For those of you wondering how to make candy corn infused vodka, the recipe is simple.

1 1/2 cups vodka
1/2 candy corn

Place the candy corn and vodka in an air tight container and leave for 3 hours. After 3 hours, strain the vodka. Viola!

To serve, I recommend that you mix the vodka with a bit of OJ and a squeeze of lemon juice, shake with ice, and serve in a martini glass with a gummy tarantula or worm as garnish.

Labels: candy, cocktails, gummy candy, halloween, vodka

So I was reading this Metafilter post about a man who was arrested for being naked in his own kitchen Apparently details are still forthcoming, but regardless it shocked me that it COULD be considered illegal to be naked in one's own home. I mean even if the guy IS a flasher, he was in his own freakin' house!

Being raised in a "medical" family (ie both parents worked in medicine as do several members of my extended family) nudity was not considered, in and of itself, sexual. I didn't understand nudity as being funny (why did anyone care?) nor do I see it as something threatening. Not that I was going to go to school naked, but certainly it was OK to be naked in a private setting. So much so that when I was very young, I often went skinny dipping in our pool as did my mother. (I know, that Mere Lapin is a racy one!) Now my house was in the middle of the forest and the only side of the house that faced the street was protected by a very high fence. Thus no one could casually spy me swimming regardless of whether I was clothed or naked.

I've continued to have a rather casual attitude towards nudity-more European than American I suppose. I do lounge in my apartment naked (not as much now that there are workmen outside my window ALL THE TIME), and it is how I prefer to sleep in the summer. I'm not trying to let you in on more than you need to know, but I think I should be OK doing that. And if someone DOES spy me naked accidentally, they should just avert their eyes and move along not call the freakin' cops even if there is a 7 year old kid in tow. It's just not something to freak out about.

If you are one of those people, DO NOT GO TO A BEACH IN EUROPE. It's rather common to see even 7 year old children stark naked, casually playing in the water. My Parisian boyfriend made fun of Americans as Puritans, and in this respect he is right. I was perfectly comfortable hanging out with topless matrons and naked kids because, again, I don't think of nudity as shameful or inherently sexual.

But all of this is aside from the point, I wanted to share with you a story my grandmother told me, which illustrates how much our attitudes have changed. Not just towards nudity but towards out neighbors, particularly when children are involved. (This whole "think of the children" cult is plain old ridiculous. I'm not going to get into it in detail, but just seeing someone naked? Not that scarring for a kid especially if the parent talks to the child about it instead of creating a media frenzy. But I digress.)

In the early 70s, a psychiatrist and his wife moved into the neighborhood where my grandmother lived. Apparently, the psychiatrist liked gardening in the nude. So every day, he would go out there naked. Now my grandmother could care less, but she was amused by let's call it the theater of neighborhood drama. The neighbors would call the cops, who would arrive, and tell him to put on clothes. He would argue for a bit and then do so. Well this played itself out every day for almost two weeks. Finally, the cops said, "Listen, we can't show up here EVERYDAY. You need to wear clothes when you garden or when you're outside your home or we'll be forced to arrest you."

The next day the psychiatrist was gardening clothed. So a week goes by, and the neighborhood finally begins to believe the reign of the naked gardener is over. They become convinced when he and his lovely wife decided to have a cocktail party to make amends for the dispute and get to know people. Imagine the horror one their faces when he opened the door to greet all of his guests in the nude!

The point was since he was IN the house, this was perfectly fine, and my grandmother thought it was AWESOMELY entertaining, which I think is the right attitude to have. If it was me, I would have laughed and said "OK where's the wine and cheese?" After that, the neighborhood arrived at a comfortable truce-inside the house he and his wife could frolic in the nude, while outside he would dress. Essentially, everybody wins.

Except now in which heaven forfend a 7 year old gaze upon a naked human being. Sheesh.

