I didn’t know Sam, although I met him, once, when I was a baby; he was married to my father’s beloved cousin Josephine. Josephine was a few years older than my dad; she was on the Altman side of the family that eventually became obscured by time and a confluence of strong personalities and ancient resentments. Eventually, Sam and Josephine became little more than memory and lore, lost to the petty grievances that compel families to inevitably, sadly, prefer one side over the other.

So I don’t really know why, a few years ago, I decided to dig up Sam’s email address on the internet, and write to him. It seemed a weird, impetuous thing to do — to write to this man in his early 90s — and when he responded immediately, in a heavy, purple, gigantic san serif font that reminded me of the cover of Harold and the Purple Crayon, it made me nervous, like I was opening up a Pandora’s Box that wasn’t mine to unseal.

CALL ME INSTEAD, Sam wrote in all caps, giving me his phone number. I HATE THIS MACHINE.

So I called.

“You’re Cy’s little girl–” he asked, cautiously, his voice quivering a little bit. “I remember you. You had blonde curls—I heard he died in an accident.”

“I am … he did–” I responded. Just saying so still shook me to my core, eight years after my father’s car crash. “And you’re Josephine’s husband–”

“I am,” he answered gruffly. “And your grandmother — she liked to play cards.”

“That’s right,” I laughed. “She was very good at it—”

“Except when she wasn’t,” he barked.

There was a quick edge of anger in his voice; it was old and taut, and glazed with enmity. I had heard stories forever; I knew what was true and what wasn’t, and even after more than seventy years, it was all right there, on the tip of his tongue, dying to get out.

“We never liked each other–” he went on. “It was mutual–”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. There was silence.

“So what do you do?” he coughed, changing the subject. I was relieved.

“I cook— and I write about food.”

“Where?”

“In books. And on the computer.”

I said on the computer like I was speaking in some sort of geriatric dialect that I thought Sam would understand, even though he had been deft enough to respond to my email in large, purple letters. How we underestimate the elderly.

“I have something for you, then—I think you should have it. I don’t want it to get thrown away.”

It made me uncomfortable; I had last seen this man when I was possibly not yet out of diapers.

“When I married Josephine in 1938, she couldn’t cook. A regular disaster area. So as a wedding gift, I bought her a cookbook. It was the only one she ever used, and she learned from it. She loved your father, so I want you to have it.”

“But Sam—doesn’t she still need it?” I waited for the inevitable.

“No sweetheart”– he softened — “she has no memory anymore. It’s gone. So you’ll take care of her book then, if I send it to you?”

“I will Sam,” I promised.

He asked me for my address, and just like that, we said goodbye.

A few days later, an ancient Jiffy bag — it had clearly been used and reused; I remembered my grandmother’s penchant for saving plastic shopping bags just in case until they overtook her hallway coat closet like Tribbles — sat in my mailbox. He had addressed it using a thick black magic marker; the word Altman was three times the size of my first name and street address, all of which were written in giant caps, just like his email.

My father’s cousin Josephine had used The Settlement Cookbook for decades; it got stained, splattered, stuffed with other recipes for things like noodle kugel and cheese blintzes torn out of the Miami Sun-Sentinel and the Jerusalem Post. A page pulled out of a tiny spiral notebook described a recipe called EGGPLANT:

The twenty-second edition and published in 1938, Josephine’s prized cookbook had lived through World War II and Korea, the birth of children and grandchildren, and Sam’s son-in-law’s decision to move his family to Tel Aviv. When the book fell apart, which it did at least twice judging from the two layers of tape holding its spine together, Josephine and Sam simply performed surgery on it, and patched it back up. I called Sam to tell him it arrived and he told me to take good care of it; it was the one and only cookbook that Josephine had ever used, and the only one she owned. There was no reason to have another.

I have a lot of cookbooks on my shelves; hundreds, perhaps. Some have come from tag sales, others from remarkable stores like Celia Sack‘s Omnivore Books in San Francisco, and Nach Waxman‘s Kitchen Arts and Letters in Manhattan. Some I bought when I was in cooking school, or with my discount when I worked at Dean & Deluca; some were sent to me by authors, and others came from the years I spent as an editor at Random House and Harper Collins. They clog up my office, my living room, my den; they sit on a special shelf in the kitchen, and in boxes in the basement. I have a stack of them on my nightstand and a few in both bathrooms. And still, whenever I talk to other food writers or editors, or I participate in a panel discussion somewhere, invariably the conversation turns to whether or not the digital world will kill cookbooks. Do we still need them. Do we still want them. Are we getting all of our recipes from the internet, or via 140 word snippets on Twitter.

Do they still matter. 

And I look at this battered, beloved, dribbled-upon cookbook sitting on my desk tonight, that fed a hungry husband — and eventually, children and grandchildren — for 69 years, until Josephine lost her memory, and the book went unused in her kitchen while Sam took care of her for as long as he could.

Cookbooks tell us who we are, what we’ve done, and how we’ve lived. We’d do well to remember that, to hang on to them like family bibles, and to pass them on to others who’ll cherish them.

Yes, I think.

They still matter. 

It’s freezing outside. And gray. And rainy. It’s not romantic.

It’s generally miserable.

There’s whole wheat bread rising in the kitchen (under a heat lamp). My terrier is bored silly and is threatening to dismember the cats.

I’m putting off organizing my office now that my book is done, and I’m starting to think about the next one. But I’m getting totally distracted by:

The Makers

Yellow House

My dream carriage house in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, blocks from where my mother grew up. Nice shutters. 

A lamp that looks like the pearl necklace my Aunt Olga gave me when I graduated from middle school. 

The French person who had the good sense to line sneakers in shearling.

A bottle of cold Cuban beer.

And a Cubano at Versailles in Miami.

Maybe the flan.

A celebratory dinner here. 

Shaking Beef here.

Learning how to shoot with this.

Breakfast with housemade chorizo here.

Followed by a late-ish dinner here.

Maybe a bottle of this.

But definitely not this. 

Reading and re-reading this. And remembering A.J. Liebling’s quote that “No ascetic can be considered reliably sane.”

Happy Birthday Mia Farrow. 

His glasses. Which annoy the crap out of me. 

And having troubling imaging him married to her back in the 60s.

The sourpusses who think it’s hip to hate her. It’s not cool. She’s dead, and if she weren’t she’d be really old. And still a hottie. 

Thinking maybe it’s time for a haircut. Just sayin.

Wondering if a wooden hedgehog is really worth this price. 

Hand thrown dog bowls that cost as much as a one-way flight from NY to San Francisco. Woops, not available anymore. Too bad.

A lesson in this. Really? 

The price of these, when you can get them in France for $3 at the beach. 

Thinking that maybe Susan and I should get married here, instead of at City Hall. It’d be fun. Right?

Enough already with the cupcakes.

Just don’t. Okay? It looks like bad things.

(Okay, maybe not God. Or god. Or whatever. Maybe just Steve, the nice, cute butcher down the road, who reminds you that life is meant to be lived in moderation.)

I used to spend a lot of time wondering why Susan and I wound up in our specific town, in southwestern Connecticut. It’s a nice place, really, but it actually used to be kind of a joke between us, because, until a few days after 9/11, I was the editorial director of the books group at a publishing house located in this particular town; we were living way up in northern Litchfield County at the time, and when I left that gig, I couldn’t possibly fathom there being ANY reason for me to live down the road from my former employer. Just driving past the building gave me the willies. So when we moved here in 2004, I had to laugh: Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, I had to wind up here. 

It’s been almost eight years, and in that time, I published my first book, just sent my second one off to my editor, and have now begun early work on a third. Every day, I’m blessed with a job for which I’m (mostly, generally) paid to think, and write, and talk about food. I try, very hard, not to fetishize it; sometimes I succeed, sometimes I don’t.

