Getting Over It

All of this talk of swine flu made me remember the time I was sick in Bangalore. It had been a miserable year all around. I hated my job, my boyfriend was continents away and I felt alienated from my family. To add to all that I caught a bug that made me horribly sick. I shivered, alternated between feeling really cold & burning hot and vomited endlessly. I wanted to be strong and get through this by myself. That was the point of me working, living single in the city. I remember staring at the ceiling above my bed and feeling my inner self hovering somewhere between my nose and the end of the world. I lifted my hand and felt the souls of my ancestors, my smiling grandfathers and cousins I didn't recognize. I felt defeated and weak, sure I was going to die, alone, in a strange city away from all who loved me and before having made anything of my life.

Then the door opened and my mother walked in. It took me a minute to realize she was real and then I felt relief so intense, a love so overwhelming that my soul floated right back into my body. I didn't feel the need to carry the weight of the whole world on my shoulders anymore. Perversely, that was the moment I realized needing someone else, having the courage to open oneself up to others was actually a sign of strength. I was never that sick again and never alone when I was.

All that from watching Anderson Cooper talk about swine flu.

Outside My Window

Graveyard of orange
Leaves flailing, lifted
By endless winds

Pomegranate

my white shirt is splattered pink
I lick my fingers clean of juice
plunge them back into its heart

and wonder
about the first time
they
came upon this strange husk
lying quietly scarlet

a little boy perhaps
picked it up
a slight crack, a ray of sun
something glimmered within

the pearls lay on his tongue
cool, calm, wondrous
never before
had something stained
his mother's lips so sweet

End of the Tunnel

For the last few weeks I’ve been digging myself out of the dark cave that is my mind. Hence the silence. You know how for some people life is one even keel, a smooth journey with nary a bump. That would be not me. For me, life is a series of ups and downs. I live it in extremes of joy and sadness, never a happy middle. I suppose if I had been the child of different parents, born slightly later (say in the 90’s) I would have been diagnosed with some kind of chemical imbalance and stuffed full of medication. But since I am me and was brought up to pull myself up by my boot straps, I muddle my way through the darkness. The good news is I see the light at the end of the tunnel now.
Travelling helps actually, it distracts me and provides new stimuli to my senses. I am in San Francisco today having endured a long flight with a chatty Pakistani guy as my seat mate. Earlier in my career I enjoyed getting to know my travel mates, but not anymore. I snubbed the poor guy pretty rudely and plugged my iPod into my ears. The thing is I want my peace when I travel, I want to stare at the clouds and listen to Ira Glass. I want to ruminate on life and make myself feel better.
I find it hard to sleep when I am away from home and end up watching the most ridiculous things on TV. Last night I watched a show called Man vs. Food, which I found really offensive. It’s a travel food show where the host prides himself on finding the biggest, hugest portions of food and stuffs himself full of it. Yesterday he was at a Seattle diner forcing himself to eat a 5 pound omelet made from 12 eggs. Half way through it he looked green at the edges, but he forced himself to eat most of it – as a challenge. He didn’t seem like he was enjoying it after the fortieth bite and in a world where children are dying of starvation every minute I am not sure if that show is in good taste (pun intended). (Oh, and did you know you get the King James Bible on DVD now?)
Once in a while you stumble onto a pretty good show, like Sixteen & Pregnant, which is exactly what it seems to be about, but makes for some really compelling television. It blows my mind how ordinary teenage pregnancy has become. Its not even a scandal anymore. None of the girls on the show considered abortion, though one did give her child up for adoption. The implications of having a baby at that age are obviously huge and not something any of the girls seem to comprehend.
This trip has been good for me. For one thing I got to meet Hubert Keller. Yes, really! I went to lunch with my colleague to his new restaurant Burger Bar (in the Macy’s on Union Square). He is exactly like he seems to be on TV. Friendly and sweet, more humbled by his success than anything else. He is the antithesis of the cliched arrogant French chefs one sees on TV. I walked a lot today through the streets of San Francisco. The weather was perfect, no fog, sprinkles of sunshine and blue sky. I gazed at the beautiful shops, eavesdropped as a couple professed their love for each other, paused to watch a sidewalk skateboarder, kept time with a passing tram and sat on the steps of Union Square sipping coffee. There's something about this city that makes my endorphins go wild. I feel happier just being here.

