Departure Lists

I feel like I’m bursting with writing ideas for this blog, but at the same time, I’m trying to stay focused on my upcoming trip and all the prep work I need to do in order to leave town with a peaceful mind.  I’m finally done with all my trip-related errands (bank, Target, library), and I’ve even stashed a post-trip meal of brown rice and okra in spicy tomato sauce in the freezer.  It’s good that my errands are all done and all that remains is packing because I’ve been exhausted this weekend.  So exhausted that I felt only a twinge of guilt about watching six episodes of Friday Night Lights in two days (but in my defense, that show is so good!).  I started packing today, and though I’m far from finished, I’m feeling pretty pulled-together this week.

In the interest of staying focused on my trip preparations, I thought I’d share a few travel-related lists with you.  I like lists, and I hope you do too!

* Packing to wear: lots of clothing that can be easily layered in different ways.  After a summer of Texas heat, I think Michigan’s 60-70-degree temperatures are going to feel blissfully cool, but I’m sort of afraid of being cold!  So I’m packing smart layers, including my favorite green Five Bamboo dress (as seen here), tights, jeans, some light cardigans, and a few tops.

* Planning transit day meals: I’m going to try to get away with not buying any food on my way up to Michigan.  I think we can all agree that airport food sucks, so I’m going to pack minestrone (to be eaten at Houston Hobby Airport before going through security), a big salad, some chopped vegetables, a sandwich, some fruit (dried or fresh—whatever I’ve got), a peanut butter bar (yum!), and some nuts.  It sounds like a lot of food, but that will be lunch and dinner, I hope.  I’ll probably buy tea and water at the airport—the tea because I like tea and water because it’s absolutely essential.  Also, drinking my tea gives me something to do to fend off airport boredom!

* Hoping to read: my new library books!  I’m really excited about this set of novels, which you can see above.  I love Edith Wharton’s style, and I’ve heard great things about Michael Chabon’s writing.  I don’t know as much about Joanne Harris, but Chocolat is on my reading list for this year.  In fact, all three authors are on my reading list, but most of these titles are not.  What can I say?  In my defense, the library didn’t have the Michael Chabon title I wanted (all copies are checked out right now), and The House of Mirth was recommended to me by Matt.  Sadly, I’m missing him a lot right now, and it’s going to be a while before we see each other again.

* Ready: for a few days off.  It’s been a long, hard summer.  I miss my family, especially my niece, and I’m hoping to bond a little more with my baby nephew.

I may be MIA around the blog world for the next week or two, so please don’t be offended by my absence.  I’ll be back before you know it, yammering on about how much I love fall and how happy I am about the autumn harvest.  Until then, be well, sweet readers.

I’ll See You Soon

I think it’s hard to write about family without sounding cliché.  As Matt once said to me about grammar, “Nothing is more clichéd than grammar, which repeats the same structures over and over again.”  Writing about family is a lot like that: I traveled many miles, visited the family, we had a good time, the end!  Oh yeah, and isn’t my niece the cutest thing in the entire WORLD?!?

No, seriously.  Isn’t she?

But family is far more complicated than that because with family comes family dysfunction.  Take, for instance, Christmas Day last year.  It was actually not quite the cozy, snow-covered portrait I painted months ago.  The day turned out okay in the end, but before that, it featured such heartwarming moments as my brother John storming out of my parents’ house, me saying the f-bomb in front of my parents (not my finest moment, I assure you), and this very funny conversation my sister had with my brother Charlie:

Theresa: “How do you make mashed potatoes?”

Charlie: “One part mash, one part potato.”

At this point, Theresa’s phone died and she burst into tears.  I don’t remember why she was so upset that morning, but the whole “one part mash, one part potato” thing pushed her over the edge.  Maybe I’m a jerk, but it was one of the funniest stories of that day and it still makes me laugh now, just thinking about it.  One part mash, one part potato!  That’s my brother, in six words.  He makes me laugh.

