December 10, 2012; Sofia, Bulgaria. The December 3, 2012, issue of The New Yorker is “The Food Issue,” which I tucked into my carry-on, along with three cameras, to take with me to a South African bushcamp in late November. To see those big animals in the wild had been a lifelong dream of mine, conjured at an early age, when I would anxiously await the arrival each month of The National Geographic. (My parents subscribed to The New Yorker as well, and, in fact, my high school graduation gift from my parents (read: Mother) was a set of stainless flatware and a 5-year subscription to the then literary magazine. Odd for a 17-year-old boy, I admit, but much appreciated.)

The first meal we had at the camp, the scrumptious pasta with shrimp at left, was the best meal we had there, but we didn’t go for the food. We saw crocodiles and zebras and lions and buffaloes, black and white rhinos, hippos, dozens of varieties of birds, lots of giraffes, one leopard, monitor lizards, fascinating insects, monkeys, baboons, beautiful flowering plants, water bucks, hundreds of impalas, geckos, toads, centipedes, millipedes, rabbits, squirrels, a genet, and gorgeous sunsets. And you can see many of them on my Facebook page. But, again, we weren’t there for the food. (Nor the wines. I have never been a fan of South African wines, save their chenin blancs and a few sparklers from Graham Beck. And I do not like the pinotage grape at all, especially not the latest style that accentuates the odd coffee smell. I did have the lovely Lazanou Viognier 2011 (right) with an amazing Cape Malay curry made by the charming chef at our hotel in Cape Town (which you can also read about on my Facebook page), but that’s not what I’m writing about today.)

I didn’t get to read much in Africa, because the bushcamp schedule began at 5 am — two 4-hour games drives each day. We invariably fell asleep after our 10pm dinners, only to awaken and begin the drives again the next morning. When I did finally get around to the magazine, I was appalled at the air of privilege pervading most of the writing (I’ve read the entire issue except for Mimi Sheraton’s charcuterie article, which I’m saving for later, not wanting to sully hers with the bad taste left in my mouth from the others.) Curious as to what others may have thought, I posted the following on my Facebook page:

I have subscribed to The New Yorker for much of my adult life. I have watched with mixed emotions the magazine’s forays into food writing (my own field for the past 29 years). This year’s food issue has an article by Dana Goodyear on Craig Thornton’s underground dinners in L.A., in which she writes about the chef’s rabbit meatballs: “The rabbit still had the whiff of trembly, nervous game.” I doubt very seriously that that rabbit, ground and served with mushrooms and crêpes in a “briny, cool, and sour-sweet concoction made from lobster shell, shallot, vermouth, and tarragon, with a rich zap of lemon-lime curd,” was ever wild, or that, with all those flavors going on, that it had a whiff of rabbit at all, much less game. I don’t know if the sentence is the dumbest thing I’ve ever read or just the most pretentious.

Lots of folks visit my Facebook page, many of whom are professional colleagues, and some of whom are fans of this blog who asked to be my friend on Facebook, where I post hundreds of photos.   I have not been blogging much the past year, for several reasons. My main excuse is that I hate the new blog platform and the way it looks; moreover, it reminds me of the jerks I hired to move it here when Microsoft announced it was doing away with the place where I had it previously for five years. But there’s a deeper truth, and that is that I have mixed emotions about blogging, especially since so many folks are doing it now. And I wonder if I haven’t said all I have to say. Yes, I could be digging deeper into the cuisine of the Balkans, but, frankly, I have not found the cooking here to be inspired (my favorite restaurants here are Italian, Greek, Spanish, Nepalese, Lebanese, and Chinese). There is a certain sameness to Bulgarian menus, and a limited offering of ingredients (I do lots of my shopping at the big Austrian Costco-like METRO, where I can find fresh oysters from France, fresh rabbits from Italy, and frozen quail from Germany, not to mention (stalk) celery, French butter, and Spanish cheese).  I’m also on hold, preparing myself for our move to Sichuan next summer, studying Mandarin. Again, I digress.