Molecular Gastronomy & Other Delights

There is a big reason I've not been writing lately and once all this is over maybe it will be the subject of great literature (by me of course).

But. In other news. President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize of course (really, why? to make a point? for not passing Health Care or repealing DADT or pulling troops out of Afghanistan or not kicking the goons from Goldman Sachs out of his team?). More importantly, K and I celebrated our fifth anniversary this week (feels like it went by in a whisper). We went to dinner at Alinea, which for me was a dream come true. Grant Achatz is known for his ultra modern cuisine, his quest to distill flavors emphasizing taste over texture. It was a strange, perplexing, fascinating experience. Each dish was an enigma, a puzzle to be decoded with a hidden message or joke in every morsel. So here is what we ate, a twelve course story in pictures told through some really grainy photos and inadequate words.

We started with caviar on a foam that tasted exactly like crackers and emulsion that didn't feel like capers, but tasted of them.

Then came the best tasting Asian dish I have ever eaten. A plate that started with a shot of "Thai distillation" which captured the essence of the 3 essential Thai ingredients - lemongrass, red chili and fish sauce. This prepares you for the culinary delight to come - tender pork belly resting on a cucumber. Yummy.

Next came a plate of brook trout done three ways, the best of which was a smoked piece that captured the very soul of fishiness.

After that was a succulent breast of pheasant, deep fried and skewered by a leaf and stuck in a metallic thingamajig.

The next course was one of my favorites. A bowl of cold potato soup in a bowl of wax pierced by a pin upon which was impaled two cubes that distilled the flavor of potatoes and truffles. Before you drink the soup, you draw the pin out and let the truffles and potato spheres fall into the soup and dissolve. Amazing.

Next came Colorado lamb done three ways and placed on a burning hot block of metal. Before we could eat it, the server inserted a sprig of rosemary in a hole on the metal, which burnt and spread an aroma over the lamb. Each medallion of lamb was covered with pureed pumpkin, quince and eggplant.

The next dish was my least favorite. It was duck done several ways and suspended in a foamy duck consomme flavored with chestnut, mace and orange. Somehow there was too much going on in there and the dish just didn't come together.

After that was a deconstructed Caprese salad. What was interesting about this was they placed a bowl of greens in the middle of the table, a veritable mini forest which had a scent of earth and leaves, again a play on the senses. The salad itself was interesting, but not tasty except for the heirloom tomato.

Then started the dessert courses, or rather an easing into dessert. This was by far the most dramatic of the courses and unfortunately I couldn't capture a photo that incorporated all three elements of this dish. There was a long metal rod on top of which was "Thai banana" which was some kind of globule that tasted of bananas and pecans. Then you knocked back a salty, peanut butter brittle puddle. And finally you pulled off a piece of apple cured bacon. It was sweet, salty and sour all at the same time. Overall fulfilling.

The next dish was also a savory dessert. A plate of sorbets and ice creams made of goats milk and infused with the flavor of sweet onions. The interesting thing was that the plate was placed on a pillow filled with lavender air which leaked out as the pillow deflated. The aroma wafted over the plate and almost seemed part of the dessert itself.

Then came my favorite dessert, boring as I am. Chocolate ice cream on a bed of tobacco foam, surrounded by fresh blueberries. There was also a large globule made from maple wood (yes, wood!) that we pierced with our forks to let the syrup submerge the ice cream.

And finally, the "bubble gum." A test tube filled with creme fraiche, hibiscus cream and tapioca beads that you held horizontal and sucked up. Truly yummy.

So, did the restaurant live up to the hype? Yes. Was it worth the hefty bill? Perhaps. The food was tasty in parts, but it was more about the experience itself, which felt like a homage to the art of cooking.

Why I Blog

“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some beautifully bound book. It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.”
- Carl Jung

ps. Replace "book" with "blog"

