As soon as I publicly announced my New Year’s blogolutions, it was only a matter of time before I just as publicly failed to follow up on any of them. If you had your money on week one in the When Does Maya Follow Through pool, you wouldn’t have been throwing it away—I do like to procrastinate.
I’d say it’s better late than never, but even this first installment in my cookbook chronicles is kind of a cheat—I made this dish in 2011.
One of my favorite Twitter hashtags is #firstworldproblems. For the Twitter uninitiated, it’s typically used when someone is complaining about bourgeois or tedious day-to-day issues that are not actually problems, a self-effacing nod to having the good life. So when I say that I needed a vacation from my vacation, I hereby acknowledge the ridiculousness of the statement. Nonetheless, it was true. After ten days of non-stop travel (during half of those one or both of us were sick), Ben and I needed a way to recover from our trip to London. We needed to rest. Luckily, I’d anticipated this happening, and booked a weekend stay at the Inn at Cedar Falls for the weekend after we’d return home.
This? It’s the opposite of the near panic attack I had on an over-crowded, over-heated Picadilly line where I accidentally stepped on a woman’s foot before hitting her head with my bag. And, happily, it’s only about an hour and a half from my house. In recent experiences, a trip to the destinations within the Hocking Hills of Southeast Ohio can seem like a trip to Disney World, with lines of crying children and gossipy octogenarians. And to be honest, Cedar Falls (which incidentally, has no cedars nearby), was no different.
My first cultural food shock came in the form of fish sauce. Cambodian cuisine and I were already on shaky grounds (based on the dubious absence of cheese) when I passed a fish sauce factory. My olfactory senses singed for hours; one simple, clear and well-reasoned thought resonated: There is no possible way that anyone in their right mind would eat the stuff.
It didn’t take long for me to adapt to the cuisine and its beloved fish sauce (which tastes infinitely better than it smells). By the end of the trip, I’d almost forgotten about dairy products. Almost.
While it’s acceptable to (temporarily) question other cuisines, my own American-bred eating habits have never come under fire. Until my recent trip to England, when my choice of ordering bacon, of all things, proved to be somewhat of a cultural snafu.
It’s not like I was in Israel or something. I was in Patisserie Valerie in Leeds. They had bacon on the menu. It turns out that it wasn’t the ordering of a side of bacon that gave my server pause. It was that I ordered it to accompany a scone. Sweet and savory. “Are you sure?” she asked in amazement. In my years of eating (and ordering way too much), I’ve never actually caused the waitstaff to openly question my choices. Both the server and I were equally confused. “Yes, I want the bacon and the scone.” She shrugged and processed my weirdo order.
After ten minutes sandwiched between all of London and her tourists in Camden Market, I realized that in at least one way, living in the Midwest is a luxury. Space. We spent an afternoon getting caught in the current of foot traffic, wandering the stalls without stopping to look closely at anything designed to attract our attention along the way. To stop would mean to be run over, or to lose a member of our party. We’d gone to Camden to meet up with Sarah, Ben’s childhood friend, and we’d brought Elen, our London hostess along with us. With only a cup of coffee as our nourishment for the day, we were starving. While the food stalls in the market were tempting, we let Sarah talk us into visiting her favorite nearby pizza place. (The crowds helped persuade us, as did the underlying fear that any food near a tourist site was likely to be crap.)
In what was to become a tradition in our London dining experience, our initial goal (in this case, pizza) was just out of reach. (This happened several times during the trip; we’d get to a bistro that a friend recommended and find that the kitchen had closed seconds prior to our arrival, or we’d arrive at our destination restaurant to learn that they could only seat us at their second location, thirty minutes away.) Camden Bar and Kitchen had changed menus and its beloved stone-baked pizzas weren’t available for brunch on Sundays. Our server—who did not approve of this very recent change in operations—tried to talk the kitchen into serving us pizzas, to no avail. Brunch it would be.
You can’t go home. That sounds so final, so bitter. Sometimes, you can’t go home. Or, to be more on point, sometimes home changes to a point where you don’t even recognize it. In this case, home isn’t even home. It is, instead, the place I spent most of my time in my temporary home of London, during the summer of 2000: Mezzo. A restaurant. I’ve written about it before. I’ve waxed poetically about the place to anyone who will listen, and if Facebook could somehow chronicle a Timeline for my mind (a terrifying concept), many Life Events would be connected to the place.
