Dirt Candy

My pictures did not come out, but here are four leeks. Or are they scallions? Hmm...

There comes a day in the life of every young woman when she does something absolutely abhorrent to her body in the name of having a cool experience. This is exactly what I did at Dirt Candy, a vegetarian restaurant in New York City that serves whimsical dishes made exclusively of photosynthesizing things that grow in the ground.

When one hears “vegetarian,” one envisions something healthy, like steamed carrots. Dirt Candy wants to shatter that association and melt maple butter all over it. Here are some things that are vegetarian: French fries. Waffles. Deep-fried waffles. Ice cream. Five-cheese ravioli. Speculoos cookie butter. Speculoos butter on a deep-fried waffle.

In conclusion, “vegetarian” and “healthy” are hardly synonyms. I learned this lesson the hard way at Veggie Galaxy in Boston a few months ago as I choked down the last bite of vegan cream cheese waffle and this week I learned it again. I am no stranger to making myself sick with yummy foods. Everything I ate at Dirt Candy was deep fried, slathered in butter, or alchemically transmogrified into cotton candy.

Dirt Candy, it turns out, gets completely booked at least three months ahead of time. I found this out when I tried to make a reservation online. I might have secured a seat sometime in June of 2014. Instead, my friend Abbey and I showed up around the time the doors opened and tap danced in their window until they seated us. (Until someone forgot that reservation they made three months ago.) Every time someone got seated, we hovered in the window with a look of disdain that burned into the very essence of their beings, especially when they sipped a beverage. The unseasonable October heat was oppressive and I was dressed for autumn.

Inside, the seating was intimate. The waitress pulled the table out so that I would be able to squeeze into the bench against the wall. We ordered jalapeno hush puppies with maple butter. We liberally applied the maple butter. Maple butter is a shameful thing to waste.

Everything on the menu was enthusiastically named after its primary vegetable ingredient. Mushroom! Cucumber! Potato! I took my chances the Parsnip! while Abbey asked for the Corn! as her entrée. My dish was described as “parsnip pillows” – essentially, extra squishy parsnip gnocchi. On Abbey’s plate, a tempura-fried poached egg sat atop some very cheesy and savory corn grits.

One of my main motivations for wanting to go to this vegetable alchemy lab was to try a dessert made of vegetables. We wavered between an ice cream bar made of peas and rosemary eggplant tiramisu. We asked the waitress what we should order.

“You want the tiramisu,” she said very seriously.

Of course, the tiramisu was two dollars more than the other desserts. When the plate arrived, we first saw this white fluffy cloud hovering on the plate. The woman next to me leaned in.

“Is that a wedding veil?” she asked.

No, that was the rosemary cotton candy. Resting below the cloud was a 2” by 2” square slice of tiramisu. It tasted like tiramisu, but also like eggplant. Somehow it worked. The cotton candy tasted like rosemary and I haven’t had cotton candy since age ten and probably will not have it again. My pancreas got so angry at me. I can’t believe you've done this, said my pancreas.

As we walked out of the restaurant, I felt like I needed a small perambulator on which Abbey could wheel me through the streets of Manhattan. Instant nausea. Between the butter and the sugar and the creamy sauces and all the disparate food items, I felt like my entire body shut down in order to digest the chaos. I wanted to make words and talk to my friend, but apparently walking and digesting and listening and speaking at the same time was more multitasking than I could manage. I suggested we walk it off, perhaps in the direction of a hospital. The walking did not last long and I ducked out early to go home and recover.

Was it worth it? Yes. I enjoyed the eating. Can I eat like this every day? No. I felt a little sad after the meal because I don’t get to see Abbey too often and here I was channeling all of my energy into assimilating the parsnip pillows. We made some jokes about the cotton candy being a poodle, but the thing is I actually felt like I ate a poodle. If I ate a small, snooty dog, that is exactly how I would feel. The Dirt Candy experience, although delicious, was a good reminder of why I eat the way I do.

One thing to cross off my list.

The Life Cycle of Toxoplasma Gondii

Love and Magic

I had heard about a free play in Central Park and my friend L. and I decided to venture into the city for the day to see it. By the time we found the outdoor theater there was no one around. The chatty employees in matching shirts did not notice us staring into their booth, clearing our throats. Waiting. We noticed a sign hanging above us that leveled our lukewarm hopes:

Tonight’s Show SOLD OUT

A man came around to the front of the booth to put up a poster.

