Tomato Kumato

Whoa… found these pictures archived from the day I got to Paris and forgot about them.

The day I got to Paris, I tried, as I always do, to avoid jet lag by acting as though it didn’t exist. I walked around my new neighborhood, the 7th arrondissement, getting a feel for what was around. I found Rue Cler, my new foodie home, which is a pedestrian street within spitting distance that has all variety of foodie shops. I picked up a few things… some bread, cheese, pâté, the ever present tomatoes, onions, and garlic, and of course some wine, before walking back to my new apartment… and crashing.

For some reason it didn’t work this time, and jet lag crept up like the bad guy in a slasher film. I woke up around 8, disoriented, groggy, and starving. I walked over to the fridge and filled a plate with pâté and goat cheese, grabbed jars of cornichons and mustard, broke my baguette in two, and poured myself a glass of wine. And there, on my new couch, I had my very own French picnic.

So I’m sorry for the quality of the pictures of my first dinner in France, but I was too tired to adjust the lighting to make them pretty. What counts is that it was all delicious, and I liked the wine so much that I’m keeping the bottle. I am a walking stereotype, and I love it.

So… last night, I was a little bit depressed about fall. I know I posted all happy and excited about baklava, but the truth is, in comparison with last summer, this summer was pretty amazing (actually… three months in Europe and one basking in the sun is better than most summers…), and so I’m kind of sorry to see it go.

This morning, I woke up too late for breakfast, and instead had to vault out of bed and go directly to my cousin’s house, where I had stored my suitcase for the summer. By the time I got home, I was cold and hungry, so I decided to go for one of my favorites: scrambled eggs.

I’m usually a coffee and toast kind of person in the morning. Very low maintenance. Sometimes just the coffee. I’m high maintenance about coffee. But sometimes, when I don’t have time for a real breakfast, and I don’t notice until lunch is rolling around, I’ll make myself some peppers and fried eggs, or else scramble a few with lox, cream cheese, and shallots. This morning, however, all I had were the shallots. Grumbling about my empty fridge, I fried up the shallots in some olive oil, added salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper, and then reached for the eggs. I cracked one in the bowl and stopped short. This egg was bright, fluorescent orange. How curious. I cracked the second, and it was the same. As I beat them with the only dairy product I had, some 1% milk, I watched them turn from bright orange to a pale, agreeable orange-yellow. I added them to the pan and slow-cooked the whole thing together. I moved them to the plate and realized what I had made myself for breakfast.

A plateful of sunshine.

I had expected to have a little bit more time. I wanted to experiment with some corn butter recipes I’ve been putting off since last summer. I hardly had my fill of summer ripe tomatoes. I’ve half a mind to stuff my mouth full of nothing but basil before it all withers and dies. Yes… summer is over, at least for me. In New York, they’ll get a few more weeks, but here in Paris, it is undeniably fall.

Yes… I have finally made the move. I have my own tiny kitchen in my tiny apartment in a tiny building on a tiny street. And all of this is in the huge metropolis that is Paris. My new home. I broke it in (finally) today, by making my ceremonial “new home” tomato sauce. The recipe is secret, but it’s very labor intensive, so I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want to know it anyway. I’ll be making a few more batches before the fresh tomatoes are off the produce stands.

Fall is bringing in yet another exciting new thing: my new (and first) food book of the month: The Language of Baklava by Diana Abu-Jaber. I cheated a little by picking a book that I’ve already read… it’s a memoir of an immigrant’s journey between upstate New York and Jordan throughout her life, and her relationship with the two places. The story is punctuated with recipes, mostly from Abu-Jaber’s food-obsessed father, Bud.

In the book, while making baklava, Diana and her aunt have a discussion about food as a way to remember: to Bud, it is the only way he can remember his homeland of Jordan. Her aunt’s theory, however, negates this concept: she thinks that food is a way to forget. By cooking the same things he ate at home, Bud is forgetting how they were originally. Now, he can never truly go back to the way things were.

I only recently understood this concept. I have tried again and again to replicate my mother’s tomato sauce, putting hers on a pedestal and knowing that mine can never equal it. The more I try, the farther I get from the original, until I can’t even remember what was right. Luckily, I still have Christmas to taste my mother’s and to remember why it is so special. For Bud, though, this is impossible.

Luckily, these recipes don’t hold any history for me, so I am free to enjoy them. It seems strange to start my life in France by experimenting with Jordanian cooking, but I’m looking forward to it, and I hope you all are excited about baklava, shish kebab, lebneh, hummus….