Category Archives: Features

Gustatory Oddities from the Animal Kingdom

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aye aye

We spend a lot of time here at PitchKnives thinking about the peculiar feeding habits of one particular species, but what about all the other eaters out there? This was the question that came to me when Jason sent me this pretty awesome video about aye ayes. Aye ayes are a kind of lemur with a wicked-looking middle finger/ultimate grub-hunting tool. Seriously, just watch the video.

caecilian

Mom! We’re hungry!

But this doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of some of the weird animal noshing that’s happening out there. Take the caecilian, for instance, a wormy-looking amphibian that lives in South America and Africa. Since the mother caecilians don’t want to leave their young to look for food, the young just strip the skin off their mom with special fangs and subsist on it. And then she regenerates it so they can do it again. So happy almost-Mothers Day, you lucky ladies out there! At least your babies (probably) did not repeatedly flay you and feast on the remains.

Or what about the male nursery web spider who meticulously gift-wraps a tasty insect in his silk in order to present it to a potential mate? It’s kind of like one of those Japanese gift melons that costs thousands of dollars. The really desperate male spiders (i.e. jerks) will even wrap up pebbles to try to fool the female spiders into mating. The female nursery web spider’s favorite song is the TLC song “No Scrubs.” Continue reading →

Where Did I Put My Farro Salad Knick Knacks?: A Blue Apron Experiment

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chilaquilesIf you’ve never heard of Blue Apron, you have either been living under a rock or you like cooking so much that it has never occurred to you to outsource your grocery shopping and meal planning to someone else. I was one (or possibly the other) until very recently, when my friend Monisha (note: she is infinitely hipper than me) hooked me up with a free trial. Here’s the way it works: subscribers get a weekly box of ingredients that they use to follow three prescribed recipes for two-person dinners. (There’s also a family plan that is for four people, two or four times per week.) And when I say they send you the ingredients, I mean ALL the ingredients, right down to itty-bitty bags of pre-measured spices and toppings that they label “knick knacks.”

knick knacksThe week of my free test run I chose the vegetarian box (obvs), which happened to be farro and sumac-roasted sweet potato salad, poblano chilaquiles topped with avocado and an egg, and roasted butternut squash with stewed white beans and gremolata. (I know, right? If you don’t have to look any of those words up, hats off to you.) I will admit that, in advance of the box’s arrival, I was a wee bit skeptical, mostly because it is in my nature to be skeptical.

But I am here to inform you that it was actually kind of awesome. First, there’s the oooh-and-ahhh Christmas present feel of opening a big box of interesting stuff. Second, it made me consider cooking recipes that were outside my typical repertoire. Third, there is a mindless pleasure in following a set of beautifully written directions, and Blue Apron must know this, because the recipe cards are like the supermodels of the recipe card population. Continue reading →

How to Pretend to be Tamar Adler (Part II)

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cauliflower pastaAnd so the saga continued. And this time, I was determined to step it up a notch.

Attempt 3: A Cabbage with a College Education
What’s not to love about a vegetable that looks like a brain? So I decided to cook up some cauliflower, Tamar-style. She’s an advocate for boiling vegetables rather than steaming them (crisper is not always better), so I sawed up about half a head and dropped it in a pot of salty boiling water. And since I hadn’t done so well at thinking ahead up to this point, I also put the rest of the cauliflower (with some whole cloves of garlic) and some sweet potatoes in a 425 degree oven to roast.

When the boiling cauliflower was nice and tender, I ladled it out with a slotted spoon, and then used the same pot of water to cook some penne pasta. Then I mashed up the cauliflower with a generous handful of Parmesan cheese, some freshly ground pepper and the roasted garlic from the oven.  I added some of the starchy pasta water to turn to all into a sauce right before I drained the pasta. I don’t like to brag, but I think I got some extra points for tapping into Tamar’s fresh herb enthusiasm and topping it all with a bunch of fresh dill before serving.

The results were pretty good, simple but tasty. The components of the sauce did not combine quite as smoothly as I wanted them to, but no one can really complain about a big clump of melted cheese.
Tamar Score: 7

Attempt 4: It’s Not Over ‘Til the Skinny Yam Sings Continue reading →

How to Pretend to be Tamar Adler (Part I)

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tamar sandwichFrequent readers of the blog already know about my obsession with Tamar Adler and her book. An Everlasting Meal is not a cookbook exactly; it’s more a string of philosophies about how to treat food. Now take whatever you’re imagining and make it not pretentious or insufferable, and you’ll pretty much have it. Anyway, I was so in the thrall of this book that I decided to try to be Tamar for a few days (we’re on a first name basis, obviously), focusing mostly on her chapter on vegetables, “How to Stride Ahead.” Here are the results:

Attempt 1: The Agony and the Ecstasy of Vegetable Retrieval
Tamar is a big proponent of buying a ton of vegetables on one day of the week and cooking them all at once. That way, you’re already a step ahead for the rest of the week’s cooking. This sounded lovely and elegant, and since we had a big ol’ shipment of CSA vegetables coming one Saturday, I thought I had this locked down.

