Tag Archives: resourcefulness

The NYC Food Film Festival, or How I Legally Yanked Food from a Truck

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Gastrocinephiles! So you’ve watched and rewound the opening scene of Eat Drink Man Woman multiple times? Your dreams involve recreating the timpano from Big Night? Then the NYC Food Film Festival is the place to be, celebrating the year’s accomplishments in food film, food documentary, and of course, food porn. In its fifth year of running, the Food Film Fest is attracting all sorts of attention from food media, filmmakers, and even Mayor Bloomberg, who kicked off the opening ceremony by declaring “Food Film Fest Day” in New York.

I was present for the closing gala, themed “Farm to Film to Table.” Held in the Varick Room at the Tribeca Theater, the city’s student filmmakers, publicists and chefs gathered for hors d’oeuvres and cocktails made from locally sourced ingredients. Chef and Food Network star Amanda Freitag spearheaded a menu of baked crab apples with pork belly in the core, butternut squash with curry and pepitas, and roasted sunchokes with red garlic. Most interesting was the edible dirt, a powdery concoction of mushrooms served with peppery arugula. The dirt, while tasty, would’ve been better if it were warm, so I actually ended up sprinkling some over a bowl of chili for highly satisfactory results. Continue reading The NYC Food Film Festival, or How I Legally Yanked Food from a Truck →

An Employment Epistle

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Dear R.,

It has only been six weeks since that napkin-crumpling, tear-stained breakfast with you at the Z-7 Diner, but it feels like years have passed. My job was on tenterhooks; I needed to find a new one or soon join the swelling ranks of the unemployed. Murmurs of a double dip recession were getting louder. I had so many questions and too little time. What do you do with a gastronomy degree anyway? Why is it that the sustainable, “socially responsible” organizations are the ones offering only unpaid internships? How do I land a new apartment lease in the highly competitive NYC real estate market if I can’t demonstrate an income? I am a fighter, yes, but this city is one who fights back. And I was determined to go down in a Viking pyre of glory.

So I started reaching out for help. I talked to old friends’ drinking buddies, lingered to chat with the cheesemonger, shook hands at conferences. I cyberstalked people whose jobs I wanted in ten years and wheedled them into grabbing coffee with me. I emailed you on a whim because—I don’t know—it seemed like you’d made some valuable mistakes before, and you weren’t hesitant to talk about them.

Most of all, I talked to myself. I said that I wanted to write. You asked one innocent yet oh-so-probing question that morning that stuck with me: why should anyone read what I have to say? How do I gain credibility as a writer? After all, you don’t have to bill yourself as a writer to be one. Dan Barber’s platform is his role as chef-owner of Blue Hill; Marion Nestle is a professor at NYU. I let that one marinate, as I searched for roles that would give me a soapbox.

Along the way, I made some incredibly naive mistakes. There was the time I asked a teacher if he would serve as a reference for me. He flatly turned me down. After all, I’d written a publicly critical blog post about the university that he served. There was the time I got rejected for an interview with a publicity agency. Though they were impressed by my cover letter, after Googling me, they’d stumbled across the aforementioned blog post and decided I was too risky a prospect—what if I decided to “write an angry tirade” about them? It turns out that being a writer with opinions is perceived as a threat. For the first time, people were paying attention to what I had to say, and I didn’t want them to.

Things happen in stochastic ways. Maddening weeks went by, as I sent out dozens of resumes into a void of silence. I kept rewriting my cover letter. I applied for unpaid internships and jobs that I was overqualified for. They never replied. I considered going back to economics research. Finally, I sent in an application to work as a sales representative at W&T Seafood, a second generation seafood distributor in Brooklyn. When I met the manager, we hit it off with the immediate chemistry that children born of immigrant entrepreneurs share.

She thought I was smart and would fit into the company handily. The problem was, I wasn’t all that interested in sales. I did, however, have other talents that could be harnessed. W&T was looking to expand some of its PR and marketing initiatives, projects that I was eager to tackle. Would they hire me for a position that didn’t exist yet? We gave it a few days of thought and one updated job description later, I was officially on board as the business development and communications guru.