Since I’ve lived here, I’ve also spent years fighting what I honestly believe is my body’s own aversion to eating a strictly vegetarian diet. I’ve tried to stick to it for all sorts of the usual reasons: political, ethical, humane — certainly. But also health-related, and the simple fact that, long term, I just feel better if I cut back on meat. So I refrain from eating animals for as long as I can, and then, like an alcoholic on a bender, I go on wild-eyed meat binges, even after spending an hour or so standing in my neighbor’s yard and singing to her wonderful chickens, who I’ve gotten to know personally in all their glorious chicken-ness. (Maybe that’s why we moved here: because the universe wanted me to personally get to know the little peckers, so they would cease being just another shrink-wrapped, air-chilled product in my grocery’s meat case.)

Living here in our lovely town for the last eight years, I’ve very publicly fought the good food fight that requires not only what I buy to be honestly and transparently labeled, but my SELF to be labeled as well. The labeling process goes something like this: I’m a vegetarian. No I’m not. Maybe I’m a vegan. No, no—not if I put ground pork in my mapo tofu. How about a flexitarian? That’s totally idiotic. Okay, so I’m MOSTLY a vegetarian, with the exception of the pig fixation and the fact that I really love lamb. I was once involved with a vegetarian who ate hot dogs when no one was looking, I remind myself, and she still called herself a vegetarian. So maybe I’m an omnivore? Too Berkeley, somehow.

It’s all very cumbersome, and sometimes, I want to tell myself to shut the f**k up.

Naturally, just as I hit on a label and a plan — I know: I’ll eat vegetarian all week, and then eat an entire side of beef on the weekend. What a great idea — I wander in to Steve’s butcher shop because, I tell myself, he also carries really fresh seafood. CRAZY fresh. He once sliced me a sliver of raw scallop as thin as onionskin paper, handed it across the counter, and I thought I’d pass out on the spot. So, dum dee dum dee dum….I innocently stroll in, and decide to pick up whatever fish he’s got that’s super fresh, to pan-roast and then lay atop a proportionally immense pile of sturdy dinosaur kale sauteed with the incendiary Georgian garlic we grew last year.

“Oh my god, Steve,” I gasp, pointing into the case after he inquires about my health. “You’ve got veal cheeks.”

“I do,” he says, laconically. He takes out the tray and holds it up for my inspection; they’re fresh and rosy and lovely as daisies.

But they’re veal. And there are rules about veal. Veal is a whole other can of worms. I’d have to go into therapy for at least a year.

There’s also the odd cut thing — we were never big eaters of odd cuts in my family; most Jews aren’t (with the exception of chopped chicken liver, or even helzel — chicken neck — which Old Worlders stuff and braise, or roast). For me, it’s not a religious thing: when I was eleven, my father took me out to Brooklyn for lunch at my grandmother’s house, and she served me a brain on a plate. Just like that.

Brain. Plate. Knife. Fork. 

I had just seen Young Frankenstein at The Ziegfield. I’ve written about that here, but it was a pretty memorable afternoon, and very much informed the way I think about variety meats. So while I’d like to be comfortable with the idea of cooking cheeks, it’s not something I would generally do. Still, I was stunned to see them in my friend Steve’s butcher case, in our quiet town in southwestern Connecticut where my cell phone doesn’t work. I mean, this isn’t exactly Brooklyn.

In typical fashion, I stood there, staring — gawking — at the meat case, when I’d come in for seafood. I wound up with two pork chops, a steak, two fresh kielbasa, and two chorizo, all of which I froze; the half pound each of ground pork and ground beef from which I intended to make mostly kale meatish balls, I did not freeze.

“I’m giving you a couple of cheeks,” Steve whispered across the counter. “Because if I don’t, I’ll have to freeze them — no one knows what to do with them, and I know you’ll respect them.”

I felt very tall and annoyingly pecksniffian.

But just like that, I suddenly had to be okay with the idea of cooking and eating cheeks. Of a veal. Because when a butcher — who has devoted his professional life to teaching people how to use every part of the animal and not waste anything — gives you a gift of something that you’re otherwise hesitant to try, you say thank you. And then you prepare it with as much respect and love as you can muster.

Maybe that’s why we found our way to this town; kismet.

 Veal Cheek Barbacoa with Pickled Watermelon Radish

Yeah, yeah. I know. Slap my wrist; it was hard for me, too. But if you can manage to find honorably, ethically-produced veal, and you have access to cheeks — which are far milder in flavor then big, burly beef cheeks — grab them (they’re not at all expensive) and give yourself plenty of time to prepare them; they’re actually muscle and require a long slow braise and an infusion of flavor from a strong marinade, like the spicy, smokey, earthy, orangey, garlic-laden one below. Because I did not have the wherewithal to dig the traditional hole in the ground which typifies barbacoa cooking, I simply wrapped the cheeks in banana leaves (not exotic; you can get them, frozen, at any good Asian supermarket) and slow-cooked them in the ancient Romertopf that my cousin Carol handed down to me when she left New York. (If you don’t have a romertopf, a slow cooker set on low, or a Creuset will work fine.) They were lovely, exceedingly rich, and the perfect amount for a meaty side to an otherwise vegetable-focused dinner. Serve leftover pickled watermelon radish on a banh mi (vegetarian, vegan, or not).

Serves 2

Marinade

1/2 cup chicken broth

2 chipotle peppers in adobo

1 tablespoon adobo

2 garlic cloves

1 teaspoon instant coffee

1/2 teaspoon toasted cumin

1 small Manadarin, peeled and seeded

1/2 cup cilantro

Juice of 1/2 Meyer Lemon

Veal Cheeks

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

2 veal cheeks, silver skin removed, about 8 ounces, total

2 frozen banana leaves, defrosted

4 fresh corn tortillas

1/2 red onion, thinly sliced

pickled watermelon radish (optional)

queso fresco (optional)

For the marinade:

Place all the ingredients for the marinade in the bowl of a food processor and pulse repeatedly until the Mandarin is completely pureed.

Put the cheeks in a bowl large enough to hold them, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for 8 hours, or preferably overnight.

For the veal cheeks:

If you’re using a Romertopf, soak both pieces in cool water for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, remove the cheeks from the marinade, and scrape off any residual marinade back into the bowl. Pat the cheeks dry, heat the oil in a medium saute pan until it begins to shimmer and brown them on both sides, about seven minutes. Set aside.

Preheat oven to 300 degrees F. When the Romertopf is ready, lightly pat it dry with a clean kitchen towel, and line the bottom with one banana leaf. Set the cheeks down on the leaf, pour the marinade over the cheeks, along with any remaining cooking juices from the saute pan. Top the cheeks with the remaining banana leaf, and tuck the ends in underneath them to form a package. Put the top of the romertopf back on, and place in oven for 3 hours.

Carefully unwrap the cheeks — which should be butter-soft — and place them in a shallow bowl. Using two forks, pull the meat apart into small pieces. Pour any remaining cooking juices into a small saucepan, and keep warm over very low heat.

Serve drizzled with cooking juices on warm corn tortillas with slivered red onion, pickled watermelon radish (recipe below), and queso fresco, if desired.

Pickled Watermelon Radish

1 cup water

1 cup white wine vinegar

1 tablespoon coriander seeds, lightly smashed in mortar & pestle

pinch hot red pepper flakes

1 pound watermelon radishes, stemmed and tailed

In a medium sauce pan, combine the water, vinegar, coriander seeds, and pepper flakes, and bring to a boil for 3 minutes. Remove from heat and let cool while you slice the radishes.

Using a Benringer slicer (or other similar mandoline), carefully slice the radishes to a thickness of 1/16th of an inch. Place them in a large Mason jar, pour in the brine to cover, and refrigerate for an hour before using.

Lentils are always a good thing.

I’d like to say that I’m not big on zodiacal cliches, even though, as a Cancerian, I am one, down to the bone: I’m all about nurturing and comfort and caring for people, assuming you haven’t caught me on a bad day when I’ve crawled into my shell.  I’m drawn to water like a fish, and I cry at the drop of a hat. My dream vacation involves renting a house with friends and cooking every night. There’s no place I’d rather be than at home, in the loving safety of my kitchen, with Susan and my dogs/cats (aka kids).

