Well, this one’s for the books.

Winter greens slumped in a warm broth, with toast and eggs— was there ever anything more soulful?

I substituted rainbow chard for kale; also, I was unsure about whether or not to spoon the remaining stock along with my greens into the bowl; frankly, I went all in, and poured a fair amount of the pan juices over my bread. The dish was soupy in the best possible way— brothy, tender greens, and a perfect fried egg, all crackly at the edges. A hunk of ciabatta sopped up the savory juices and all but melted into the earthy greens. Elemental, rustic, and utterly satisfying.

And how have you been?

I went to the market the other day, so I am happy. Is there anything more cherubic than a tight, golden head of cauliflower? I made granola for my farm fresh milk, and made carrot & fennel salad— it is marinating right now; I made soft scrambled eggs to fill corn tortillas, along with sauteed chard and new potatoes, all with a fiery salsa.

These last weeks I had been making big pots of soup from dried pulses— red lentil soup with sweet potato & tomato, split pea soup. Delicious as they were, having all of these fresh wonders in my kitchen thrills me endlessly.

Joe, Raquel, and I walked over to a community garden plot the other day, and later, over dinner (soft scrambled eggs and a kohlrabi & carrot salad + fennel seed and sesame), we discussed which crops we want to prioritize.

That’s right! I am going to start an urban garden, with my best friends. Soonish.

Things are looking up, you know?

So, some of the fears and trappings of a young, lustful and wistful life:

I have great, gaping fears of getting lost in my work again— by which I mean rather the opposite of my art-work; by which I mean my current menial job. Living to work rather than working to live, etc.

Naturally, there are greater things to work tirelessly toward, greater joys and troubles to be had!

There are evenings of making dinner and talking social theory, locavorism, and dinosaurs with grand, old friends. There are gorgeous days of big flatland wind, expansive blue sky, and straw-colored sun dedicated to long lunches, where you can cover Martin Scorcese, Cormac McCarthy, and Kanye West in the hours it takes to happily devour tender semolina-encrusted calamari stuffed into a roll with lemon ailoi and lettuce & tomato, or a little crock of goat’s milk raviloi all burnished and beautiful. Glasses of prosecco! There are nights that follow watching Spaghetti Westerns, drinking cups of tea.

There are bigger and brighter things, and I am working, really hard, at focusing on those— as ever. It’s funny, but it really is truly scary to throw yourself headlong into the pleasure principle, the good stuff. To open yourself up and be present and loving and sensitive and vulnerable and observant and really genuinely real. You’ve got to let all sorts of guards down to get there, let me tell you.

On that we have a word from young Truman Capote, whose letters I am reading right now, on hiatus from Moby Dick:

“In this day and age sensitivity…is almost an anachronism. Did you ever, in that wonderland wilderness of adolescence ever, quite unexpectedly, see something, a dusk sky, a wild bird, a landscape, so exquisite terror touched you to the bone? And you are afraid, terribly afraid the smallest movement, a leaf, say, turning in the wind, will shatter all? That is, I think, the way love is, or should be: one lives in beautiful terror.”

Hello.

Hello!!!

I know I’ve been away for a long while. But I’m back, for now, hopefully at regular intervals. Updates, you ask? Well, then:

I am working in a mighty hip pizza place on South Congress that makes mighty fine hand-tossed pies and leaves me sore and tired-limbed, raspy-voiced from yelling over rock n’ roll music, exuding deep musty smells of garlic.

I am reading Moby Dick, growing out my hair, reevaluating my concept of home and a sense of place, trying to take a breath, trying not to burn out on big New York slices of meatball and onion pizza.

On the latter front, here are some things I’ve made myself that stand out in my mind, from October onward:

cherry tomato & sweet onion salad with thyme; cucumber and creme fraiche tea sandwiches, classic lentil salad with supple sauteed carrots and onions and a slurry of rich vinaigrette deep with dijon and smoky tabasco; grilled cheese sandwiches with grana padano, strawberry jam, prosciutto, and thyme.

carrot salad with sunflower seeds; spiced roasted pumpkin with rice & lentils, shaved romano, and parsley; lemony chickpea and tuna salad with chopped romaine and a boiled egg; soft butter lettuce salad with jamon serrano, avocado, figs; spicy tomato, fennel, and chickpea soup; whole roasted chicken legs with carrots and parsley.

