh Mi.
Enjoy the long weekend. Grill some burgers. I'll be here, working away.
[clicking an individual picture above will go to the submission]
Just a quickie with pictures and links to catch ourselves up with what was Hot! Fresh! Then! last week ending 08.02.2008 on TasteSpotting, the thing that has been sucking the cream-filling out of the Twinkie that is my life as of late (as bitter as I love to be and sound about it, I honestly don't know what I would do with myself if I wasn't running on Costco coffee fumes until 3 am every morning working on this stuff). These are the user submissions that went live and got the most *raises eyebrows* action during that week. Don't ask me what "got action" means. I really wouldn't know. No, really.
I am making a few (hopefully snide) remarks about some of the submissions here because I just can't help myself. Trust me, you'd get this way too if you stared at 250x250px pictures of ridiculously good looking food for 24 hours - it's the same kind of sarcastic, cynical attitude you have toward beautiful women if you stare at runway models for a living.
If you'd like to comment on Rachael Ray's use of Teddy Grahams to decorate a cake, feel free to do so here since there is no commenting over on TasteSpotting for reasons that will remain known only to me until next Wednesday. Oh, hell, why wait until an arbitrary day like Wednesday to tell you? I will tell you! One of the bullet points in the grand list that is TasteSpotting's mission statement is that the site serves as a gateway to blogs that might not get as much exposure otherwise. So, if readers are compelled to make a comment on something they see on TasteSpotting, we would rather they click through to the originating site and contribute to the discussion there.
Okay, so do we all feel better about why TasteSpotting doesn't have commenting?
Now then, about last week's posts. It appears that as "foodie" as we may all claim to be, we have a curious obsession with French fries, Rachael Ray, and microwave cooking. Go figure.
[clicking an individual picture above will go to the submission]
I owe my blog a post or two.
Hell, I think I owe The Delicious Life something like two dozen posts in addition to a whole week of cookbooks yet to giveaway, but I've been, well, a little occupied, to say the least. A lot has happened -- there is much narration, exposition, and explanation, to be sure. I've been meaning to post it all out and have dedicated more than a reasonable amount of time in front of my laptop staring at the blank Compose window in Blogger. I've written, read, deleted, paraphrased, re-written, re-deleted, and re-written again (oh, the redundantation!) a post about what in this last two months of my Delicious Life has kept me away from the thing I love to do most, writing on my blog. Still, I have but barely a paragraph to show for my intent, and I'm not yet satisfied with the feeble attempt at a blog post that is sitting as a draft in the background. Though it is often the case with me that emotional and psychological disastrophe makes for great blogging, I am also physically exhausted. It will come - stories, posts, pictures, and of course, cookbooks - but not right now.
Instead, for now, I am taking the easy way out -- the "safe," factual, data-driven way out as I have so often done before in my past life as a pre-med student, a consultant, an MBA, and marketer. Pull some numbers out of the database. Comma separate them into Excel. Mix, match, massage and macro the hell out of them. Throw the results up in front of everybody and pray, just pray, that time will run out before they have time to ask questions.
The matrix above represents TasteSpotting's Top 12 Submissions, week ending 07.26.2008. Ooooobviously, I know that the 26th was last last week -- I'm the one who did the analysis, so wouldn't I know that it's a week off?! -- but like I said, I'm barely, just barely, able to keep up with this mindcircus. Needless to say, the Top 12 is something I want to do every week because as much as I love food in every form - from blog to boo-fay (ok, not buffet, but I couldn't resist the alliteration), I may actually love geeking out on data even more. Don't be surprised if you see some pie charts (did I just? Oh god, I did) in the near future.
Click on any of the pictures to see the detail. If you're wondering how we chose the Top 12 Submissions, it's a complex multi-variate, multi-factor, multi-colored algorithm that...OH! I think we're out of time :)
(I am refining the algorithm as we speak, and will post the Top 12 from this past week, along with my thoughts and hypotheses on what makes something "clicky" based on these data, some time in the near future, which you now know means, "don't count on seeing it before Monday.")