“Excuse me,” I said, “But the sold out sign – is that for the play at seven?”

“Oh, yeah, we ran out of tickets hours ago. People start lining up at six in the morning and wait there until two when we begin passing them out. Then it’s crazy for a half hour and it’s all sold out by two-thirty.”

I sighed. It was about three now.

“If you want, though, you can get in line over there and I can just about guarantee that I can get you a seat when the show starts.”

He indicated a line of people on the distant sidewalk, kept far from the ticket booth. Neither of us felt like waiting in line for four hours and enduring the lethargy that was sure to madden our fragile minds, so we declined and moved on. There was an enormous park before us, several hours of daylight, and a half-eaten bag of truffles in L’s bag for us to feed our sugar highs.

I smelled a delicious smell wafting through the air.

“Food,” I said lovingly.

L. and I followed the path and passed the turtle pond and a little league baseball game. We came to a stand and knew immediately the source of the orgasmic odor.

Waffles.

Waffles.

We inched closer to the waffle stand and read the menu carefully. I wanted to know everything.

“What are you girls doing, standing all the way over there?” a black haired fellow with glasses and a white apron said from inside of the stand. He had an accent that sounded Scottish to me, but I rationalized that he must be a waffle expert from Belgium. “Come closer. Come on.”

We took a few little steps towards the stand.

“Where are you girls from?”

“New York,” I answered, gazing down at the varieties of waffles described below his face.

“Brittany, we’re in New York,” L. said. “Saratoga.”

L. and I did not want anyone selling us anything. We quietly discussed waffles. We wondered what dinges were and how to even say it.

“I think it’s pronounced ‘dingus,’” L. whispered.

“That’s what Dave calls people when their being idiots,” I said. “Spekaloos - what is that? Is that a Belgian thing?”

The fellow behind the counter overheard us.

“Do you want to try it?” he said.

I nodded eagerly. He dipped both sides of a plastic knife with a tan, buttery substance, much like a goopy peanut butter. I took it, licked the knife end, and handed L. the handle. It was warm, spicy, and smooth. She tasted the handle end.

 “This tastes so familiar. What is this made of?” I asked.

“Love and magic,” the man behind the stand said. “What do you think it tastes like?”

“Love and magic seems about right, actually,” I said.

“There’s some cinnamon,” said L, thinking aloud.

“It’s gingerbread,” the fellow in the stand said before either of us could produce the answer.

Gingerbread!

“Oh! Gingerbread!” I cried. “That’s exactly what it is!”

That’s what we were smelling before; it wasn’t merely the waffles.

L. and I whispered about the possibility of buying some fragrant waffles. We had already planned to go to Alice’s Tea Cup and fill our happy stomachs with scones and tea after dinner, and with bellies already gushing with truffles, the thought of waffles seemed over the top.

“Should we go then?” I asked her.

“Let’s go.”

“Bye,” I said to the guy at the stand, “Thanks for all the magic!”

He looked sad. We walked away very quickly.

Indigestion

My neighbor is a twelve-year-old girl with a Venus flytrap. I have other neighbors, but they are not important.

This afternoon I called her to the bushes that divide our residences. She was riding her bike back and forth in the driveway, the pompoms on the handlebars rustling in the breeze. I inquired about her Venus flytrap, Tito, and she fetched the darling little hydra from her porch. Tito is a boy, she explained, because no girl would ever eat flies.

She won her carnivorous plant with a golden ticket at a school raffle. Her plant is far more intimidating than mine ever got before it was scorched to the root in a tiny, contained brush fire. As far as my neighbor is concerned, her plant is as good as a pet.

She found some black and yellow caterpillars on the porch and dropped one into each hungry mouth, which snapped shut like a bear trap. Two days have passed since the barbarian feast and the siesta continues. You can still make out the outlines of the little yellow caterpillars gurgling in acidic juices. The mouths are all still shut. Venus flytraps, the politest of predators, never chew with their mouths open.

Tomorrow morning, the carnivorous plant next door may very well explode into butterflies. Who will prevail, the predatory plant or the very hungry caterpillar?