Our winter CSA is a little different than the regular season. Instead of picking it up every week, you get a gigantic box of stored vegetables and fruit once a month. It’s great, except that Jason and I have somehow messed it up every single time: we’re out of town or we’re busy, and we have to impose upon friends and neighbors and bribe them with vegetables to make it happen. This time, though, we were ready. We went to visit some friends and their new baby, not too far from our place, with plans to pick up the box on the way home. But then the baby was supernaturally cute, and we were running late. And then, even though we’ve both lived in NYC for too long, we managed to get lost on the walk to the subway. And then the next train was delayed. And then Jason ran up the stairs to get in a cab and rescue the vegetables, but since I wasn’t sure if he would be successful, I stayed on the train and sprinted a dozen blocks in snow boots to try to get them, too. But there he was, vegetables saved in the nick of time.

I was so exhausted after this debacle that I decided not to cook the vegetables that day, and instead got drunk and ate nachos at 11 p.m. Jason says we should get a high score for effort, but I know the truth.
Tamar Score: 2 out of a possible 10

Attempt 2: No Sandwich is a Bad Sandwich Continue reading →

Pizza Party!: A Contest and Ode to Optimism

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pizzapartyYesterday, my boss said, “I declare today a pizza day,” and my mood instantly improved.

Even people who have fairly neutral feelings about pizza as a food item have to admit that there’s a mystical quality to the phrase “pizza party.” Think of the power those words held over you and your classmates in elementary school. In third grade, my teacher Mrs. Medwid made an announcement one day that my mom (My mom! The secrets that woman could keep…) was going to bring in pizza, and we were going to watch Return to Snowy River on videocassette for the rest of the afternoon instead of doing stupid math homework.  It was maybe one of the best things that had ever happened to me. I don’t think it was even a reward for anything in particular; I think Mrs. Medwid was just awesome and thought we deserved a pizza. I still think of that day sometimes when the world feels harsh.

Look, everybody, winter is tough. The days are short, and the cold winds blow, and a lot of people are feeling down. So let’s bring a little levity to the blog in the form of pizza party anecdotes. Send your best pizza party story to submissions@pitchknives.com by next Friday, January 30. I will post my favorites here, and the winner will receive a pizza-related prize specially devised by me. Now go eat a slice.

I Want to Be Alone with My Celery Loaf

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I'll Have What She's HavingWas it just my imagination or was there a little bit of Hollywood at the launch of Rebecca Harrington’s “celebrity diet journalism” book I’ll Have What She’s Having? There were definitely some air kisses being thrown about. There was definitely more blonde hair dye than I typically see in Dumbo. And I’m not going to lie; there were definitely some people there who looked like they hadn’t had a decent sandwich in a while.

But lest we feel too out of place (for, it’s true, we don’t typically spend much time thinking about dieting here at Pitchknives), the charming Ms. Harrington immediately put us at ease by explaining why she embarked on the project of trying a bunch of weirdo celebrity diets. It was not because she wanted to look like Marilyn Monroe. It was because she was perusing a website about William Howard Taft’s possible sleep apnea (naturally enough), and she happened upon his diet regimen from 1905, which called for boiled fish for breakfast, mutton for lunch and a lamb chop for dinner. That, she thought, was too weird not to try.

Subsequently, she embraced all kinds of other curious culinary schemes of the rich and famous, like Karl Lagerfeld’s endless cans of Diet Coke and Elizabeth Taylor’s tuna salad recipe. (In case you want to tuna it up like Liz: “First you take a can of tuna. Then you take tomato paste. Then you take a grapefruit…” at which point, sorry, the entire audience was gagging too loud for me to hear the rest of the recipe.) Some items were not as bad as she anticipated, like Marilyn Monroe’s raw eggs in milk: “Not that bad. Just like bad eggnog.”  But particularly repulsive to Harrington was Greta Garbo’s celery loaf recipe (“Why? Just…why?”), and so free samples of this gem had been prepared for the audience. Continue reading →

Fruitcake Memories

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fruitcakeIt saddens me to think that fruitcake has fallen from such great heights. In medieval Europe, it was the epitome of luxury, chock full of the spices and nuts and dried fruit that could only be imported, for a hefty price, from the mystical Far East. A perfect birthday cake for Jesus, I guess. But in more recent days, it has become less a Christmas treat than a punch line. Here is a famous fruitcake joke: “The worst Christmas gift is fruitcake. There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other, year after year.” Johnny Carson said that on The Tonight Show, and it’s been downhill for fruitcake ever since.

I will admit that fruitcake, the actual foodstuff, has never made much of an impression on me. I don’t make fruitcake as a Christmas tradition and the few times I’ve eaten it during the holiday season have been less than memorable. But fruitcake as an idea…well, that’s a completely different story.