Many folks agreed with me that the writing in the New Yorker was pretentious. My friend Nancy Harmon Jenkins, the Mediterranean scholar, wrote: “I have been so disappointed in almost ALL food writing lately–I don’t mean books, which continue to enthrall, but newspapers, such as they are, the pitifully few mags we have left plus the deliberately outrageous new ones (e.g. Lucky Peach which I find on the whole just sort of disgusting), and the blogs. I think blog writing has been so detrimental to good food writing. Obviously there are some very good blogs out there but there are SO many bad ones, they are SO clamorous for public attention (what DO they get out of it?), and SO hungry for anything new-new-new, that I can’t work up any interest. Now the New Yorker has joined the New York Times in promoting that kind of bloggy writing, writing that doesn’t ever stop for a minute to think, wait a minute, what’d I just say anyway??? Goodyear a good example, but there are many others. Too many.”

Sharon Parquette Nimtz, whom I do not personally know, but who  blogs here, wrote, “Suddenly everyone is a food expert. So denigrating to the study, so boring. I’d rather be a plumber these days.”

My South Carolina chef friend Philip Bardin chimed in:  ” The most offensive thing here is the dish itself. The description and style matches it perfectly : a must to avoid.” And Harriet Bell,  longtime cookbook editor, asked, “How about the Ottolenghi piece? The writer goes on and on, then says (I paraphrase) the ‘rice was undercooked, the chicken was pink at the bone, etc., but the meal was wonderful!’”

I did finally get around to the article about Israeli chef Ottolenghi, and responded to Harriet:  The author goes on and on about the chef’s life — I couldn’t keep up with his boyfriends or, for that matter, her relationship with them. She went home with him for some home cooking…they open a second bottle of wine and “crashed.” Again she went  to his house where he  undercooked both chicken and rice. I don’t trust chefs who can’t cook simple foods at home. But I really don’t trust food writers who wax poetic about bad food and then ask for seconds. Even worse to me, though,  were the short pieces — all of them by people of privilege basically bragging about their lofty status. Even Calvin Trillin’s article had the whiff — no, stench — of station. So many delusions of entitlement throughout the magazine.

Facebook is a funny place. It can be addictive, especially to those of us who live in foreign cultures and stay at home a lot. It’s such an easy way for me to stay in touch with family and friends, to see their photos and for them to see mine. Posting photos on Facebook is a LOT easier than posting them here on this blog. I have asked perhaps a dozen people to be my Facebook friend — and they were all my real friends. Yet somehow I have over 1000 “friends” there. I don’t deny friendship on Facebook — most are people who are interested in food writing. Many are colleagues or our mutual friends are all colleagues. But I also get a lot of novice writers who want me to read their blogs. I almost never do. In fact, like many, many bloggers, I don’t read anyone’s blog.

One blogger’s writing is so bad that I wonder why on earth anyone would read it more than once. A CIA-trained chef professionally employed, she reviews restaurants mindlessly, almost as afterthoughts.  In a review of one of my favorite dining spots, she wrote: “My husband chose a simple main course of Tagelelli.  The pasta was fresh and cooked well, but the water could have been saltier, not much to say about noodles with butter and cheese. For my main, I went with gnocchi, which when fresh as these were, they are little bites of paradise.  These gnocchi were quite good, but my perspective might have been skewed due to my hospital diet.My only complaint about the dish was the sauce add-ins: ham, peas and mushrooms.  First of all, the sauce had a distinct pea flavor, not fresh pea flavor but of the water that is left over in the can of peas (Angel tasted it too). The flavor permeated the sauce and was a bit off putting. The other thing was the ham, which was cut into strips, not an ideal cut as it needed manipulation to stay on the fork and there was a lot of it. Now, most people don’t complain about having too much meat in their food, but I thought the ratio of pasta to meat and vegetables was off. I would have preferred less. I can understand the psychology of adding more. For a [$10] pasta dish, they want to give their customers the appearance of value by giving more of the stuff that is cheap, sandwich ham and canned peas. I was annoyed that I had to dig around all the excess to find the balance of the dish. In the end there was a lot of wasted ham.”

As Nancy Jenkins wondered, I, too, must ask myself, “What does this blogger get out of this?” And what about her reader? For the record, I also had that gnocchi dish last spring when she did, when there were fresh peas in season, and I thought it was fine. The chef and his wife are Italian, and know what they’re doing. I wonder about the blogger, whose site also includes a recipe for a broccoli, chicken, bread and cheese casserole that you could find at any American church supper.

