Alex Van Buren

Photo by the talented Ms. Jennifer Causey

So the lovely folks at Design*Sponge contacted me recently about sharing a recipe for a dish I love. I chose this mint panna cotta with strawberries balsamico, adapted from Mario Batali and Epicurious. It’s easy, it’s dead sexy, and it will impress the bejesus out of your friends. The full photo shoot is here, and my Shun santoku blade looks awesome in it. Thanks to Jenene Chesbroughfor also taking a patently ridiculous photo of yours truly.

“Mad Men” may have wrapped for the season, but 60s fashion and retro cuisine are going nowhere fast. My friends have been throwing big-eyeliner-wearing, casserole-eating parties to watch the show, and I hope that the era’s adorable dresses and rad suits stick around for a while.

If you’re not current on your granma’s cuisine, Katie Lee Joel can give you a hand. I interviewed her for the December issue of InStyle(page 390) about how to throw an awesome 60s holiday party, and can attest that her deviled eggs are among the best I’ve ever eaten. So pick up a copy (the story includes recipes!) when you have a chance; turns out Katie Lee believes in yard sales, Don Draper crushes and champagne cocktails — a gal after my own heart.

Anton Walbrook as Boris Lermontov in The Red Shoes.

Do you remember your first encounter with sugar cubes, as a kid? They were magic, right? Perfectly square and glowing white, they could be stacked like Legos or popped on the tongue, one at a time, until the corners fuzzed and they broke.

In our house, sugar was nearly verboten. We’d go to friends’ homes, pull open their cabinets and gaze adoringly at bags of Oreos, like sweet-toothed, big-eyed basset hounds. So I remember quite clearly when my elder sister had to make an Egyptian pyramid. Out of sugar cubes. For class. This struck me as a project very much in need of a supervisor. I gallantly took upon the role of producer, assistant director and grip. Anyplace that pyramid was, I was, delivering structural advice and stealing as many cubes as would fit into my little pockets.

You forget about sugar cubes as an adult until you see them in some Euro-style café, and it’s so lovely when you do. (These days I use agave for my coffee since it doesn’t make my blood sugar go racing, which I learned while working on this book). But I miss the luxury of them, which is why I so appreciated an early scene in “The Red Shoes,” currently playing at Film Forum in New York. It’s a gorgeous movie — ostensibly about ballet, but really about obsession — with enough color, punch and chutzpah to make Fellini blush. Film critics are calling the new Technicolor print “sumptuous,” “delirious” and “life-changing.” For critics, they’re not mincing words. Though I’m a purely amateur filmgoer, I was for the first time in my life that obnoxious theatergoer who said, “Wow,” aloud, at a poppingly blue dress.

One of my favorite scenes was, naturally, centered around food. We’ve just met the French ballet director, Lermontov. We know he’s a snob and that he’s a man of few words, but we don’t know much more. Then we witness him calmly interviewing — in his dressing gown, natch — a tremulous undergraduate music student over his Continental breakfast.

Lermontov has his cup of black coffee in one hand, a solitary sugar cube in the other. While speaking to the student, maintaining eye contact all the while, he dips the corner of the cube into the coffee. We see it change color, pinched between his thumb and forefinger. It doesn’t burst. He delivers his final line, the student walks out, and he pops the soaked cube in his mouth, finally taking a sip of coffee. It is the height of audacity that he thought the cube would not crumble without his permission — and the best bit of foreshadowing I’ve seen in a long time.

The flick ends on November 19th. If you’re local, go see itbefore it does.

City Bakery. Photo by Michael Harlan Turkell.

Keep an eye out for the new Edible Manhattan, which always makes for good subway reading, en route to happy hours and rock shows this weekend. Look for the one with marshmallows on its cover and try not to run over to City Bakery for its famous hot chocolate immediately after reading the profile penned by yours truly and editor Gabrielle Langholtz.

It’s a neat piece in part because Rubin is an interesting character, and partly because it’s a rare style collaboration between two pretty different journalists. Gabrielle layered her snap-crackle pop-punk voice on to the chill, lyrical motif I’ve been trying on for size lately, and I think it works. It’s like getting a makeover at Macy’s — different, but somehow awesome: “Gold eyeshadow! Who knew?”