There are two beloved, imagined fruitcakes in my life. One is from the Truman Capote short story, “A Christmas Memory.” I force Jason to listen to me read this at least once every Christmas season, and out of kindness, he pretends that I’m going to make it to the end each time without crying. (I really am very good at doing the voice of Mr. Haha Jones, by the way). If you haven’t read the story, you should stop reading this right now and follow the link above and read the story already.

Less of a heartbreaker but no less dear to me is a memory that comes from Christmases more distantly past. Continue reading →

That Smell: Crosswords and Cantonese Party Tricks

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hong kong

Hong Kong: Smells delicious!

Quick, give me an eight-letter English word that means “smells good.” If you instantaneously came up with “fragrant” or “aromatic,” then you’re probably very good at crossword puzzles. But if you didn’t, you shouldn’t feel bad, because English is relatively poor in smell words. Plenty of days probably pass without you using the word “fragrant,” but apparently, Cantonese-speaking people drop their equivalent word, heung, into conversation all the time (thus, Hong Kong, or “good-smelling harbor”) to say nothing of their negative smell words, which range from meaning “the ammoniacal smell of urine” to “the rancid smell of old grain.” Any way you cut it, there’s just no easy way to fit those into an English crossword.

If you’re wondering where I’m getting these little chestnuts, it’s my mom’s fault. She gave me the fascinating book The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu by Dan Jurafsky, and now I’m at risk of becoming the person at a party who insists on telling everyone the Cantonese word for the smell of burnt hair. (It’s lou.)

Initially, the section on our lack of smell words frustrated me. English (arguably) has more words than any other language! How could we have overlooked smell words? And come on, Jurafsky, we have plenty of taste words, and it’s so hard to differentiate between taste and smell. And yet, I see his point; there aren’t many words devoted solely to smell the way there are words devoted solely to taste. That is, you can’t tell how sweet something is from its smell, or I’d probably be better at baking.

We’re not alone in this, by the way; most languages are poor in smell words. Continue reading →

Umami and the Apple in the Tomato Slayer’s Eye

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oscarmushroom

“Stop embarrassing yourself.”

We have made it through an entire tomato season having only woken up a handful of times to a mauled tomato on the living room floor. This is progress. I think the progress is mostly due to the habit we’ve developed of hiding our tomatoes like Easter eggs rather than any real rehabilitation on the part of Oscar (a.k.a. The Tomato Slayer). But progress nonetheless.

The other day, while Oscar was busy seducing the top of a soy sauce bottle, I hatched a new theory about his unnatural tomato love. Maybe he is so nuts about them because of umami, that mysterious fifth taste that English has hard time capturing in words. Most people say it corresponds to savory, the taste of meat and MSG and ketchup (and…tomatoes?!) A quick Google search had me feeling smug; there were multiple reports of carnivorous housecats attacking non-meat items that are rich in that umami taste, particularly mushrooms. Oscar has never shown a particular taste for mushrooms, even the ones that I grew on my windowsill, but he does have a discriminating palate, so I decided to rehydrate one of our fancy Chinese black mushrooms and run a little experiment. Perhaps I had finally plumbed the secrets of the Tomato Slayer’s inner workings.

But the response was… Continue reading →

Reasons I Would Have Made a Lousy 1950s Cook

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50s cookThe other day, I happened upon this little horror show of an article, about the long-running column, “Can this Marriage Be Saved?” in Ladies Home Journal. The 1950s issues of the column were real beauties, mostly counseling women that it was their fault when their husbands acted like jerks. (If you don’t find the advice in the old articles disturbing, just read the comments, since clearly they’re written by your kind of people.) Anyway, I later found this academic article from the Journal of Social History, about what 1950s cookbooks have to say about the women who read them. The author, Jessamyn Neuhaus, is careful to point out that there’s a big difference between what these cookbooks suggest and how those suggestions were received, and, in fact, part of her argument is that 1950s housewives were probably more subversive than most people give them credit for. Even so, it’s hard not to read some of these lines and cringe, and I think it’s fair to say that whoever wrote these cookbooks probably wouldn’t be too impressed with my performance in the kitchen. Here’s why:

1.  I do not demonstrate adequate fondness for Jell-O.
limecheesesaladNothing against Jell-O Jigglers, which I always found kind of awesome, but these cookbooks would have you believe that you could survive on Jell-O alone. Neuhaus calls it a “fantasy food” that could be transformed into anything, and believe me, they tried. Tuna and Jell-O Pie, anyone? Jellied Tomato Refresher? Or how about the delicious Lime Cheese Salad, which involved putting lime Jell-O and cottage cheese into a mold and then filling the center with seafood salad?!

2. I have never felt the desire to throw a themed dinner party.
Apparently, 1950s cookbook authors thought it was a scream to stage things like a “Hawaiian company dinner” or a neighborhood party where “everyone on the block is dressed for the hoe-down,” (though I would sort of like to witness the bafflement on my West Indian neighbors faces if I really tried to sell that hoedown idea). I think the closest I got to a themed dinner party was in my early twenties when my college boyfriend threw a Food that Will Get You Drunk party, Continue reading →