So when the stars turn left instead of right (or right instead of left), I get tripped up; I stumble, like someone metaphysically hog-tied me around the kneecaps.  Things go haywire: recipes go wrong. Projects are delayed. Bank accounts echo. People get sick. I start cooking things I’ve sworn off, like heavy, meaty stuff. I’ve recently discovered that my personal crutch — for some it’s chocolate or sweets or alcohol — is fried chicken: just one piece — just one — eaten in the car on the way home from the gym. In the back seat, there’s a big, hulking, snotty, snorting, hideously revolting, wart-covered monster, breathing fire over my shoulder and belching in my ear: You totally suck, it laughs, as I eat a drumstick, brushing the crumbs off my lap.

Bad mind, my Buddhist friends would say.

It’s been a long time since my last post, and for that, I’m sorry: the great news is that I finally finished my book (yay!) while simultaneously dealing with a universe that appears to be snickering in my face like that big angry George Booth dog with sharp, nasty teeth.  There have been other projects delayed, cancelled, and retooled midstream. There’ve been checks that have gotten lost, phone messages that were never received, emails that disappeared into a black hole. And just to let me know that my small, writerly, food-obsessed life is tiny beans in the broad scheme of things, there have been a host of folks around me who have gotten sick, or who I’ve lost along the way, like my good friend and neighbor Melissa’s mother, Jean Smith.

When Susan and I first moved to our neighborhood eight years ago, we didn’t really know what to expect — who ever does? Lucky us, we were surrounded by great, kind people, more or less our own age. And then, there was this woman, Jean, who was very much NOT our own age. But although she was in her early eighties when we first met her, she seemed to be our age, and even a bit younger and more carefree. Over the years, we sort of adopted her and she, us; she came to Christmas dinner one year with Susan’s family. She came to a neighborhood Passover Seder that I threw, where my mother and I were the only Jews at the table. And wherever she went, she brought joy, loving kindness, and compassion.

She also brought these kick-ass chocolate covered, caramelized Saltines that completely rocked my non-sweet tooth. (When she came to the Seder, she actually made them with salted matzo. A very nice lady. Here’s Smitten Kitchen’s version of the non-matzo variety.)

Anyway, whenever life threw Jean a curveball — which it did, a lot — she’d toss her hands up in the air, and say “Well, my dears, it’s just the way things are, so I have to get over it. No point in getting stressed out!” And then, there were these mammoth hugs that she’d offer if she thought that you — or anyone in her midst — needed them. Which we all almost always did.

Jean valiantly battled a virulent form of cancer this past year. “Can you BELIEVE it?” she’d say to me. “I feel pretty good, all things considered,” she’d laugh. And the day that this picture was taken, she was in perfect Jean shape, which was at least good enough to flirt like crazy with the tasting room manager at our local McLaughlin Vineyards; he responded by giving her a glass of wine large enough to soak her feet in. She drank the entire thing, pretty quickly.

The last time we saw her, she had already taken a turn for the worse. That afternoon, she woke up long enough to say hello, even though it took her a good ten minutes to recognize who we were. I knelt down alongside of the living room recliner she was dozing in, and when she touched my cheek and I looked into her eyes, I didn’t see the face of an old lady who was on her way out; I saw the face of my friend, who might as well have been 35. That’s how young and filled with spirit she looked that day, and that’s the face I’ll always remember.

So, we lost Jean. And then, as if on cue, all hell broke loose, and everything started to go haywire. It was like the universe got SO pissed off at the fact that she wasn’t with us anymore, that it had a major temper tantrum. It reminded me of that great Anne Lamott essay from Salon, Traveling Mercies:

Broken things have been on my mind as the year lurches to an end, because so much broke and broke down this year in my life, and in the lives of the people I love. Lives broke, hearts broke, health broke, minds broke. On the first Sunday of Advent our preacher, Veronica, said that this is life’s nature, that lives and hearts get broken, those of people we love, those of people we’ll never meet. She said the world sometimes feels like the waiting room of the emergency ward, and that we, who are more or less OK for now, need to take the tenderest possible care of the more wounded people in the waiting room, until the healer comes. You sit with people, she said, you bring them juice and graham crackers. And then she went on vacation.

Ah, Anne.

Anyway, I’ve been trying to convince myself of something I already know: that when I’m feeling like crap and I really want to eat the food that will momentarily make me feel good (followed by not good), I’d be much better off actually taking care of myself, and cooking things that are not only soothing, but also reasonably healthy. This does not include fried chicken. A few weeks back, Heidi Swanson sent me the link to her outrageously delicious lentil soup recipe, and ever since then, I’ve made it a bunch of times, tweaking it here and there to make it smokier and spicier. I thought about adding diced bacon, but then I figured, better not. 

This soup, which I think Jean would have loved, falls into the chicken soup category for me — it’s mysteriously soothing and calming and cleansing, all at once. And until the universe takes a Xanax, it’s exactly what I need.

Tomato Lentil Soup with Pimenton, Fried Shallots, and Saffron Yogurt

(Adapted from Heidi Swanson)

As Heidi says, it really is imperative that you use black lentils, or Lentils du Puy for this soup; you not only get incomparable earthiness, but they hold together beautifully. In my version of this insanely delicious curative, I’ve swapped out water for vegetable stock and added a pinch of pimenton, cayenne, and toasted, ground cumin, which I find adds depth. Unless you’re really up for frying sliced shallots, you can find them at any good Asian grocery store.  This soup only gets better if it sits in the refrigerator overnight, and should you have any leftovers (I’ve had very little, every time), serve them over a slice of garlic-rubbed crusty bread drizzled with good olive oil, like a quasi-ribollita.

Serves 4

2 cups rinsed Lentils du Puy

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1/2 teaspoon pimenton, or hot smoked paprika

1/2 teaspoon toasted, ground cumin

1/8 teaspoon cayenne

1 medium Spanish onion, coarsely chopped

1 teaspoon sea salt

1 28 ounce can crushed San Marzano tomatoes

2 cups vegetable stock

3 cups chopped Lacinato kale leaves

1-2 tablespoons crispy fried shallots

Saffron yogurt

1 pinch of saffron threads

1 tablespoon boiling water

1/2 cup Greek yogurt (Heidi calls for 2%; I made this with non-fat)

Bring 6 cups of water to a boil in a large saucepan, add the lentils, and cook until just tender, about 20 minutes. Drain, and set aside.

In a medium soup pot (clay is great if you have it, and I’m deeply in love with my Bram Cookware La Chamba pot, which I’m convinced adds flavor to anything I cook in it) over medium heat, warm the olive oil until it begins to shimmer. Add the pimenton, cumin, and cayenne, and stir well until the spices just begin to release their aroma. Add the onion, reduce the heat to medium low, and cook slowly, until the onion becomes translucent and glassy.

Sprinkle in the salt and pour in the tomatoes and the stock. Add the lentils to the pot, and stir well to combine. Raise the heat a little bit until the soup just gets to a burble, and cook for ten minutes, uncovered.

While the soup is simmering, make the saffron yogurt: combine the saffron and boiling water in a small bowl, and let stand for 3 minutes, until the water has taken on the saffron’s color and fragrance. Stir the contents of the bowl (the liquid and the threads) into the yogurt, and blend thoroughly.

Fold the kale into the soup, and cook until completely wilted. Serve immediately, with a dollop of saffron yogurt, and a sprinkling of fried shallots.

There comes a point in every local food-loving New Englander’s life when, during the dark snowy days of mid-winter, she puts her hands on her hips, stamps her feet, and says If I eat one more freaking turnip, I’m going to throw up. 

I am officially at that point.

This generally happens to me towards the end of January, so it’s not like I should be surprised or anything. Still, as someone who believes in local, seasonal eating (as much as I can, living in western Connecticut), I wind up feeling guilty for even thinking about my favorite wintertime flavor — lemon — when by the fact of my geography, I should be hunkered down over my seven quart Creuset while it burbles away on the back of the stove, filled with the brownish, earthy murkiness of the season.

