Not Derby Pie

I know, I know, I still haven’t posted about our trip to Thailand. Sorry! I did just go through my pictures this weekend, and gosh – we really had a fantastic time. The food was amazing and loads of fun to relive. Lots of obsessing about everything Thai is coming your way – I can’t wait to share it all with you.

The one thing you’ve already heard about (and heard about, and heard about) from our Thailand adventure is yam som-o, pomelo salad. Ever since I had it that first time, at an absurdly named but very tasty restaurant in Bangkok called The Foodie, I’ve wanted to recreate it at home. When yam som-o is done right, it’s the perfect balance of spicy, sour, salty, sweet, crunchy, and juicy. It’s downright addictive, and after falling hard for it that first day in Bangkok, I sought it out everywhere we went. The version at The Foodie was heavy on the crunch: I think the garlic and shallot were very, very lightly battered before they were fried. There were also a lot of fried herbs in it, which are hard to do in the US since kaffir lime leaves don’t grow on trees down the street. And their dressing was heavy on the tamarind and heavy on the palm sugar, which feels a bit like cheating (sweet salad!) but made stuff even more impossible to stop eating than it would have been.

The few street establishments where I had yam som-o made a much different rendition, with more (and fresher) pomelo, less sugar, and more herbs, none of them fried. The dressing at these street spots had tamarind and some palm sugar, but it also had coconut milk and loads of lime juice, which made the salad taste more like salad. Pomelo wasn’t in season when we were there; I can only imagine how much more of it I’d have eaten (and how much better?) if it were. So when I returned to DC to find that my local grocery had just gotten pomelo in, I pounced, splurged on three, and started testing.

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I’m having a bit of a moment with Asian food right now. If you follow me on twitter or instagram, you’ve seen this borne out in a series of slightly-obsessive photos of yam som-o, pomelo salad, which I am very, very close to perfecting (and then posting!). This, of course, is because we traveled to Vietnam and Thailand in December. D so anticipates these obsessive bouts when and after we travel that she doesn’t even bother to roll her eyes anymore. She sees the packages of  rice, tamarind, bamboo steamers, and obscure Thai cookbooks, makes me promise I’ll still make pasta sometimes, and lets it lie. Best wife ever.

It just so happens that my Asian cooking moment has coincided with a period of self-imposed exile from Mediterranean food. You wouldn’t know it from the number of recipes I’ve posted from Plenty and Jerusalem lately, but I’ve been taking a break from hummus, muhamarra,, and labneh. I ate too much of it in the fall, and I needed some time off.

The vacation was also a vacation from grape leaves, which I generally love but basically O.D.ed on back in November. After a not-particularly-successful attempt at making my own, I cut myself off. We ate a lot of pasta in December, and then we went to Asia. Now we’re back, and while I could eat pad thai for probably 2 weeks straight before needing a break, D has had enough Asian noodles to last her a lifetime. It was time to get back on the Mediterranean bandwagon.

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Every January, I tell myself I’ll eat more salads. The catch: when I’m not saying this with my mouth full of muffin, I’m swearing it in between bites of spaghetti. The cold months make it tough to get it up for leafy greens. Still, I don’t back down so easily. I empty my pockets for Next Step Produce’s arugula, which is not at all cheap – an insurance policy against wasting the stuff, I guess. I buy good olives and Asian pears, thick, aged balsamic and salty, herby Pecorino. I put all the ingredients in the fridge, nod knowingly. I will make salads. And then, when I get home from a long day at the office where the heat is broken and the air registers a nice comfy 50 DEGREES, I open the fridge, pull out the arugula, the olives and pears, that lovely pecorino, and pile it all on a square of puff pastry for a delightful winter tart that has nothing at all to do with salad. Oops.