All of this Christmas Day family dysfunction occurred before the official family celebration began, and I’ll admit, I was pretty grumpy.  My family can be stubborn and grouchy, and I’m no different.  But it was Christmas Day.  Christmas Day!  And I was about to spend it with people I love, at least in theory.  Even more important to me, it was a Christmas with Lydia and Devin, and I’d like to avoid giving them memories that later they will recall to therapists as they try to undo the psychic damage we inflicted on them on Christmas Day.

So I rallied. We rallied.  I apologized to my parents for that little f-bomb that fell from my lips—I was pretty embarrassed by that.  They shrugged it off, and I felt a tiny bit better.  My sister never quite recovered from that “one part mash, one part potato” thing, but sometimes you just have to let people be grumpy for a while.  And John seemed to cheer up once the festivities started—I think he also got a kick out of the whole mashed potato “disaster.”

My point now in recalling our not-so-merry Christmas is that sometimes families have bad days.  But we stick together, and we tough it out, and sometimes we escape into bedrooms and call our boyfriends, whose cell phones have no reception out in the boonies, but we leave a message anyway because it’s nice to say Merry Christmas to the people we love.

Families are bigger and stronger than the bad days and the bad times.  Or at least my family is, and I consider myself very fortunate that I come from such sturdy, if stubborn, stock.  Tolstoy may have written that “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” but I disagree.  Even happy families are complex and multidimensional.  A happy family may contain some unhappy members.  But I am happy to be a part of my family.

* * *

My sister-in-law Amanda is a great cook, and we do eat quite well at her house.  That’s her up there in the third photo, baking with Lydia.  It’s funny to remember that at the time of that photo, about a year ago, she was pregnant with Devin, my nephew.  Now I hear that Devin has started to pull himself up onto his feet!  It’s crazy how fast babies grow.

Last winter, while I was in Michigan for Christmas, Amanda made these amazing peanut butter bars, and it was love at first bite for me.  The recipe is pretty similar to these flourless peanut butter brownies, but the addition of chocolate, some tweaks on the salt and baking soda, and a change in baking technique make these bars quite different and very delicious.

While the old brownie recipe produces an almost fudgelike confection, this new recipe makes a chewier treat.  It’s a little crumbly in the best way, and the chocolate plays really well against the toasty flavor of peanut butter.  These bars get a little darker at the edges, so you have layers of flavor, a savory toasted note and a hint of caramel.  They’re so good—I can’t quite capture in words how good they are.  But I think the photo below does them justice.  I got a little fluffy with my food photos on Sunday, posing this pan of peanut butter bars next to the window in the good light.  But I do like how the photo makes me want to dive right into that pan.

Amanda’s Amazing Peanut Butter Bars

Adapted from this recipe for Almond Butter Blondies at elana’s pantry

Makes 24 bars in a 9x13-inch pan

For the peanut butter, I used an organic, “natural” peanut butter, and it worked well.  Because the peanut butter gets beaten until creamy, I imagine that any brand would work, including those that require you to stir the separated oil back into the solids.

Oh, and one more note: I bet this recipe would be fantastic with 1 tsp. cinnamon added to the batter.  Peanut butter and cinnamon is a favorite combination of mine, so maybe I’ll try that the next time I make these bars.

Cooking spray or butter to grease the pan

18 ounces (2 cups) creamy peanut butter

8 ounces (about 3/4 cup, by eyeball analysis) honey

2 eggs

1/2 tsp. salt

1 tsp. baking soda

1 cup chocolate chips (I used semisweet here), divided

1)  Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.  Spray a 9x13-inch pan with cooking spray or use your preferred method of greasing the pan (butter, etc.).

2)  In a large mixing bowl, use a hand mixer to beat the peanut butter until very smooth and creamy.

3)  Beat the honey and eggs into the peanut butter.

4)  Sprinkle the salt and baking soda over the peanut butter mixture, then beat everything together.

5)  Sprinkle 1/2 cup chocolate chips over the batter, then mix them into the batter by hand.  The batter will be very thick!