Of Monkeys and Monasteries

On Sunday morning Christine and I roused ourselves at seven in the morning for a long drive to the Blue Cliff Monastery in Pine Bush, New York. We planned to spend the day chilling with Buddhist monks and nuns, trying to be mindful. It was an hour and a half trip fueled entirely by peanut butter smoothies and adrenaline, with only the robotic whispers of a faulty GPS and a blazing sun to keep us from dozing off on the Tappan Zee Bridge.

We arrived at nine, just in time for the impending day of mindfulness. Christine and I rushed into the meditation hall, past granite boulders announcing, “You Are Home.” We were greeted by a calm, soft-spoken monk in a brown robe. He told us that we could sit down, or we could go for a walk in the woods. Or walk the barren garden. It didn't matter as long as we enjoyed the silence. For all of our rushing, we seemed to be the only people in a rush.

Christine and I lingered stiffly in the doorway of the enormous meditation room, barefoot and unsure. It smelled delightfully like wood and campfire. To our right, a circle of monks and nuns were chanting with some people in regular clothes. Ahead of us, empty chairs and cushions were lined up in rows on the floor and a nun was misting orchids with a plastic spray bottle. Another lit up sticks of incense that made me sneeze. One monk noticed us creeping by the door and suggested we sit down in the empty arena of cushions until a question and answer session with the teachers began.

We took a seat on some cushions in the sunlight and soon the seats around us filled up. After a few minutes, I turned around and every cushion and chair was occupied. In front of me, monks struggled to pull the tail ends of their robes over the back of their meditation cushions.

A few nuns lead us in a Buddhist-style sing-along that reminded me of my days in Vacation Bible School. They sang songs about how we are all part of one tree, one sea, one sky. I smiled wryly and performed some of the hand motions. Christine hummed along.

A gong sounded and a line of teachers walked to the front of the room. They sat on their cushions and adjusted their robe tails. Sunday was the end of a retreat for members of the Order of Interbeing and a question and answer session was scheduled. (Something I found out later: Everyone is a member of the Order of Interbeing.) Since half of the overflowing room consisted of people who were visiting for the day, there were a lot of questions that had nothing to do with the retreat. Someone asked if pain and suffering are the same thing, another asked how to control feelings of “specialness.” One woman asked the best way to deal with a rogue contractor.

A teacher tackled questions about what young people should know about the practice and how to control a certain syndrome called “monkey mind.” She especially wanted young people to know that they should take care of their bodies. When you wake up in the morning, you should massage your face and thank your eyes for seeing and your mouth for taking in food. Massage your abdomen and thank your organs. If you have a hangover or ate a lot of heavy food the night before, you should apologize. The mind is important, but when you feel sick you only think about how much you would like to feel better.

Then the teacher talked about monkey mind, which is a problem that everyone has. (Also known as “monkey nucleosis.”) There’s a monkey in your brain that wants to grab things and hold onto them, not unlike a real monkey. The trick is to catch it in the act and stop yourself when you want something. She caught the monkey’s wrist in the air and held onto it. “Ha, I caught you,” she said, smiling at the monkey. “If I want something that badly, I probably shouldn't have it.”

Photo courtesy of PicturesOfMonkeys.blogspot.com. For all of your monkey image needs.

Confessions of a Fire-Breathing Brontosaurus

I used to be obsessed with hot wings. I would order them at the highest level of spiciness offered in a restaurant, usually extra spicy with fire sauce, a side of death, and a stack of napkins to cry into. The waiters always raised their eyebrows and asked me if I knew how powerful extra hot really was, to which I would arrogantly respond, “I think I can handle it.” My personal chicken wing philosophy at the time: If it doesn’t make you cry, it’s not worth it.

In high school, one of those school magazines that recognize precocious young artists printed a poem I wrote, a passionate sonnet to the chicken wing called “Chicken’s Kiss.” My passion wasn't limited to tasty birds, however. I had an impressive assortment of hot sauces lined up in my refrigerator, like Dinosaur Duels the Devil hot sauce. The label depicted a fire-breathing brontosaurus sword fighting Satan. Sometimes I dribbled hot sauce on a bowl of ice cream because I liked to eat my pain for dessert.

In college, I stopped eating meat. Hot wings were removed from the dietary equation, but my cravings for foods that burn only multiplied. I couldn’t even take a whiff of the dining hall air on Wacky Wing Wednesday without my mouth watering. I flipped open a Thai food takeout menu searching for answers and discovered drunken noodles, a sort of string bean and bell pepper stir fry with a spicy sauce speckled with Thai chilies.

