I almost want to delete Christiane Amanpour, as she’s the only one without green eyes… Is that genocide?
Rufus Wainwright sat in front of Marina Abramović for 8 minutes on March 14th. Photo by Marco Anelli.
Agnes Gund (MoMA president, 1991 - 2002) sat in front of Marina Abramović for 11 minutes on April 14th.
Christiane Amanpour sat in front of Marina Abramović for 2 minutes on April 17th. Photo by Marco Anelli.
Isabelle Huppert sat in front of Marina Abramović for 16 minutes on April 25th. Photo by Marco Anelli.
Antony sat in front of Marina Abramović for 8 minutes on April 25th. Photo by Marco Anelli.
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-4-25) →
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
This post right here is exactly why I adore Emily Gould as much as I adore Emily Gould. It’s not why I think she is our generational mouthpiece (for that, see this), but it’s why I adore her, and why you should too.
Laurie Colwin’s creamed spinach with jalapeno peppers, above, is the best thing I have ever cooked.
Everyone who has actually tried to cook from Home Cooking and More Home Cooking reports that Colwin’s wild enthusiasm for her favorite foods doesn’t always translate to happy cooking results — something that I had suspected early on in Home Cooking, when Colwin tries to convince the reader to incorporate fermented black beans into yam cakes. And as if her own idiosyncratic palate wasn’t enough of a hindrance, Colwin was writing these celebrations of home cooking during the fat-phobic 1980s, and was also at some point was told by a doctor to avoid salt (SALT!) entirely, a proscription that she seems to have enforced on her guests.
All that being said, though: no one has ever written more contagiously about her passion for food and cooking. Colwin’s readers typically feel that they have no choice but to attempt her recipes, even if they suspect that the results might be disastrous. After all, some of Colwin’s funniest and best essays — “Repulsive Dinners: A Memoir” and “Stuffed Breast of Veal: A Bad Idea” among them — are written less in the triumphalist “I ate such a delicious thing, let me evoke that experience for you” mode that can, in large doses, be the most grating form of food writing, and more in the spirit of living and learning. This is why some people don’t love, say, Amanda Hesser — so much food writing is in the unleavened “I made something so delicious,” mode, which conveys little of the sense that one’s cooking style is refined via trial and grievous, hilarious error. ( I love Amanda Hesser, triumphalist though she may be, especially the recipe for lemon sablés in Cooking for Mr. Latte.)
And on that note, actually, let me return to the ostensible topic of this post, which is, I made something so delicious.
I did tweak the original recipe slightly; it calls for frozen spinach and evaporated milk and buttered bread crumbs, and I used fresh spinach, half and half, and panko. The first two substitutions were probably unnecessary— though there is something mossy and dank about frozen spinach that I don’t love, I warmed to the idea of it at some point during the half hour that Ruth and I spent cleaning and draining and chopping and re-draining the completely bonkers amount of fresh spinach — about 8 pounds! — that works out to be equivalent to the amount in a 10 oz. package of frozen. Probably a Cook’s Illustrated-style test kitchen would conclude that there’s only a whisper of difference in the finished product, and you save five or six bucks by using frozen. The difference between evaporated milk and half and half also seems likely to be indistinguishable in a casserole. But panko browns to a delicate crunchy crisp and if you don’t have stale homemade bread lying around ready to be crumbed in the food processor, it’s a much better alternative than storebought bread crumbs.
Everything else, though, is exactly as Colwin described: gently cooking four tablespoons of butter and flour together, being careful not to let the mixture brown, then adding diced onion and garlic, then the cup of reserved spinach-water the 1/2 cup of evaporated milk or half and half, then 6 oz of cubed monterey jack and a can of diced jalapenos (I used Hatch brand fire-roasted ones, which claim to be “hot” but are not in the slightest and for this recipe that’s just fine). At this point you have something that would be really great to dip tortilla chips into.
Then you add the spinach and adjust the seasoning (we added a bit of lemon zest to cut the richness slightly), turn it into a buttered gratin dish, top it with the panko, dot with slivers of butter and bake it — Colwin says for 45 minutes at 300 but we had the oven around 350 because we were simultaneously roasting new potatoes in the fat that had dripped off a slow-roasted chicken, and that worked fine.
