Matthew Barney meets AvP

On Friday, Andy and I went to see a dance performance by Shen Wei's dance company. It was mind-blowing. Since the Park Avenue Armory's arts performances are pretty much obligated to include something amusingly high-concept, the third piece allowed audience members to walk among the dancers (who were mostly naked, so don't bring the kids unless you deem them mature enough to appreciate topless male and female dancers rolling around in paint*) and appreciate the union of technology and humanity** that is going to be driving Shen Wei's next artistic phase, or so the program says. In any case, the second piece, Folding, was by far my favorite. Like I said, mind-blowing. You can watch several YouTube performances, like this one. However, the most amazing piece also included what I found to be the performance's only perceptible-to-a-non-dancer-or-dance-aficionado flaw: very silly headgear. Andy likened the head coverings to squash; I imagined them as what would happen if Matthew Barney remade Alien versus Predator. They were downright distracting from the ridiculous choreography.

Other note (and skip this one if you have a weak stomach): I accompanied three of my classmates this morning in shadowing an autopsy at the medical examiner's office. Aside from experiencing fresh organs, substantial amounts of blood, and a man whose long bones had been harvested for grafts***, I noted that of the cadavers we encountered, nobody was older than 46, and nobody's BMI was anywhere near normal. This stands in stark contrast to the quite elderly, usually practically cachectic cadavers in the anatomy lab. Hmm.

Now, food! Two days' worth to blog about today:

Brown sushi rice with seared tempeh and a marinated Asian vegetable salad****.

Farmhouse vegetable soup from Cook's Illustrated, with whole-wheat bread.

In deference to Cook's Illustrated, I'm not going to post the recipe. They do ridiculous things like use forty-five pounds of ground meat to find the absolute perfect meatloaf recipe. For this recipe, the tester made at least ten varieties of vegetable soup to find the perfect balance of umami and nuttiness and fatty deliciousness (lemon-thyme butter to finish is the secret!). For that, I'll pay for a subscription.

One note, though: the recipe calls for cabbage and parsley. I forgot to buy both, so I used kale. It's a cabbage relative, and it's got that fresh tang of parsley. Other than that: totally faithful to the brilliance that is this soup.

*It's artistic, not voyeuristic, I swear to you.
**Including projected T1-weighted cranial MRIs!
***Have you ever bent someone's boneless arm? No? Never thought I would, either.
****I found a massive daikon for a dollar. And layed the smackdown on a woman about my age who tried to insist that the watermelon radish I was teaching Andy about was not, in fact, a radish. Score.

Fungi gone wild

It's cold. Again. I'm still wearing flip-flops*, but this counts as soup weather.

Cream of wild mushroom! Well, mostly wild. Thirty-three percent tame, actually. The porcini are dried and from a Whole Foods bin; the shiitake and cremini were from farmers market bins and are purportedly woods-gathered or whatever. Either way, they were great in soup form, especially with shallot croutons (read: shallots fried in brown butter) and whole wheat artisan-style bread. And then about a pound of spinach, a persimmon, and a mango for dessert. I felt fancy, so I abandoned the behind-on-studying mentality and actually passed the soup through a wire strainer a couple times to make it smooth.

Cream of mushroom soup
3 cloves garlic
1/2 oz dried porcini
12 oz fresh cremini
8 oz fresh shiitake
3 large shallots
2 to 3 tbsp butter
about 1/3 cup white wine
3 cups water
1 1/2 cups milk
a dash of soy sauce
sage, thyme, nutmeg, salt, and pepper


Bring the water to a boil and put in the dried porcini; let sit while you prepare the rest of the ingredients. Mince 2 of the shallots and the garlic. While the butter is melting in the bottom of a pot, slice the third shallot thinly. Just as the butter begins to sizzle, fry the shallot slices in the butter. Remove when they're toasted to a dark golden brown. Add the minced shallots when the butter is fully browned and cook until translucent. Add the garlic, salt and pepper to taste, and the chopped fresh mushrooms; cook until the mushrooms have stopped exuding liquid. Add the wine and reduce to about 1/3 of the original total volume of wine and mushroom liquid. Add the porcini broth (but not the porcini themselves), soy sauce, sage, thyme, nutmeg (you only need a little of each, especially the nutmeg), and bring to a boil, then reduce and simmer until all the mushrooms are very soft. Puree, strain, puree again, and strain again. Stir in the milk and heat gently until the soup is warm. Adjust salt, pepper, and spices to taste.


*and will continue to do so until it actually endangers my toes.