Every Thai restaurant menu has a spiciness scale of one to five chilies, with one chili representing mildly spicy (or American spicy, as Thai folks surely call it) and five chilies indicating Thai spicy. One might notice, scanning through a menu, that there are no more than two chilies in a row beside the titles of spicy dishes. Sure, two chilies on the scale of one to five (Mexican spicy?) is pretty hot, but it seemed important to experience the particular burn of five chilies for myself.

The Thai food restaurant in the area where I grew up used to employ a totally Thai staff. Smiling Thai women in traditional Thai garb used to pour our Thai tea and bring us complementary Thai soup. Then all of the Thai ladies were slowly replaced with white guys in button-up shirts. One day, while out to lunch with Dave, I asked one of the waiters if I could have the drunken noodles at the highest level of spiciness.

“Are you sure?” he asked wryly. “That’s really hot.” I assured him that I could handle it.

When my meal arrived, I ate half of the plate with my eyes streaming and lips burning. I must have downed five or six glasses of water. It was glorious.

“I hope you’re enjoying that,” Dave said, watching me sob into my napkin.

Homemade salsa became another source of spicy indulgence. My brother and I would stay up late chopping up tomatoes from the garden and variety boxes of hot pepper from the farmer’s market. The first time I cut a jalapeno, I ingeniously used my bare hands. The acid got under my fingernails, singed my skin, and sizzled into the wee hours of the morning.

Following advice from a forum I found from a Google search, I soaked my hands in straight-up white vinegar, scrubbed them with dish soap in the hottest water my hands could stand, and washed them in ketchup. In the end, I drifted into an uneasy sleep in bed with plastic baggies full of ketchup tied over my hands.

It’s funny to think that a jalapeno, barely spicy enough to tickle my taste buds, could cause so much agony on my skin and I can only imagine what hot peppers do to my internal organs. Why do I eat these things and why do I enjoy them? There certainly is a hint of masochism to adoring spicy food.

Last night, Dave refilled our jars of curry and red pepper flakes while I did the dishes. He peered into the enormous bag of red pepper flakes and took a sniff.

“Red pepper smells really weird,” he said. He brought the bag to me. “Smell this.”

Dave accidentally squeezed the bag and a red pepper flake popped into my eyeball. It felt like fire under my eyelid. Wailing, I ran to the bathroom and doused my eye with cold water to get the pepper flake out, but the burning sensation lingered. Once my eye cooled down enough for me to see, Dave consulted the internet, finding amusing anecdotes about people burning themselves with hot peppers and how to keep cats out of your garden with a barrier of red pepper flakes. The burning stopped before “how to get red pepper flakes out of my girlfriend’s eye” turned up with any useful answers.

Somehow, after all of this, I’m not in the least put off by hot peppers. I’m am no less interested in a plate of Thai food or a salsa that needs to be chased with twenty gallons of cold water. Recently, I read in a nutrition book that cold-blooded, reptilian monsters like me crave spicy food to warm our bodies and increase circulation to our extremities, which explains a lot. But it doesn't explain why I’m drawn to food that makes me cry.

The Scoby Delivers

Man, last night was crazy.  I drank, like, three bottles of kombucha.

Voila, three utterly perfect bottles of kombucha. If I was disease ridden before and did not know it, I certainly must be healthy now, for we have emptied every one.

The original scoby became a mother and produced a baby, which we put to work when we began to brew two jars at once. Our refrigerator currently contains six bottles of kombucha. Two are fermented with pomegranate lime juice, two have some grated ginger stewing at the bottom, and two are original scoby-flavored. The juiced-up kombucha doesn’t taste any different from the unflavored version. This makes me sad. The ginger flavored kombucha is epic, like what ginger ale would taste like if it was actually made of ginger.

Two new jars are brewing in the corner and should be fully fermented this weekend, which means we are going to have to chug an enormous amount of kombucha or make new friends with indigestion. Dave now has a great deal of confidence in making things in jars and took up pickling. I'm still not quite sure how he did it and believe that some wizardry was indubitably involved. It's much prettier than a jar of bacteria pancakes.

Scoby City

The bacterial city within our gallon-sized glass jar continued to multiply over a three week period.

Conception.

Age: 2 weeks.

A scoby is born.