There have been some good meals. There have been some late nights, friendly visits, engagement announcements, philosophy talks, and the like. There have been bad days and weird days, pints of delicious home-brewed beer, flirtations, evenings wasted away watching James Bond on TV.

It’s been alright.

See you later.

Oh, Nico, work that melancholy drawl and talk to me some more about leaving in the fairest of the seasons. Lately, it has been cool and beautiful, and eggplants and bell peppers arrived at the market today, and all I can think about is how much I miss home.

(So enough already with the bombastic declarations. I’m still shopping at the Columbia market, and it’s because I’ve really come to love those people. And the carrots weren’t that good, anyway. Don’t worry, I’m making a list.)

But back to some oh-so-generously fitting music: songs that have been on my mind, lately:

New York, I love you, but you’re bringing me down by LCD Soundsystem (watch the video. It is amazing).

I’m Coming Home by The Almighty Defenders

The latter I just happened to hear looking at this. Avenue B is a street my dad lived on, once. It was an awesome, old apartment across from a church yard, on a street lined with trees and rosemary bushes and within walking distance of Quack’s Bakery, of the salty oat cookies.

The in-the-moment perfection of this series of photographs —music not included— should be accredited to a newly discovered blog, one with a seemingly endless supply of just such perfect moments (many of them, recently, New York and New-York-market centric) captured by a generous eye: Threading in the Choirs. Go, peruse, feel any of the day’s ugliness washed away.

There are people, things, places out there to love. And —let’s face the wonderful, sentimental truth of it— places to call home.

I know a place— the sun shines a whole lot, and most every sandwich has ripe avocado on it.

My routine tends to be: full-speed ahead cooking in the early week, a lapse in the middle, a rush of ambition directly following market (Thursdays, now), a slow hold on the kitchen come Saturday, and the chillest-of-chill dinners on Sunday.

This morning, certainly, there were steaming pots— one of rhubarb compote and one with softening wheat berries for an afternoon bowl mixed with mint, parsley, ricotta salata, and sambal. Tonight, however, some more generous slices of roast beef, slathered with dijon mustard, were stuffed into a whole-wheat-pecan roll alongside some lovely greens dressed in a very gently sweet-sour red wine vinaigrette with parmesan shavings. Simply, perfection. I felt the happiness that comes with a plate of steak frites; the balance, after all, was there. The mineral bitterness of greens bright with oil and sweet acid, the harmony between leanness & fat in a cut of rare-cooked red meat, and the humble comfort of a well-loved starch on the plate— be it bread or potatoes.

Speaking of food. As per usual.

Some things going down in Austin that I’m excited about coming home to:

Walton’s Fancy & Staple, just in general, as far as I can tell.

Frank is almost painfully hip, but I have an inkling that they serve very solid hot dogs; they also use Intelligentsia for their coffee! Promising.

Enoteca, as ever. (One of the first places where I realized, as a young adult with my passions all a-kindling, the way in which I care about food. One of the first places were the setting, the smells and sounds, the excitement of a meal there, made me kinda giddy. The first place I dreamed of the possible wonders of frying a chickpea and serving it in a paper cone. The first place I had a real panino and an Italian soda.)

Ice cream & tacos.

And then there is the fact that my coworker, friend and fellow Austinite making a home away from home, Tyler, has connects with Wheatsville, and may well be able to get me a job there pretty smoothly. Ah, to be among those contentedly ‘granola’ (very, very fitting, in this instance) foodies and young & old hipsters! A veritable cornucopia of organic delights and unabashed hippiness! With good sandwiches. Simply, perfection.

The doors & windows are open, the spirits are high, the livin’ is easy. My optimism is filtering back in, like all that sunlight. There are prospects!

Aimee and I went our separate ways this morning after eating H & H bagels with butter and sipping mediocre coffee from paper cups on a church stoop, people watching and sighing over the yeasted bread. I headed on alone towards the park, and, walking down 79th with the sun clattering against its golden awning, I saw this old-school hotel named “The Austin”.

I felt content. I am very excited to move back, because it is so lovely here, and I will be so happy with my memories! What more can you ask for, than to have an interlude be just brief enough to smack of reality, only one that consists above all of bagels on stoops and big skies and old buildings, the Upper West and rich old ladies with giant sunglasses and tiny dogs. And the full glory of a New York Summer is so close I can almost taste it.