6)  Scrape the batter into the prepared pan.  Then use your hands to pat it into a layer that’s more or less even.  (I find it easiest to use my hands here.  For some reason, the batter sticks like crazy to mixing spoons, but it doesn’t stick too badly to my fingers.)  Sprinkle the remaining 1/2 cup chocolate chips on top of the batter.

7)  Bake for 20-30 minutes at 325 degrees F.  The edges will darken, which is okay, but keep an eye on your bars so they don’t burn.

8)  Allow bars to cool in their pan on a wire rack.  Slice and serve.

* * *

I’ll see you soon, Michigan.  You know I can’t wait.

September’s Not to Do List

On the topic of kitchen resolutions, I’d say I’m 1 for 2: my drying rack has been very busy, trying to keep up with me as I keep my kitchen mess to a minimum.  My sink is totally, gloriously empty right now, the perfect prelude to some Saturday night cooking.  My freezer, however, has seen few of its tenants move out and welcomed half a chocolate cake this week, my attempt to preserve the remainder of the chocolate raspberry pudding cake.  I’m having sort of a hard time figuring out how to deal with the freezer this month because I’m going out of town soon (11 days, to be precise!).  I don’t know what to use now and what to keep.  I suppose what I’m really lacking is a battle plan: I need a freezer inventory and a list of the recipes with which I’m going to tackle the freezer.  Make freezer inventory.  There!  That’s my next kitchen resolution.

But this month, I thought it important to make some notes on the resolutions I will not be making.  Writing a not-to-do list is a bit rebellious, but it’s also very reassuring.  And I feel it can be useful for harnessing your resolution energy to make sure it’s aimed squarely in the direction you want to move.  I find that I am sometimes vulnerable to the suggestions from other people’s to-do lists and resolutions, such that when someone talks about, for example, quitting alcohol, suddenly the idea that I should quit drinking takes root in my brain.  But the thing is, I don’t drink much in the first place!  And I like the occasional glass of wine!  Writing my not-to-do list is a way of ferreting out all those unwanted ideas and saying to them, firmly but kindly, “NO.”  Go ahead, try it: “No!”  See?  Like I said, it’s very reassuring.

For the month of September, I promise not to:

* Drink less coffee.

* Drink less wine.

* Ride my bike less often.

* Get up earlier.

* Worry about my job and my future.

* Spend less time feeling grateful for my wonderful friends, great colleagues, and good life.

* Feel less loved by the sweetest man I know.

* Spend more time being serious.

* Hurry up.

What are you planning not to do this month?

Late-Summer Kitchen Resolutions

Even though it was 108 degrees here yesterday, I’m going to declare that we are in the home stretch: summer is almost over.

(For those of you who had to deal with Hurricane Irene, I’m really sorry.  Though I live in Texas, we are far enough inland that hurricanes tend not to bother us too much.  But to Chrissy and any readers who were stuck inside, or underground, because of Irene, I hope you are okay.)

It’s been an outrageously hot month for us down here: over 100 degrees F for most of August, according to my sources.  That’s beyond hot.  That’s an inferno, right outside your front door.  It’s heat the likes of which I’ve never encountered in the North.  I’m living in a firepit.  These days, I dream of winter, of an unfamiliar silence during which the air-conditioner doesn’t hum.  I dream of cool mornings and hot oatmeal, putting layers under my summer dresses and bike rides that leave me feeling refreshed and not dripping with sweat.  I dream of fall, of putting away my shorts and pulling out my tights.  I dream of hot apple cider, simmered with spices and ladled into mugs that may or may not be spiked with a shot of rum.

But most of all, I dream of the end of August.  And that’s just two days away.  I am so happy.

In the spirit of new starts—a new month, a new season—I’ve decided to make two kitchen resolutions to light a little fire under my behind.  To illustrate the first, I present to you this rather scary picture of my kitchen a few weeks ago:

Yikes!