I knew that in the eleven years since I’d worked at the Soho restaurant, things had changed. For one, Mezzo had become Meza, and the place had changed ownership. Despite this knowledge, I couldn’t not visit it in my recent trip to London. On the first night in the city, I showed up on the doorstep of the restaurant, sans reservations and sans club attire. My super-duper fancy dining establishment had turned from the place that introduced me to mis en place and fruits de mer to what was essentially a club, a place that as a civilian, I would never enter. Instead, I was a woman on a mission: to touch base, at least emotionally, with twenty-one year-old me.
Once we walked in and looked at the menu, I had to have a stern conversation with myself: absolutely nothing would be the same and I could either enjoy my dining experience or lament the changes. The former would be way more interesting for my dining companions, so I tried to keep my commentary to a minimum. (This, of course, did not stop me from informing my first-day-on-the-job server that I once was in her shoes, but that on my first day, the building was on fire.) (True story.) (I’m sure that she didn’t care.) (I’ve turned into one of those people, the ones who show you pictures of their pets or grandchildren or announce that in this very building, eleven years ago, I ate a bowl of crème bruûlée in a stall in the server’s restroom so that the security guards wouldn’t see me stealing from the company.)
I seem to be doing it again. Right here.
I may not have written much during the past few months, but I have had plenty of good food—and become completely obsessed with posting snapshots of said food on Instagram. To the photographic evidence!
1. Bronx pork-a-palooza.
In October, I capped off a wholesome trip to the Bronx Zoo with the amazing — and decidedly unwholesome — lechón at El Nuevo Bohío. The crackling skin alone made the train ride uptown worthwhile.
I can’t say I’m sad to see the back of 2011. It was a year of upheaval and major life change—for the most part, the events of the past twelve months are not ones I hope to have repeated anytime soon. There were positives, too, of course, but my personal drama (and, to be honest, my tendency to wallow in the negative) obscured much of that: The bust-up of a nine-year relationship isn’t easy, no matter how you cut it. It was tough to think straight through the fallout, let alone write through it. Jill picked up the slack admirably, but our little blog here still suffered for my lack of focus.
But a new year, a new start, and all that nonsense.
Take a moment from your not-quite-last-minute Christmas shopping to peruse some pictures from my day in Cambridge. And if you find yourself wondering what you can give your favorite food blog (oh please, let it be us!) for Christmas, a suggested list is below.
Cambridge had their Christmas decorations up in October. (In comparison, the Newark airport was just putting up their pink and green Christmas balloons sixteen days ago.) It seems that the British are serious about the holiday.
When Ben and I planned our itinerary for the England trip this fall, most of our destinations had to do with the people we’d see. London had Elen, Sam and Sarah; Leeds was home to his sister Maria and Cambridge had Ben’s college roommate, Nate. The entire trip was a perfect vehicle to catch up with folks we hadn’t seen in ages.
While seeing Nate was the purpose of our one-day visit to Cambridge, we found ourselves wishing we’d scheduled more time to see the city, itself. It was pure joy to see history coinciding with every day life. Just one walk through made me want to spend days exploring every college, every path along the canal and, of course, every restaurant on its stone streets. (Stay tuned for a picture-only post of the sights of Cambridge.)
I’ve got a hand-me-down dining room table in my living room that goes unused about 360 days a year. Shoved in the window, behind the couch, the table holds a plant and is the official location for my household’s Thrift Store Pile. I frequently try to envision the room without the table and its accompanying hutch and credenza that my family dumped into my house days after I signed the mortgage papers. In my imagination, the space is airy and brighter. It’s lovely. For ages, I couldn’t emotionally part with the set; it was Granny’s. It keeps me close to her. But in the past few years, I’ve realized that it’s not actually my Great Grandmother, it’s just her stuff. It’s not going to make her come alive in my house; in reality, I can’t even remember the pieces in her house. (I do, however, remember a doll toilet paper cover in her powder room quite vividly.) These days, it’s not a faux connection with the dead that keeps the dining room set in my house. Instead, it’s the idea of no giant table at all. With three leaves, the table can hold close to 14 people. And there may be nothing I love more than shoving one-too-many people in my living room for cozy dinner parties. While these gatherings are few and far between, they’re frequent enough to keep the table.
In what’s becoming something of a November tradition, I threw a soiree shortly after Thanksgiving. Borrowing from a friend of Maya’s, I loosely termed it “Friendsgiving.” I’d cook a turkey dinner that would be outside of the constraints of family Thanksgiving. My inspiration with a list of recipes compiled by Saveur. As is my habit when cooking for large parties, I made sure that each menu item was something I’d never made before and that I’d employ at least one or two new techniques. Just to add a little pressure to the event. (Why make it easy?)