Labels: arrest, nudity

Labels: date, humor

The truth is I never thought I liked risotto. My mother always ordered it, and I tasted once or twice and hated it. Now I have a thing about textures-mushy or mushy with grains in it, I don't like it. (Yet somehow I love yogurt with grape nuts. I'm just weird that way I guess.) But then a few weeks ago my mother and I were in an Italian restaurant and she ordered risotto. And it came with carrots. My mother hates carrots, and carrots weren't listed in the description of the dish, but there they were. And I LOVE carrots, so in the name of carrots I tried a bite and I realized that I do like risotto if it's al dente. Whenever I discover something I new I like (for example artichokes 2 years ago) I can almost hear "A Whole New World" playing in the background, which is odd because I've never watched Aladdin. Suddenly a whole new venue of recipes and dishes, I can see them in my head laid out on a long table with a white cloth, which makes me excited to immediately get into the kitchen and begin playing around because I've already wasted too much time thinking I didn't like this wonderful thing. Thus my risotto revelation resulted in my desire to begin making it, and just my luck the most recent issue of Gourmet included a risotto with radishes dish. I had some leftover radishes, and it seemed that Destiny was trying to tell me "It's time you make risotto."

And then I found out Gourmet was folding.

I'm going to digress for a moment about Gourmet. When I was little, I remember my mother getting Gourmet and leafing through the pages. This was back when my mother cooked, and we had family dinners every night. I knew that Gourmet was important to my mother, which is why I recall the following incident so clearly. My mother had angered me. I don't remember why, but I was mad. And being me, I decided to seek revenge, so I tore up the front page of the latest Gourmet. My mother hadn't even looked at it yet. It had a bunch of purple wet grapes on the front, I think. (It could just as easily have been blueberries.)

But my revenge was calculated. By tearing up the front page, I knew it was bad and I was interfering with her enjoyment of the magazine. However, I also understood there was just an ad on the other side of the page. I wasn't destroying anything with real content. So my revenge was calculated to be hurtful, but even I wouldn't destroy the precious contents, which were the real value of the magazine.

This is how far back my memory of Gourmet goes. In high school, when my mother had long stopped cooking and dedicated her entire caloric intake to rice cakes with peanut butter, I began to cook. Instead of showing me how to make things, she would simply tell me where to find the recipe in the recipe books. And this is how I began to teach myself to cook. I couldn't sleep at night in CT and so often I would begin making elaborate dishes at 11 only to finish cooking around 1 or 2. I would make steak au poivre, potatoes dauphinoise, or minestrone in the middle of the night. I would leave the leftovers in the refrigerator and put a note on the table so my mother would know that should she wish to eat actual food it was available.

Thus my mother got me a subscription to Gourmet, which I enjoyed throughout high school. In college, I didn't have a kitchen, but while in graduate school I discovered Epicurious. Glory be! I didn't need Gourmet anymore to get recipes from Gourmet! Until a few months ago when Gourmet sent me an offer I couldn't refuse and even though I like Epicurious there is something about getting Gourmet. Maybe it's that I remember watching my mother read it as a child. Maybe it's all the dishes I learned how to make when I was in high school. Or maybe it's just that it's one of the last great magazines. But when I found this out, in the wake of 2 of my favorite restaurants closing (We Liang Ye, which was written up by Gourmet, and Payard) I thought "This is truly the end of American Culinary culture." (I know, I know. I'm a drama queen.)

This is not to say that Gourmet didn't have bad moments or contribute to hours of my time lost to make some dish that was only so-so. I remember one dish in particular-a white bean dip that they claimed could be made in a food processor OR blender. NOT TRUE. Only Cthulhu could make this stuff in the blender and not lose his mind, but I wouldn't give up. Unfortunately, the result did not nearly warrant the hour and half of sweating, cursing, swearing, and improvising so I could serve it to my then boyfriend and my mother who were decorating the Christmas tree.

Or even more entertainingly, in the back of issue there was a list of specialty cocktails including a long island iced tea. For some reason, despite the fact that ALL the other recipes had the serving size listed under the title and before the ingredients list, this recipe had the serving size at the end. Thus everytime I would mix a long island iced tea, it wasn't until I got to the bottom of the recipe I would see "Serves 2" and realize I had to drink a double all on my own. Somehow, I never remembered this and made the mistake over and over. Still, I'm filled with nostalgia for even the more trying moments I had with Gourmet, and so I wouldn't give them up. It makes it easier for me not to give them up that most of the time I would make a recipe, realize I screwed up after the fact, and still get something delicious out of it as well as a lesson learned.