For problems like these, dinner parties were created. If a plate of food gets served to company, it better have something fresh. Armed with a shred of dignity (I can’t actually serve them all just pasta, can I?), I finish the pureed sweet potatoes and green beans and quiche, take a deep breath, and toss together a salad. I tell myself that people will be warm enough, they will want to eat it. Sometimes, I’m right.

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You guys know about monkey bread, right? It’s a pull-apart loaf made from bits of dough that have been rolled in lots of melted butter and sugar. Why it’s called monkey bread is anyone’s guess (though as Nancy Reagan not-so-famously claimed, the bread got its name ”Because when you make it, you have to monkey around with it.” Yep, I think Nancy was onto something.)

It’s the right time for invoking presidents and first ladies; tomorrow is inauguration day, and this city is once again thrumming with the energy of the millions of people here to partake in celebration. We’ve got house guests, and we’ve got the tv tuned to the right channels, but this time, instead of venturing out into the cold to be part of history, we’re taking it all in from our couch. We and our house guests are planning to cuddle up with something warm and sweet and chewy and delicious. It might just be monkey bread.

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Well clearly, it’s January. I got to the gym yesterday morning and my god was it crowded! You can practically taste the hope in the air. So much ambition, so many plans. Resolutions abound.

It’s the second week of January, so I trust we’ve moved past the “I only eat raw vegetables” phase and are drifting back to real life. By real life, I mean “it’s 6:30 and I just got home and I’m hungry enough that if I don’t eat actual dinner right now I’m gonna go medieval on the chocolate bar in the drawer.” That kind of real life.

For days like those, consider this fasolakia. Faso-what? It’s a Greek dish of  green beans braised in tomato sauce. It’s healthy. It’s easy. Not only can you make it in advance, you should; it gets better with time.  And – here’s something you can’t say about that many dishes made of green beans – it’s addictive. It’s also gluten-free and can be vegan very easily. What other boxes can I check?

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Over brunch last week, my friend Mike – who’s been to a lot of places, but never Southeast Asia – asked me what made me want to visit Vietnam. Actually, I think he asked me if the motivation was purely the country’s food. Can I answer honestly without sounding totally uncurious about everything else? Yes. I wanted to go to Vietnam for the food. Just the food. (Fortunately, D takes an interest in pretty much everything else. Or should I say, anything else. Opposites attract, yes?)

The thing about Vietnam – and Thailand, for that matter – is that in many ways, the food is the country. Maybe it’s true of any place; all my friends always talk of visiting Italy, and I guarantee you they didn’t choose it just for the museums. Eating your weight in pizza is a great way to spend a holiday. For me, eating my weight in pho has similar appeal.

But it’s more than the taste of the broth, the texture of the noodles, the 17 kinds of mint each different from the next. Food ways tell you so much about a place and a group of people that you can’t learn by visiting a museum. Getting out on the street (and in Vietnam, food literally is on the street) and eating with others is the fastest way to understand the rhythms and pulses of a place. I ate with a lot of strangers on this trip, and when the lady across the table from me barked orders about how to position my bean sprouts just so, about how I was putting the wrong sauce on my noodles, I learned something. Next time, I’ll use the green sauce. Also: the Vietnamese take their food very, very seriously.

I took nearly 1,000 pictures of ladies pointing to green sauce, among many other things. Here are some highlights.

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Well hi there. Hopefully you’re curled up on the couch in pajamas, eating something tasty and sipping something warm.

We’re in comfies on the couch, with coffee in hand. I’m already contemplating a mug of hot chocolate with one of last night’s vanilla-bean marshmallows plopped on. There’s so much time to run around like a crazy woman with my head cut off; today is for staying warm and full.

I mentioned that celebrated the new year at home, with friends. It was almost the same crowd we had over last year, and I think it’s becoming something of a tradition. We’d planned to keep things low-key, given that we’d been traveling and didn’t think we’d have much time to cook. But as it turned out, last week was a sleepy one at the office, giving me a few afternoons with enough time to plan a proper menu. Here’s how it all went down.

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