one if by land, two if by sea

What are vacations good for if not eating? A photo-essay of the good eats to be had will have to suffice for now as I'm only home for a second. I have about four hours until I am back on the road again until Sunday, and I haven't even started to pack. Silence for now, but rest assured that the stories are plentiful, fresh, and locally grown.

In a quick synopsis of events: we went clamming!

Sum-Sum-Sum I Sum(mer)- I Let Go

I'm not normally a big maker of salads. Big time lover of them, yes, but not a big-time maker. Although I've always silently acknowledged this fact about myself, I've done little to try and understand it. See also: any other single characteristic I've ever exhibited in my entire life. Woe is me, though, the onset of my first humidity-happy, East Coast summer has been very convincing in favor of salads. The idea of anything but the lightest and coolest of cuisines is difficult to stomach--waka waka waka.

Salads are excellent dumping grounds for leftovers, cravings, and all kinds of seasonal goodies. Anything that happens to strike my fancy at the grocery store can easily be negotiated into a salad by weeks end, a quality that I'm particularly fond of in a dish due to my bad habit of wandering into corner stores and emerging hours later the proud parent of 8 pounds of strange vegetables. Also, keeping myself in supply of fresh spinach and mesclun mix is as easy as 1-2-walk to the corner store and buy a container for only two dollars-3. The rest is a revolving door of ingredients and fly-by-night fancies. This tempeh and avocado concoction was dreamt up as I scavenged my recently cleaned (i.e. everything thrown away) fridge for a satisfying lunch. It's definitely light, but full of good proteins and veggies for a filling and utterly delightful dish.

You Will Need:
8 oz. tempeh
1/4 an avocado
1/2 med. sized tomato, diced
1/4 cup chickpeas
1/2 cup sliced carrots
Handful of sliced almonds.
Spinach
A few tbls. of vinegar

To Make:

Tempeh preparation takes longest, so best to do it first. Dice up the tempeh into 3/4 inch cubes and lay them out on a baking sheet. No oil or prep is necessary. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees (or somewhere in the vicinity), and slide the baking sheet in. Check in on them periodically, turning to make sure all sides turn golden. Once they are crispy and brownish, they're ready to go.
Rinse your spinach and toss it with the chickpeas, diced tomato, carrots, and almonds. Place this part in a bowl and lay some avocado slices over it. When the tempeh is done, throw that on top and drizzle vinegar to taste over the whole she-bang. I say this every time but: delicious!

Summer's First Sound!

The first time I ever came to New York, my friend Julia and I survived exclusively on two dollar slices of cheese pizza selected at random from various sidewalk cafes. It was the dead of winter, fresh snow shivering in the still air, and I remember being particularly grateful for each still-steaming, gratuitously layered slice of genuine Big Apple 'za. I was then unacquainted with East Coast weather beyond the novelty of a Christmas spent in Ohio with my extended family, and I thought that pizza must be the pinnacle of all NYC cold-weather-food staples. Short of heavy drinking, it was second to none in terms of combining comfort and satisfaction with warmth.

I certainly wasn't giving summer a second thought at the time, let alone the idea that I might be a bona-fide resident of NYC by the time the season rolled through again, so I was pleasantly surprised by my recent discovery that pizza transcends seasonal parameters and is actually the perfect food all year round. It was a revelation sparked first by a decadent pie-on-the-promenade in Brooklyn Heights (see above), and then fully solidified by a hasty grease-fest on the LIRR coming home from Long Beach yesterday afternoon. After gorging at the latter, we all laid back, hands comfortably resting on newly-inflated belly's, to satisfactorily contemplate the greenery idling by our windows.

If I thought that pizza was good when it was cold out, it was only because I was utterly clueless to the delight of pizza when it is quite literally BOILING out. As far as slices go, I'll admit that the Long Island wedge was a simpleton...bubbly cheese crested with grease and ringed with a slim, attractively golden crust, but of a quality smartly bolstered by its consumption on such a perfectly hot summer day. It became the perfect accessory to my already overblown sense of adolescence. (A sense wrought upon me by the coming of every June, let me remind you, an academic hangover of sorts from my still habitual expectation of summer vacation.) It's just so easy to pretend I'm still a kid on a summer day when I'm toting around a massive hunk of dripping, cheesy pizza. Sigh! If only Miss Julia could see me now...

craving

Sometimes I feel like I'm just a few gestation periods shy of being a full-on pregnant woman. My cravings for certain foods are so strange, sudden, and intense that the only possible explanation must be preggers. Sorry, Mom & Dad! But the Cheese Must Be HAD!

vaguely related to things vaguely related to food

I remember dinners with my family being a lot like the first few moments of this video: the curious gravity, the warmth, the ceremonial and quiet gifting. It seems sad now in my remembering of it, but only in the peculiar way that anything seems sad when it has succumbed to a little time and a great distance.

A Picture of Our Torn Up Praise:Phosphorescent