This may be a somewhat boring notation of mine; regardless: I find it kind of funny, but whenever it begins to feel warm & beautiful & blue-skyed, I, black-coffee drinker that I am, crave an iced latte. It’s a drink that inevitably reminds me of home— iced lattes are, pretty much without exception, ingrained in the Austinite. I’ve always gotten one or two when the weather just starts to turn, here up North.

Honestly: soy lattes & tacos— that’s it, right there. That’s Austin.

And the sun is shining here with abandon. Aimee and I went to Brooklyn yesterday for delicious tacos and soupy-sweet-humble ezquites; La Superior’s rendition of the Mexican street dish (roasted corn kernels, epazote, chili, lime, queso fresco, and, in this case, mayonnaise) cooed in our stomachs, right along with the Mexican coke, the sauteed mushrooms with salsa verde, the cream-coated sauteed peppers and onions, the spicy, smoky shrimp.

We strolled through Williamsburg’s bright brownstones— there were pinkstones, baby bluestones!— wandering into a sort of mall of interconnected vintage stores and coffeeshops, milling about the longest in a really excellent bookshop with white shelves and a slinky black cat. On the way back to the subway, the streets teeming with New Yorkers in Summer high spirits, a Van Leeuwen ice cream truck roared past.

“Follow it,” I screamed, and we did, for about a block. It clearly wasn’t stopping anytime soon, but rather than waste that perfect night, we went down to Soho and got some gelato, happily sitting on a stoop with the comfortable breeze and the cobblestones.

So, here’s hoping your Springtime is off to an equally fortuitous start. I’m going to leave you with that, wholeheartedly, and some last-minute endorsements:

Reading the Wind Up Bird Chronicle, which is mysterious and surreal and beautiful, the latter being in a wholly unassuming way. The novel has an almost apathetic casualness to the oddities haunting; it has this hard edged modernity to its ghosts and psychics and the varied otherworldly entities that have cropped up in the protagonist’s life— a life which is otherwise remarkably real. In fact, I feel like Murakami manages to capture an ordinary life’s wonderful mundanities better than most any author I’ve read, and all while throwing in ‘prostitutes of the mind’ and curses. I read it on a park bench today and my head was spinning.

And then I’ve really enjoyed listening to Esperanza Spalding, whom I discovered after reading an article in The New Yorker. She is gorgeous, bodacious and very talented. I love the open, smooth style of jazz she makes, especially on warm nights with the windows open.

She also lives in Austin. Prospects! Yes.

Lately:

I’ve been stopping in the middle of what I’m doing to just, simply, think. There is much thinking to be done— currently on the agenda: moving back to Austin, around September.

We won’t go into unglamorous details. We won’t go over the anxious nature of my travels, the failed nature of these ventures. Chicago was a slow in-between, a couple years of waiting for New York, starry-eyed, and I fled. But it was also dirty-mouthed girlfriends, the city skyline sitting atop the beach of Lake Michigan, the best sandwiches served in a bright space rattling under the Damen Blue Line, spicy cabbage and Seinfeld with Sarah.

And now here I am. I have given New York its due, or at least feel confident that I will have done so come next Fall. It’ll be a full year, and it’ll be a good one. I’m ready.

Home, home, home, of the endless summers, the salsa and the salty-oat cookies. Thinking about it is like a big hug. It’s warm, and it’s comfortable.

People act like you can’t be comfortable and be accomplishing something. But if I can just slow down, just stop and think, sit down and doodle, I will be there. I will be accomplishing what I need in order to be happy. Art school’s not in the stars, as of yet, and a little house in Austin with Aimee sounds like the peace of mind I need in order to actually work on something in my own time. If there’s sunlight streaming through the kitchen window, all the better.

Whew.

So, no more chicken for me for a little while, I’ll tell you what. Chicken has pervaded my week: in a leafy salad with some of the roasted fingerlings from the pan, capers, & grated parmesan; on whole wheat bread with chopped green olive, mayonnaise, and shaved red onion; laid out cold on a plate with tabasco-spiked aioli.

It was lovely, it was all well and good, but frankly I am fed up with chicken. As my friend Sandra said, “You’re chickened out”. Get it?!