D'Amore's Pizza Connection 1136 Westwood Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90024 310.208.7077
Before I proceed to only half-bash D'Amore's Pizza in Westwood for neither being so good that I gush like a schoolgirl nor being so bad that I can displace some repressed childhood bitterness about pull-top canned processed meat onto greasy-yet-dry Italian sausage, but being only right smack dab in the middle of halfway to so very average that all I can do is nothing, let's give away some books, shall we?
Oh, double yeah. Remember that? The month of June is my birthday month.
According to my extraordinarily accurate calculasians, we were about three days shy of June's month-end, and since 27 is a good 75% of the way through 30 days, it makes perfect sense that the book we're giving away today is number 15 out of 30: Grilled Pizzas and Piadinas, in which "pizza" is pizza and "piadina" is bourgie-talian for "tortilla."
The winner of the book, who didn't list a single Michael Jackson song, not even my favorite song PYT, not even the easiest possible answer Beat It, not even Thriller, the greatest stupidest music video of all time, is...
...oddlyme. Please drop an email with your mailing address to me at sarah[at]tastespotting[dot]com and leave a comment on this post so I know to catch it before it possibly gets sucked into the blackspamhole. Because you know, the last thing you want to think about is something of yours getting sucked into a blackspamhole.
Which brings me to D'Amore's. The reason we ended up at D'Amore's is that it was not only new to us, but at the time, it looked new because it only had a temporary large-banner-print-at-Kinko's sign flapping above the door. Something new, though possibly bad, was a far better option than familiar, franchised mediocrity.
But who knew that D'Amore's would be new mediocrity! The restaurant's space is nothing special - a non-descript storefront among other non-descript storefronts in a college nabe (UCLA's Westwood Village, for the uninitiated). The restaurant has a typical pizza parlor decor, and I suspect it was going for that "New York pizzeria" look and feel. We sat at a table against the large windows in the front, partially because it was weirdly dark for midday further back inside the dining area, and mostly because there were a lot of college students making too much noise back there. The Chopped Antipasto Salad was fine. The Garlic Rolls were fine. The pizzas, except for the odd texture of the crust that went so far the extreme of "thin crust" that it tasted like a cracker, were, essentially, fine. In summary, everything was fine.
Grilling may be going the way of the genteel with mini Kobe beef burgers and pulled pork in lettuce cups as passed hors d'ouevre on the veranda, but there's one sub-genre of barbecue that will always be rustic, no matter what kind of fancy geisha paint you put on its face.
Korean barbecue.
But before I get into how an entire day sipping strawberry mojitos poolside on a Sunday afternoon made me extraordinarily grateful that I carry a camera with me wherever I go to, uh, "remember," let's give away BBQ Bash: The Be-All, End-All Party Guide from Barefoot to Black Tie to...
...no. 17, stuntman, and I swear it's not just because his comment said that he'll "never get enough delicious."
Stuntman, daaah-ling, please drop me an email at sarah[at]thedeliciouslife[dot]com and share your mailing address with me so I can send a copy of BBQ Bash to you. Whether you invite me to your next BBQ Bash is up to you. No pressure. Not like I am giving you a book for my birthday and sending it to you at my shipping expense and all, but hey, if you want to just be all exclusive and private like that, fine.
The Delicious Life Cookbook-A-Day Giveaway Winner 2500 Recipes Everyday to Extraordinary
It's my birthday month and I'm "gift"-ing you birthday presents every day! It's like The Delicious Life is just one enormous virtual blog pinata that's freely spilling sweet, sweet delicious candylove all over the web! How kind! How generous!
O, but be not ye fooled. TheDelicious is not as generous as you think. At least not to anyone but...
...no. 6 DessertObsessed! Dorothy, would you mind dropping me an email at sarah[at]thedeliciouslife[dot]com with your mailing address so I can send a copy of 2500 Recipes: Everyday to Extraordinary out to you? Also, please leave a comment on this post when you do so I can catch your email before it gets canned into spam.
Now then... For reasons that are not officially known to me, but can be reasonably assumed to be the fact that so much stunningNESS can radiate from a profile photo that features merely half a face, The Delicious Life is the target of many PR companies. These agencies seem to believe that sending "review copies" and product samples to little delicious moi will give their clients all kinds of positive online exposure because I will read and cook and bake and blog praises of their products, sending readers to the store in droves to buy! buy! buy!