“It’s Meyer Lemon season here!” my California friends wrote to me the other day. “We have so many of them, we just don’t know what to do with them all!”

I know what you can do with them all, I thought, gazing virtuously out the window at our stone garden Buddha, buried under eight inches of snow.

“Well,” I wrote back to her, “if you have to live every day with the knowledge that your city might slip into the bay at any moment, you might as well have the best Meyer Lemons in the world. After all, you have to have something.”

And suddenly, just like that — just like it was God’s little joke — they started showing up everywhere I looked: shrink-wrapped in my supermarket. (I will not buy shrink-wrapped produce. Not. Not. Not.) In the San Francisco Chronicle (which I read on line every day, so I can feel like I’m right there even if I’m on the other side of the country). All over the bloody blogosphere. All over the little food television I actually watch. I finally threw in the towel when I clicked over to 101Cookbooks.com and found Heidi Swanson in the throes of a citrus takeover of her kitchen.

“I’m not kidding when I tell you it looks like a citrus orchard shook out its limbs in my kitchen,” she wrote in her most recent post.

I’m stuck here in root vegetable hell, so just shut up, Heidi, I wanted to say. But I didn’t. I really like Heidi. I took it as a sign: I needed to give myself a break. In the depths of winter, I needed to be kind to myself. So I drove to my local healthy foods market, bought myself some Meyer Lemons that had been shipped over from the other side of the country, and smugly drove home. Between the .75 metric tons of carbon dioxide it took to fly the damned things here and the gallon and a half of gas it took my Subaru to get to the store and home again, I was feeling fairly guilty. The small package of mint and bag of frozen organic peas I bought to go with them didn’t help.

But when it gets to be this time of year and you don’t live anywhere near Berkeley and you’re drowning in turnips and rutabagas and those cute little acorn squash you managed to grow last summer before the hurricane wiped out your garden, and it’s freezing and snowing and the days are short and all you can think about is spring, you need a little brightness and spark and zip in your culinary life. At least I do. A few hours after coming home from my shopping trip, I was standing in the kitchen making barley risotto with a significant splash of the sweet lemon juice, a good amount of zest, chopped fresh mint, a handful of peas, and a crumbling of good sheep’s milk feta.

And just for a little while, it felt ever so slightly like spring.

 Barley Risotto with Meyer Lemon, Peas, and Feta

Adapted from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

I don’t know why it took me so long, but it wasn’t until years ago, when I came upon Amanda Hesser’s sloshy pappardelle with lemon, ricotta salata, and herbs in Cooking with Mr. Latte that I really fell in love with the idea of combining pasta with lemon, cheese, and herbs. Oddly enough, I’d been making an unofficial version of it for years in my tiny Manhattan apartment kitchen — it almost always involved bare cupboards and the kind of after-midnight, carb-laden cooking necessitated by too much youthful imbibing — but I wouldn’t have dared make it for anyone else. Fast forward twelve years, and the combination is one of my favorites: Meyer lemon, because of its sweetness, works beautifully with so many herbs and types of cheese — thyme, rosemary, mint, marjoram, pecorino, feta, Parmigiana Reggiano, chevre — that the possibilities are endless. In this version, I’ve married the flavors to Deborah Madison‘s wonderfully earthy barley risotto; farro would work beautifully, too. (Note: Because of the salt in the stock and the salty feta, I’ve omitted any additional salt.)

Serves 4

4-1/2 cups vegetable stock (I prefer Rapunzel Vegetable Stock with Sea Salt)

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1/2 cup finely diced onion

1 garlic clove, minced

1 cup pearl barley

2 tablespoons fresh Meyer Lemon juice

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

3/4 cup frozen peas

1 tablespoon Meyer Lemon zest, minced

1/4 cup finely chopped fresh mint leaves

1/2 cup crumbled feta plus more for serving

In a medium saucepan, bring the stock to a slow simmer. Heat the oil in a large, straight-sided, deep saute pan set over medium heat. Add the onion and garlic and cook until barely translucent. Add the barley to the pan, stir well to coat the grains with oil.

Add about a cup of the stock and continue to stir until it’s nearly absorbed. Continue to add about a half a cup of stock at a time, stirring constantly and waiting for each addition to be almost absorbed before adding more. The risotto is done when the barley is tender and the dish is creamy. Fold in the lemon juice and the butter, and then add the peas, stirring well to combine (the heat from the dish will cook the peas).

Stir in the zest, the mint, and the feta and let rest for five minutes before serving, topped with more crumbled feta.

(For Christina Choi, 1977-2011)

My grandmother was the primary cook in my house when I was growing up, and much of what she made had a sort of Mitteleuropan bent to it: veal breast was stuffed with dried fruit, strudel was laden with cabbage, roast chicken was redolent of paprika, beef was braised with caraway and sour cream, and tea was drunk from a glass. Her preferred side dish always seemed to be potatoes and onions that had been haphazardly sliced and tossed into the bottom of the roasting pan, where they would soften and then caramelize alongside whatever else was cooking. She sometimes made egg noodles. She sometimes made rice. And on the most special of occasions, when she was really reaching back into her Austro-Hungarian genetic memory, I’d find her standing in the kitchen with an enormous, enameled, white colander through which she’d press a thinnish batter into the pot of rapidly boiling water beneath it. Minutes later, I was presented with a bowl of misshapen, butter-soaked knoepfli — what she called sometimes called spaetzle and other times, Little Rags — and a spoon.

There was nothing I loved more, and  even now, I’ve been known to order whole dishes just because they come with a side order of this stuff of my dreams, which otherwise manages to get lodged in the recesses of my culinary brain alongside grape jam and latkes, and the other things I really like and have mostly forgotten about until formally presented with them.

A few months ago, I flew to Seattle for a few days to have a short meet up with my friend Molly. It was a totally miserable flight. Weather forced me to lay over in Chicago, and this was no Bourdain layover: it was the kind of layover where you find yourself sleeping in your clothes in a Motel 6 situated alongside a gun/pawnshop, and trying to not hear what’s going on in the room next to you just beyond the adjoining door. By the time I reached Seattle the next day, I was just this side of comatose. I mostly remember the dukkah that came sprinkled on the feta we ate at Sitka & Spruce the day I arrived, and how good the bread was. I can’t help but remember how incredible the pizza was that night at Brandon Pettit’s Delancey. Molly and I worked a little bit and talked an enormous amount, and the next day she took me to a tiny place called Nettletown in Eastlake, for lunch.

“It’s Christina Choi’s restaurant. The food is simple and lovely,” Molly said, as we drove over.

I was still a little catatonic, but my interest was piqued as I learned that Christina was half Swiss and half Chinese. And that you could get noodles and tea eggs and scallion fried tofu.

And knoepfli, for which, Molly said, Christina was known.

Nobody is ever known for their knoepfli. 

We sat down — the only people in the restaurant that afternoon — and at Molly’s suggestion, I ordered a bowl, and the knoepfli arrived, pan-fried to a lovely dark caramel, and laden with herbs, leeks, cabbage, and bacon. I think there was a poached egg involved. There might have been a drop of soy or shoyu, but I’m not positive. [Post pub note: A friend of Christina's who posted a reply below pointed out that it was Maggi seasoning that I was likely tasting. Maggi is a umami-explosive Swiss condiment used heavily in Asian cooking--a lovely nod to Christina's heritage. Thanks to Tea Austen.] Molly ordered something involving local, Rain Shadow bratwurst. I don’t remember anything else at that restaurant because I sat there, head down, indelicately shoveling enormous amounts of the tender, chewy, remarkable dumplings into my mouth. I don’t believe my eyes were closed, but they might as well have been, for the bliss I was experiencing.

Who was this Christina Choi person that she, at such a young age (34), could marry one side of her culinary heritage so seamlessly to the other? Why hadn’t I, on the other side of the country but still (jealously and vicariously) clued in to the gastronomical happenings in the northwest, heard about Nettletown, and about Christina Choi? Because, I guess, I wasn’t a member of the community.