I’m not very good at cleaning up the kitchen after every meal.  I do some clean-up, but inevitably there are still dirty dishes in the sink when I wander off to do something else.  It’s a bad habit, I know, but it accompanies a really good habit, which is cooking at home.  Almost all of my meals are home-cooked, so my kitchen sees a lot of action.  And I really do love to cook.  This weekend, with a soup bubbling on the stove and a cake batter coming together on the countertop, I was just filled with a sense of well-being, of happy productivity.  But before my cooking session, I made myself spend a healthy chunk of time cleaning up all the dirty dishes, the ones that started to pile up on me late in the week.  It felt good to make that mess go away.

For my kitchen resolution, I’m taking baby steps.  Twice a week, I’m going to tackle whatever random mess is in the kitchen sink.  I’m going to wash everything until I have an empty sink.  Twice a week.  It’s a modest goal, but like I said: baby steps.

My second resolution is to work on emptying out the freezer.  I have a lot of food that I’ve frozen, such as last year’s cranberries, some very ripe bananas, and okra from Christopher’s garden.  I’d like to eat my way through that stash to make room for the fall harvest.  Inevitably, I’m going to end up wanting to freeze more cranberries and stash more pumpkin puree away for the winter.  I’d like to have room to do that, so I’d better make room now.

I’m happy to report that I’ve already started on the second resolution: I thawed a bag of pumpkin puree from last year.  Tonight I simmered a big scoop of it on the stovetop, then dressed it with maple syrup, butter, and a few pinches of salt.  It was delicious—earthy and rich and a little haunting.  The perfect prelude to autumn, which is just around the corner.

Do you have any kitchen resolutions?  How do you keep your cooking space from turning into a disaster zone?  Do share your secrets—this messy cook is all ears!

A Humble Little Bowl

Last night I ate a wonderful, comfort-foods dinner: a vegetable soup, pureed, swirled with yogurt, and topped with shredded cheese, almost like a baked potato in soup form; crunchy romaine lettuce, eaten in pure green form—no dressing, no nothing, just leaves; and a chocolate raspberry pudding cake, a Nigella Lawson recipe that I’d been eyeing for a long time and finally made into a kitchen reality.

To be honest, I thought the cake would steal the show.  How could it not?  A dense, fudgy cake, rich with chocolate and studded with raspberries, “like glinting, mud-covered garnets,” as Nigella says.  I love the combination of chocolate and raspberry.  It’s a match made in heaven, with the fruity tartness of the berries cutting through the palate-coating richness of chocolate.  But to be honest, while the cake was tasty enough, and while I plan to eat another slice tonight for dessert, I’m not sure I’d make this cake again.  Or if I did, I would make some changes.  It wasn’t sweet enough for my taste, for one thing.  It’s made with coffee, so it’s more like a mocha raspberry cake, and I think the bitterness of the coffee dulls the sweetness.  Another thing is that the cake was more cake-like than I expected.  I was hoping for a bit of a molten quality, a pudding quality, so I think I’d underbake this a bit, 40 minutes instead of 45 in the oven.  The cake was pretty solid at 45 minutes.

Like I said, I’ll eat my cake and not complain because after all, it’s still chocolate and raspberries and oh man, it’s that time of the month when chocolate practically becomes its own food group at my table.  But I should mention that making the cake was really quite fun.  I got to use my springform pan for the first time (I’ve only owned it for, oh, three years now?), and it worked beautifully: no leaks!  And my cake came out easily after its requisite cooling time.  Also, raspberries!  They’re gorgeous!  And this cake features a layer of them, scattered on top of half the cake batter and then covered with the remaining batter.  Putting the layers of cake together in their springform pan was my favorite part.  Eating the cake was my second favorite part.  Washing all the dishes was my least favorite part.

It turns out that the best part of dinner was my rather understated baked potato in soup form.  The recipe comes from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home, a much-loved cookbook with some fantastic soup recipes.  I’ve made this soup before and liked it quite a bit, but yesterday, while wandering around the hippie food store, thinking vaguely of dinner and looking at yellow squash, I was reminded of the recipe and decided it would make for an easy, tasty, and soothing dinner.  I wasn’t entirely sure I’d be able to remember all the ingredients for a soup I’d made once, but I felt confident that I could improvise if I forgot something.  I knew it called for yellow squash, and potatoes, and carrots, and cheese, but what else?  Onions?  And that was all I could remember.

