simple pleasures #2

caramel apples, anything and everything about them!

Also, anything and everything about this girl.

Summertime Soul, Volume 2

Otherwise known as: a further attempt at justifying my eggplant-avocado sandwich "recipe".

This morning, making lunch before work.

Summertime Soul, Volume 1

I don't know what I am going to do when summer is over. Frequent, easy, and rewarding access to my neighborhood Greenmarket has completely spoiled me. No longer do I discuss foods in combination with each other("meals" if you will), but rather as entirely independent beings with no need nor desire to maneuver around one another within a single dish.

Whole, fresh heirloom tomatoes straight from the vine. Hunks of unblemished, ripe, yellow mango. Avocado scraped directly from the shell. Peaches, apples, and plums. Eggplants! Does this all sound familiar? It should! If not creative, it is certainly satisfying.

In an effort to recapture the spirit of cooking ambitions past, I recently took all of these things fresh from the Farmer's Market, slapped them together between two pieces of bread, and called it a 'sandwich'. I know that it's borderline ridiculous to post this as a "recipe", but the gooey, toothy mess of delicious that it produced was too good not to share. So, without further ado, let me infringe on your conscious with the Eggplant-Avocado Sandwich.



Eggplant-Avocado Sandwich

You Will Need:
1/2 avocado
Hummus
Eggplant
Tomato
Mustard
1 tbs. olive oil
Salt+Pepper to taste

(That's IT!)

To Make:

Pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees. Slice the eggplant, brush it with olive oil, and arrange it in a baking dish. Pop it in the oven. Smear your bread with hearty portions of hummus and mustard. Add wedges of avocado and tomato to that, contributing a dash of salt and pepper just for fun. After the eggplant has been baked soft, remove it from the oven and let it cool for a second. Then layer it on top of the avocado and tomato, and smash everything together immediately. With any luck, the eggplant will still be warm when you start to eat.





(If applicable, lay in sunny park during consumption.)

Spoiled rotten, I tells ya!

simple pleasures #1

Eating food out of coffee mugs for no apparent reason, either in the morning or very late at night.

I haven't had a lot of time recently. The only sad and lonely spot I can find for cooking these days is the twenty or so minutes it takes every morning to put together my sack lunch for work. And so it goes!

Swiss chard with tomatoes, roasted mushrooms, and summer squash.


Confined to the plastic walls of my lunch-time tupperware.

cheeseburgers in the sky

Look up!

That's right. As part of the globally enacted "Wall Project" celebrating the urban canvas as an artspace, a giant cheeseburger has been painted on the facade of a building on 7th ave and 19th street. At the opening they gave away--you guessed it--free cheeseburgers. Never ones to act appropriate about anything involving burgers, Nani and I were there to celebrate.

This is going to get dangerous, though, as I have to walk by said canvas every day on my work and it is already hard enough to not want to eat hamburgers four meals a day eight days a week. C'est la vie! The Diesel Wall

best in show

Food is a lovely thing. On more than one occasion--embarrassingly more--the stoop-shouldered slope of a bell pepper's top will swoon me to the point that I'll be late for work. Literally late for work. It turns out that I'm helpless in admiration of the evolutionary tactics that nature has employed in order to make what's edible appealing. Lustrous, yellow-skinned summer squashes, eggplants thick and fleshy, ebony with ripeness, garlic bulbs puckered from heat and oil into tiny brown kisses. The feast is entirely visual before it is edible.

In my perfect world, eating would always be composed of these three parts: careful preparation, ensuing admiration, and then celebratory consumption. It seems sadly more often than not that food is lost beneath the noise and traffic of restaurants; it moves effortlessly into our awareness and is just as easily swept back out again, a carousel of aroma with the occasional nutritive benefit. The diner entertains no relationship to the individual ingredient and the vibrant space between kitchen and table is plunged into darkness.

I take great enjoyment from the private illumination of this realm. To know how something smells, appears, and feels before it is coaxed into relationship with a half dozen others of its kind. As a result, I know that a lot of what I cook seems unforgivably dull at first glance. The eggplant pictured below was simply sliced in half and baked with garlic cloves at 350 degrees until it was soft. The squash was sliced, layered, coated in olive oil and fresh herbs, and then baked as well. The cross-section of fresh pepper above just happened to catch the light coming through my window when it was on its way to my mouth. You see? It's not that I'm eating plainly! It's that I am partaking in a prolonged and thorough study of food appreciation. Huzzah huzzah!

morning sounds

If I had to pick a moment, this is it. The morning, the breakfast, the coffee. The friends and hangovers. Yellow kitchen walls. Endlessly and endless, forever on repeat.