I came home and told Susan what I’d had on my visit to Seattle. There were the Hama Hama oysters that smelled, sweetly, of the ocean, that we had at The Walrus and The Carpenter. There was that dukkah and the local feta at Sitka & Spruce. There were the small plates that everyone out there seemed to be comfortable eating as a matter of course. And then there was Nettletown’s knoepfli. I went on and on about it, like a lunatic.

“It was the very best thing,” I said to Susan, who, many years and another relationship ago, spent a lot of time in Seattle, and grew to love it. “—the very best. I can’t wait to go back, and to take you for the knoepfli.”

Every once in a while, in the middle of my working day, I’d peruse the Nettletown website, just to remember how great and interesting the menu was. And then, one day, out of the clear blue sky, my friend and colleague, Edible Seattle’s editor, Jill Lightner, emailed to say that the place was closing. They were successful, but I guess that Christina Choi wanted to do other things —- she was young, so why shouldn’t she? Still, I felt a sharp pang, knowing that I’d never again have her simple, sophisticated, rustic, Swiss Chinese riff on a dish of my childhood, for which I was willing to fly to the other side of the country to eat. There was something about the simplicity of it, its elegance, and its earthiness, and how near it was to my heart; it had captivated me as only truly simple, kind food can, and in the weirdest of ways, it wouldn’t let me go.

I never knew Christina Choi — I never knew that she had launched Foraged and Found Edibles with Jeremy Faber way back in 2001, and supplied the Seattle community with wild foods like morels, nettles, fiddleheads, and miner’s lettuce. I never knew anything about her, really — not about how much of a fixture she was in the very tight, very loving Seattle food world, or how big her family was, or how many friends she had. But when I heard that, on December 28th, after being diagnosed weeks earlier with a brain aneurysm, and having repeated surgeries, she died, I felt as though I’d had the wind knocked out of me. I spent hours reading the blog that her family created,  Honey from a Weed — based on Christina’s favorite book that has long been one of mine — tracing her steps from diagnosis until the day that her family and friends had to say goodbye.

I don’t know what it is about food that forces connections like this. But I loved what Christina Choi crafted and the very personal, quiet gift that she gave to me — a stranger way over on the other coast — in a simple, delicious bowl of rags.

Pan-Fried Knoepfli with Cabbage, Leeks, and Bacon

Call it what you will — knoepfli, spaetzle, knopfle, spatzle — but at the end of the day, all these babies are are tiny dumplings made from a batter consisting of flour, egg, milk, and sometimes water, which gets pressed either through a colander or a special potato ricer-like contraption into a stockpot of boiling water, and when they float to the top, they’re done. It takes virtually no time for this to happen — maybe four or five minutes, tops — making the dish not only incredibly cheap (and a perfect foil for anything you’d otherwise toss with noodles), but really fast. I initially made my version of this dish with 2 eggs, which yielded a batter that was not unlike wallpaper paste; use 3 instead, and if you still cannot force the stuff through the holes in your colander, I give you permission to very gently drop strings of the batter directly off the tines of a fork into the boiling water while cursing like a longshoreman. But a colander is preferable.

Serves 3 as a side dish

For the knoepfli:

1 cup unbleached, all purpose f lour

1 teaspoon salt

3 eggs

1/4 cup milk

For the cabbage:

1/4 cup diced bacon

1 large leek, white part only, roughly chopped

3 loosely packed cups thinly sliced green cabbage

1 tablespoon fresh snipped chives

1/2 tablespoon thyme leaves

salt and pepper, to taste

1 tablespoon of olive oil

1 scallion, slivered

Optional: Fried eggs, slices of extra firm, fried tofu, Sriracha

Combine the flour and salt in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, beat the eggs together with the milk. Fold the egg mixture into the flour and stir well until the combination has the consistency of a thick batter. Cover and let rest while you bring a large stockpot filled with lightly salted water to a boil.

Meanwhile, in a large, straight-sided saute pan, cook the bacon until light brown and crispy, about 6 minutes, and wipe out all but a tablespoon of the remaining fat. Add the leeks to the pan and cook until soft, about 5 minutes; add the cabbage, chives, and thyme, and stir to combine. Cook until the mixture is a soft, wilted mess, about 12 minutes, and season to taste with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Remove to a bowl, and set aside.

When the water comes to a boil, carefully nestle the colander over the top of the stockpot, and using a wooden spoon or a silicone bench scraper, force the batter through the holes and into the water; they”ll resemble little rags. When they float to the surface, strain them and add them to the saute pan along with the olive oil. Cook until they begin to turn a light golden brown, and then add the bacon, cabbage, and leek mixture back to the pan. Cook together for another five minutes, and then serve hot, topped with a fried egg, or slices of tofu, or nothing at all beyond a squirt of Sriracha, a drizzle of Maggi, [Post pub note: Thanks to Tea Austen for the hint!] and a handful of slivered scallion.

About twelve years ago, my father and stepmother took a trip with some friends to Tuscany. These friends, who happen to be vegetarian — not interesting vegetarian, but sprouts-and-a-plate-of-mashed-yeast vegetarian — insisted that my father and stepmother eat the same way. It wasn’t hard for Shirley, who is as near to a vegetarian as one might get without actually being one; put a plate of steamed vegetables and re-heated brown rice in front of her and she swoons with delight. But my father spent the entire trip sulking; they ate plain steamed fennel and peppers (to avoid any additional fat despite the glorious dark green Tuscan olive oil they had at their disposal) and broccoli and cauliflower (also steamed to death) while Dad dreamed of visiting Dario Cecchini, the Dante-spouting butcher of Panzano, and having a real bistecca.

“But you ate the vegetables anyway, Cy,” my stepmother said, when he related the story to me over dinner on their return.

“I did,” my father responded. “But I never said I liked them….”

And there’s the green elephant in the room, and possibly the biggest stumbling block to eating a plant-based diet that we have in this country…and the one that nobody ever talks about: We think of eating vegetables as a chore. We’ll eat them if we absolutely have to, but we won’t necessarily like them. We won’t automatically gravitate to them. And until we do — until vegetables enter our culinary lexicon without having to be manipulated into analogous foods like tofu dogs and veggie burgers imprinted with faux grill hatch marks — we are destined to remain, hopelessly, a nation of meat eaters living with a steak knife in one hand, and a bottle of Lipitor in the other.

It doesn’t matter that we know, intellectually, how good vegetables are for us; it doesn’t even matter how politically-motivated, or anti-CAFO we may be. So what if Mark Bittman whacks us over the head with more and more colorful vegan-till-six recipes, imploring us ever-so-apologetically to go on and give it a try because, after all, even PB&Js are vegan (which is a little bit like saying that Mussolini was a fascist, but boy, he certainly got the trains to run on time). It doesn’t matter if you’re a  local food lover with a die-hard belief in sustainability, or you have a $600 CSA share, or you can proudly claim that your seven-year-old gardens a small plot attached to his Montessori school, and knows, roughly speaking, the pH of the soil. That’s all nice stuff, but if someone offers you a slice of thin-crust pizza or a pile of fresh vegetables for lunch, you’ll probably have to think about it for a second. Ultimately, I know which one you’ll be more likely to choose, and so do you. Because, most Americans are lukewarm on vegetables. You don’t wake up one morning and suddenly become a vegetarian after a lifetime of burying your peas in your mashed potatoes, and anyone who claims that they’ve suddenly seen the light and gone totally plant-based after years of eating meat is probably sneaking takeout Hong Shao Rao in the closet at 3 a.m. Guilty as charged.

I’ll never call myself a vegetarian, but I do what I can. Moving to a mostly plant-based diet, for me, is plenty political: I believe that CAFOs are hell-on-earth, I think that GMOs exist to line the pockets of big Ag. But it’s also health-related. I come from a long line of cardiac patients. My skinny-minnie mother is a borderline diabetic. I sit on my ass for a living. I’ve lived in the suburbs since 2001, when I left Manhattan. I drive everywhere. Not a processed bit of food passes these lips, yet I’ve recently become glucose intolerant and for the last four years, I’ve taken a small handful — yes, a handful — of pills for my blood pressure and cholesterol. I’d like to not have the pharmaceutical industry own quite so much real estate in my medicine cabinet.  I’d like to not have to worry about being pre-diabetic, or, should the rules surrounding my health insurance change, wonder how I’ll afford the pills I might need. So eating a plant-based diet makes a lot of sense for me. Woo-hoo.