As such, I felt morally bound to make a tribute to my love of Gourmet while it still was around. And so exhausted on a Friday, I set to work in my postage stamp of a kitchen making risotto for the very first time. And let me just tell you not only was the dish MADE OF AWESOME, I even managed to make it look pretty, which I NEVER PULL OFF. So it seemed like a fitting tribute to one of my favorite periodicals ever.

If you do make this, a note. The radish salad and risotto work well on their own if you're as nervous about putting radish salad on top of the risotto as I was. You can try them separately and then try a bit together just to be sure that they work. Also I used regular chicken soup because, well, I had it and I didn't want to run out to the store again. Long story short, you can use regular chicken broth and just omit the salt later. Seriously, it'll be fine.

So in closing, thank you Gourmet for all the the articles, the food porn, the tips, the hours spent in frustrating contemplation of "how the hell did they pull this off in 35 minutes in the test kitchen?", the fantasies about owning a kitchen large enough to include some of the fabulous equipment you showcased, the recipes clipped with the best intentions of being made that week but somehow patiently waited for years before they were attempted, the "Eureka" moments when I tried a new dish that on paper seemed questionable, but on the palate were a revelation, the "crack bar" recipe (chocolate and caramel covered graham crackers) that is the hit of every party, and, most importantly, the accidental double long island iced teas. I'll never forget you...mainly because I still have a backlog of about 400 recipes to make from old issues. So you'll still be a part of my life, which is good. It's very very good.

Labels: cooking, food porn, gourmet, radishes, risotto

Over the last few years there has been an increase in bed bugs in NYC. So far this fall not one BUT TWO colleges-John Jay and now Manhattan College- have serious bed bug problems. So now as a NYC college prof I risk getting bitten by bed bugs and potentially bringing them back to my apartment all of this in the name of trying to get my students to read a 6 page article, which they didn't do. They couldn't even bother to feign interest in it. And this wasn't 6 pages of the Lacanian literary analysis, this was 6 pages of this is how to handle a PR scandal.

What's fun is MC is handling it the wrong way, which illustrated my point to the class exactly. While they did send out an email to students, they didn't inform students about 1. what to do if they suspect they have bed bugs 2 how to prevent a bed bug infestation. Considering what I teach-the first thing I would do (after dealing with getting students into "clean" housing) would be to clarify these issues. As it was, I spent a large portion of the class discussing ways students can prevent an infestation. (I happen to know because my apartment had bed bugs when I first moved in.) With a lack of disclosure and useful information, it's not surprising that some students say "They also say that neither the building manager nor college officials are handling the situation correctly."

I would agree.

The school sends out daily emails about H1N1, but doesn't do the same for bed bugs? Not only should students receive an email but ALL STAFF-the kitchen staff, guards, receptionists,-should receive an email clearly explaining what is going ("The infestation is confined to one building off campus") and how they are coping with it ("We have moved those students to another dorm on campus while we make alternative housing arrangements"). Furthermore, they should include directives to help prevent a bed bug infestation (a special mattress cover can help reduce the likelihood of infestation as can vacuuming every three days).

Finally, because of the way the school is handling information (or not handling it) students aren't finding out from administration, they are finding out from word of mouth. Not only does this fail to instill faith that administration knows how to cope with such a situation, it also increases the potential for misinformation to be repeated as truth. We know from the game "Telephone" that even a well intentioned repetition of what one THINKS one hears can result in a horrible distortion of the original phrase. Now imagine that same game in a highly emotionally charged atmosphere and with the players who have their own agendas-emphasizing or inventing details to make the story more dramatic. Essentially by not offering clear information, the school is fostering an atmosphere where damaging "untruths" will proliferate.

And now I'm going to vacuum everything in my apartment (sigh).

Labels: bed bugs, NYC, pr scandal