Turkey After Birth
February 6, 2015
I have to warn you that while this is more or less a conventional food blog, I’m going to be talking to you about placentaphogy before I give you my rendition of Muhammara, the Turkish red pepper and walnut dip my son and I ate in Istanbul last month. Muhammara blows humus back to the Middle Ages. But don’t worry. Muhammara is vegan, and if it means you’ll keep reading, I’ll reveal, right here from the outset, that I never went through with my faint-hearted plan to consume my children’s afterbirths.
Though would you believe during my first pregnancy, I was one of those expectant women weighing its merits, considering either braising the endocrine organ with fortified wine, or desiccating and pulverizing it into a shelf-stable supplement powder. Either method would have provided me with no-second-chances custom nutrients, or so the alternative San Francisco maternity journal that printed the article I read claimed.
The more compelling in-favor argument that struck this home-birthing mother-to-be, bandied about along with other theories of what constituted natural at the Thursday evening Noe Valley birthing class my Balinese husband and I, the only heterosexual married couple in the class, attended was this: humans are just about the only land mammals who don’t eat their placentas.
“Exactly, Karen,” my otherwise open-minded but thoroughly grossed out mother rebutted over the phone when I solicited her opinion. “Humans are the only land mammals who do not eat their placentas.”
As it turned out I was let off this afterbirth hook by the gods almighty because Read more…
RECIPE Turkish Walnut and Red Pepper Dip
TAGS Dips and Sauces, Vegan, Vegetarian
COMMENTS 7 comments.
The Big Apple, My Little Grape
November 15, 2014My daughter moved far away last month, and since I dropped her off at LAX, I keep thinking of her as a piece of fruit. A little grape, to be specific.
I mean, the weekend after she left New York we did a dual mother/daughter retreat in Santa Barbara and bought some tiny Thompson organic grapes at the farmer’s market. Could that be it?
I asked a writer friend, who got no closer than me to the curious source of my flora-fication. She urged me to make it art.
It all happened so fast. One minute My Little Grape and I were lugging her leaden suitcases to the car. Then, on the way to Venice Beach for lunch, we visited the tennis-court sized AT&T store on Lincoln Boulevard to unlock her iPhone, where the specialists were pretty useless and looped her back to the phone operator who’d sent her to the store in the first place, leaving My Little Grape so preoccupied with reaching 611, and listening carefully because the options may have changed, that, as she was stepping back into the car, her ankle gave way and instead of landing in the seat, next to me where she belonged, she crumpled down into the curb and vanished Read more…
RECIPE Savoy Cabbage with Apples and Grapes
TAGS Gluten-Free, Vegetable Dishes, Vegetarian
COMMENTS 4 comments.
The Allotment
September 8, 2014I’m getting emails and calls from friends wondering where I disappeared to this summer.
“I’m holed up in Ireland and the UK writing my novel,” I told one, who tracked me down when I’d inadvertently left my phone on. Roaming charges, you know.
“And I’m writing mine on the Great Wall of China,” she joked in return.
Only I’m not joking. Where I’ve spent the summer of 2014 is at desks, in rooms. Not quite a room of my own, but empty rooms nonetheless, loaned to me by generous friends who, in an unspoken barter, know that when my fingers are not tapping unedited gibberish on this laptop, they will be fiddling with ingredients in their kitchen.
NOMAD
May 9, 2014I’ve been looking for you. Where have you been?
Seat 21A. I like the window.
Oh, so you mean you’re in Limbo.
That’s one way of putting it.
How’s the food in Limbo?
RECIPE Brussels Sprouts with Bacon and Blue Cheese
TAGS Gluten-Free, Vegetable Dishes
COMMENTS 8 comments.
Crack Cauliflower
April 5, 2014It’s everywhere.
My mother. My daughter. They’ve been talking about a cauliflower mash they recently made. They text about it.
At a Lilliputian shared-plate outpost in Providence, Rhode Island—curiously named North despite being located in the southwestern section of the city—as our group’s bottoms are just nestling into five of the eighteen coveted seats we’ve been on our feet almost an hour waiting for, my son, a regular, pronounces that first and foremost we will be ordering the Spicy Cauliflower in Various Forms. It sounds like a camp-ey horror film. Read more…
RECIPE Roasted Cauliflower with Pine Nut and Currant Crumble
TAGS Vegan, Vegetable Dishes
COMMENTS 7 comments.