If only I liked it as much as, say, a braised pork shoulder-based diet.

Recently, though, I made a small discovery about vegetarian food that I’d never really hit on before, and it’s been a game-changer: Americans are used to vegetarian food (think the ubiquitous steamed vegetables and rice) having no textural or taste contrast — no bright flavor highs, and no earthy flavor lows. We think of them as one-note, boring, and perhaps just a bit slippery. Conversely, we all know to put ketchup on our burgers: the brightness of the “tomato” flavor adds a spark to the earthy rich fattiness of the meat. It cuts through it, and so all your taste buds are happy. We all know that the gorgeous, caramelized crunchy bits on top of baked macaroni and cheese add another dimension to a dish that is otherwise dense, creamy, rich, and totally one-note. It’s the reason why we all fight over the corner brownie, and why we loved fried chicken, and oatmeal raisin cookies, and bacon with our eggs, and chewy, meaty, salty pork tucked into a tender, sweet, pillowy Chinese bun. It’s about flavor, sure, but it’s also about high notes and low, sweetness against richness, suppleness and density and crispiness and crunch. It’s about texture and contrast, and when it’s missing from vegetarian food, we know it immediately, because the result can be vile.

So, with this knowledge, I’m slowly re-learning how to cook: my cupboards are filled with jars of things — pepitas, pine nuts, slivered almonds — that, when toasted, lend earthy crunch to a dish. Instead of splashing vinegar into cooked-down rabe to give it a little sweetness (and a whole lot more sogginess), I’m adding a sprinkling of currants, and some lightly-toasted sunflower seeds. Actually taking the time to think about the vegetables I’m eating — what their flavor and texture profiles are, and what would contrast against those profiles — has made a very big difference. Admittedly, I wouldn’t have come to this by myself — I have people like Deborah Madison, Heidi Swanson, Yotam Ottolenghi, Kim O’Donnel, and Sara Forte to thank. In all the years I’ve cooked, I’ve never considered texture to be as important as flavor. Most of us don’t; but in plant-based cooking, it’s imperative.

I don’t know if my father ever would have learned to like vegetarian food; his memories of boiled Brussels sprouts, boiled carrots, and boiled green beans ran very deep, and not in a good way. Still, I wish I’d had the chance to share with him what I’ve learned. I’d like to think he’d have enjoyed it, even without the pork.

Crispy Cabbage Salad

(Adapted from Balaboosta, NYC)

Recently, Susan and I had lunch at the glorious Balaboosta with Grace Young, author of Stir-Frying to the Sky’s Edge and Breath of a Wok. It was Grace’s suggestion; she’d been wanting to try Einat Admony‘s refined Middle Eastern food, and to say that we were delighted with what we ate would be an understatement. But of everything on the table that day, I fell head-over-heels in love with a simple, shredded cabbage salad tossed with a minty cumin vinaigrette,  toasted almonds and — wonderfully — a handful of what appeared to be Chinese chow mein noodles. It was tender, creamy, pungent, sour, sweet, earthy, and crispy all at once, and everything that a good vegetable dish should be. Here’s my spin on it; the vinaigrette may seem very spice-forward. It is.

Serves 3 as a main dish

For the vinaigrette:

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

2 tablespoons mild extra virgin olive oil

1-2 tablespoons fromage blanc (or plain yogurt)

1 heaping tablespoon chopped fresh mint leaves

Agave, to taste

1 tablespoon toasted, ground cumin

1/4 teaspoon sumac

For the salad:

1-1/2 cups romaine lettuce, torn into bite-sized pieces

2 cups shredded Savoy cabbage, loosely packed

1/3 cup unsalted sliced almonds, lightly toasted in a dry skillet until barely golden

1/2 cup crispy chow mein noodles

Make the vinaigrette:

Place the mustard in a medium bowl and whisk in the olive oil until emulsified. Whisk in the fromage blanc or yogurt until blended; thin out slightly with water if necessary (the consistency should be like a creamy, loose batter). Fold in the mint, and add the agave, a quarter teaspoon at a time, and combine well, tasting for sweetness. Fold in the toasted cumin and whisk vigorously. Set aside at room temperature while you assemble the salad.

Assemble the salad:

Using your hands, in a large wooden bowl toss together the romaine and the cabbage until evenly distributed. Add the almonds and toss again. Dress the salad with the vinaigrette — it should be a wet salad — and then add the crispy noodles. Toss well to combine, and serve immediately.

I’ve been laughing all day.

Really.

We’re three days past Christmas, and last night was the very last candle of Hanukkah. It’s been a holiday season that’s been both blessed and difficult (as holiday seasons usually are. This is a universal truth).

The house this year was gorgeous. The tree was perfect. The menorah — we eschewed the tiny silver one and instead pulled out the big recycled metal one I bought for a dollar at my local Waldorf School’s holiday sale a few years ago — and filled it with stunning white tapers that we wound up not lighting, mostly because things just got away from us.

There was roasted, herb-crusted fillet. Oven-blasted root vegetables and potatoes tossed with rosemary and whole garlic cloves. There were Brussels sprouts and tiny lardons cubed from the bacon that my friend Steve-the-Butcher makes. I ate virtually none of it during Christmas dinner, instead tasting very tentatively as I cooked. I avoided the sourdough boule. I had one chunk of a crispy, golden-roasted potato. I had a Brussels sprout and one lardon. Un lardon. I set the Christmas pudding ablaze despite a debilitating fear of fire and drizzled it with hard sauce which I scraped off my hummingbird-sized portion. I ate not one Christmas cookie, and drank not one cup of eggnog. I ate one tiny latke bound together with rice flour instead of wheat — it performed as I’d hoped, and crisped up much more enthusiastically than when I make it with its white whole wheat flour cousin — and topped it with a tiny slice of smoked salmon from the Gaspe peninsula, and a petite dot of black tobiko, which I dolloped, ceremoniously, off the end of an antique silver salt spoon.

It was all very nice.

But today, with the holiday pretty much being over — trees are starting to appear piled up at the dump and in the streets next to city garbage cans; the torturous, endless loops of sterile Mitch Miller carols are growing mercifully fainter — I’ve been laughing.

Not a good laugh, but a nervous, embarrassed tic. Because every single year around this time, I’m in the exact same place both gastronomically and healthfully: I visit the doctor on the 23rd, as my health insurance year draws to a close and the news — just as we’re about to fling ourselves into the land of trifles and game birds, sufganiyot and latkes, standing rib, vintage port and aged burgundy — isn’t wonderful. This happened last year, the year before, and the year before that. Without getting into specifics, the instructions are always the same: Cut this. Cut that. Cut the other stuff. Your numbers are off the scale. 

I’m a food writer, I tell my doctor.

That’s your problem, she says, staring at me over her glasses.

It’s the holidays, I say.

Tough, she answers. Be creative. 

And every year, I am.

Until I’m not.

“I’ll change the New Years’ menu,” my dear friend Lisa says, when I tell her what’s going on. “We don’t have to have a rib roast. Or any wine.”

Sure. No wine. 

“Absolutely not,” I tell her, refusing to drag her and her partner into the milquetoasty world of health-related culinary blandness, where conviviality gets bogged down by worry, like an immovable anchor on a party ship.

But this year, two days before Christmas, when every wealthy holiday table in America sits creaking under the weight of the extravagant excess that we seem to believe is our right, I learned that I am one of the others.

I am not obese. I have been athletic my entire life. I don’t eat sweets. I don’t like chocolate. I don’t eat anything white, or any baked goods, cakes, candies, or pies. I eat meat once or twice a month, and pasta a bit more than that. I love rice and Asian food and whole grains and towering piles of sauteed kale with tons of garlic and hot red pepper, and I can eat an entire bucket of heavily-spiced chole in one sitting.

