Pet Pumpkin

The other day, after stumbling out of the Barnes and Noble café where I had been torturing myself with hours of GRE practice to the sounds of smooth jazz and other people complaining about their lives, I was cheered up by a collection of pumpkins at the green grocer on Atlantic. The mere sight of their effulgent orange skin helped to stymie the mental wounds of the pernicious vocabulary questions to which I had become almost inured, and made the day seem far less stygian.

So I bought one. One of the smaller sugar pumpkins, streaked with dark turquoise marks that made it look a bit like a magnified zebra tomato, jumped out at me right away. As I picked it up, the name “Cordelia” jumped to mind as well. I don’t remember if I named my Halloween pumpkins as a child, but every year required a meticulous search through the gigantic pumpkin mountain at Monterey Market for one with just the right personality. Picking a pumpkin can be like picking a pet: you choose one that seems friendly, carry it home in your arms, enjoy the certainty of its loyal, albeit subtle, excitement when you get home from work. And then, you remove its innards and use its flesh for various artistic and culinary purposes.

This whole phenomenon reminded me of an ongoing plot in Gordon Ramsay’s show The F Word, in which he raises pigs and sheep in his backyard to educate his children about where meat really comes from. I like the idea of self-sufficiency, and as a committed omnivore I feel that I should be able to face the reality of killing an animal for food. But when it comes down to it, I probably can’t.

That’s where this pumpkin comes in. I’ve devised a plan to bring me slightly closer to shedding my hypocritical stance on meat-eating (but note that no animals will be harmed in the execution of this plan). I’m going to nurture Cordelia for a week, making sure she doesn’t get too dusty, setting her near different windows every once in a while to keep her mind active, keeping her away from any radiators that might cause premature decay. Then, on October 31, she will be sacrificed and used for the most delicious pumpkin-based recipe known to mankind.

I need to find this recipe. Let me know if you have any ideas.

Vietnamese Sandwich on a Chinese Bus

The banh-mi craze has been going on for a while in New York, and with any luck they’ll soon become as ubiquitous across America as bubble tea. Everyone who’s tried one will probably tell you that they’ll eat a Vietnamese sandwich anytime and anywhere, but I sense whispered rivalries building up in this city as more and more banh-mi shops spring up. My first was purchased at Nicky’s in the East Village, and I’ll always be partial to their “Classic” sandwich, a buttery baguette densely stuffed with three kinds of pork, which warmed and filled me up on an otherwise-bleak winter day in 2008. The decadent combination of pate, ground pork, and roasted ham, contrasted with fresh carrots, cilantro, and jalapenos, is what makes the banh-mi a work of genius, in my opinion.

I’ve ordered the same thing at a tiny place on Broome Street, which offers a slightly cheaper and much, much bigger version. I was happy with what I got – like I said, you just don’t say no to a Vietnamese sandwich – but the bread was drier than the Nicky’s baguette, almost dangerously crusty. Not a bad option if you want to spend $3 on lunch and dinner combined, but I’d probably just spend an extra dollar and go to Nicky’s.

It’s very hard, in fact, to convince me to go anywhere but Nicky’s. But Paris Sandwich, a small establishment on Hester Street, has such a fanatical following (on the internet, at least) that I was willing to give it a try, and $4 of my hard-earned money. All reviews gushed about the bread, which is baked on the premises every hour, and I was guardedly hopeful that I would discover a source of fresh baguette that didn’t require a passport and plane ticket.

I planned to take the Chinatown bus to Boston last Friday, and a sandwich seemed like a good thing to bring on a four-hour bus ride that only stops at an Arby’s in New Haven. So before making my way to the Lucky Star pick-up point, I stopped by Paris Sandwich, a small but difficult-to-miss storefront with some very prominent signage. I decided on a shredded chicken bahn-mi, since I was branching out anyway, and it was handed to me promptly by a brisk bahn-mi server.