While it’s initially flattering to read an email that strokes my influencer ego, the reality is that just beneath the surface, 622 of the 623 emails I receive each day have nothing to do with me whatsoever. New restaurant opening...in New York (I live in LA?). New bakery specializing in...cupcakes (come on?). New gadget that pits...seedless grapes (wtf?)! New USB-powered...Hello Kitty vibrator (oops, did I blog that one out loud)!
After the emails elicit some sort of potentially illicit response from me that may or may not be limited to slander or threats of bodily harm because they’re so offensively email merged, most of the emails just harmlessly click themselves to a trashy, half-skimmed fate.
Every once in a while though, there is something that is worth something, and more than anything, it's better than nothing. I agree to "review," take a look, read it, use it, maybe write about it, then set it aside to give away. You see, whether or not there is some sort of actual law around review copies, samples, or whatever euphemism you use for "freebie," I cannot, in good conscience, keep the "gifts" that PR firms send me.
Over the past few months I have filled an entire cheap, Ikea bookshelf to the point of snapping under the weight of no less than 35 complimentary copies of cookbooks. It just so coincidentally happened that the tipping point of my complimentary cookbook shelf coincided with my birthday monthcoincided with a very symbolic life “clean up.”
Let's just say that the stars were aligned for giving all those books away.
Giving away cookbooks is Too. Much. Fun. Really, it is, and to be quite honest, it makes me feel ever so slightly less stupid for stomping around the kitchen in my 5" platform wedges and frilly little apron, screaming at my invisible staff about an equal number of blueberries in every muffin. Someone has to test the recipes in these books before reviewing them, doesn't she?!
Blueberry Muffins from 2500 Recipes by Andrew Schlosser Makes 12 muffins
2 cups all-purpose flour 2 tsp baking powder ½ tsp ground cardamom (optional) ¾ cup granulated sugar ½ cup unsalted butter, softened 1 tsp vanilla 2 extra-large eggs ½ cup milk [** Sarah's Note: I used yogurt instead of milk. Not sure if it was a good idea, but the muffins weren't horrible] 2 cups blueberries
Preheat oven to 375 and prepare muffin tins (greasing the interior of each cup and the top surface of the tin [vegetable cooking spray works well], or place a paper or foil cupcake liner in each cup). Sift together flour, baking powder and cardamom; set aside. In a large bowl, beat sugar and butter until light and fluffy. Stir in vanilla. Beat in eggs, one at a time. Stir in half the flour mixture, then milk, then the remaining flour mixture. Fold in 2 cups blueberries. Spoon into prepared tin and bake for 30 minutes, until fully risen and browned.
(For most of the other muffin variations that follow, there is a simple replacement of the ½ tsp of cardamom with up to 1 tsp of whatever matching spice, up to 1 Tbsp of grated citrus zest, and 2 cups of chopped fruit, berries, or nuts.)
The Delicious Life Cookbook-A-Day Giveaway Summer Weekend Reading Edition, no. 5
Whilst I sit here debating with my schizobloggic self about whether I should embarrass myself publicly on the Internets by revealing some certain things that I do when I am alone, in the dark and quiet, late at night, let's give away another book to add to The Delicious Life Summer Reading List.
Technically, it's not supposed to matter what you say in your comment since "winners" are always chosen by random drawing, but if you happen to make some culinary confession related to what you do when you are alone in the kitchen (with or without an eggplant) and it happens to be equivalent in embarrassingness (real word, I swear) to eating macaroni and cheese from the generic store-brand blue box made with water because who just keeps milk in their fridge at all times (?!), it might incentivize me to share, too.
Leave a comment on this post to possibly win it. The content of your comment in no way affects your chances of winning, but the quality does. Okay, quality doesn't matter either, since this a random drawing-type of thing. However, if you are so inclined, let us know which you prefer: beer or wine? It's not fair to say "both" or "neither." That kind of wafflicious, indcisive lack of commitment has no place here.
I'm also in the process of randomly selecting the winners from an entire preceding week of giveaways. Until the announcement posts go up for each of these, you can still make comments to add your name to the pool:
