A Departure...Food

When I started thinking about writing this blog, I wanted to write about what has long been my greatest interest, interior design, with a special focus on the challenges inherent in decorating a home that also happens to be inhabited by an 85-lb Chocolate Lab (and Labs are a whole other blog entirely). But lately I've been thinking a lot about food.

It all began with my ex-boyfriend. He was Jewish, and during the year we spent together I was re-introduced to the major Jewish holidays (I say "re-introduced" since my childhood best friend had also invited me to many seders, et al, at her home, but I don't remember very much about what we ate.) Gefilte fish aside, I enjoyed many holiday dishes served by my ex's family, and I became interested in learning more about Jewish food traditions. A few years later, the boyfriend is gone, but my interest remains, and gets sparked every few months or so, when another holiday season comes around.

In my family, which is Catholic, and of Irish descent, there are few holiday food traditions. We always had Thanksgiving at my paternal grandmother's, and, for the rest of my life, her Thanksgiving dinner will always be my gold standard for a Thanksgiving meal. But that was about it. My mother made Irish soda bread on St. Patrick's Day to take to her work friends, but my taste for carraway seeds and raisins didn't develop until I reached my 30's. (A recipe quite similar to hers was recently debunked in the NY Times as being not traditionally Irish at all. Whatever.) No special Easter or Christmas recipes--one grandfather hated ham; the other, turkey. Any food traditions from Ireland were discarded when my ancestors hit the shores of America.

My family does have a few favorite dishes, such as "Mrs. Rombauer's" Gaston Beef Stew and Chicken Cacciatore--my grandmother refused to call it The Joy of Cooking and it always seemed to me that she considered the author a friend. My grandmother also made a potato salad that will forever be the taste of summer for her children and grandchildren (and I believe a key ingredient is a variation of "Mrs. Rombauer's" french dressing). My mother makes a delicious chili that is perfect on a cold winter night. But we had no Italian or German Christmas, Greek Easter, Jewish Passover. It was more or less a post-WWII, white, solidly American take on cuisine. As an adult, though, I wish we had grown up with more food traditions, that maybe we had held on to hot cross buns on Ash Wednesday, pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, mutton at Easter, or even created our own new traditions.

So now I find myself requesting noodle kugel recipes from that childhood best friend of mine, or baking her grandmother's mandelbrot, and reading with fascination (and hunger!) the New Yorker's recent profile on Claudia Roden and her Middle Eastern and Jewish cookbooks. All in all, though, creating a personal cuisine from your own traditions, borrowing favorites from others, is essentially part of creating your own home--or sense of home--and therefore is not unlike decorating. I'm sure my big brown lab will be delighted to sample whatever comes out my oven.

P.S. If I can figure out how to do it, I'll add a link to that childhood best friend's blog, CookieStuffs. Read it--and you can find those kugel and mandlebrot recipes too.

Pet Peeve

Just a bit of a kvetch here today. With the updating and revamping of the "shelter" magazines websites comes an invitation to be part of the team--let us send you surveys, and as an interested design fan, you can tell us your likes and dislikes, which will ultimately help us gauge the new trends, and so forth. I'll keep the sites/mags nameless for now. However, lately the surveys seek my response to recent advertisements in the magazines--did you notice them? will they influence your purchase habits? etc. etc. Now I feel like a participant in a marketer's focus group, instead of a valued reader whose thoughts on design were worth gathering. Although I understand that ad pages are the lifeblood of a magazine, I personally skip right over them. I have never (okay, not never, but rarely) torn out an advertisement as inspiration for something I would like to do. So these new surveys are getting irritating. I'm interested in editorial content, not ads, so I wish they'd stop asking me about them. Let the advertisers do this research themselves and ask me about design.

Boo and I have a new walk. When we moved last winter from the high West 80's to the low West 70's, we had to find a new route. You may not think 17 blocks makes that big of a difference, but in NYC, it's a whole new neighborhood. Frankly, it's been hard to find a good walk. I was used to my switchback walks in the high-80's / low 90's, passing by lovingly restored brownstones, enviously peering into windows of duplexes or one-family homes. Down in the low-70's there is a greater dichotomy between high and low--empty brownstones t0 carved up spaces with sleeping lofts to the few one-family homes by CPW.

But we found a new walk. We head east on 74th, where by the time you get to Amsterdam, the two towers of the San Remo rise about the neighborhood. I wonder about the view from those towers--east across the Park, west to the Hudson, downtown--how far downtown can they see? Then we walk one block south on Central Park West, the Park trees dark against the night, past the Langham. The first time we ever walked past the Langham, Boo trotted right up the steps to the doorman, as if he went there every day. (Which then made me wonder about the life of NYC dogs when they are not with their owners. How many building has Boo been in with his walkers? How many dog friends does he have on the Upper West Side? Does he go into the Langham every day?) Finally, we turn the corner on 73rd to head west towards home. Here I can peer into the windows of the Dakota, apartments with high ceilings apartments with potted palms, crystal chandeliers, and polished oak screens.

All of this tonight reminded me the challenges of getting used to, and then decorating, a new home. Over the weekend, I was reading a home decor book by NYC designer Jeffrey Bilhuber (Design Basics), looking for ideas for my new apartment, which sadly (and confoundingly!) has not felt particularly "home-like" over the past few months. One of his suggestions jumped out at me: "Start with the simplest solution." Sounds sort of, well, simple. But sometimes we get so caught up in the big picture of decorating--all that has to be done, fixed, renovated, furniture to be purchased, color choices--that it's hard to break it out into small steps. So, I rearranged the furniture. It was the simplest thing, but it had a huge impact. I can't figure out why I didn't see months ago that the new arrangement would work so much better. That it would open up the space, make it feel more welcoming, that lying full out on the couch to watch TV would be more comfortable than curling up on one corner.

We're starting to get used to things down here in the 70's.