Which, as it turns out, was enough.

This soup appears like a humble little bowl, but I find it absolutely delightful.  The flavors are really well balanced: the starchy mildness of the vegetables, really good vegetable stock, the punchy brightness of yogurt, and to top it all off, the savory melt of shredded cheese.  The original recipe calls for stirring the cheese into the soup, but last night, when I was lazy and didn’t feel like shredding an entire cup of cheese, I just sprinkled a handful over one bowl and I loved the effect.  I feel like the cheese has more presence when it’s not melted into the soup—it’s more pronounced, with a distinct texture and flavor apart from the soup.

Happy cooking, friends.

Potato-Yogurt Soup

Adapted from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home (the original recipe is Golden Cheddar Cheese Soup)

Makes 4 servings

2 tbsp. vegetable oil

2 medium white or yellow onions, chopped

2 medium potatoes, thinly sliced (I like red potatoes or Yukon Golds here)

1 medium or large carrot, sliced

1 medium yellow summer squash, halved lengthwise and sliced

1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper (I didn’t measure this but used a lot of pepper and called it good)

1/8 tsp. tumeric (a big pinch)

2 cups vegetable stock

1/2 cup yogurt

1/2 cup water

Grated cheese, such as cheddar or jack, for sprinkling on top

1)  In a soup pot, heat the oil over medium to medium-high heat.  Add the onions and cook for several minutes, until they soften.

2)  Add the potatoes, carrots, yellow squash, black pepper, and tumeric to the onions.  Cook for a few minutes, stirring frequently.

3)  Add the vegetable stock, bring to a bubble, and simmer for 15-20 minutes, or until the vegetables are very soft.

4)  Turn off the heat and let the soup sit for a few minutes.  Then blend it to smoothness in a blender or using an immersion blender, if you have one.

5)  Mix the yogurt with the water and stir to combine.  Pour the yogurt mixture into the blended soup and stir.  Taste for seasonings (salt and pepper) and adjust if needed.

6)  Ladle the soup into bowls and sprinkle the top with shredded cheese.  You could also put more shredded cheese on the table and let your guests doctor their bowls themselves.  Some people might even reach for the hot sauce, but I think this soup is perfect as is. 

On Perseverance

Today I decided that it’s time for me to write a really honest post about what is happening behind the scenes around here.  I want to share my still-unfolding story with you because that’s what writers do: they tell stories, sometimes other people’s stories and sometimes their own story.  This is my story.

It’s been a really hard summer.  In June, I received an evaluation at work in which I was told that my performance “needed improvement.”  I was informed that if my performance did not improve by October of 2011, my position may be eliminated.  In a nutshell, I’ve struggled in my research since I started my postdoc in October 2009.  My main project, the project on which my advisor and I thought I was guaranteed success, failed to go anywhere.  It failed to thrive.  I spent over a year on that project, trying to make some progress, but all I got was negative data and frustration.  This type of failure is really common in science—it happens all the goddamn time.  At the end of last summer, when it became clear that this “surefire project” was becoming elusive, I started working on a secondary project.  On that secondary project, I also generated a lot of negative results (which, again, is very normal in science!), but very slowly, I started building a project.  I started seeing an interesting phenomenon, one that repeated itself, and I thought, Could this be real?

The new project has had its share of ups and downs, but there was a trickle of interesting data that kept me intrigued, so I continued to work on it.  For a variety of reasons, the work on that project was slow, but I kept plugging away at it.  The aforementioned “guaranteed success” project faded from my everyday thoughts, but it didn’t fade from my advisor’s thoughts when he did my annual evaluation.  Because I had failed to make progress on that particular project, and because my advisor and I had been going through a rough patch, he gave me a really negative evaluation.  To be honest, I had been expecting a negative evaluation because things weren’t going so well between us, but still, when I finally held the document in my hands, its words shook me hard and long.