Not that I’m any better. I just can’t be bothered with the cult of the new. Consequently, I tend to cook the same things over and over again, using the best ingredients I can find. Yes, I occasionally make discoveries in the kitchen — and when I do, I share them: it was just a couple of years ago that I realized that, after decades of cleaning huge pots of collard and turnip greens for New Year’s outdoors in freezing weather, with cold water, that I could have been using lukewarm water all those years to wash the greens that would be immediately cooked. And just yesterday I was making the classic southern “campfire” cobbler that is so easy and delicious when I actually remembered to stop and take a photo to show you something I’ve been doing for years, but forgetting to tell folks. The cobbler, often called “Cup-o’-cup-o’-cup o’” for its simple recipe calling for one cup milk, one cup sugar, and one cup flour, is one of those all-but-foolproof recipes that is delicious overcooked, undercooked, or with very small or very large amounts of fruit. I’ve published the recipe so many times in so many publications, it’s embarrassing, but once folks — even jaded New York food editors — taste it, they want the recipe. (You melt a stick of butter in an 8″ square pan in an oven preheating to 350 degrees F while you combine a cup of sugar, a cup of flour (self-rising or plain plus 2 tsp of baking powder), and a cup of milk. When the oven is preheated and the butter melted, you pour in the batter, then 2 to 4 cups of fruit (berries, peaches, etc.) and their juices. In the fall, I use apples, softened first by sautéeing, or, in a hurry, in the microwave. I  peel, core, and slice the apples and soften them in a little butter, but because they aren’t as juicy as peaches or summer berries, I add some water to the peels and cores, and put them in another pot to boil, coaxing all the flavors from them. When the apple slices are soft, I run the apple skins and cores through a food mill, adding the puree to the apples before adding them to the batter. The apple cobbler, which cooks in about an hour, was infinitely more flavorful than usual.

Since tens of thousands of folks have bought my cookbooks and corn products, I’d like to think that those of you reading this blog are those same folks, who know my work. But I really don’t know much about my readers, who continue to come to the page even when I’m not writing. There are over a million words here and 2000 photos, so there’s lot to see (though I haven’t managed to clean up all the posts that were ruined in the transfer — typeface changes, uneven edges, and photos out of place). Since I’ve been absent a lot lately, I thought I would go back through my photos from the past couple of months (beginning before I went on my book tour in October), and just tell you a little bit about what I’ve been eating — mostly at home.

Greens, Again

As I have written  several times before (see September 8, 2011), I truly miss the variety of cooked leafy green vegetables that I was accustomed to eating in the States. Yes, I can get as much spinach as I want — and I adore it, but I just don’t understand the lack of collards, mustard, beet, and turnips greens here (especially since they grow the latter three. I’m told the greens go to the hogs.) Everywhere I went on my book tour in the States, I begged for greens, and when I had the opportunity to cook myself (as at the home of my friends Chuck Dalby and Bruce Rashbaum, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland), I made sure to get my fill then (in the photo at right, from October, I have both turnips and collards ready to be braised). In New Orleans, I swooned over the big bunches that folks were carrying home from the farmers market (see photo, below). When I returned home from the month-long tour, one of the first meals I made was homemade duck sausage, served with a side of canned greens I ordered from home (see photo) and Smilyan beans (grown here for 250 years, they are now recognized by Slow Food as a food to be safeguarded.

I even asked that you send me seeds, which you did, so that I could not only grow greens on my balcony (see photo of me harvesting turnips, above), but also have my friends with farms grow greens for me. I can never get enough.

Wholesome Food, Plainly Cooked

When I was in grad school, one of my professors often invited me over for excellent dinners at his house. He knew that I had grown up with good food and appreciated it. I would always profusely compliment him on the meals, which he invariably described as “wholesome food, plainly cooked.” I’ve always striven to let the ingredients speak for themselves when I cook, rather than trying to claim the dishes as my own.  Here are some of the things I’ve had to eat at home lately:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the Florida Keys, I ate mostly fish and shellfish (and local citrus, avocadoes, and tomatoes).

Some meals at home

One of my go-to dishes when I want something fresh and light is pasta with mixed fresh herbs chopped with garlic and a little salt. Tossed into the best extra virgin olive oil heated just before serving with a few grinds of fresh pepper,  a few shavings of parmesan, some crusty bread, and a simple green salad. Simple perfection.

Sometimes I splurge on a really good bottle of wine. Bulgarian merlots can be elegant, redolent of the wines of the right bank of the Gironde. Pomerol comes to mind.

