It was two years ago today that my first post appeared on Frost Street. So the blog's two year anniversary falls on the day after Yom Kippur, the leading fast day on the Jewish calendar. Last night, following on a twenty-four-hour fast, I broke bread with Lisa over a traditional meal of rice, chicken, cucumbers, and dates, washed down with a glass of sweet wine. You have to start the new year off sweet, you see, and the meal that breaks a fast is a sacred thing. I've always loved the order and simplicity of a Jewish sacred meal. You bless a glass of wine and pass it round; you break bread that it may be shared; you praise God for bringing forth fruit from the ground and from the tree as you taste a bite of each. There's humility in it, and joy; two things which seldom go together but more often should.

On the High Holidays surrounding the Jewish New Year the traditional braided challah is fashioned in round. The special shape is meant to symbolize the cycle of the years: as one ends another begins. It's the kind of simple truth that is equivalent to beauty, and we bake it into our food. And because this remains a foodblog, I'm here to tell you how. Thanks for sticking around for the past two years.

Recipe: Challah

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 lbs. unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 cups water
• 2 tbsp. sugar
• 1/4 cup honey
• 2 eggs plus 2 egg yolks
• 2 pkgs. dry-active yeast
• 1/3 cup olive oil
  
• One egg for egg wash

Heat 1/2 cup of the water to between 100 and 110 degrees. Stir yeast into warm water and allow to soften for 5-10 minutes.

Meanwhile, mix together remaining water, honey, oil, eggs and yolks. Stir in flour and sugar and add yeast mixture. Knead or stir in an electric mixer equipped with a dough hook on low speed for about 15 minutes, or until smooth. Add a small amount of additional flour while kneading if necessary to achieve a smooth consistency.

If you're a traditionalist, pull off a 1/20th portion of the dough now and set it aside. According to Jewish law this is the priestly portion; since the destruction of the Temple it has traditionally been burned in the oven (typically by wrapping it directly around the front of the oven rack) during baking. Set the remaining dough in an oiled bowl and cover with a towel. Allow to rise in a warm place until doubled in size, approximately 90 minutes.

Turn out the dough, punch it down, knead it for a minute or two, and set it back in a covered bowl to double in size again, approximately 60 minutes. This is a good time to preheat the oven to 325-350 degrees.

Turn out the dough and punch it down again, then separate it into two equal portions (this recipe is for two loaves). If making a braided challah, separate each half of the dough into three equal portions, roll them out into ropes of dough, pinch them together on one end and braid them, pinching the ends together when the braid is complete. If making a round New Year's challah, roll each half of the dough out into one thick rope, and coil it around itself in an outward spiral, tucking the end underneath the loaf. Set the loaves on a baking sheet lined with either a silpat or parchment paper, and allow them to rise until 1 1/2 times their original size, about 45 minutes.

Make an egg wash by beating an egg with a small amount of water. When the loaves are fully risen, brush them all over with the egg wash and place them in the center rack of the oven. Bake for 30 minutes or until the loaves make a hollow sound when tapped on the bottom. Cool on a wire rack until ready to serve.

Posted by jeremy at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

It is an enduring part of the mythos of Manhattan that you can have anything imaginable delivered to your doorstep at any hour of the day or night. In practice, there are many qualifications to this rule, but it remains a huge element of the city's appeal, and a major counterbalance to the sacrifices city-dwellers make on issues such as square footage and cost of living. Case in point: many urban professionals are familiar with Seamless Web. This is a web-based service that allows you to peruse the menus of many local restaurants and delivery joints, order what you like, and charge it either to a credit card or a firm account. This is the primary mechanism by which large professional service firms provide their most pervasive perk: if you're in the office late at night or on the weekend, the firm (or more typically, the client) pays for your meals. It works like this: after a certain hour of the day, the Seamless Web website is open for you to place an order, up to a certain dollar limit, at any one of many local restaurants. The restaurant delivers your order to your office, and the cost of the meal gets billed directly to your firm's accounting office. You just pop down to the lobby to pick it up.