So there you have it. Kids, the surefire way to get a job is to interview at a company, confess that you’d rather do something else, and then work with them to come up with the perfect position for you. I now have a new role as the voice of W&T, a vehicle that allows me to write with expertise on sustainable seafood. I’ve learned how to negotiate a salary and how to identify companies I wouldn’t be a good fit for. I’m 3 for 3 with jobs that allow me to bike to work and don’t require dressing up. I feel like a winner.

This euphoria won’t last. But I felt the need to capture it—right now at 6 am—to bottle it for the next time I’m in a panic. It’s a potent homebrew of optimism built on proactive perseverance.

Feel free to take a sip when you need it.

Thanks again,
C

Badass Sage and Sausage Stuffing, or a UNISG Thanksgiving

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No cranberries. No pecans. And forget the canned pumpkin. Celebrating America’s most foodie of holidays while abroad certainly poses its challenges. But by jove, we were going to try our darndest. The email was sent out to the class: “The 4th Thursday of November is a national holiday in the USA, a day originally to remember and celebrate the hospitality that the Native Americans showed the pilgrims during their first winter. Without the Native Americans sharing their knowledge of native crops, of squash, corn etc, the pilgrims may not have survived. (Whether the Native Americans may have later regreted this generousity is another story.)” A list of suggested dishes was provided, with the invitation to choose one and bring it to the Thanksgiving potluck. Without giving it too much thought, I volunteered to make the stuffing. After all, the StoveTop version takes six minutes to make; how difficult can this possibly be?

I should mention that my family has never done a Thanksgiving dinner with the classic roast turkey; we think it’s too dry/flavorless to merit 20 hours of roasting time. In the past, we have made curry turkey or deep-fried turkey, or deviated entirely away from turkey to lobster, soft-shelled crab, duck, hotpot…you get the idea. I did suggest hotpot for Thanksgiving dinner to my classmates, but this was met with strong cries of resistance. Ah well.

As it turns out, for many people, stuffing is the pinnacle of the Thanksgiving feast. (And here I thought it was all about the turkey.) Immediately after I announced my intent to make the stuffing, people began barraging me with questions on what kind of stuffing I was making, which recipe I was using, whether I was using drippings from a turkey that I’d freshly slaughtered in my backyard, etc. Okay, I am kidding about that last point, but the onslaught of concerned inquiries made one thing quite clear: stuffing is Serious Business. I assured everyone that yes I have made stuffing before (um, sometimes I toss rice with pan drippings?) and I would be using my grandmother’s traditional recipe (actually, my grandmother has never eaten stuffing in her life). Then, I started scouring the internet for stuffing help.
Continue reading Badass Sage and Sausage Stuffing, or a UNISG Thanksgiving →

Recipe: Banana and Chestnut Bread, or a Celebration of Baking Powder in Italy

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One of the (many) ironies of living in Italy is that I barely twitch my eyebrows at the products that gourmets fantasize about (white truffles, Barolo wine) because they are here in abundance, while my pulse races at certain items that would be staples in every American supermarket, yet are nearly impossible to find in Italy. This phenomenon is not limited to only me; one of the highlights of our class trip to France was the discovery of a vendor stocked with cilantro at the Dijon market. The ensuing stampede of students who each snapped up two or four bunches must have left that vendor shaking his head in confusion as to what was causing the run on cilantro. When in Bra, we covertly swap info on where to find cilantro as if we are Soviet spies. (Tip: you must ask for it to be brought out, but there is a particular butcher who sells cilantro on Fridays and Saturdays. Who knew.)

What exactly is in this set of verging-on-unicorn-mystique goods? Well, cilantro, for starters, but in general any sort of Asian or Latin American product is in hot demand. Thankfully, the back corner of the Ortobra on Corso Novembre IV has a section that is dedicated to carrying international products. There are no words that can really capture the twist of joy and confusion I felt when I discovered peanut butter placed in the ethnic section. You can also take a trip to Torino and find a good selection of Asian groceries just west of Piazza della Repubblica on Corso Regina Margherita. Prices can be exorbitant compared to the US, but hey, there’s nothing like the taste of home. Latin goods are even more difficult to find. There is an upscale Mexican store in Torino that mostly carries furniture and household items, but does have some canned and dried food products. I nearly wept when I saw the €5 package of tortillas. In Chicago, they would have cost a quarter and still been steaming. What I would give for a plate of Big Star tacos right now…

Then there are the items that I didn’t even realize were unusual, but have now acquired a magnetic attraction: oatmeal, sharp cheddar cheese, sour cream, canned pumpkin, hummus, brown sugar, black beans, bagels, sourdough bread, baking powder…the list goes on and on. Baking powder? Yes, that magical white powder that you use to make pancakes and pumpkin breads without the hassle of rising time. Much to my surprise, it is nearly impossible to find this in Italy. Hence, while in a Brussels Carrefour, when Danielle barreled toward me holding a box of baking powder, I jumped about a mile and shrieked with giddiness.