If cocoa-n-marshmallows does not provide enough of a comfort food fix as the mercury drops, Jimmy’s No. 43, the dimly-lit gastropub in the East Village, has a steal of a sandwich right now. It’s a super-tender beef brisket sandwich braised in stout and served on hearty French bread, for $9. It’s like a glammed up version of pulled pork (from a totally different animal). Good times. The menu changes constantly, so call first to make sure it’s there (it is tonight)! Jimmy very kindly let my party of three hang out, drink beer and pore over our, um, Catullus translations last night before busting out some Latin of his own, earning him this nerd’s stamp of approval.

Turns out that that Anthony Bourdain fella was pretty crafty in putting Salumi – a Seattle charcuterie shop – in his “Top 13 Places to Eat Before You Die” list. At top left is their punchy, aromatic finocchiona, spiked with fennel and black pepper. At bottom left is the mole salami. The latter is fierce: chocolate, cinnamon and two different kinds of smoky pepper – in a salami.

Ahem. My favorite Mexican dish, mole poblano, thrown into a salami. I hate myself for loving you, mole salami.

We made a mean chef’s salad with the two of these, some hard-boiled eggs, butter lettuce, and a mustard-based balsamic vinaigrette. (I take my vegetables the way my dog Queenie used to take her pills — wrapped in cold cuts.) The shot above was taken at 4pm in Portland, Oregon, with two friends and a bottle of red in tow. Because that’s how they roll there.

So yeah, hie thee to Salumi, because it’s the sort of place where, no joke, you can cruise in 5 minutes past close and instead of giving you the boot when you moan “but I’m flying back to New York Cityyy” they hand you a free charcuterie sampler. Seriously. I was not going to end with “this would not happen in New York” but oh look I just did.

Pigeons plump equally spaced across a roof, as though queueing for a bus. The train edges slowly through industrial outer Seattle. Car after dead car is lumped on the side of the tracks.

Jose Gonzalez sings “Heartbeats” as tree after tree flashes by. I feel like I’m in the opening sequence of a film intended for my demographic — probably directed by Spike Jonze or Sofia Coppola. A football field spills suddenly to my right, a wet splash of color and pride amidst the grays and greens. A teen in a black t-shirt with a black cap stretched low and smurflike across his brow slumps into his seat. He stares listlessly out the window. Life is hard. Not a lick of acne, unlike myself at the same age. He’ll do well in high school.

This afternoon I ate at a café called Macrina. The lemon pie was openfaced, so plush with lemon curd it was more of an overweight tart — trembling and golden, with a curlicue of frosting lacing its top and a drift of white chocolate curls. The crust had heft, a buttery heft. (As will I, by the end of this trip.) The Postal Service song “Such Great Heights” came on, and only Seattle and a fat cup of joe and a tumble of raw sugar cubes could make that work for me today. Then there was the bacon quiche — was that bechamel inside? My god. My hands shook a little as I paged through Saveur and pictured my arteries clogging. I’d eaten a slice of coppa at Salumi the day before, thin and slick and so delicate, like guanciale. I stuffed two pounds of cured meat — mole salami and finocchiona — into my bag as housewarming presents. Who knows if they’ll be good. But it feels pretty badass to lug them from state to state.

Seattle and Portland are good places to wipe the mental slate clean. The mist, it works. The people, their gentleness and passivity, they work. The woman at the train station saw my New York State license and welcomed me to town. Last night I walked through the city in the rain, with a new haircut sitting awkwardly, feeling like a stranger to myself. A disheveled man stepped in front of me. “Do you have 42 cents?” Me: “No, I’m sorry.” Him, emphatically: “I don’t care, I love you.” I laughed aloud. It reminded me of home.

This kid across from me is listening to his Metallica but I can tell by the baleful look in his eyes that he knows I have this song on repeat, and that this is unnacceptable and besides it is extremely three years ago. I can live with that.