I did what anyone would do: I cried.  I got mad, I felt sorry for myself, and I panicked.  I talked to friends.  Then I got to work: I wrote a rebuttal to my evaluation, using a rational, evidence-based approach in my responses.  I met with my advisor a few days later, bringing my rebuttal with me.  We hashed it out, quite calmly even, and we came up with a plan for the summer.  Then it was time for me to show and prove: show him that I could do the experiments and prove that my project and I were worth our spot (and funding!) in the lab.

So I got to work, and I worked hard.  I was in the lab seven days a week, trying to crank it out.  I’m still in that phase now, though I’d say things feel more optimistic to me than they did three months ago.  One thing that I decided against doing, even though it would have been reasonable to do it, was launch into a job search.  I thought long and hard about whether I should just find another job and walk away from this one.  There were two good reasons not to start a job search right away.  The first and best reason is that I liked my project.  I still do.  And I wanted to give it my best shot to see if I could build a story out of it.  The second is that four months is not a lot of time in the research world.  Blink and four months will have passed.  If I really wanted to give my best effort in the lab in those four months, I couldn’t be distracted by looking for jobs elsewhere.  I had to focus.

In June, immediately following my evaluation, I was a wreck: angry, anxious, scared.  I don’t think I’ve ever received such negative feedback on my work.  It was demoralizing and upsetting, even if I didn’t agree with all the specifics of the evaluation.  I’ve always been a hard worker and a high achiever, but now I was facing a boss who was telling me otherwise.  And the thing is, he wasn’t totally wrong.  I had been struggling in my research.  I had been unlucky.  And I was frustrated with that.  But never before had an advisor come down so hard on me.  It rattled me.

I took my time, processing the aftershocks of the bad news.  Perhaps it sounds like I was overreacting, but consider this: in my life, my work is huge.  It’s my livelihood, of course, but it’s also part of my identity and my pride.  I moved 1100 miles for this job, giving up all my local friends and comforts as well as easy travel back to Michigan to see my family.  I made huge sacrifices for my current job because I thought it was worth it.  And now here it was, crumbling beneath my feet, despite my best efforts to make it work.

But here is the amazing thing: after giving myself time to feel however I happened to feel, I have arrived at a better place.  Research-wise, I feel optimistic about the future.  More importantly, I feel at peace about whatever happens.  I may still lose my job (or as I like to say, because it sounds better, “my contract may not be renewed”), but I know that I gave it my best effort.  That’s really all I can do.  The only way for me to guarantee that my experiments will yield a particular result is for me to fake the data, which is not a strategy I endorse.  For me, recognizing that all I can do is perform the experiments patiently and thoughtfully was a huge step toward making peace with my situation.

Is my situation still anxiety-provoking?  Yes, absolutely.  Not knowing whether I will have a monthly income in November does not make me happy.  But for now, I’ve chosen to focus on what I do have, which is a few more months in this job.  After that, we will see what happens. 

Either way, everything is going to be okay.  That much I know. 

Here’s a photo to illustrate my research interests.  Any guesses?

Lucky Me

This is Part Three and the final installment of my rambling little essay on love.  You can find Part One here and Part Two over here.

I fully intend to finish this essay series before the end of August because I need to make sure you still have access to good summer produce!  Today we’re talking melons, but before that, let’s talk about friends and the food they cook for us.

I’ve waxed poetically about Matt’s cooking before, but his recipes remain elusive.  He cooks intuitively and delightfully, which makes watching him cook quite the pleasure.  We don’t really cook together any more, which would make me sad if I hadn’t decided to just accept my role as audience member when he’s in the kitchen.  I think part of loving someone, especially for a long time, is accepting them: their temperament, rhythms, and habits.  Matt and I do a pretty good job at this with each other.  Part of how Matt operates is that when he cooks, it’s mostly a solo operation.  It’s certainly possible that my small kitchen has something to do with this; it might not be as easy for him to handle the small space.  My friend Amutha, who is a scientist like me, pointed out that when you work in labs as we do, you get used to sharing small spaces with people.  You perfect the art of dancing around other people.  It’s fitting that Amutha and I have an easy time sharing my kitchen, but Matt and I tend to segregate: he takes over the kitchen while I eat snacks at the kitchen table and occasionally play sous-chef (“Can you rinse these tomatoes?”).

