I recently reactivated my Park Slope Food Coop membership after 5 years of inactivity as I’m in Brooklyn a little more frequently. Today was my first shift and I was flooded with memories of co-members past: overly permissive mommies, hipster daddies, angry vegan lesbians, friendly vegan lesbians, cute Vermonty boys and the trollish sci-fi hippie types with personal space issues. All these people are still there but the place is so huge now that they get lost in the general fray of average Park Slope BoBos.

I have to admit to an embarrassing idealism around the food cooperative - I really get into being involved. I love the oldsters that have been there all 35 years that we’ve been open - when I’m checking someone out and their card list member number 00008 I feel like I’ve won a dollar scratch card or I’m experiencing Park Slope history. And now there is meat! Even offal! And beer! All for the cost of 2.75 hours a month. I could have spent hours perusing the shelves and am excited to have bulk grains, affordable cashew butter and $2.62 kombucha drink in my life in ‘08.

Last weekend night before Christmas, the restaurant was carnage tonight, literally a full house of customers with menus 15 minutes before we opened. Which meant orders for an entire restaurant right out of the gate.

Three women on the line. Each of the three of us got her period this morning. No joke. The bleeding ones. Coincedence, not any of that lunar sisters BS.

We were fierce. And we were seamless. We made great food fast.  Irritable, but seamless. The bartender treated us to homemade lime rickeys, hereafter called “The Dragon Time“, at half-time.  1 tablespoon grenadine, 2 tablespoons lime juice into a highball packed with ice, topped with soda water, a lime wheel and a maraschino cherry. Sweet hydration. Make it “adult” with a jigger of vodka.

 The male host was made very sorry for opening early.

The kitchen at the restaurant is a legion of women, with a couple of exceptions; one, our corn-fed midwestern boy who brings more actual line-cooking chops to the line than most of us put together, has given his notice so that he can spend a season traveling around Spain in search of tasty hams and old art.

I’m really sorry to see him go, although the time is right for him and the restaurant. The major reason for my sorrow is that, after moving to the low country as a teen and spending his early twenties cooking in South Carolina’s restaurants, the boy can cook some fierce southern food, which he does for family meal at least once a week. As a person who has spent too little time below the Mason-Dixon line, this has meant some of the finest friend chicken, green bean casserole, braised turnip greens and slow-cooked ribs I’ve ever had.

He’s also given me a lot of good lessons on how to be an efficient cook, talks about cooking in terms of the science of the materials, and while he is rough around the edges in terms of relationship management in the workplace, as a blunt asshole I enjoy a blunt asshole, so I enjoy his company.

Tonight he shared his biscuit secrets with me. There was relief in the house knowing that flaky, warm, buttermilk pillows weren’t leaving with him.

Roode’s Biscuits

• 2 cups flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• Salt to taste
• 4 oz butter, cold, cut into pea-sized pieces
• 4 oz buttermilk

1. Sift together your dry ingredients less the salt 3 times. This aerates the flour. Sprinkle in salt to taste and fluff it with your fingers.
2. Work in the butter with your hands until it is fairly tight, without too much dry floury chaff.
3. Pour in the buttermilk, and use a knife to cut through the flour until the liquid in integrated, rather than using your hands or a spoon to mix it. It should be springy and not very sticky, a lightly crumbled texture.
4. Put it out onto a floured surface and fold it over and press into a mass 5 times. Roll it out to 1/2″ thickness and cut it into rounds.
5. Bake at 425 degrees for about 10 minutes, until golden on top and bottom and moist inside.

These will be on the menu of the Old Stove Tavern, sent out with pan-fried chicken livers in smoked paprika-sherry vinegar gravy on a blustery evening, and with maple butter, house-cured bacon and strong coffee on weekend mornings.

I’m just realizing how much of a procrastinator I had become while I had the temp gig. Having too much to do usually makes me perform with a high degree of efficiency, but lately all I’ve wanted to do is pull covers over head and watch Buffy episodes. Happily, having the 20 or so hours a week spent temping and worrying about temping back at my disposal has left me feeling less pressure and so much more productive.

I’ve been spending more time in Brooklyn lately and that means getting to run in Prospect Park. In doing so for the first time in several years, I felt as though I was visiting with a fond, final, long lost love or rereading Great Expectations for the zillionth time or listening today to the album that mattered most when I was 15. 

Trees near the concert grove with roots pushing above ground are still pushing out their roots, breaking my stride into hops and jumps. The perma-puddle at the base of the carriage path still makes for a wet entry onto the lake path. The battle pass marker is still the hardest part of the run.

I’ve changed, but the challenge, determination and satisfaction are the same.

It is so rare to find everything exactly where you left it, and so comforting to know you can appreciate difference layered over the familiar.

One thing I learned during the freelance gig was the existence of “scripture candy“, faith pops and ol’fashioned lemon sours inscribed with verse from the King James Bible. And the ultimate in children’s birthday party favor, the bag of prayerful jelly beans.