I don’t live in a food desert. Very far from it.

But as a comparatively monied American who grew up in 1970s semi-suburbia, I also love pizza, and cheese, and sausage, and good wine, and hand-crafted ale, and barbecue, and the very occasional grass-fed hot dog. I am kept in local, organic eggs by chickens who live next door, and I eat those eggs poached and served on whole grain toast, or fried and tucked into a griddled roll with a tissue-thin slice of ham, or fried and perched atop a tangle of soba noodles heavily doused with Sriracha sauce. My idea of a swell Sunday night is roasting a local chicken (not a neighbor) surrounded, as Laurie Colwin once described it, like a tugboat in a sea of olive oil-slicked vegetables glimmering under a snowy shower of salt crystals.

In my home, the pizza is produced from organic, local ingredients. The cheese comes from a cow whose name I know, and the sausage is house-made by Steve-the-Butcher. The salt crystals are hand-harvested. The chicken has a grassy, earthy taste, from noshing on the slugs in the fields where it has spent its chickeny life gleefully roaming around. It’s all, generally speaking, pretty healthy stuff. And expensive. It’s what food professionals like me rave about. It’s the way we want to eat — the way we want everyone to eat; folks would be a lot healthier if they did  — and we’re very lucky if we can.

But we shouldn’t. Not all the time.

Not in the quantities that we, in this country — that I, in my home — have come to know as normal. It doesn’t matter if it’s locally sourced or hand-crafted or made from a cow named Ernestine who lives on the north side of a pasture in Vermont. I am proof positive that, however spectacular the ingredients, too much is just too much. Whatever it is. As I once said here, grass-fed beef is lovely. But it’s not a vegetable. Not. A. Vegetable. 

Given the quality of the food that I eat and the way that I cook it, I really shouldn’t have this issue with triglycerides and the beginnings of glucose intolerance. But I do. And knowing this fact — finding out about it just as 2011 is poised to leave — is the greatest gift that anyone’s ever given me. Despite the tears.

I am representative of those of us who run screaming from fast food, who don’t eat anything processed, who rarely eat anything cured, who are members of $70-per-month gyms, who take their two dogs on long walks every day in their nice, tidy towns, who drink small-batch bourbons procured at high-end liquor stores, who shop mostly at organic cooperatives and CSAs and farmer’s markets and who know the names of the people who grow the corn that we eat with our veggie burgers. I ostensibly do all the right things; I can afford to. Many can’t.

But I now understand that sometimes, it’s not only what we eat, but how we eat it, how often we eat it, and in what quantity. Repeat: Too much is just too much.

So now, with a new year ahead, I’ll be thinking about food very differently. There will be a lot more vegetarian and vegan dishes showing up here, despite the little piggy who lives up top. The ingredients will still be the local, organic, natural, and freshest I can find. There will be far more single-plate dishes, and those plates, physically, will be smaller.

This is my New Year’s gift to myself and my partner.

This is my fork in the road. I can go one way, or the other.

I'd like an electric menorah, please.

We never celebrated Christmas when I was child.

I grew up in a Jewish home — well, sort of; I didn’t go to Hebrew school and we never kept kosher and my maternal grandmother had just the tiniest obsession with dragging me off to see the life size Baby Jesus at St Patrick’s Cathedral every Shabbes before Christmas Eve — and while we were surrounded by the trappings of the holiday, we never actually initiated any Christmas activities. We had no tree, no stockings, no eggnog, and no Yule log, except for the one that burned for twenty four hours on Channel 11. Every Christmas, I would watch it in a catatonic stupor and invariably drift off, imagining that those were the peals of the non-existent churches in my Queens neighborhood instead of car alarms.

Still, every family has their own ways of marking the holiday season, and we were no different. Over Christmas, my best friends down the street filled stockings and went ice skating at Skyrink or Rockefeller Center, and came home to hot chocolate laced with tiny, industrially-fabricated marshmallows, and plates of golden, broiled, buttered toast sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. One year, we spent the holiday with friends who lived a few floors up from us in our apartment building. I don’t know what is more vivid: the memory of my friend’s big brother — a large child — getting his head stuck for hours in a cherry red football helmet that my father had bought him, or the half pound of sugar that their mother had decided would make a flavorful addition to the pork meatballs that were a regular part of their Feast of the Seven Fishes.

When they were very young, my friends were taken to sit on Santa’s lap at Macy’s; one year, my mother and grandmother turned the thumbscrews until my father relented and plunked me down on the lap of the truly fabulous 1970 Santa who asked me what I wanted for Christmas.

An electric menorah, I said happily, meaning the kind with the orange bulbs that you turn a little bit to ignite. They flicker constantly no matter what you do, like a sort of Judaic disco ball.

As I got older, my holiday desires and needs changed fairly radically: I began playing the guitar when I was very young, and by the time I was eight, I was fanatical about it, always hoping that my holiday would involve strings or picks or capos or that 1939 Martin D-28 I coveted. A few years later, when I started taking piano lessons, I infuriated my teacher, a short French man with a red combover; he was incensed that I could play as well as I could by ear, and proceeded to torture me with technique and theory. He eventually quit when he walked in for my lesson one pre-Christmas afternoon and found me staring at the ceiling and playing God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen by heart, using both hands.

“Your daughter ees petulant,” he said to my father, who just smiled, handed him a five dollar bill and wished him a happy holiday. He never returned.

That Saturday, my father announced that we would be spending the day together while my mother was working part-time in Manhattan as a fur model.

“We’re going to the mall,” he said, as we drove out along Grand Central Parkway and then south, on the Cross Island. I assumed it was to do some shopping, but he had other plans, and as we ambled through the glittering corridors of 1970s consumerism — there was a store called Magik Candle that sold black light posters and spewed bilious clouds of incense into the air, and tee shirt shops where you could choose iron-on appliques featuring everyone from Loggins & Messina to the cast of Welcome Back, Kotter — he steered me along until we got to an enormous, carpeted showroom lined with pedal organs. And it was there that we began a special holiday tradition all our own.

When we got to the Wurlitzer store that first year, the salesman — a thinnish guy with greasy dark hair, dressed in a russet brown polyester triple weave suit with a sprig of fake holly stuck in his lapel — stood loitering nervously around the entrance to the organ showroom, looking like Mr. Bean.

“Bet I can teach the little lady how to play in no time flat–” he gloated to my father, slapping him on the back and winking at my diminutive, snorkel parka-wearing self as we pretended to stroll past on our way to the mall steakhouse next door, for a frozen Beef Wellington and virgin eggnog snack.

“I guess,” my father replied, shrugging his shoulders while I stood there.

“Why don’t you give it a shot, honey,” the salesman beckoned. “Let your daddy hold your coat, and sit right down over here.”

I took my parka off and handed it to my father while the salesman pulled the bench away from an enormous, four foot-wide pedal organ that sat on a low riser near the entrance to the store, its red levers marked TUBA and SOUSAPHONE and BOSSA NOVA. He flipped the ON switch and the organ purred like a kitten.

“Let’s set the beat for you,” he said. And he pressed another button marked RHYTHM, and a muffled, electronic uptempo began, untethered to any music or melody, like an arrhythmia.

“The keys are marked with numbers, honey, so just press the ones that correspond to these—”

He propped the EASY ORGAN 1-2-3 sheet music for Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas in front of me and pointed to the color-coded, numbered notes.

“Think you can do it, sweetie?” my father asked, feigning sincerity.

“I’m just not sure, Daddy –” I whined, looking over my shoulder.

“Come on, honey–” the salesman implored, impatiently. “You’ve already got your rhythm section. Let’s give her a whirl—Go on and play some Christmas jingles!”

A small crowd gathered around behind me, laughing at the fact that my feet didn’t even reach the pedals. I  pushed up my sleeves, took a deep breath, flipped the BOSSA NOVA lever to the ON position, and played the single-note version of The Girl from Ipanema, which I’d picked up from recently listening to my parents’ new Astrud Gilberto album. In the years that followed, I’d go on to play Delilah, The Green Green Grass of Home, and eventually, the first four bars of Positively Fourth Street, just like Al Kooper.