I Know What I Did This Summer

On Wednesday our condo building turned 85 years old. Our association threw a party and decorated our courtyard with lights and Japanese lanterns. Lots of people showed up including people who lived in the building in years past. I met one lady who has lived here for sixty years. Sixty years! I cant even process half this summer and she's lived in one place for sixty years. She came here as a young bride in 1949 and moved into the basement apartment. Over the years she moved upwards (monetarily and physically), finally landing in the three bedroom, windowed duplex at the top. She raised three sons and watched as the neighborhood went from majority Jewish to "ethnic" as she put it. Ah, the passage of time.
In retrospect it has been a pretty great summer, which we wrapped up last night by throwing a wonderful party. Even as work has been brutal, my personal life couldn't have been better. I made some great new friends this year and had so much fun with K, we almost feel like newly weds again. There was that trip to Hawaii, which I must write about soon (the other day, someone asked me what to do on a trip to Jamaica and it was easy enough to point to my blog post. Sixty years from now, this blog is how I will remember my life's events). I went for my first ever live tennis tournament and enjoyed it more than I can say. We had court side seats to watch Federer play Djokovich at the Cincinnati Masters tournament and I learnt so much about tennis from K that we have decided to make it a summer ritual. We got to see U2 live in concert, which for me was a dream come true. Not only was Bono every bit as charismatic as I knew he would be, the show itself was a spectacle of light, sound and special effects. Besides we watched it in Soldier Field with 50,000 screaming people around us - that in itself was a once in a lifetime experience for me.
We did all the Chicago summer things of course, going to every street festival we possibly could from the chi-chi River North fest where we ate Kobe beef burgers to the Jamaican street fest where we licked jerk sauce off our fingers. We also went to Ravinia for the first time, where my friend M set up a mini feast on a lawn table. We gorged on southern fried chicken and chocolate cake while listening to John Legend perform live in the distance (and the sweet smell of pot all around us). One glorious August evening, we went to Jazz Evening at the Museum of Contemporary Art. We ate paella and gazed upon the sunset over Lake Michigan while listening to the saxophonist play Gershwin hits. Pure bliss. There was also a lot of active stuff (since the sun is short lived, we soaked it in) from kayaking on the Chicago river (gross, not recommended) to biking through the neighborhoods of Chicago. I biked to a baking class at a Polish bakery, for frozen custard at Scooters, to the library for a ton of books that I never ended up reading and of course up and down the lake shore. I also saw several good (and bad) movies. The best of them was Inglorious Basterds which was every bit as entertaining and offensive as I would expect a Tarantino movie to be. The new Harry Potter movie was disappointing while the new Star Trek movie was exhilarating. We went to see a play at the Theater on the Lake and while the space was glorious, the play itself was too depressing for summer. A play about the Irish famine during a recession does not make me happy.
And then there was the party last night, ostensibly in honor of Eid. As I have written before, Eid for me is about food and friends and family. Eid without the smell of biriyani in the house isnt really Eid. I made goat biriyani and semiya payasam as my mother would have, but I also made stuffed leg of lamb and K made his famous tahini in honor of the diversity around our table. We celebrated Eid, Rosh Hashanah, a birthday and a wedding anniversary with this motley collection of new friends - Hindus, Christians, Jews and lapsed Muslims. If only world leaders (say Osama and Obama) could sup in peace like us, there wouldn't be any war.

And now I feel a little more ready for winter than I did last year because cliched as it sounds I feel warmed by the friendships I have woven over the summer past. I am sure we will have plenty of cosy dinners this winter and my renewed obsession with cooking means I can experiment with winter stews and roasts. Plus of course, I will actually have time to watch TV and read books since stepping outside wont be an option. I don't understand this sudden obsession with vampires in popular culture, so I will probably give New Moon and the Vampire Diaries a pass, but I may watch Jennifer's Body and the Informant. Certainly the new Sherlock Holmes movie. I have the new season of Gossip Girl and Mad Men to look forward to. Not to mention the latest iteration of the Real Housewives. There is a whole pile of books on my bedside table just waiting to be read. Groundswell for work, since I am fast becoming a social media expert, the Time Traveller's Wife, which seems more entertaining than the movie and My Life in France by Julia Child since I have to read about food at least once a day. I also have a pile of programs to go through from the Steppenwolf and the Goodman because the new theatre season is kicking off in a week or so. Perhaps this will be the year I will finally convince K to take me to the opera.

Bring it on winter, I am so ready for you.

ps. My friend D pointed out that my foodie list didn't have a single restaurant from Chicago. I did finally remember one that I would include. Arun's Thai which is a high end Thai restaurant (yes such a thing does exist). The semi-shady Uptown location belies the perfection of the food, the only option being a chef's tasting menu. Sit down and prepare for a series of sublime dishes from the most delicately constructed shrimp wonton to spicy short ribs that melt in your mouth to lemongrass flavored scallops to mango custard like you never imagined it could be. Call at least a month ahead for a table.