I didn’t miss Virginia too terribly when I lived in Chicago. I missed the people, sure, and sometimes the weather, but overall I was pretty happy being an Illinois resident, where the politics were more liberal and I could buy whiskey in Target. My NYC friends would wax poetic about the Virginia countryside and I’d be all, “Yep, it sure is pretty. ANYWAY…”

Well friends, maybe it’s the lack of green space where I live in New York, or maybe I just finally got some smarts, but on this trip I understood. The breeze! Like the beautiful green cool breath of tree angels! And the smell! Like plants and dirt—DIRT dirt, from the EARTH, not particles of trash and human feces! When the air caresses your skin in New York it always makes you feel sort of molested and vaguely dirty. When the air caresses your skin at my parents’ house it’s like the cool touch of a beautiful Scandinavian man who smells nice.

This is not my parents’ house, but it is very near their house.

I listened to birds. The dog frolicked. My dad, the original hipster, showed me his backyard chickens. We all ate burgers and inhaled fresh air and looked at green things. And then we took my mom to brunch.

The brunch was good, and I wasn’t about to make my mom cook on Mother’s Day, but normally the real pleasure for me in going home is digging through my parents’ fridge, or coaxing my mom to make one of my favorites. Deviled eggs, chicken salad, german chocolate cake—one of those things that isn’t really hard to make but that no one but Mom will ever be able to do just right. I particularly remember this chicken salad inspiring school-lunch envy

 when I was growing up. One friend of mine repeatedly bugged her own mother to make it, then when she finally did, informed her that the result “just wasn’t as good” as my mom’s. Burn.

And truly, when I made it yesterday in my little Brooklyn kitchen, the result was good—delicious, even—but it just wasn’t quite the same.

Mom’s Chicken Salad

3–4 boneless chicken breasts (Mom’s note: Rib-in is fine too, it just takes more time to pull off the bone.)
¾ cup celery (about 3 stalks), peeled and finely chopped
¾ cup sweet pickle relish
2 hard boiled eggs, finely chopped
½–¾ cup vidalia onion (about 1 med. onion), finely chopped
Salt and pepper to taste
Mayonnaise (about ½–1 cup, according to taste—don’t skimp though!)

1. Boil the chicken til done (mine took about half an hour) and shred or chop while still warm. (Mom shreds hers and this is how I recommend it.)
2. Add celery, relish, eggs, onion, salt and pepper—taste and then add more celery, relish or onion depending on what it needs.
3. Add the mayonnaise last, in ½-cup increments, until it’s the consistency you like.

“I HAVE to try that salty licorice!” I said/typed. Actually, I think it was more along the lines of “omguhhhhhhh that salty licorice! hafta try it!!!” but we’ll pretend that someone on the cusp of thirty doesn’t communicate like a fifteen year old.

For some reason the sort of licorice that is popular in Scandinavia—strong and salty, one of those things that falls very far on the “acquired taste” end of the spectrum—had been on my mind. First a friend went to Denmark and tried it. Then it came up in conversation in a bar. And then I saw this. Whenever I start to hear a lot about something weird-tasting that I haven’t tried yet, I get jealous. How come everyone had tried this but me??

A few minutes later I got a message with a name and address: Sockerbit Sweet & Swedish, 89 Christopher Street.

Sockerbit is in the West Village, near the Christopher Street stop on the 1 and next to a skincare shop where a guy from Israel will try to rub you with dead sea salt. It is wall-to-wall gummies and licorice, sold by the pound, plus a few other Scandinavian food items. You will feel this excited when you enter:

My friend and I filled a bag with candies and walked down the street, tasting them one by one, trying to find a piece of licorice that approximated the one she had tried in Copenhagen. They were salty, and mouth-puckering, but in a good way. “No, this one isn’t as strong,” she kept saying, every time we reached in the bag. Finally we both pulled out a little black wheel and bit into it. It tasted of… blue cheese. “Yep, that’s it,” she said, and made an incomprehensible face. I turned it over in my mouth for a minute, willing myself to like it. Then I spit it out. Not there yet.

I mean, I see how you might acquire the taste for it. I’m sure it escalates, like alcohol tolerance or libertarianism. And then one day you’re drunk at 10am, eating “candy” that tastes like Gorgonzola and spitting on homeless people.

Sometimes I wonder how far one should really take this acquired taste thing. I’ve used the tactic of repeatedly eating a food until it goes from “HURGH” to “I suppose this is edible” to “Hey I actually like this” with a pretty good success rate. Fennel, blue cheese, cilantro, olives, and yes, licorice: these are all things I had to learn to like but that I legitimately enjoy now. But at what point do you begin to seem delusional when you’re standing around trying to convince your friends that no REALLY, this gross-tasting thing is actually GOOD, you just haven’t REALIZED it yet? (I’m looking at you, Malort. Which, as it happens, was created by a Swedish person! Swedes, why do you want everything you ingest to punch you in the mouth?)

One day, I fear, I will just down anything you put in front of me, with no regard to whether it actually tastes good or not (all those who I have tried to convince that a shot of Jagermeister mixed with Rumpleminze “tastes like Christmas” will undoubtedly argue that this day has come and gone).

Nevertheless, I found myself craving a piece of licorice as I wrote this post. Maybe just a slightly-salty piece, more of a light smack rather than a punch in the face. Time for another trip?

Have you guys ever been on a cruise?

Before this trip I had been on exactly one, when I was twelve, to the Bahamas. I don’t remember much about it except that our room was really small and claustrophobic and I played a lot of ping pong.

So I didn’t really know what to expect this time around. In my head I guess I was sort of imagining a combination of dinner at Downton Abbey and the resort in Dirty Dancing?