The last time we had dinner together, I very slyly convinced both Matt and Amutha to cook dinner for us: a tag-team effort between two of my favorite cooks.  They agreed easily; it probably helped matters that the two of them get along quite cheerfully, and we like to keep the red wine flowing in the evening.  The menu was Spain-meets-India: Matt made a refreshing gazpacho packed with produce from that morning’s visit to the farmers’ market.  Amutha made a channa paneer, if I may be so bold as to call it that: a heavily spiced dish of chickpeas and fried cheese, made magical with Amutha’s spice kit.  Matt and I both knew we’d be eating well that night when we heard Amutha was bringing her spice kit over to my place.  Oh yes.  And finally, as a palate cleanser, Matt assembled plates of melon and prosciutto for the meat-eaters; for me, he swapped out the prosciutto and instead dressed the melon slices with fresh lime juice and chopped mint.

As he chopped vegetables for the gazpacho, Matt nudged me to get out my camera and document his gazpacho-making.  And it was quite lovely, too, all the layers of summer vegetables, piled on top of one another in a rainbow of garden beauty.  Knowing that Amutha would be making a spicy Indian dish, Matt borrowed a note from the subcontinent’s raitas and went heavy on the cucumber so the gazpacho would complement the richness of Amutha’s dish.

But the gazpacho would not have been gazpacho without a judicious handful of raw garlic and a generous pour of olive oil to give it body.  We’re not talking vegetable smoothie here; we’re talking gazpacho. 

The red wine must have started working by the time Amutha arrived, as I have no photographic evidence of her efforts at the stove.  But I know this much: nobody cooks Indian food more deliciously than an Indian.  I love watching Amutha cook, the way her hands move so gracefully through chopping, seasoning, and cooking her food.  She has her own little kitchen dance, swaying from chopping board to frying pan to spice kit.  And her food tastes like nothing I’ve eaten before.  I mean, it tastes like Indian food, but it’s better than anything I’d had in an Indian restaurant.  To say that I like it would be an understatement.  I really, really, really like it.

When Amutha finished her channa paneer, the three of us sat down to dinner and had one of the loveliest evenings in recent memory.  Matt and Amutha have so many little habits and preferences in common that I say they are like two peas in a pod.  I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that Matt would find his counterpart in an Indian woman, but it’s true and hilarious.  They both prefer red wine over white, evenings to mornings, hot weather to cold, and both have a way of making everything they do look easy.  They also have a shared affinity for people who are a little more outwardly emotional, people who don’t have the cool-as-a-cucumber act down pat.  I find this last similarity fascinating, perhaps because it speaks more deeply to a similarity in temperament which shapes their attraction to other people.

And lucky me, they put up with my shenanigans.  I am hardly cool as a cucumber most of the time, but sometimes I’m mellow as a melon.  Since that evening, I’ve been preparing cantaloupe the way Matt did for me: with mint and fresh lime juice.  I’ve also started adding a pinch of salt, a move inspired by the prosciutto, whose saltiness plays so well against cantaloupe’s sweetness.  It’s a deeply refreshing recipe (hardly a recipe at all, really), and I thought you might enjoy it as much as I have.

Matt’s Melon with Lime and Mint

Serves 3-4 as a side dish

1 perfectly ripe cantaloupe melon

A lime

Kosher salt to taste

Fresh mint to taste

1)  Chop the melon into bite-sized chunks and place in a large bowl.  Chop the lime in half and squeeze some juice over the melon.  Sprinkle some salt over the melon.

2)  Wash, dry, and chop the mint.  Sprinkle some chopped mint over the melon, then toss everything together.  Serve immediately or tuck in the fridge to save for later.