 

Of course, sometimes only a roast chicken will do, but here, as everywhere, finding good poultry is the hardest part (putting a chicken in a hot oven and turning it a few times is hardly work). I’ve been buying fresh galleti (young roosters) from Italy at METRO. They’re much better than the frozen poussins from France. At left, they’re served with pole beans and roasted potatoes and carrots. The root vegetables here in Bulgaria are second to none, but finding green vegetables beyond broccoli (imported), cabbage, spinach, and okra (local, but only in summer) is always difficult. I buy green beans whenever I see them — usually late summer (local) through fall (from Greece and Turkey). I keep the recipes very simple.

Recently, I read an article online about LaFrieda Meats, one of the finest purveyors of prime beef in the country. Accompanied with a video, the article profiled the century-old family business and included a recipe for “the best way to cook a steak.” I’ve had excellent steaks at the hands of some master chefs and grillmasters. I thought I was pretty good at cooking them as well. But the LaFriedas’ method clashed with everything I had ever learned. Instead of letting the meat come to room temperature and not salting it before cooking, they recommend keeping it a a very cold 36 degrees F until cooking and salting it beforehand (pepper it only afterwards). I had just been purchased some beautiful Argentinian grass-fed ribeyes (also from METRO). It was snowing outside, so I put the meat outdoors in a covered area where the temperature was exactly right. Placed on a hot grill or in a hot pan ( I used a grill pan, as you can see in the photo), the meat is cooked on the first side for 5 to 7 minutes, turned, and cooked on the second side for about the same amount of time, depending on the thickness of the steaks. Don’t turn the meat more than three times, they warn. I know when a steak is cooked to my liking by touch, so I pushed the steaks with my finger and saw that they needed about two minutes more. I turned them twice more, about a minute on each side, branding each steak with perpendicular grill marks.  We opened another special bottle of wine. It was the best steak I can remember eating in years. But before the steaks, we had delicious, enormous, briny Giga oysters from France. I really don’t like cold weather, but I will stay outdoors in the freezing cold to eat oysters!

Tis the season!

Now that it’s winter, complete with snow, I’ll have much less variety to choose from, not only because of the seasons, but because I venture out less in the car. I make the most of what there is. The root vegetables, as I’ve noted, are excellent, and I go through kilos of them each week. For Nikulden (see December 6, 2011), my fishmonger Costas Giouroudis gave me a pair of beautiful sea bream, which I grilled and served with wilted leeks and the pictured parsnips and carrots, roasted with olive oil in a hot oven (photo below).

 

Per southern Italian and Greek tradition, the fish is napped at the last minute with a salmoriglio sauce — warm water and lemon juice are whisked into olive oil with garlic and fresh oregano and/or parsley and capers. Boy, this was good!

 

 

 

 

Don’t forget the parsley (again)!

 

Soometimes I wonder if it weren’t parsley that civilized the Mediterranean and Balkans. It’s everywhere, on everything, in everything. But unlike America, parsley is featured here. Its bright green color and flavor can transform an ordinary dish. And so it was that I found myself yesterday going out in blustery winter storm to buy a bunch of parsley, considered an essential element of the classic French dish, Lapin à la Dijonnaise (also known as Lapin à la Moutarde) — Rabbit with Mustard and Cream. (The large bunch of Italian parsley in my hand at left cost 40 stotinki  — 26 cents US.)

For some reason folks shy away from French dishes, thinking them either too rich to eat or too hard to prepare. Nothing could be simpler than this classic. You cut up a rabbit, salt the pieces and let them sit at room temperature for about a half hour, pat them dry and brown them in a little butter, very slowly so that the butter doesn’t burn and the rabbit gets evenly browned. Remove the rabbit and set aside. Add a couple of shallots and brown them. Pour in a half cup white or rosé wine and a half cup of water, turn up the heat, and deglaze the pan. Add a half cup of mustard, some sprigs of fresh thyme (or a teaspoon of dried), and stir well, bringing the mixture to a boil. Add the rabbit pieces, toss them well so that all pieces are covered, turn down the heat, and cover the pot. Simmer until the meat is very tender and beginning to fall from the bones, about an hour. Remove the rabbit pieces to a warm plate, turn up the heat again, and reduce the sauce in half. Remove from the heat, stir in a half cup of cream and a quarter cup of chopped parsley. Return the rabbit to the pan, toss all pieces well in the sauce, and serve at once with good, crusty bread and a good bottle of big white wine.