What began as a rural community of God-fearing microbes in uncharted beverage territory became increasingly more populated, enjoyed the cerebral stimulation of the Enlightenment, experienced rapid industrialization, endured a bloody revolution, and became a full-fledged scoby ready for fermenting a gallon of white tea into kombucha.

We brewed a large sauce pot full of white tea for our first batch of kombucha. Dave courageously reached into the jar, extracted the slimy disc with his bare hands and relocated it to a large glass bowl with a quarter of the jar’s contents. The rest of the jar was emptied into the sink and carefully cleaned. The slightest smear of soap can annihilate a bacterial civilization.

By the time the pot of tea cooled, Dave realized that we didn't add a cup of sugar to the tea, a blunder that would have spurred the slow starvation of our sweet-toothed scoby. Dave reheated the saucepot of tea as the clock struck 11:00 pm and the scoby dozed under a fresh white towel.

Once the second pot of tea came to room temperature – with ample assistance from the freezer – we poured the tea into the jar and released the scoby into the depths of the tea. Then we covered it with a towel secured with a rubber band.

Now we wait.

Many questions occur to me. Did we grow the scoby correctly? Does the scoby know that I'm thinking about it? Can it feel human emotions like love and anguish? Will the resulting kombucha make us blind like bathtub gin?  These questions and more will be answered when the kombucha is unveiled.

Pepto-Bismol Suitcase

Image from www.werewolves.com. No, really.

I love traveling, but it always makes me sick. No matter how many times nausea strikes my gut at an inconvenient time, I somehow never seem to lose my enthusiasm. I did not regret my trip to Boston even when I was curled in a ball on my bus seat squeezing my knees to my chest and chewing a chalky disk of Pepto-Bismol. I had a sheet of it tucked away in my bag and by the end of the bus ride it was nothing but shredded plastic.

I’ve learned to prepare for the inevitable lurch after lunch – a chocolate chip scone and fudge brownie shortly before my departure was a probably culprit. I got sick in Prague during my first week and I got sick leaving Prague for the United States. I also fell ill in Berlin and Cesky Krumlov and almost every time I’ve ever chugged into New York City on the Metro North.

If I were really practical, I would religiously pack a medium-sized rolling suitcase full of Pepto-Bismol for every voyage. I would fold up an enormous sheet of Pepto-Bismol tablets as small as it would go, like a pink polka-dotted pool tarp. I would pack the neatly folded antacids into the Pepto -pink suitcase, sit on the flap to flatten the air pockets, and zip. I would wheel the onerous load behind me like the queer biological baggage that it is and hoist it onto the next step of the escalator.

Tonight's Dinner...

...head of elephant baked with red potatoes. We shall feast like Mongol kings.

The Bacteria Farm

Dave and I have decided to make our own kombucha - an effervescent, probiotic beverage that we mutually enjoy. A bottle of bubbling intestinal regularity costs about four dollars, but if you brew it yourself in a big glass jar or a claw-foot tub it costs fifty cents a serving. We purchased a gallon glass jar from the Container Store, a box of organic green tea, a bag of sugar and a bottle of commercial kombucha.

Once we began boiling the sugar and water, Dave referred back to his directions and realized that we needed to grow a scoby before we could brew the kombucha. A scoby is a slimy bacteria culture that resembles a mushroom or a soggy pancake.

This is not a pancake. This is also not a picture of me holding a pancake. I don't know who this is.

You need scoby to start brewing kombucha and every finished jar of kombucha produces a new scoby that you can give as a gift to a confused friend. So why not give the gift of digestive balance this holiday season? There’s no cure for the nausea caused by receiving a scoby like a tall glass of probiotic drink.

We found detailed directions for making a scoby using a bottle of kombucha online. It appears that you brew a saucepan of sweet tea and pour it into a jar with twelve cups of water and a bottle of finished kombucha from the grocery store. Then you cap it with a towel secured with a rubber band and watch it grow for three weeks. When the time comes, you lift out the glob of bacteria and use it to brew a jar of delicious kombucha. The rest of the jar goes down the drain.

If you like instant gratification and want to produce a jar of kombucha sometime within the next month, you could buy a designer scoby online or get one from a kombucha chemist you know and trust. Or put it on your Christmas list. Maybe Santa will take note of your need for a doughy disc of single-celled organisms.

Valentine's Day isn't too far away.