I made the bus with plenty of time thanks to this efficiency, and tried out the sandwich. Maybe it was the choice of chicken, a fairly unassuming flavor in comparison to a trio of pork, but the baguette was certainly the most memorable component. It was nice and soft on the inside, with a crackly crust that provided the perfect shell the other ingredients. Paris Sandwich has not, I have to say, fulfilled my quest for a real French baguette: the crust did not have the required shellacked sheen, and it was drier and dusted with some kind of cornmeal. But it was delicate and fresh, far from the offensive “Italian loaf” sold at so many delis around here.

The sandwich had the typical organization of a banh-mi: the meat stuffed into the uncut side of the baguette, strips of carrot and daikon and sprigs of cilantro running the length of the thing on the other side, topped unevenly with jalapenos to keep you guessing about how spicy the next bite will be. Eating one of these is always undignified, since unless you have perfectly placed incisors, you will inevitably fail to get a clean bite, and end up with an entire cilantro stalk or string of carrot hanging from your mouth. I was grateful that the bus wasn’t crowded, so there was no one next to me to witness this struggle or be showered by the layer of crumbs that I brushed off my jacket when I had finished.

Paris Sandwich is certainly worth going back to, although it came nowhere near to topping Nicky’s, and I certainly learned from the one I got that there’s no reason to stray away from the pork version. Honestly, I’m more excited about the prospect of buying a bag of mini-baguettes, which they sell for 85 cents, and taking them home to slather with butter and various other condiments.

Autumn Is for Apple

My first year in New York was virtually fruitless. I hardly ate any fruit. At home in Berkeley, our fruit bowl was dependably filled with softball-sized oranges, glowing nectarines, juicy Asian pears, and, on more exciting days, lychees, pomegranates, and starfuit; in New York, all I could find were puny bananas and apples with the taste and texture of packing peanuts. I should mention, however, that my searches didn’t reach beyond the NYU dining halls, which I assume cut costs by accepting shipments of the rest of the city’s reject fruit every few weeks. Eating a piece of cafeteria fruit was such a joyless experience – reaching for the least dusty apple, glancing around to see if you were getting weird looks for removing what was actually part of a month-old counter decoration, biting into the thing and being unable to discern any difference in taste from the soup, bagel, and chocolate cake you had eaten previously – that I rarely put myself through it.

After freshman year I started cooking for myself, and I stocked up on fruits and vegetables weekly at Trader Joe’s, occasionally treating myself to superior produce at Whole Foods. I found the fruit merely adequate; it came nowhere near to producing the transcendent fruit-eating experiences I remembered having in California on a regular basis. Apples and bananas were reliably decent, but it took me three years to eat an orange in New York City. It’s taken me several more years to figure out that those transcendent experiences can be had here, but it takes a little more effort to seek them out, and it really comes down to eating seasonally.

The harvest cycle is immediately apparent at any farmers market. There are always a few sad weeks in early March when the stalls offer nothing but limp carrots and bruised apples; then suddenly the vendors will unload tomatoes in shades of ruby and dark purple, along with mountains of stone fruits and berries. In the moment, at least, the excitement is worth enduring the more unpleasant aspects of the previous season. (Does admitting this make me a real East Coaster?)

I love summer, but fall comes with enough new good things to eat to make up for the dropping temperature. Specifically, apples. Magical things start happening to apples in late September. They go from reliable to remarkable, and they’re available in countless delicious varieties. This fall I’ve been particularly taken by the simple goodness of the apple and the subtle differences between types, and I’ve compiled a short guide to some of the Apples of Our Lives.

Gala: Available year-round at reasonable prices. Not overly sweet, but dense and hardy; excellent for pairing with cheese.

Pink lady: Very juicy but with a good crunch, and extremely sweet. Its sugary taste and flamingo color almost make this variety more candy than apple.

Honeycrisp: A new discovery, and I think I might have discovered the fruit of the gods. These apples have a beautifully dappled skin and glowing yellow flesh, and the mellow sweetness of honey and melon.

Macoun: You can tell these are going to be tart from the bright green that muscles through their ruddy red streaks. The minute I took a bite of one I decided it tasted like a backyard (in a good way). Definitely best eaten outside.

Mutzu: These are a muted pale green, much prettier than electric Granny Smiths. This softness is reflected in their flavor as well: sweet but slightly lemony and herbal (although this might have been the result of sitting in a bag with a bunch of sage for several hours).