And so, I celebrated my newly purchased baking powder with the following banana bread. I still had to make a few ingredient substitutions, so feel free to use the more commonly found “ethnic” American ingredients noted parenthetically.
Continue reading Recipe: Banana and Chestnut Bread, or a Celebration of Baking Powder in Italy →

Lessons from a Small Farmer

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Clockwise: aubergine growing in the garden; Barbialla Nuova’s lake; a spider makes its home amidst the blackberry brambles; drawing on the car’s dusty rear window for kids by kids

Over the last couple weeks while WWOOFing, I weeded a pumpkin patch, staked tomatoes, cleaned and revitalized a garden bed, created and turned compost piles, sanded and painted wood beams, and helped measure and construct a pergola. All these were activities I’d never done before. They were only the tip of the iceberg in what I learned while in Tuscany.

The thing is, volunteering with WWOOF is not simply a job or a means of traveling cheaply, it is adopting a lifestyle and exploring a set of values. I did it because I was interested in learning about sustainable agriculture and the rural lifestyle of a farmer, but I ended up getting crash courses on Australian folk music, parenting small children and welding. I was lucky to find a family who welcomed me into their daily routine, included me in meals and activities, and were genuinely interested in getting to know me. And although I initially wanted to live with an Italian family to improve my Italian, I am very happy that my host family was English-speaking because I wouldn’t have been able to connect beyond a superficial level otherwise.

A few lessons from an agrarian lifestyle:
Continue reading Lessons from a Small Farmer →

Recipe: Matcha Green Tea Mochi Cupcakes with White Chocolate Ganache

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Matcha green tea mochi cupcakesA couple months ago, I embarked on a mission to clear out my freezer and cupboards before moving. I stopped buying pantry items, and only allowed myself purchases of produce, dairy products and occasionally starches, like rice or pasta. Within weeks, I had finished all the random cuts of meat in the freezer, and had baked through all my bread and all purpose flours. This Iron Chef-esque exercise also forced me to come up with new ways to use esoteric ingredients like harissa (a North African chili and red pepper paste), chickpea flour (for Indian pakoras) and pomegranate molasses (a byproduct of my one-time obsession with tagines). Some of my experiments were successful (horseradish-sharp cheddar bread was a win), and others were not as good (horseradish cream and pomegranate molasses sauce was pretty fail). But hey, I was the only one around to witness my mistakes, and I never botched a dish so badly that I was unwilling to eat it myself.

At any rate, my kitchen is currently looking quite bare. If I didn’t know any better, I would look at my cupboards and call myself food-insecure. I am out of staples like flour, milk, butter and salt. Yes, salt. Actually, you’d be surprised at what you can do without salt in the house. Though my first impulse was to panic and run out to buy salt, after a few moments, I realized I had plenty of other salting mechanisms, like soy sauce, oyster sauce, fish sauce, nuoc mam and salty cheeses. And so, I’ve been getting by on a low-salt (but not low-sodium) diet for the last week or so.

All this is simply background to explain the engineering process that went into the cupcakes pictured above. I wanted to make something for my economists as a parting gift, and this recipe for strawberry mochi cupcakes caught my eye. Some further digging turned up this recipe for matcha green tea mochi cake, which was supposed to be a bit chewier and less cake-like than the previous formulation.

Baking is one of the most precise of culinary arts (second only to candy-making), which is why I don’t do it often. Here, my improvisatory ways tend to backfire and all that is left is a crest-fallen soufflé. However, I was adamant in my obsession with not having leftover ingredients, so I studied the two recipes carefully and combined them. And hoped that my gamble would work.
Continue reading Recipe: Matcha Green Tea Mochi Cupcakes with White Chocolate Ganache →