I've made a lot of use of Seamless Web during my time here, but I increasingly get the feeling that there's something horrifically immoral about all this. It comes down to a basic lack of respect for the process of eating. It disrespects the restaurant that prepares the food, whose cooks and management work in thankless anonymity. It disrespects the animal that died to have its carcass shipped across the country only to be chopped up and wedged into a plastic dish or styrofoam tray and hung off the handlebars of a rickety bicycle. It disrespects the deliveryperson who speeds that bicycle into oncoming traffic, riding headlong the wrong way down a one-way street, to bring dinner to my door, even though he and I will never meet face to face. It disrespects the person whose job it is to sit in the lobby and place anonymous phone calls informing perfect strangers that their dinners are getting cold forty stories under their feet. It disrespects everyone who paid a little more to heat their homes because my firm used up so many kilowatt-hours of energy to run an elevator carting me, alone, down and back up forty stories to pick up my meal. It disrespects the client, who shells out an extra twenty or thirty dollars to keep me at my desk for another hour or two of work (for which they are already paying several hundred dollars). It disrespects me, who accepts the twenty or thirty dollars in exchange for getting my sustenance this way.

We are not meant to dine alone. Food is pleasure; it wants to be shared. Shared pleasure is the most intimate and fulfilling category of human experience, and letting someone else prepare food for you is an act of trust. This is why dining, at its best, must ultimately be about hospitality; my most memorable meals have left me feeling not only satisfied, but grateful. These connections between guest, host, and meal are all bound up in an essential sense of respect -- for the life we consume, for the skill of its preparation, for the trust in that skill, for the pleasure of the shared experience.

What Seamless Web says about city living is that these basic human interactions -- hospitality and gratitude, pleasure and sharing -- have a price, and can be readily traded away. An economist might call this efficiency, and they would be right, for what it's worth. But we who live in the city, who gorge at our desks on the labors of a faceless multitude, are on the wrong end of this bargain. Each time I click in my order, I am commodifying -- disrespecting -- both the multitude and myself. Even though I never spend a dime out of my own pocket, in a very real sense I am paying for both sides of the exchange.

Posted by jeremy at 04:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Americans have a hard time dealing with religion. Some of us have too much religion, others not enough. Or more precisely, some of us think others of us have too much religion, or not enough. Problems also arise when one follows the wrong religion: even though no American has ever found himself in this position, it is impolitic for him to suggest to others that they might be guilty of such error. Unless, of course, his religion demands that he do so.

These dilemmas are what cause many of us -- mostly young, single persons living in places like New York -- to hew to the advice of our third President:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

When you live in a dense knot of heterogeneity like the typical coastal American metropolis, keeping religion to yourself sidesteps a potential raft of conflicts with your millions of tightly-packed neighbors. In these circles, faith is a secret romance. You conclude that God is less offended that you keep your relationship with him secret than your fellow citizens would be if you flaunted it. You substitute yourself for the Jeffersonian State, segregating your religious tendencies from the other aspects of your daily life: your work, your play, your politics, your romances of the flesh. It's this last bit that most often gets you into trouble.

Lisa is Catholic. I am Jewish. Just a couple of generations ago, our relationship might have been cause for my family to disown me, or for her family to murder me. But that was in the old country. This is America. We're two coastal urban professional Jeffersonians testifying to the world that yes, we can all just get along. It helps, of course, that we are both lapsed.

The holiday season sets religious differences in high relief. You have to be flexible and creative to make sure nobody feels left out. For example: sufganiyot are Israeli jelly doughnuts made specially for Chanukah. I've never made them before. But in our house, we take every opportunity to reconcile faith with love. I made a batch of tiny doughnuts based on the dough recipe in the French Laundry Cookbook. Instead of the traditional apricot jelly filling, I piped them full of Harney & Son's Christmas Preserves, a spiced plum and currant jam that I thinned with a little brandy. Hard work, but all in the service of peace, love and understanding.

I'm just a little bothered that Lisa nor I particularly liked the doughnuts.

Posted by jeremy at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Last year I took Lisa to Daniel for our anniversary. I didn't tell you much about it. There were no pictures. No florid descriptions of food and drink. No detailed explanations of ingredients and their preparation. None of the things people come to this corner of the web to find.

Last week I took Lisa to Per Se for our second anniversary. I've been obsessing over this restaurant for a year. I waited months for it to open. I tried desperately, but in vain, to secure an early reservation. I reveled in the misfortune of the privileged few who lost their opening-month tables to a fire in the restaurant's kitchen.

Now I've experienced Thomas Keller's return to New York, and I still can't write about it here. I have no photos to share with you. I'm sure the words exist to describe the meal. But I took Lisa to Per Se for our anniversary. Per Se is for her.

Posted by jeremy at 11:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

A wise man once observed: "everything in New York City comes back to real estate". Anyone who has lived here for any appreciable period of time recognizes the essential truth of this statement. We come back to real estate as surely as we desire things we cannot have; obsessing over apartments is the New Yorker's way of reaching beyond our grasp.

Lisa and I make a good living by any reasonable standard. But we have little hope of ever owning a real home in this city, where the average apartment runs a cool million. So we compromise. We rent slightly below our means, saving our pennies and waiting -- praying -- for the bubble to burst. We have a decent-sized one-bedroom apartment on a convenient Upper West Side block. It has everything we need, none of the things we dream about: it will do for now. It has ample closets but faces an airshaft; the bedroom is larger than the one in my old apartment, but -- and this is finally the point -- the kitchen is smaller.

New Yorkers know a lot about square footage; how it gets eaten up by bathtubs, hallways, and retrofitted "conversion" walls. Very few of us think about cubic footage though. My old kitchen not only had a six-foot-long counter, it had cabinet space above and below the whole six feet, plus a closet-sized pantry and above-sink cabinets. (It also had a gas range, but that's another story). In a room with nine-foot-high ceilings, each square foot you give up a loss of three square feet* costs you a cubic yard. So to make room for the detritus of a wandering, accumulated life, you have to think vertical. You cram every cubic inch of headroom with storage, you make more of less.

This is how we made room for all my pots and pans in our new apartment; we hung them from the ceiling. Suspended in mid-air, waiting on the chance that I might come home in time to use them. It's not ideal, but for now, it will do. And Lisa seems to be happy with the arrangement, even though these pots and pans are hanging just beyond her reach.

*Thanks to Felix for pointing out my faulty arithmetic.

Posted by jeremy at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (1)

Today is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Lots of Jewish holidays have particular foods attached to them, and many have complex dietary rules surrounding them. The demands of Rosh Hashanah, though, are simple and easy to comply with: start the new year with something sweet.

Many European Jews fulfil this requirement with apples dipped in honey, a traditional Rosh Hashanah pairing. My family, being from the Middle East, has somewhat different traditions. Whereas at every other time of year we break our bread and dip it in salt, on Rosh Hashanah we dip it in sugar. We pass around a plate of plump medjool dates. We pile up treats flavored with the Middle Eastern dessert aromatics of choice: Rosewater and Cardamom. We drench pastries with a sugar syrup perfumed with roses, cardamom, and lemon. We eat candies infused with the aroma of roses, like these marzipan dainties.

Sweet foods for a sweet year. A simple superstition, but one I don't mind indulging. Happy New Year everybody.

Posted by jeremy at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by jeremy at 02:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

A friend pointed out to me that my discussion of ingredient-focused cuisine in my last post is somewhat ambiguous (most of my friends are lawyers; they're real big on precision). So let's clear things up a bit.

There are at least two ways ingredients can occupy the center of a culinary philosophy, and I sort of conflated them the other day. The first emphasizes the skill of the chef in taking what most would consider undesirable ingredients and turning them into something magnificent. It requires a deep knowledge of cooking techniques and a sublime understanding of the ingredient itself. You can see this attitude at work in the bones and tails of Blue Ribbon, in the delicate cold tripe salad at Cibrèo, or in the celebration of offal on display at London's St. John. These are just some examples of a school of thought that seeks out the true nature and the inner virtues of that which is edible but generally overlooked in favor of less challenging, more predictable, more expensive ingredients. At its core, the philosophy underlying this trend is to rediscover and celebrate the primitive, humble ingredients that have been given short shrift by the luxury and rigidity of modern Western cuisine: marrow, viscera, sinewy cuts of meat. Like the romantic poets casting off the shackles of neoclassicism, chefs in this school of cooking are invoking primal lessons from the cuisine of poverty to teach us something we already knew, but had forgotten for want of practice. They are awakening the nobility in the most common ingredients.

The other way one can focus on ingredients is to insist on only the very best ingredients and manipulate them as little as possible, simply allowing them to speak for themselves. In an age where most of our produce is picked weeks before it is ripe, where most of our meat animals are raised on high-volume farms on a diet of formula feeds and antibiotics, the chefs who focus on the natural beauty of the life on which we feed -- its seasonality, its eccentricity, its subtle and marvelous variety -- are doing us no small service. Their influence is evident in contemporary cuisine; my friend pointed out the work of Tom Colicchio at Craft; Anthony Bourdain describes the same phenomenon at Masa Takayama's sushi temple (scroll down). Of course, if this trend is reduced to the point of absurdity, the chef becomes little more than a broker: seeking out the very best ingredients from around the world for the benefit of those who lack the time and skill to do so themselves but have the money to pay for it. We haven't reached that point yet, though, and for now these chefs are still bringing considerable expertise to bear on the preparation of their painstakingly selected raw materials.

My friend seemed to be quite content to have both these schools of cooking at work in the world today, and I think he's got a point. From an ideological perspective, though, I have to admit to being more enamored of the first trend than the second. Seasonality, variety, and quality are all obviously virtues, but they shouldn't be the exclusive province of elite restaurant chefs. If we could learn how to better nurture and develop our food supply, I think the brokerage function of high-end restaurants would quickly collapse as rank-and-file food lovers were able to find fresh, high-quality, seasonal products for themselves. But the world will always need skilled chefs to coax out the grandeur of challenging ingredients. It's easy to make offal taste foul; it's nearly impossible to make it taste glorious. That's why I have boundless respect for chefs who face challenging ingredients head-on, and show us how rich our lives can be if we are willing to let go of the familiar. Their restaurants are examples of how cuisine can transcend its function as nourishment, transcend even its potential to be art, and become something far more significant: culture.

Posted by jeremy at 01:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Lawyers get a bad rap. You've heard the jokes. Maybe you've told them. We're soulless, bloodsucking shysters who would push our own mothers into traffic for a buck. We lie. All the time. We'll lie to your face while we're picking your pockets. And then we'll bill you for it.

I don't really believe all this. After all, I'm a lawyer, and I like to think I'm a decent person. But the strangest thing happened to me today... I lost my appetite.

I didn't see something that made me sick. I didn't eat too much at lunch and not have room for dinner. I've just been under so much pressure, on so little sleep, for so many consecutive days, that I find that I don't really want to eat anything. And now I am really terrified of what I might be turning into. Is this what it means to become a lawyer? Because it feels ever so slightly like dying from the inside out.

What are we if we don't eat? If we can't taste? If we won't enjoy? Everything important in life can be found in our gastronomic experiences: simplicity, luxury, companionship, passion, pleasure and, yes, sometimes pain. Chicken soup isn't for the soul, it is the soul (but with noodles). If I have no appetite -- if I never crave and can never be sated -- what is left of me?

I think maybe all I need is a good night's sleep. But I worry. I wonder if this is a setup for some really awful punchline. Because frankly, I don't laugh at lawyer jokes as much as I used to.

Posted by jeremy at 09:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Still hard at work. Don't have much to write about. So I'll pass the buck to a worthier author, to give you something to think about while I'm eating nothing but takeout.

It is these comparitively cheap and private expeditions that substantiate our existence and batten our lives -- as, where a vine touches the earth in its undulating course, it puts forth roots and thickens its stock. Our employment generally is tinkering, mending the old worn-out teapot of society. Our stock in trade is solder. Better for me, says my genius, to go cranberrying this afternoon for the Vaccinium oxycoccus in Gowing's Swamp, to get but a pocketful and learn its peculiar flavor -- aye, and the flavor of Gowing's Swamp and of life in New England -- than to go consul to Liverpool and get I don't know how many thousand dollars for it, with no such flavor. Many of our days should be spent, not in vain expectations and lying on our oars, but in carrying out deliberately and faithfully the hundred little purposes which every man's genius must have suggested to him. Let not your life be wholly without an object, though it be only to ascertain the flavor of a cranberry, for it will not be only the quality of an insignificant berry that you will have tasted, but the flavor of your life to that extent, and it will be such a sauce as no wealth can buy.

- Henry David Thoreau, Wild Fruits (1859), excerpted in Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing from Around the World and Throughout History (Mark Kurlansky ed.), at 319, 320-21 (Ballantine 2002).

Good advice for all of us, particularly New York City lawyers.

Posted by jeremy at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Iron Chef America, which premiered tonight on the Food Network, is a mistake. I love the original Iron Chef series, but Iron Chef America is the sequel you wish they never made. The Food Network has missed the point of the original entirely.

Iron Chef is not about food. It's about fetish.

What makes Iron Chef entertaining is its other-ness. In the best and worst meanings of the word, it is Oriental. We watch it, not to enjoy the spectacle of cooking, but for the voyeuristic thrill of observing an utterly foreign culture from the safety of our living rooms. We watch it for sequined epaulets and ruffled lace cuffs; for a giggling woman-child's description of what a meal is doing inside her mouth; for a chef who will shave his head to prove a point that nobody seems to be arguing with him about. We are hypnotized by stiff-backed bows and politeness in victory, by puns that don't hurt us so much because they originated in another language, by a misplaced sportscaster in a silver bow tie. We revel in the double-irony of those who take their theatricized combat seriously. The food's main purpose is to trigger an otherworldly ballet of preparation: ritual slaughter, fanciful knifework, seafood desserts. It is only when the bizzarre, sometimes grotesque dishes are presented for tasting that we finally connect in any recognizable way to what we have witnessed. The outlandish weirdness of it all ultimately resolves itself in the most universal of human experiences: a meal.

The popularity of Iron Chef in this country is a silent testament to the chauvinism of American leisure. It thrives on the same smug sense of cultural superiority that made Lost in Translation one of the most popular films of 2003. But we cannot possibly admit to ourselves that this is what entertains us about it. So long as it mimics formal details like a know-it-all commentator, a stoveside correspondent radioing in updates, and a stern-jawed "chairman" presiding meaninglessly over the fray, many Iron Chef fans will never understand why Iron Chef America does not provide them with the guilty pleasures of its forebear.

That's why the best part of tonight's broadcast was an Orbit chewing-gum commercial, in which a female Asian kickboxer hurled an incomprehensible obscenity at her blonde caucasian adversary, scandalizing everybody but the oblivious target of her insult.

News Flash, Iron Chef lovers: we're the blonde.

Posted by jeremy at 11:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (1)

The day after Easter. 15-packs of Peeps are seventy-five cents at Rite-Aid. An egg crate filled with a dozen chocolate-covered marshmallow eggs costs fifty cents. How am I to resist? I'm just a man. So yeah, I bought something like seventeen pounds of candy for about four dollars.

Now I'm just a man with a tummyache.

Posted by jeremy at 03:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Went to court yesterday. We did not get what we wanted, but at least it's over now. I got home at 8:30, the earliest by far I've been in my apartment in the last two weeks.

When you live in your office for two weeks, returning to your apartment is like walking into a ghost town. Everything seems empty and unfamiliar. What's worse, there's little if anything to eat.

So last night I watched the West Wing in my pajamas over Jelly Bellies and Laphroaig. The deliciously smoky peat of an Islay malt, I've discovered, does not pair well with Tutti-Frutti flavored jellybeans.

Posted by jeremy at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

9:20 a.m. I've already billed a full nine-hour day, and the rest of my team is just strolling in to work. It was one of those nights. One of those nights when 2:30 rolls around and you resign yourself to the fact that you will be watching the sun rise from your office window. One of those nights when you want to sleep so bad your stomach hurts. One of those nights when you try to remember what you wanted to be when you grew up, and all you know for sure is that this isn't it.

When I was in high school I loved coffee. I used to drink it every day and night. I used to hang out with friends at coffee shops, and pound espressos until they closed. I loved the nutty smell of a brewing pot; I loved the bitter crunch of whole roasted beans; I loved the ambrosial confluence of coffee and steamed milk. Then I got to college.

I grew up with parents who needed two cups of coffee to get out the door in the morning; who suffered migraines if you gave them decaf. I knew I was going to have some late nights in college; probably a few all-nighters. And I decided I wasn't going to use caffeine to get me through it. My dad, like all doctors, got through medical school on a steady diet of caffeine, and he's never recovered. I've seen addiction, and it's ugly, and I don't want any part of it. I gave up coffee. Every once in a while I have a cup of decaf, just for the memories. But I don't do caffeine any more. Once or twice I've thoughtlessly downed a cup of the real stuff, and my jaw starts to clench, my skin crawls, I fidget uncontrollably, and I lose a night of sleep. I've become caffeine-intolerant.

The coffee in my office is not great, but it's free. It pretty much has to be in an office like this one; the place is swarming with addicts. Last night, as the cleaning crew packed up and I realized I was alone with my work until sun-up, I started jonesing for joe. I resisted, and six tall glasses of ice water later, I'm still awake with the sun.

I have to wait around for a few documents, and then I'm going home for a desperately-needed nap. There's a tin of fancy cocoa in my pantry that Lisa's mom gave me for Christmas. I think I'll brew myself a cup before I settle in. I believe I've earned it.

Posted by jeremy at 09:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

There is a prayer, or rather a blessing, that Jews say over a glass of wine on special occasions. The prayer is called called Kiddush, a Hebrew word that means "to make holy". It is a ritual that goes back thousands of years, to pause in our revels and praise God for his many blessings, including the one being celebrated with this glass of wine. As with anything in Judaism, there are multiple interpretations of the Kiddush. One holds that it is the celebration, not the wine, that is being sanctified. The wine is the token and seal of the blessing, it makes holy our joy. Another interpretation holds that the wine is the object of sanctification: our joy is made holy, and we drink it down.

There is also a Jewish prayer called the Kaddish, an Aramaic word that means "holy". It is an expression of fervent praise of God, praise beyond words that words are forced to bear, praise wedded to a plea that we may know God's heavenly peace in our time. The Kaddish is recited several times in any standard liturgy, but it is known to most Jews as the prayer of mourners.

Yesterday my grandfather passed away. He was a man raised in a tradition thousands of years old, the tradition of the now-scattered Iraqi Jews. To my grandfather, born a subject of the Ottoman Empire in the province of Mosul, the God of Abraham and Moses was a living presence who had exiled his ancestors to Babylon in the time of Jeremiah. He had good reasons to offer God his praise: he had prospered in a hostile land; his family had escaped safely to America; his seven children had given him eighteen grandchildren.

I must have heard my grandfather recite the Kiddush hundreds of times growing up. But I only heard him recite the Kaddish once, over my grandmother's grave. The last time I saw him alive, he and my mother and I shared a Sabbath dinner. He recited the Kiddush as he had thousands of times before, and for the first and only time in my life I took the kiddush cup from his hand after he had drunk from it.

I'm not a religious person, but I've been reflecting on these two prayers today. I am not permitted to say Kaddish for my grandfather; in our family's tradition only his children do so. But I am permitted to drink Kiddush wine. And I don't think I'll ever hear the Kiddush again without thinking of him.

My grandfather built a world for himself filled with happiness and life. It was holy work, and deserves to be remembered in joy.

Posted by jeremy at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For all my complaining, I actually had a pretty good day-after-my-birthday. Relieved of the pressures of our court appearance on Thursday, my team gathered in the partner's suite to surprise me with cake and cards. And when I finally got up to Rhinebeck, Lisa presented me with this masterpiece, lovingly crafted with her own two hands. I don't think a cake has ever tasted so good to me.

Posted by jeremy at 01:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There was a time when birthdays were the greatest days of the year. They were days that brought you closer to those things we covet but can earn only by patience: a seat at the grown-ups table, a driver's license, the right to vote, a legal beer. They were days when those who cared about you would gather and be merry and celebrate the fact that you were alive.

It's been a tough week. We're going to court today, and I've been working some later nights than usual. It's cold and windy and gray outside. And yes, today I'm one year closer to 30.

There aren't any celebrations today. I'll head to court with a bunch of other lawyers, and afterwards there'll be a debriefing and probably more work to do. This weekend Lisa's taking me to the Escoffier Room at the Culinary Institute of America, which I've been looking forward to for weeks, but today she's a hundred miles away. My family is even farther away. And my friends -- well, there may be a round of drinks tonight, but frankly, my friends all work too.

Tonight I think I'll go home and bake my own damn cake.

Posted by jeremy at 03:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I was just in an elevator with two paralegals who were talking about their home cooking. The wiry, suspiciously vegetarian-looking he-para was explaining how easy it is to add a little soft tofu (for protein) to his homemade spinach with garlic. The blushing, blonde, obviously carnivorous she-para, carrying a cafeteria tray loaded with an unidentifiable stuffed breaded meat (and with a straight face), excitedly declared how much she loves cooking tofu.

I don't think they saw me shaking my head.

Posted by jeremy at 07:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

When a junior associate at a large Manhattan law firm tells you on Thursday that he'll do something "tomorrow," what he's really saying is he'll do it "tomorrow, in the unlikely event that I am not locked in a room with two other associates and twenty boxes of documents that have to be read before Monday."

Posted by jeremy at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night I got back from a long weekend at my parents' house. When I was a kid, we used to visit my mom's parents on the weekends, and my grandmother never let us leave empty-handed. As my parents strapped me and my brothers into the backseat, she would come rushing out with a hastily assembled collection of foods she apparently believed could not be found in Manhattan. Fortunately she had a keen sense of balance; her gift of candies and cakes was always carefully paired with fresh fruits, vegetables, and cold meats left over from Saturday's dinner, which my mom used to make pita-bread sandwiches for the ride home.

My mom is falling into her mother's ways. She seems to have inherited an innate suspicion that her children, left to their own devices, will inevitably starve. But she also loves to make us happy. So she lavishes us with sweets. Yesterday she sent me home with a box of chocolate-dipped glazed apricots, a box of big chocolate-covered pretzels, a a case of liqueur-filled chocolates, and a five-pound bag of jellybeans. I very nearly made a meal of these treats tonight. I was reaching for my fourth chocolate-covered pretzel when it occurred to me that all the available calories in my house were empty ones. So I put in a call to Haru, in the hope that a sizable portion of raw fish could save me from myself, and from the guileless excesses of a mother's love.

Posted by jeremy at 11:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Well, last night's truffle expedition didn't go precisely as planned. I was at work until 8:00, which meant a later start than I had hoped for. Most of the fillings I made still hadn't set by 2:00 a.m., and the one that did used up all the dark chocolate I had meant to use for coating one or two other fillings. The Torres System, while probably ideally suited to an operation that includes a chocolate-enrobing conveyor belt, wasted too much coating chocolate for me to ever use it again. Hand-dipping remains the way to go. Still, putting the fillings in a pan to set and then portioning them by cutting into regular pieces does take a lot of the mess and waste out of forming the truffles; I'll definitely do it this way next time.

The only truffles I was able to finish were the dark chocolate and mint ones. The rest of the fillings are sitting in my freezer. Maybe I'll finish them for New Year's. Meanwhile, my landladies have about 20 truffles to get them through Christmas.

Happy Holidays y'all. I'll be back next week.

Posted by jeremy at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Everything I read this morning tells me it's time to get my holiday tipping out of the way. Advice-mongerers are saturating the local and national media to make sure I don't forget the people who make my life easier.

At work, it's time to get presents for the secretaries. There is a perverse dynamic at work here. Our secretaries are assigned in teams, that is, each secretary is a "primary" for two or three lawyers, and each lawyer has two or three "secondary" secretaries. Ordinarily this works out great for associates, who pool their resources to get something nice for their primary secretary, and never see their secondary secretaries. I, however, share a primary secretary with a partner. That means (a) my secretary's other primary lawyer isn't going to want to coordinate some bush-league holiday gesture with lowly old me; and (b) I've relied on my two secondary secretaries a lot more than most other associates do, which means they deserve some holiday consideration too (n.b., they are also partners' secretaries).

I've decided that I will get each of these secretaries some sort of gift certificate or gift check, but because the size of such gifts may disappoint the secondary secretaries (I can't afford to give them each a hundred bucks, which is apparently the firm standard), I'm going to include some sort of homemade holiday foodstuffs. I'm hoping that the thought will count for something.

The question is what to make. Cookies are traditional, but pedestrian. Cakes and pies are classic, but not to everybody's taste. And chocolate truffles are impressive, but labor-intensive.

I'd like to have my gifts coordinated by Friday, so any cash-type gifts can be used for last-minute holiday shopping if need be. Any guidance?

Posted by jeremy at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

When last weekend's dinner was cancelled, I had already assembled all the ingredients for a five-course meal in my kitchen. That was Saturday. As the week wore on, I kept telling myself that one night I would get home in time to do something with all that food, and could still put it to good use. But a series of late nights chipped away at my designs, so that where I once still hoped to assemble a cassoulet, by Wednesday I could only hope that there might be a cut of meat left in my fridge that hadn't turned so far that a good long braise wouldn't salvage it. And of course, by then, I was well in my cups.

This morning I tossed about five pounds of rancid meats and a bushel of withered vegetables into the trash. Not having been in my kitchen for a week, there was already a ripe bag of refuse waiting for me. I faced some of the most horrible smells I've ever encountered today.

But it's a beautiful day here in New York. The air is clear and crisp, the sun is bright, and on top of all that, it's Friday. Tonight I'm leaving a hellish week behind and going up to Rhinebeck to spend a weekend in the country with Lisa. We'll head to our favorite local trattoria for dinner, split a big bottle of Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, and sleep until noon. On my way to work this morning, I was whistling Take Five. Today is going to be a fantastic day.

Posted by jeremy at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yesterday we went to court for the first time in the case that's been keeping me at work for 14-18 hours a day for the past week. We won our motion for a temporary restraining order.

Last night I had liquor for dinner.

Posted by jeremy at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night ... well, ok, maybe snow.

