Me? Unable to wrestle an eggplant? Intimidated by that mysterious nightshade? Poppycock!

Tonight I ate some marinated eggplant that I had left to sit all day amongst absurd amounts of olive oil, chopped parsley & basil, capers, dried chile, pungent garlic, and an inspired addition of lightly crushed cumin seed. It was superb, and I piled it atop baguette with ricotta, and also ate it greedily out of the bowl; I sighed and mopped up residual spicy, herb-ridden oil and generally enjoyed it more than I have most things in a long while.

Lunch had also been swell, a sweet and earthy carrot salad and a wedge of humble potato tortilla. The air was cool, and I was happy.

Other things that have made me happy lately: Grace Paley, and daydreaming.

Last but not least is that I recently made it out to Brooklyn and hung out until late into the night with friends. We walked around Park Slope and watched weird clips on YouTube and shared cigarettes. We ate at a Cuban place, and I learned what an empanada was, which I thought I knew, but didn’t— that is what I ordered for my dinner. It was the size of the palm of my hand (note: I have small hands). It was comically small, in fact, and I felt very embarrassed, but it was also a blessed, buttery little envelope stuffed with cod and bits of sweet corn, and there were plaintain chips, and black bean dip, guacamole and tangy pico de gallo; my companions alike were appalled by the postage-stamp size of my order, and piled rice and soupy black beans and meaty grilled mushrooms onto my plate.

Then we talked over a snappy, sweet, cider-like beer and all was very well.

Just some foodstuffs for you today:

Cool bowls of creamy legumes: one of roasted sweet potato and borlotti with olive oil, boiled tomato, dried chile, and marjoram; another with more borlotti (such a brilliant texture!) with sweet, clean fresh mozzarella, slivered basil, garlic, a generous squeeze of lemon.

Richly sweet tomato and roasted pepper salad with basil and marjoram, capers, shaved parmesan and fresh ricotta— garnered from the Bedford Cheese Shop. The wares at the Bedford Cheese Shop include all good things in life, such as cured meats, oil and vinegar, local pickled vegetables and candies (fig and chocolate caramels, for one), strong mustard and nutella, tiny oil-packed fish. And, of course, a staggering selection of cheeses. An essential part of the package though, the brown-paper-wrapped happiness package that is little shops like these for me, was that the employees were contentedly discussing their farmer’s market purchases with one another— the heirloom carrots waiting at home for them. Then, a regular or a friend or some such popped in, and was bragging of her visit to a tortilla factory in Queens; she pulled out a package and gave them one to share, and the air was filled with the smell of steam and warmth and earth, of masa. All in about ten minutes. That, my friends, is a package.

And back at Saltie (!) I feasted on ‘The Clean Slate’, a tender—but black-crackly-edged— naan piled with earthy hummus, piquant pickled vegetables, yogurt, quinoa, and seeds (sesame, fennel). I was in love, am in love. I would go there everyday, but will of course compromise with going often and trying everything.

Absolutely everything!

Hello!

True, the past weekend led to rather lofty expectations for this week, but the cold rain the past few days has put me in a funk— even as I was reluctantly expecting this ugly weather to rear its head; it is Spring, after all.

So, rain, I’ll make you a deal— you take care of fertility, etc, and I will tromp through the puddles, etc, but can we please see some asparagus & radishes & soft fresh herbs? The Columbia market is tomorrow (besides Sunday, of course) and I’m going to wake up early and investigate in the cold sunshine. I will probably literally gasp if I spy those slim green stalks, or rosy pink radishes; I will probably faint upon seeing the delicate red of the season’s first berries. I am really sick of gazing upon pale carrots and humble potatoes. Oh, yes, but I will take some waxy baby potatoes, please! All the better for tossing with capers and lemon, or with green beans and olive oil and garlic— alternately, with snap peas and mint and maybe some young onions. With the haphazard mixture of blue skies & heavy rain we’ve been getting, I’m banking on a harvest, from some farm, soon.

Other than that, there is only the coming weekend to look forward to, despite the relative shortage of sunshine it’s predicted to grant us. But there are promises of pizza in Brooklyn with Aimee—the warm sun last weekend kind of rerouted our pizza desire; we went, of course, for the wonderful tacos.

In fact, last Sunday, while the sun still shone, I ventured back to Brooklyn to immediately revisit La Superior, with its lovely red interior that achieves perfect measures of both youthful stylishness & Mexican hole-in-the-wall simplicity. My intentions were pure: chicken with chipotle sauce, pork slow-cooked in banana leaf, peppers & onions cooked until tender with a gentle blanket of cream. Yet, it was Sunday morning (12:45 pm, to be precise) and eggs + beans beckoned from all corners of the menu. When I asked her opinion, the tall-glass-of-water waitress sat down across from me and smiled knowingly- “Huevos Motulenos” she said, and I trusted.

It’s a good thing. Made up of the modest combination of fried eggs in a pool of soupy black beans, the plate defied expectations and was, in a word, sexy. The mess beamed up at me; it was spiked with a deep, warming pepper sauce, speckled with spiced ham, and balanced by split green peas, which lent their earthy sweetness to a wonderfully savory dish. Sticky-tender slices of caramelized plantain offered a rich punctuation, a warming roundness. Brilliant!

Thankfully, the weather has been fair in my kitchen at home as well:

Creamy borlotti beans in a salad with savory, floral marjoram, intensely delicious roasted sweet potato, chile, olive oil, and oregano.

Farro with roasted Italian hot pepper, salty, cool fresh mozzarella, arugula, and olive oil.

A batch of Italian salsa verde, which was lovingly spooned over smoked salmon with a wedge of lemon; the rest was dolloped atop soft scrambled eggs with a bit of ketchup— it was perfect.

To be honest, the mornings have been the hardest. I stand aimlessly in the kitchen— Oatmeal! No…yogurt. Wait, no, oatmeal! But, by evening, the comforts of humble late-winter food has it all making sense. What’s one more batch of spicy cabbage than another bowl of happiness, after all? Tomorrow, there is the market, and I will contentedly wait.

(It’s chilly today, but fresh as a daisy. How I love you, sunshine. You make life easier. Everyone: remember to look up at the sky sometimes, ok?

On that:

“The Sun woke me this morning loud

and clear, saying “Hey! I’ve been

trying to wake you up for fifteen minutes.

…I know you love Manhattan, but you ought to look up more often.

And

always embrace things, people earth

sky stars, as I do, freely…”

          —from ‘A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island’ by Frank O’Hara)

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.