Pittsburgh Nights

I hope you had a great Thanksgiving weekend. Mine was basically spent flopping around on my delightful in-laws' delightful couch* and eating lots of desserts, and also delightful Italian food at this place called Stagioni, and watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and not doing the Introduction to Bedside Diagnosis studying that I'd promised I would do. Now, I think my mother-in-law tried to rectify our diet somewhat by making a delicious carrot soup and arugula salad and grilled cheese on Saturday night, but we had to go ahead and ruin it by two straight days of NYU-provided junk food. Other relevant point: December heralds this thing that my grandmother is calling a gala that is basically a delayed wedding reception for us. I rather dislike the spotlight, a lot, but if this spotlighting party thing** is going to happen, it's going to happen to a lady who fits into the, erm, curve-hugging dress she bought at the beginning of the summer, dammit.

Thus, chickpeas in a caramelized onion and za'atar broth with arugula, persimmon, walnut, and feta salad in a lemon-mint dressing, and homemade crackers. I call it Delicious Zip-that-dress Dinner.

*Man, that is one fine couch.
**Mom: "You never got nervous when you were the center of attention for academic achievement! But now you're being the center of attention as a whole person!"
Me: "The part of me that can get married qualifies as a whole person?"
Mom: "..."

Comme un patron

Ever given a massage? I love giving them. And working a rich, bolar pastry dough feels almost exactly like massaging the skin and subcutaneous fat of someone's back*.

Before we continue, please excuse me. I have to take a few aspirin, because it hurts to pat myself on the back for making perfect croissants on a first attempt.

Food stylist credit to Avanti, who can rompre her pain like
nobody's business.

Jen also helped with the eating.

Unbaked, puffed up, full of potential.

Okay, done being arrogant now, because making these** is actually not very difficult. It's a long process, and I nearly had to skip a class in order to finish baking the second batch***, but there's very little that is technically difficult. A few tips cobbled together from the Internet, this experience, and a couple cookbooks:

1. The dough should be smooth, cold, and pliable. Imagine giving someone a massage just after they've been in a naked snowball fight****. Like that. Be sure to keep the room and your work surface cool so that the butter stays cold and malleable.
2. You won't need much flour to keep the dough from sticking. Overflouring will leave you with tough croissants, not the flaky, delicate deliciousness that you're aiming for.
3. If you're working with a small oven in a studio apartment under 400 square feet--no shame, my indebted, belectured compatriots!--the croissants will begin to brown well before the inside is baked. Either drape them lightly with aluminum foil when they're crusty and golden on top or cut smaller croissants.
4. Use good butter. I didn't, and I regret it. Also, these are a little tiny bit too sweet for my tastes, but still, the 1/4 cup is plenty subtle. And maybe try a sourdough croissant and let me know if it's worth the extra effort.

It's Thanksgiving break now. I'm going to read (one chapter left in 1Q84!) and sleep and convince myself that med school isn't as stressful as I make it out to be.

*I tried to think of a more appetizing way to put this. "Flesh" was the best I could come up with. While it's not poetic, it's true.
**Joanne Chang is the scion of Flour, and thus I trust any food-related statement she cares to make.
***I may have skipped that class in order to make a doctor's appointment anyway, but at least it wasn't for the croissants!
****Again, I tried. I'm sacrificing imagery for accuracy.

Adherence

Such a better word than compliance, don't you think? Anyway, I faithfully followed this recipe to make what I am going to humbly say are some of the best damn bao ever.

Next time I'm going to put some tofu in the filling, and maybe roll the dough a little bit thinner. Maybe.

We're trying to use up the rest of the veggies in our fridge before we go to Pittsburgh for Thanksgiving (alert: if any of you want hilarious amounts of kale, cabbage, onions, or mushrooms, let me know), so I also made a cabbage and tofu stir-fry, just for a little protein, you know?

Duckling/swan

Once upon a time there was a head of cabbage that weighed over five pounds.

That poor, humble, ugly, morbidly obese head of cabbage got hacked in half. Part of it got made into cabbage with caraway, apples, and white beans, and it was very happy.

Just next door were some sunchokes. Not only were they tragically homely, they contain a whole lot of inulin. This makes them much-beloved by diabetics and dieters, but much-maligned by people who can't digest fructans and get horrible flatulence when they eat sunchokes.

Nothing could be done about the inulin content of the poor sunchokes, but they got sliced up and made into crispy oven-baked sunchoke chips, and they were delicious, and they were very happy.

This cinnamon bun "loaf" is just an all-star, from start to finish. It's as though the Gerber baby went on to become Heidi Klum and endured nary an awkward stage in between.

The Holy Tetrad

The Italians got it right quite a long time ago. Nothing can go wrong with a combination of noodles, cheese, tomato sauce, and garlic. If you're extra lucky, there will be vegetables.

Lasagna roll-ups! Like real lasagna, but rolled up! No need to post a recipe; it's pretty self-explanatory. Just try not to let the lasagna noodles stick together as you boil them, and boil them just until they can be rolled without breaking so that they become fully tender in the oven.

And now back to studying limb anatomy and bone pathology. It's hard to believe that this is the penultimate unit of my pre-clerkship curriculum...