Dinner guests cannot reasonably be expected to abide by the postman's creed. The blizzard kept two of my guests from dinner on Saturday, which was the doom of the dining club's latest menu. Of course, as far as partners at big New York law firms are concerned, the postman's creed is a pretty low bar for their associates, so I was in the office all weekend anyway. Disappointment all around.

Posted by jeremy at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

There has been a cancellation for this Saturday's dinner. That means an available seat at the table. Anybody want to come?

Posted by jeremy at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just got back from the Federal Bar Council's annual Thanksgiving Lunch at the Waldorf-Astoria. The food was OK, but that's not what gets me. This was a full-service sit-down lunch for what had to be at least 2000 lawyers. It was in the Waldorf's Grand Ballroom. Dozens of waiters served three courses and coffee on the main floor and two levels of balconies all in under 90 minutes. It was astonishing. I can't imagine what it takes to run an operation like that, in the kitchen or in the dining room. That's professionalism. Mad props to the Waldorf.

Posted by jeremy at 02:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The powers that be had me working until 1 a.m. last night drafting the fifth revision to a brief we may or may not file. Downside: working until 1 a.m. Upside: Thai food on the client's tab.

Boy did I screw this one up. I see a menu item described as "crispy rice noodles with prawns and tamarind sauce," and I think, "ooh, that sounds interesting, I'll have one of those please." Schmuck. I ended up with a tub full of what I'm pretty sure was deep-fried styrofoam in corn syrup and vinegar. I think I'll stick to spring rolls and green curry with coconut milk from now on.

I guess there's a silver lining to this story: I've been at work since six this morning, and I haven't had a bite to eat yet today, but I've got half a tub of cold, sticky, greasy shredded newspaper waiting for me in the fridge down the hall. Who says there's no such thing as a free lunch?

Posted by jeremy at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The guy in the office next to me just got back from Boston, fuming about how crappy the dinner was. I knew grilled cheese was the right decision.

Posted by jeremy at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I missed the fancy dinner in Boston. But I made good on my promise to eat grilled cheese for dinner. Canadian cheddar, Sicilian caciocavallo, and French port salut, on whole-grain bread, grilled with olive oil. A bowl of Campbell's Tomato Soup and a bottle of Tabasco on the side. And I ate it in my pajamas. Can't do that on the firm's tab.

Posted by jeremy at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I passed by Dougie's kosher barbecue on my way home from work tonight. For those of you who aren't familiar with Dougie's, it's part of the shtetl of kosher eateries and judaica shops lining West 72nd Street between Broadway and West End Avenue. When I was in college and we all made a habit of ordering take-out from the cheapest, greasiest hole-in-the-wall Chinese delivery joints we could find, there was always some orthodox kid who wanted to order from Dougie's. Every once in a while the rest of us would oblige, and we'd all chew silently on leathery meat while our orthodox buddies went on about how the buffalo wings were the best on the planet (as if they had a frame of reference). I can respect a person who takes their religion seriously, but kosher food just plain sucks.

Anyway, I'm walking past Dougie's, and I nearly run smack into a big blue plastic tarp wrapped around a bunch of eight-foot-high aluminum poles in the middle of the sidewalk. I round the last pole, and I see rows of tables and chairs set up within three tarp walls, where people are sitting and eating their dinners. And it hits me. This week, Jews (that is, more observant Jews than myself) are celebrating Sukkot, a/k/a/ the Festival of Huts (I did not make this up). Basically, you have to build a little hut outside your house, and sleep in it and eat meals in it. The hut has to have at least three free standing walls, and the roof must be constructed in such a way that stars can be seen through it. When I was a kid, we built up the walls of our deck with wooden lattices and covered the top with pine branches. Ours was a respectable hut.

There's an obvious shortage of outdoor decks on the Upper West Side. But the neighborhood is a link in the historical chain of Jewish migration from the Lower East Side to Riverdale and on to Westchester, and the Jews who remain here need huts this week. Dougie's to the rescue! If they can convince my old college buddy that their gray rubbery wings are God's own mannah, I guess it's not such a strech to build a sacred space out of debris from a construction site. I just hope nobody's taking them seriously enough to camp out on the sidewalk on West 72nd Street. Hag Sameach, y'all.

Posted by jeremy at 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just got back from the firm's cafeteria. While waiting for the elevator, a fellow associate noticed that I had picked up a few slices of various ethnic sausages that were being offered as free samples today. He said, "I saw those, and I was debating whether to take some."

Yeah, right. Free sausage never loses a debate.

Posted by jeremy at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)