The resulting dish is creamy but not cloying; something about it — maybe the jalapenos — makes it possible, despite its richness, to eat in large quantities. It would be a popularity-sealing thing to bring to a potluck or an ideal dish to make for someone who is sad or sick and has temporarily lost interest in food.
M.I.A. — Born Free
Few things make me more ecstatic than new M.I.A.
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-4-18) →
- Joanna Newsom (52)
- Final Fantasy (29)
- Yeah Yeah Yeahs (17)
- Antony and the Johnsons (13)
- Grizzly Bear (11)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
(via beastlybrunette)
Sick-Boy Casserole.
I had a lively discussion with my co-worker V yesterday about the inherent lameness of casseroles after he got offended when I dismissed his lunch as “disgusting.” The brownish-yellow pasta-chicken-Velveeta confection (seemingly proliferating in culture in its Gladware container) looked like a strange combination of a forgotten freshmen biology experiment and the undersea palace in The Little Mermaid.
“I don’t mean ‘disgusting’- disgusting,” I went on. “Just disgusting in that it’s such a lame middle-American concept that tossing some protein into cheese-smothered carbs and shoving it into an oven on 350 equals a meal.”
“It’s so filling, though! And yum!!!” was his argument, as he Hoovered another forkful.
Conversation of food that looks like vomit notwithstanding, I was feeling shitty yesterday. The bipolar weather, wearing sweaters instead of jackets, and mingling with a cadre of new bacteria during Toledo’s feeble attempt at a gallery hop probably all contributed to my cold; as, I’m sure, did the fact that I’d been eating restaurant food (only some of it good) almost exclusively for the last six days; and also, my mind was still reeling from the odd, junior high coldstare I received at a party on Saturday, from one of the most vacuous people I’ve ever known.
And I was hungry.
Long story short: I was ready to end my day-long fast of kombucha and zinc, and make something on my own, in my own kitchen for a change. Something warm and familiar and mushy. Something not necessarily “healthy,” but maybe just healthy for my weird mood. But most importantly!: something that would not require me to change out of my drawstring pants or leave the house. Something like a casserole!
After turning my Snob Dial down to level 2 and braving chaos that is our pantry, I emerged with a box of penne, a jar of organic roasted garlic tomato sauce, and a bag of plastic shredded mozzarella I filched from my parents house a few weeks ago, when I was exceptionally poor and grocery shopping out of their fridge (mind you, I am still exceptionally poor and continue to grocery shop out of their fridge).
As I put the penne on the stove, I remembered the huge, unopened, 10lb bag of cruciferae languishing the freezer, purchased during a trip to Costco in which I was feeling especially virtuous. I cut it open, weeded out some broccoli and a handful of julienned yellow carrots, tossing them into the boiling pasta when it was about a minute away from being done. A minute later, I strained it all, tossed it into a bowl with the tomato sauce and mozzarella, and thought to myself, “Man, some ricotta would really come in handy right now!” There was no ricotta to be found. However, there was a packet of cream cheese I made the horrible mistake of freezing and thawing, only to discover that thawed cream cheese turns into this crumbly, liquid mass that kind of resembles — hey!!!! I tossed in half a packet of bad cream cheese, stirred everything around, decanted it into oven safe Pyrex, and chucked the whole thing into the oven.
I lingered in the kitchen while the casserole baked, as my oven is absolutely not to be trusted when left to its own devices. I took a handful of stray penne from the colander, and one by one, sopped up the remaining tomato sauce in its pan; the whole while thinking about how disgusting the monstrosity in the oven was going to taste. “Still,” I thought, “it does feel nice to be cooking for myself.”
The moment of truth came, and I was astonished to find that the casserole was actually kind of delicious in the trashiest, most anti-epicurean way possible. The culinary equivalent of watching a Bad Girls Club marathon in your parents’ basement on Thanksgiving Day, really. I anointed my casserole with parmesan and red pepper flakes and ate it straight out of the pan while watching an HBO show on DVD that I’d rather not discuss here, congratulating myself with every bite, and feeling better than anyone in my delicate condition has any right to feel.
Yoskay Yamamoto, My Dumb Luck (2009). (via iheartmyart)
Jules de Balincourt, Out of the Darkness and Into the Light (2009 - 10).
On view right now @ Deitch.