And, dudes—that’s EXACTLY WHAT IT WAS LIKE. Well maybe more like the resort in Dirty Dancing combined with someone hacking up several Broadway musicals and reassembling them, human centipede-style.

I’m sorry for that, it really was the first description that came to mind.

Anyway, this, for example. This really happened:

And also this. Did I mention there was a disco on the top deck?

SO GOOD. There was also: purple carpet, a lounge singer, and bread sculptures. And not a hint of ironic posturing in sight, unlike every single stupid place in New York.

So if you have surmised that I probably drank a lot of ouzo, requested Beyoncé, danced with the cast from the musical show and in general had the best time ever, then my friends you are excellent surmisers.

IIIII KNOW. I hate me too. I honestly can’t fathom how I got so lucky.

About two weeks before I took this picture I was offered a press trip to Athens, to embark on a cruise that sailed from the port of Piraeus through the Greek islands and to several ports in Turkey. I got a forwarded e-mail from the assistant editor at midnight, a long chain of forwarded itineraries with the subject, “Wanna go?”

You will recall that I am a “Web Editorial Assistant,” a.k.a. intern, a.k.a. not exactly top on the list of people that usually travel. Uhhhhhhh yes. Yes, I want to go.

Ya’ll. Are you aware that this is some people’s job? To travel places where they are shown around and treated like VIPs, given private tours and free spa treatments and taken to dinner every night where the chef brings out surprise plates of lobsters?

Perhaps that makes it sound sleazy, that these people are basically getting bribed to write nice things. Maybe they are! Who cares! I got free shiatsu! And a towel in the shape of an animal in my room every night!

Really, though, I have never met a friendlier, smarter, more absurdly well-traveled group of people. (One of the journalists told me about a cruise she took to Antarctica. Antarctica! Antarctica.)

This picture is the opposite of Antarctica.

Anyway, the point of all this is food, of course: I ate a lot of good stuff. Too much for one post. More to come.

I love seeing all these blogs that I’ve enjoyed reading for so long be so stoked to be nominated for the SAVEUR Best Food Blog Awards. It makes me feel that the eyeball-numbing task of looking at thousands of food blogs over the course of several days was worth it. I would love to share with you guys some of the more amusing entries, but I am a consummate professional, so I will just encourage you to go register and vote so that all my clicking through horrifying rainbow-colored St. Patrick’s day baking catastrophes was not for nothing.

So I’ve been doing a bit of cocktail research for work lately (i.e. drinking a lot of cocktails – tough life, I know). I love a fancy cocktail – I’m totally a sucker for the kind of bars where you order a drink and then have to wait for 20 minutes while they rinse your glass with walnut liqueur and add homemade bitters with an eyedropper.

HOWEVER. Making a drink at home is a different story. I want something simpler, something that isn’t too strong and doesn’t require lots of expensive ingredients. I love Chartreuse and St. Germain as much as anyone else, but mama needs her money for rent. Also mama doesn’t necessarily want to be half in the bag before dinner. For these reasons, and also because it makes me look sophisticated, I keep a bottle of Campari around: its bitter flavor is a key note in a lot of classic drinks, and though it’s not cheap, a $35-ish bottle will last forever. Campari’s somewhat medicinal taste can be off-putting for some people (I myself am not a huge fan of the negroni), but here it’s perfectly balanced with grapefruit juice and sparkling water – sweet but not cloyingly so, bitter but not overwhelming. And pink! Springtime in your mouth!

I’m not aware of this drink having a name, so here are some of the dumbass names I made up for it in the process of writing this post:
Arno
Ponte Vecchio
Firenze
Piacere

Clearly being clever is not my strong suit, so I think I’ll just go with “Campari and grapefruit with a splash of soda.”

The Epic Live-Tweeting of Last Night’s Park Slope Co-op Meeting

“I’m Making Cook’s Illustrated Beef Stew (Prep time: 29 hours)!”



Pete Wells eats at Shake Shack and also says, Meh.

“To answer two obvious questions right away: Yes, I would give stars to a hamburger stand. No, probably not four stars.”

To be fair, I have only been to Shake Shack once, but there seemed to be nothing there that Mikey’s or Bareburger didn’t do equally well or better.

Obviously I’ve been stuffing my face since I arrived. TAKING A BITE FROM THE BIG APPLE, AMIRIGHT? A-hahahaha. That’s why you guys hang out with me.

Don’t worry, I have been alienating everyone by providing a running commentary of “In CHICAGO, there’s this bar just like this except the drinks are cheaper,” and “Oh, this reminds me of this dinner I had in CHICAGO,” and “did I tell you about how my friend in CHICAGO [insert story here which is of no interest to anyone]?”

This is all to hide the fact that I am a traitor and already a little bit in love with New York, despite the fact that you can’t buy wine in the grocery store and it took me almost two hours to get home on the subway the other night. My guilty jewelry purchase for the wife I’m cheating on, if you will.

Anyway. This is what I’ve eaten:

Shake shack (It was good, but I prefer this place. Or of course Edzo’s).
Bagels. Bagellllllllllls.
3 free lunches from the Saveur test kitchen.
Dinner at the rooftop Birreria at Eataly (“Braised King Oyster mushrooms with broccoli rabe fett’unta, poached egg and Grana Padano.” Fucking Mario Batali.)
A stolen kumquat at Eataly.
An aviation at the Flatiron Lounge. (Disappointing. I compared it to these.)
A fantastic brunch at Cookshop.
Everything there is to sample at Chelsea Market, after I lucked out and got a freelance gig at a place upstairs.
A lot of Indian food, falafel, wine, homemade grilled cheese, and other assorted goodies thanks to my generous and wonderful NYC and visiting-NYC friends.

That’s my attempt at reining it in. I am a monster.