Last night a friend told me about growing up in Alaska and two buddies whose parents let them choose their own middle names when they were six years old. The result? Robert Batman Bernstein. His friend chose Spiderman. They still use them on their Facebook profiles. This is the best thing I’ve heard in ages.

Lauren Balthrop Playing the Building, by Michael Arthur.

Stay out super late tonight. Picking apples, making pie. – The National

Last night I went to an art opening at a tiny café. Sitting outside on a bench afterwards, I watched a little girl and her manic halo of hair stumble down the sidewalk. She looked tipsy, as kids do when they have just learned to walk, and was singing to herself. The glow from the windows caught her eye.

A bunch of musicians, mostly from the band Balthrop, Alabama, burbled within. The evening had a magical air: The art, as one person noted, was “Shel Silverstein, but darker.” Michael Arthur, the artist, had a wide smile and a tuxedo jacket splayed open in front — a happy, handsome penguin. A teenager had powdered giant loops of blue eyeshadow round her eyes, and looked like Debbie Gibson fused with one of Disney’s wide-eyed forest creatures. She wore a top hat with a feather trailing out of it.

The toddler must have seen these two, for her face lit straight up. She marched to the café doorway with her hands in front of her like she was taking Communion and sang out, “HalloWEEN!”

Surely, where there is madness, there must also be Skittles and peanut butter cups.

Driving home from Jersey the other day, I cruised straight past the crooked wooden sign that read “APPLES.” Bruce was on the stereo. I was trying to beat rush hour. Next time I’ll stop.

Salon just published a little essay I wrote about how Gourmet magazine, which closed this week after nearly seventy years, was for the young and the scrappy too, dammit.

So can we talk about how the pork shoulder is the little black dress of the food world?

Thank you.

It’s versatile, it’s foxy, and as Mom told me once, the best way to be frugal with your grocery bill is to make “a nice roast.” Moms are generous with their advice. Mine also told me when I was 14 that I looked “tough” in the above-the-knee purple suede skirt I was trying on at Marshalls, and would not let me buy it. (Mom, I still do not understand what “tough” means in this context. And I write for a living.)

ANYways, I’ve probably worn all sorts of tough clothes since moving to New York City, and remain freaked out by the notion of making one of those giant, cooked-to-death Irish-Catholic Roasts, which seemed to last in the fridge about a year.

Pork, apparently, is a different story. We didn’t eat much of the Other White Meat growing up, but the first cubano I sampled in Gotham hooked me. Hard. Now I crave pig of every stripe: prosciutto; tonkotsu ramen; banh mis; cubanos; al pastor tacos; you name it. But pure economics have to factor into my obsession, and I can’t continue to blow $6 to $9 a pop on pork-and-fennel-sammies and croque madames at cafés.

So — look, Ma! — I bought a pork shoulder from Paisanos, one of the best butchers around, for $11. Six pounds of it. I lugged it home, unloaded it on the counter with a thud, and realized I do not, in fact, have a flock of yawping babies to feed, but am a single woman in the city. What the *&^%(* was I thinking.

It was hog heaven for a full week. I cooked the sucker up Puerto Rican-style using this pernil recipe. The apartment reeked of garlic. A fellow food writer deigned to swing by, pronounce it done, and snack on half a pound of it. I fed two pounds’ worth of tacos to friends the next night. Monte Cubanos were consumed on day three. By the end of the week I was fat, happy and making my own banh mis because I am a freaking genius — and had a lot of help from my buddy Adam of the fine blog Fifty Bucks a Week.

The lesson? You, my child, can totes make banh mis at home. And then bring them to work. Think of the admiring looks you will garner in the office kitchen when you unwrap ’em.

* Illustration by Edith Head. Photoshopping by Eric Brown.

