New Jersey Diner Cheesecake
I cannot hear a Donna Summer song without doing time travel in my head to a place where my life seemed like a boundless adventure, every opportunity for romance, fame and fortune a distinct possibility. This photo captures a moment in 1975, after I’d just turned 18, and was being nominated for Homecoming Queen, sophmore year at my small New Jersey college. I was an unlikely candidate for such mainstream popularity, having escaped high school by skipping my senior year and passing GO! in a hurry before my parents could change their minds. You don’t skip senior year of high school if you are Homecoming Queen material. You stay and revel in your top-of-the-heap status at school, you take it easy, plan all year for prom. Not me. In high school I was too tall, too introspective, a brooding journal keeper, shy, a bit of an outsider who could occasionally find a way in with humor. I was self-conscious of my immigrant parents in a homogenous town, and made even more so by the dark secrets of emotional and physical abuse that happened behind the closed doors of my home. I was looking for an escape and college provided one.
There, I found my first real boyfriend, lost 20 pounds and blossomed. I was part of a “crowd.” I can still remember in visceral detail the breathless awe I felt the first time I walked into a packed disco with my college friends, the wave of deafening music hitting me in the face, jacking up my pulse until it matched the bass line of the song being played. It was Donna Summer’s Love to Love You Baby.
ask the kitchenista: saving strawberries
Dear Kitchenista,
How timely that you have started this Q & A feature! I was just wondering the best low-or-no sugar way for me to preserve the fresh strawberries offered for sale this time of year. I want to keep them available for breakfast year round (I hate buying them from France or California in winter). Thanks, Kitchenista! — Sharon W., Asheville, NC
Dear Sharon,
ask the kitchenista | send in your questions
This is an introduction to what I hope will be a regular alternating series of posts (alternating with my regular recipe posts) in which you, the world of the culinary curious, my friends, supporters, students and readers will get to ask me, The Kitchenista, any question pertaining to cooking, the kitchen, culinary technique, kitchen tools, appliances, gadgets, etc. I get a lot of emailed and texted questions from my students—people I’ve done private or group cooking classes, or cooking parties with. Usually they are elbow deep in a recipe or trying to replicate a recipe we’ve done together in a lesson and they dash off a frantic question, no doubt leaving goop on their keyboards or iPhone screens in the process.
My desire for perfection in all things (mostly never achieved) has had me putting off launching this feature because I didn’t have all the bells and whistles in place for it…a separate page on the site, a searching tool that will allow readers to search a particular issue, a cool new logo just for this feature and on and on. Because I was awarded a scholarship to a class at my alma mater, the International Culinary Center (formerly the French Culinary Institute in New York) on Food Blogging with Steve Shaw I am being inspired (forced, coerced, held to the ground, pushed, cajoled) to just go ahead and get this idea out of my head and onto the screen.
crispy kale and faro with toasted coconut
Sometimes it’s hard to break out of the culinary box. Faro? Your children may ask, “like the guys in Egypt with the pyramids?” Crispy roasted kale? They give you this “are you kidding?” look:
balsamic red cabbage and radicchio
Mostly, my messy life measures up as a disappointment when I’m comparing it to pictures I see in magazines, or the countless catalogs of artfully-styled rooms and perfectly-placed table settings that get stuffed into my mailbox and pile up on my nightstand and bathroom reading rack. These vignettes of composed life extend to food photography too—all the propped up, tweezer-arranged, q-tip brushed, hairsprayed, backlit, cooled-down, color-enhanced and photoshopped dishes pop out from iPad screens and glossy pages to whet your appetite even though they are in fact some inedible and endlessly tweaked version of the recipe you’ll find below the image. You make it and well, it just doesn’t look as delightful on your work-a-day dishes, under your shadow-throwing kitchen lighting. This reminds me of a one-line encapsulation of Buddhist philosophy I once read: “All suffering lies in the space between expectation and reality”. As a change of pace, I offer you this under-achieving photo of a fantastic, deliciously sweet and sour, easy to make side dish that does not even begin to tell the story of it’s four purples, (radicchio, red cabbage, red onion and balsamic), golden raisins, sugar-shellacked sunflower seeds, and white-washed feta.