Anyway, some highlights this week were those dishes not dedicated to the bird, such as bowls of a brilliant, bright lentil soup with a hint of curry— these were generous meals of meaty, firm lentils and butternut squash in a tomatoey broth, sprinkled with parsley, basil, feta, and generous slip of olive oil. Balsamic roasted butternut squash & red onion with farro is a humble pairing; they are lovely, unassuming ingredients, but were made into something grander with herbs, citrus, and feta; also, a bit of hot sauce. This was eaten with bread + butter, a clementine, some slices of salami. My, my. It was perfect.

And then there’s a batch of whole wheat apple muffins with cardamom, nutmeg, and vanilla bean. There’s a story there, but I’ll save it for next time.

Now, I will clean for the arrival of a new roommate, make some granola, do laundry and grocery shopping, and continue making New York home, for as long as I can, with occasional daydreams of the abrasive sun and relaxed days that await, as ever, in Texas. I say, when you have an inkling of what’ll make you happy, just go for it. It is almost always worth it, in the end.

Listening to the new Massive Attack lately, thinking of driving home late at night with my Dad a long time ago. Back in the days & years of weekly Sunday visits, tired and thoughtful, swirling through the nighttime streets with too-cold AC and too-smooth music as the weekend came to a close. (I recommend “Splitting the Atom,” for one).

Eating a lot of sausage sandwiches lately, as I work my way through a rather large link bought at the farmer’s market. Besides sandwiches, though, I have taken a fork & knife to greasy hunks with dijon mustard; I also crumbled some into a savory, homey frittata with potato, rosemary, and garlic; topped it off with some cilantro and Cholula hot sauce— but this is besides the point.

As I sat down and ate my sandwich tonight —a delight, on crusty country bread with spicy sausage + lemony ailoi, coarse mustard and fresh red chile, with arugula, olive oil, & mint— I thought about my mom, and how much she has influenced my feelings about food and eating, despite the fact that oftentimes it seems we have opposite tastes. My mom, however, is very particular about her tastes. As am I.

This is a woman who will cry when her son eats her homemade chili resting in the fridge, because it takes 24 hours to prepare and 24 hours of fasting to ‘have her tastebuds ready’. This is a woman who will have a tuna sandwich prepared, cut and ready at the table, only to abandon it in a rush for the corner store: she’s out of Cheetos and they, simply, complete the dish. Same goes for a cold canned coke with a BLT.

She also has a funny obsession with sausage: in particular, a spicy, rosy-hued variety that comes worked into patties only obtainable from one grocer in New Orleans, LA. I distinctly remember this sausage as the lone souvenir she would request from any visits to our Louisiana relatives that were made without her; I remember a blue ice chest in the trunk of our car stocked full of it, the hot greasy smell of it cooking in our kitchen, the wild-eyed daydreams she expressed of flying down and packing return suitcases to the brim, only to have that signature peppery, lusty smell confirm fellow airplane passengers’ suspicions— that is, the ones they had of this tiny woman hoarding three times her weight in spicy sausage patties.

Bless her heart.

Like I said, I’ve been missing home, lately. Been missing driving at night, through Austin or onto Louisiana, being a kid and daydreams, lately.

Dedicated to Texas, whom I miss terribly.

Yes, I’m still thinking about it.

Not making it to Polvo’s, or Sugar Mama’s Bakeshop across the street.

Only going to Enoteca once; only going to Amy’s twice.

Only eating one and a half breakfast tacos.

But it wasn’t all bad:

There was Sam’s BBQ, with smokey baked beans, warm conversation, and awesome chicken, ribs, and sausage; cold boiled potatoes from Enoteca bright with capers, lemon, garlic, and thyme; mondo breakfast tacos with eggs, potatoes, and chorizo, sprinkled liberally with cilantro & pico de gallo from Maria’s Taco Express; a great chicken caesar salad at Kerbey Lane, where the owner personally— and sincerely— thanked the Grainers for our long, migas-fueled patronage; sweet cream and cinnamon ice cream from Amy’s; Jamaican coffee and dark chocolate ice cream from Amy’s; fish tacos with dark, complex salsa at the original El Chile; a garlic, roasted pepper, and basil white pie at Homeslice with wide circles of ricotta on top; wonderful, full-bodied coffee at the Green Muse with Raquel; breakfast everyday with Aimee at the kitchen table, where we ate our yogurt, fruit, and respective cereals in unison, together at last.

Oh! Austin. I will miss you, for now.