Banh mi (makes 6)
(Adapted from Adam Pollock)

2 pounds pork shoulder, seasoned and cooked (I like this pernil recipe)
1 large cucumber, cut into matchsticks
3 carrots, cut into tiny (1/8″ or smaller) matchsticks or grated coarsely
Sugar
Salt
White wine vinegar or Champagne vinegar
Sriracha
Dijon mustard
Mayo
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 bunch cilantro, roughly chopped
Bread: 6 banh mi rolls (check your local Chinatown), 2 fluffy Italian loaves or 1-2 not-too-hard baguettes
3 jalapenos, sliced into rounds (optional)

Chop one pound of pork shoulder into small dice. Briefly sauté crumbled pork in two teaspoons sriracha (or to taste) and one teaspoon of mustard. Remove from heat. Add tablespoon or two of mayo (or more, to taste). Add carrots to bowl of 2:1 water-to-vinegar mixture (start with 1/4 cup of water), with a generous pinch each of sugar and salt. Pickle for five minutes, to taste. Slice second pound of pork shoulder thinly. Mash garlic into three tablespoons of mayo. Set aside. Toast rolls briefly if desired. Assemble sandwich: Spread garlic mayo on lower half of roll, top with crumbled spicy pork, sliced pork, cucumbers, carrots, and finally cilantro. Add jalapenos, if desired, and more garlic mayo to top half of roll if you like. High-five everyone in sight.

(Note: This recipe from Chow uses pork paté, and this one a sort of Vietnamese bologna, which has an awesome texture. Play around; see what you like and what you’ve got in the kitchen.)

Salted skillet; caramelized onions.

Food writers need to be very honest with themselves about what they don’t know. Especially in the kitchen.

I saw a well-known editor at an event about mushrooms a few months ago and was happy to hear him admit that he just didn’t know that much about them and was there to learn. For my part, I just picked up this salted skillet cleaning trick last week.

It’s not enough to simply show up at a food event and brass your way through a snotty assessment of a wine or a dish (unless you are That Guy, who has been drinking expensive wines since he was a teen. If so, you go on with your bad self.) You’ve got to cook. I’m entirely mediocre compared to several of my culinarily trained peers, with flashes of largely-accidental awesomeness. The trick, of course, is to do a lot of it, which in this economy and the cooling weather comes more easily.

And yesterday I stumbled upon this incredible essay that made the whole cooking thing seem so … rock and roll.

Gourmet‘s Adam Houghtaling (clearly a music freak) explains how the great avant-garde/ rock musician Brian Eno created a deck of cards back in the 70s — choose-your-own-adventure credos for his fellow artists, including one-liners like, “Once the search is in progress, something will be found.”

Houghtaling passed his deck of cards to a test kitchen editor at the magazine, and sat back to watch a sort of zen beauty unfurl. The cook pushed boundaries at Eno’s behest, pairing fish with cheese in an Italian dish (a no-no) and another time deciding to “be extravagant” — he whipped up a dish starting from cream.

Yesterday I worked all day to perfect a sweet recipe for a shoot, which came out so well I had folks hustling over to my apartment to consume the leftovers. There were these extra sliced strawberries sitting in my fridge in a giant bowl of balsamic, sugar and black pepper. Macerating nigh to death. Strawberries get angry after sitting in sugar for too long. If a bowl of strawberries could furrow its eyebrows at you, this one would.

I’d had no time to hit the wine shop for my guests, and there wasn’t a drop of liquor in the house except for a lone ranger PBR, a bottle of Bulleit, some bad vodka, and a mouse’s worth of gin. Bourbon plus strawberries — egh, I’ve had berry-infused bourbon before and it was horrid. But bourbon plus rosemary, which I had kicking around … I took a nip from the bottle and broke a leaf in my mouth. Awesome. Added a leaf of mint. Better.

Mint-rosemary simple syrup materialized in my saucepan. A slick of it with bourbon, on the rocks, was aromatic and bracing. But I could do better, and as my friends licked their plates clean I brought out the angry strawberries. Balsamic versus simple syrup. Tart and sweet. Bourbon for character. Strawberries, pepper, rosemary and mint for depth of flavor. A guest suggested club soda to top it off and man, was it good — a kid’s smoothie adult-o-fied, swirling with fruit and herbs.

“Once the search is in progress, something will be found.” I came across Houghtaling’s piece hours later. It neatly parses the notion that cooking, at its most pure, provides a depth of comfort that is hard to find elsewhere.