Tag Archives: peanuts

The Dancer Lady

May 19, 2016 By in Recipes Tags: , , , , 3 Comments

Peanut Butter-Honey Ice Cream with Sriracha Candied Peanuts

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I stared at her as she stood in the locker room and moved her hands slowly up and down her perfectly flat, milky-white abdomen from under her black camisole. The top’s low back showed off strong back muscles and its spaghetti straps sat snuggly on pulled-back shoulders that extended into skinny, lean arms. Tight, flared, floor-length spandex covered endless legs. She had finished working out, but you wouldn’t know. There was no rose to her cheeks or shine to her skin, and her blonde pixie cut—soft not blunt—sat untossled on her head, framing her heart-shaped face with perfect waves. She’s a dancer. I don’t know her beyond the blonde and the pale and the black. But I know her.

I know her because I was her. Well, a brunette her. Though likely six to seven years my senior, she is my younger self before illness, fatigue, and injury diminished the place of the art and the sport in my life, aged my limbs and heart, bloated my face. I’m not sure if the trance she put me in was heartbreaking or uplifting. I’m still the bendy-twisty creature with decent balance and an ear for a beat. But I can no longer call myself a dancer—I’m just one who dances. Dancer Lady’s too old to be in a company. She may be a teacher. I don’t know. But she’s a studio rat of some kind. She scurries to the gym on her rare days off to crosstrain, to maintain her strength and stamina. She straddles the equipment with such grace, staring dead-faced ahead and never tiring.
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More Vegetables

April 14, 2016 By in Recipes Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Three Ways to Use Miso, Cauliflower, and Pickled Peanuts

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I love plants.

My hair is healthy enough, but it doesn’t shine. My skin doesn’t glow; in fact, it’s craterous in places, like my mother’s. I lack energy, and my relatively small frame always feels heavy, weighed down by something intangible. I fall asleep at inappropriate times, and yet I don’t sleep at all. I feel ill more days than I feel OK, and I cannot count my doctors on two hands. I don’t absorb nutrients.

So, like bad lovers from my younger years, plants have given me nothing, but I’m still attracted to them. Vegetables—when thoughtfully prepared—are my favorite food group. Did you just unsubscribe?

I spend a lot of time thinking about what Americans eat—how our incomes force us to eat, where our food comes from and who gets it from field to plate, how folks shame fat but not sugar, how society demonizes and diminishes intolerances, how food can heal. I choose not to tackle those questions here, because my central agenda is to have no agenda. But these are the issues that sometimes cross my mind when my fork hits the plate. (Sometimes I’m too busy stuffing my big, hungry face.) And I’m certainly opinionated about them. Lucky for me, vegetable-forward cuisine is hot right now, and restaurant chefs are using vegetables in bold new ways and putting them in the center of the plate.

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Cover-up

October 15, 2015 By in Recipes Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

Wine-Baked Apples with Fennel, Peanut, and Pecorino Filling


While summer is about shedding layers, uncovering patios, and pointing our faces toward the sun, fall, this devastatingly short transition period, is about covering things up in preparation for the hell that’s to come.

We cover things up, literally, by adding layers and sealing windows. Multicolored leaves litter the streets and walkways, obscuring the cold concrete beneath. We paint walls and exteriors now that summer’s dewy humidity is largely broken and we can air out our homes; whatever drab color that was previously there is just a memory. We burrow ourselves in fleece blankets and fluffy comforters since we resist turning on the heat. “It’s only October,” we say. “We have a long winter ahead of us.” And at the end of October, costumed trick-or-treaters come knocking, their true character hidden behind constructed whimsy.

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Sweet, Salty, Spicy

February 13, 2014 By in Recipes Tags: , , , , , , 7 Comments

Chocolate-Dipped Peanut Butter Cookies with Aleppo Pepper

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I don’t love to post recipes that are Valentine’s Day–themed. So I didn’t. Intentionally, anyway. But then I made these chewy, intensely flavorful cookies and thought, “Oh. God. Yes.”

Instead of lacing this post with innuendo, I’m just going to put it out there: These are sex cookies. A little sweet, a little salty, a little heat, and some chocolate—that’s all you need out of Valentine’s Day, right?

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Stoner’s Delight II?

October 24, 2013 By in Recipes Tags: , , , , 11 Comments

Miso S’more Bars

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I like to think that I have a magic tongue.* A tongue so vital and active and curious that it must possess neurons and synapses and such. It can taste and feel what’s not on it. Sometimes I find more sense and more wisdom in that tongue than I ever could in my actual brain. It’s sensitive to idea. Inspiration strikes just about anytime and that crazy, infallible tongue won’t stop thinking and wagging and thinking some more until dream is reality and foodstuff comes from oven.

As such, I often feel like I know exactly what something—a flavor combination, a restaurant menu item, a cookbook recipe—tastes like without ever having tasted it, physically. I’m not sure if this tongue is a blessing or a curse. Blessing: There’s always something new to try. Curse: Well, there’s always something new to try.

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The Last (Caramel) Apple

October 31, 2012 By in Recipes Tags: , , , 11 Comments

Caramel Apple Cake


I meant to take a photo on Sunday while I was capturing the above cake. A photo of my yard. It was the first time I really looked at it since autumn had begun. I thought I had missed the foliage this year, complaining of under-tinted trees and lots of yellow but little blush. But then I looked into my yard, on October 28th, and I saw trees afire. I hadn’t sat down, I hadn’t taken a break to notice until October 28th. My attention stolen by the cake, though, I didn’t snap that shot. It was just my backyard. It didn’t really matter.

One day later and those leaves were dead. Gone. Washed away by Sandy, the East Coast storm that came and went. Ordered to stay home from work, I sat, trying to be productive, as I heard those leaves flapping one by one from the branches damp and brown and ripped at the veins. I was hypersensitive. I felt fall’s end, taken not, coincidentally, by a cold winter breeze or a Halloween snow storm (like last year) but by a tropical front: muggy air, bands of flooding rain, branch-stripping winds.

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Seasonal Confusion

November 6, 2011 By in Recipes Tags: , , , , , 5 Comments

caramel popcorn with chocolate and peanuts

It’s still fall, right? Good, because the onslaught of cooler weather, the nor’easter that prematurely ripped the colored leaves off the trees, and the Christmas-themed jewelry and department store advertisements that started running on Halloween (yes, October 31st), were starting to confuse me. Like Spring, Fall in New England is woefully short, but this year, forces of both the meteorological and commercial kind seem to be speeding it along even more than is normal. Although Fall is my favorite season, this rush hasn’t bothered me too much in the past. Snapshots of snow and the holidays to come signaled that winter break was not so far away and that I’d be back in my kitchen at home shortly.

This year, though, my mind is in a better place. The pressure of academia hasn’t eclipsed my days, and I have been trying to rekindle old traditions and forge some new ones. I went on an apple orchard crawl, during which I visited eight orchards to make up for my absence in the past few years. I made a treat so cutesy for Halloween, you would think it was the work of someone else. And then I made this caramel corn. Although caramel popcorn can be eaten and gifted any time of the year, I see it as intrinsically autumnal. It reminds me of county fairs and Halloween. It’s indulgent and comforting, so it’s well suited for cooler weather, but it lacks the requisite spice and flavors that would give it winter holiday flair.

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