“That’s not very Christmas-y,” the scowling salesman said through his teeth that first year. He was embarassed and confused and hopeful all at once, and as he stood next to me on the riser, sweating, his face flushed a deep, holiday red. The crowd applauded wildly as I climbed down and took my coat from my father.

“Wow–” my father said to the salesman. “I guess it really is a cinch!”

“She’s a natural,” the salesman admitted. “I can have this baby sitting in your living room in time for Christmas dinner —” he added, taking a cordovan leatherette pad out of his jacket pocket to write up the order.

“I don’t think so,” my father replied, handing me my parka and ushering me away as the salesman blanched. “But thanks all the same — and Merry Christmas.”

A few minutes later, my father and I were sitting in a booth at the steakhouse next door, listening to the Muzaq version of Ave Maria, and sharing a Beef Wellington before heading back to Manhattan to pick up my mother.

My father took thoughtful sips of his gin Gibson from a small martini glass.

“I think we really got him — didn’t we,” he mused, pulling the tiny onions off their little plastic sword one by one.

“I guess so,” I said, sucking up my fake eggnog through an unraveling paper straw. I felt badly that we’d just bilked this guy out of the hefty commission he was certain he’d made, while onlookers quietly ran silent computations, envisioning their children flipping a switch and suddenly being able to play Lady of Spain, right out of the gate.

“Maybe someone else will buy one,” I added brightly, silently wondering exactly how many Wurlitzers could possibly ever be sold in the course of one Christmas season.

“Could be,” my father said, slicing into the tufts of puff pastry wrapped around the meaty hockey puck. “Could be.”

We ate in silence that afternoon and during all the Christmas afternoons at the mall for years that followed, until I got too old, and too good at playing keyboards for it to be funny anymore. It was years before I understood that the holiday was not about the mall and the Christmas consumerism and taunting the poor shlub with the plastic holly in his lapel, who probably never unloaded one damn organ; even though we lived in the city, it seemed to me to be about peace and quiet, and coming in from the bitter cold, and powdered hot chocolate with marshmallows that tasted like styrofoam, and the burnt sugar rime on the cinnamon toast that my friend’s mother down the street made every single Christmas, and still does. Each year, she eats it quietly before her adult children arrive, sitting alone in her kitchen and listening to an old vinyl Caedmon recording of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales, while the dusty, unremarkable spinet piano of their childhood gathers dust in the corner, next to the tree.

A few weeks ago, Susan and I were down in Florida visiting my cousins, as we often are over Thanksgiving. On Wednesday, I squirreled myself away for a long, call-in phone interview with the folks over at Wisconsin Public Radio; people phoned in from all over the northern midwest wanting answers to everything from how to shake up lentil nut loaf (I was kind) to how to brine a pre-brined turkey (don’t). The number of vegetarians and vegans who called was astonishing, and for the first time ever, no one asked anything about leftovers. The conversation eventually led to a discussion about my favorite vegetable dish, and when I described it, I could hear a long, cavernous echo coming from that great freezing land of beer, badgers, and brats.

Brussels sprouts and grapes? the host repeated, incredulous.

Yes, I said. It’s sweet and savory; the grapes release their delicious sugars as they cook, which in turn caramelize the sprouts. You can eat it hot, cold, or at room temperature. You can add anything to it, within reason: toasted walnuts, pine nuts, spicy pepitas, lardons, whole garlic cloves, fresh thyme or rosemary, sea salt. Or nothing at all, which is generally how I like it.

And then people started calling in to ask for the recipe, and I realized that, while I’ve often spoken of the dish, I’ve only infrequently provided a recipe for it, or any inkling into its provenance.

I was never much of a Brussels sprouts fan; the idea of them conjured up memories of sitting in my sleepaway camp dining room as both a camper, and then, a counselor, and having them whiz past my head after being hurled like a small boulder from a trebuchet. Years later, when I was studying in England, they were presented to me cloaked in a sort of grayish grease, having been boiled in water for what must have been days. Or months. A little while after I came home to New York, I was having dinner with my mother at a very trendy restaurant on the Upper West Side, and there were Brussels sprouts leaves strewn about the plate, but no sign of the sprouts themselves. Eventually, I read Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking, and took note of the part where she says she sometimes makes marinated Brussels sprouts for the Christmas holidays; I trust her completely, so I gave it a shot. And lo and behold, I discovered that I not only liked them. I loved them.

A few years ago, I was driving around my neighborhood, running errands, when I heard a restaurateur on NPR talking about roasting Brussels sprouts together with grapes. The host was mystified, but so enamored of the dish was the guest that I pulled into my local market and bought a pound of sprouts and a bunch of grapes, and headed home to make them. No recipe had been given, so I had at it: I tossed the sprouts in a cast iron pan (cast iron is key) with a few dribbles of olive oil, a pinch of salt, and a bit of pepper. I gave the pan a shake, and then popped it into a hot oven. Once the sprouts turned bright green, I added a handful of red seedless grapes. I gave the pan another shake, and put it back in the oven until the grapes softened and the sprouts were knife-tender and caramelized. It was easy and delicious. And just a little bit surprising.

Over the years, I’ve tweaked the recipe: if the Brussels sprouts are big (or if time is a concern), simply slice them in half. Add herbs, or not. Or nuts, or not. Add tiny, cubed, crisp lardons. Or not. Drizzle it with a light splash of red wine vinegar, and serve it at room temperature with a wedge of earthy sheep’s milk cheese like Sardo di Pecora. I’ve even cooked the dish in a metal basket on the grill, alongside a steak. The direct-fire method results in a bit more charring, but the dish is still delicious.

However you make it and in whatever proportions, bear in mind the balance of sweet to salty/savory, and keep an eye on the pan as your guests begin to arrive. Shake it frequently to keep things roasting evenly, and when it’s time to eat, bring the pan directly to the table. Even Brussels sprouts naysayers will fall in love; they will likely be found in the middle of the night, eating the leftovers directly out of the fridge.

At least in my house.

Brussels Sprouts and Grapes

I’ve been making this dish for years, and always to various levels of bemusement and scoffing, until my guests tuck in. If you’re able to find very young, tiny Brussels sprouts, add grapes with a lighter hand, otherwise you’ll wind up obscuring the fresh, grassy flavor that make baby sprouts so wonderful. Forget about slicing an X in the bottom of your sprouts; in this dish, there’s no need for it.

Serves 4

1 pound Brussels sprouts, tough outer leaves and stem removed

1 tablespoon Extra virgin olive oil

1/4 teaspoon sea salt

freshly ground black pepper, to taste

1/4 pound red seedless grapes (not Globe)

Optional: fresh thyme sprigs, fresh rosemary sprigs, whole peeled garlic cloves, toasted walnuts/spicy pepitas/toasted pine nuts, lardons

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

Place the sprouts in a large cast iron pan and drizzle with oil, shaking the pan to lightly coat them. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and give the pan another shake. Place the pan on the middle rack in the oven and roast, shaking every once in a while, for twenty minutes.

Add the grapes to the pan, place it back in the oven, and continue to roast for another ten minutes, shaking frequently, until the grapes have softened and their skins wrinkle, and the sprouts are knife tender. Serve immediately, or at room temperature.

ADD-ONS NOTE:

If you are adding nuts to this dish, add them five minutes before removing the pan from the oven.

If you are adding thyme or rosemary, add it to the sprouts after the first pan shake.

If you are adding whole garlic cloves, add it to the sprouts after the first pan shake.

If you are adding lardons, you can either:

1- Cook the lardons separately, drain off the fat, and add them when you add the grapes. Or,

2 – Cook the lardons in the cast iron pan, remove them to a bowl, drain off all but one tablespoon of the fat and then add the sprouts to the remaining fat in the pan, and continue with the recipe. Add the cooked lardons as above.