Each large bag is filled with approx. 25 small individual bags. Each small bag contains an assortment of the 6 different gourmet flavored jelly beans. Each small bag features the beautiful jelly bean prayer:

“Thank you, Lord, for jelly beans. They remind me of your love./ Speckled represents the effects of sin/Separating me from you above./ Red is for the blood you shed A sacrifice only you could pay. /White represents the cleansing of my soul as you wash my sins away. /Blue is for water baptism. An outward expression of faith. /Yellow represents heaven above, A long awaited place! /Green is for the growth that I must do. As I study your Word to gain closeness to you. ”

The god-botherers have done the work for me, I need not add anything more.

On my last day here at the offices of the freelance gig I swung by the snack shelf as a treat. Every office has some desk or shelf or cube in which the snacks are to be had; at the bank it was a sad, bored lady’s candy bowl or the pantry, where you could score corporate lunch leftovers such as cold pizza.

I virtuously (and sensibly) bypassed the Entemenn’s “chocolate” shellacked “donuts”, and greedily grabbed the matzoh for this morning’s triumphant “I’m outtie!” snack.

I have always really liked the taste and texture of matzoh - preferably with cold butter smooshed on top, but plain is OK with a cup of hot tea. It is one of those sweetish, plain crackers, and I love how smooth and brittle it feels when you crunch into it and the little burnt bubbles flake off. But within a bite of cracker I knew something was amiss.

Because this matzoh was whole wheat.

While I’m crazy about whole grains and understand that when the Jews fled Egypt their crackers probably weren’t made with King Arthur, there are some simple flavor/texture combos that are not to be fucked with. I’m frankly a little pissed  about the gerbilly fibrousness and woodchippy taste going on right now.

I’ve been dead air for a week because I can’t justify blogging when I have a raft of freelance stuff to attend to, but was a doing some weird procrastination thing where I refused to start my freelance work.

But the freelance work is just about to dry up, so I’ve gotten a wiggle on it. And while relying on my cooking salary is a ludicrous prospect, I’ll be glad to have a few hours to myself over the next few weeks in which to write (and run and cook and read). And after the holidays I’ll see about next steps.

In the meantime, I’ll be back on regular posting. Look forward to such topics as:

• Paul Newman Limeade causing phleghm
• When a burger is so off temp that you need to send it back
• Why society continues to morally prioritize a diurnal schedule like some Puritanical flashback despite the flexibility of schedule our modern world affords us
• Getting to actually prepare food in the actually full-sized kitchen at the Cook Crush’s new apartment
• What I want for Christmas dinner

I had back-to-back pizza this weekend. Both places I visited have been the subject of lots of commentary in magazines and newspapers and on food blogs. I was excited to try both first hand.

First up was Franny’s. I got off to a good start - a gin martini made with a house-pickled golden beet. And, although this place is known for its pies andfor its commitment to sustainable agriculture, it is the commitment to making salumi in house that really excites me. So, we started with pork cheek and beef tongue terrine, which was silky and sweet and glistening and exactly the snack I want to eat on a cold night. We moved onto wood-roasted octopus served with lemony olive-flecked creaminess, and leeks with capers and raisins. (The octo was divine, the leeks tasted wonderful but would have benefited from being either 1) braised further and so more tender or 2) cut into fork-friendly rings.)

We ordered the pie with clams, chilies and parsley. Usually I like to go with a simple tomato and mozz pie for a first outing, but I had heard raves about the clam and really wanted to try it, especially after seeing it at our neighbor’s table. The sweet, creamy, lightly briny, fresh quality of the topping was heavenly. I would have been thrilled to have a bowl of topping with a side of bread, but as it was, the crust was so-so. It tasted great: smoky, charred on the edges, but it was sort of soggy - the point of the triangle of a slice had no spine at all. Don’t get me wrong - I’ll return to Franny’s. It was a glowingly lovely meal and there are many other house-cured meats to sample.

The next night I went to Una Pizza Napoletana. The chef-owner is a man possessed by a desire to produce only perfect pies. He has a bad-ass wood burning oven, makes each pie himself, doesn’t allow any changes to the short, elegant menu, makes a bunch of dough each morning and closes up shop when the dough is gone. He’s got the zeal of a missionary; although he doesn’t want you to stop eating American style pizza, he wants you to stop calling it pizza, and to recognize his classic Neopolitan style as the One True Way. He charges a remarkable $21 for a pie. His feeling is that we should be paying twice that much for the amount of love he puts into it.

We had a marinara pie (San Marzano tomatoes, extra virgin olive oil, oregano, garlic, basil, and sea salt) and a filetti (cherry tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella, garlic, extra virgin olive oil, basil, and sea salt). The marinara was tasty for sure but the filleti was far and away the winner. The sweet tang of the cherry tomatoes, the mild creaminess of the cheese, the high note of salt, the yeast of the bread all came together in a transporting sigh - you are taken somewhere where the sun is warm. I learned recently that wine is not the traditional Italian choice of beverage for pizza, that they believe that beer or carbonated cola go much better - and really loved washing it down with a Peroni. But again, a little too much softness in the center of the dough disk. I understand that DOC pies in Naples are eaten with a knife and fork and that some tenderness is the ideal, but both pies verged on soggy.

Both of Franny’s and Una Pizza were very good restaurants with thoughtfully chosen ingredients and a great deal of demonstrated care and traditional ovens. And their pizzas are better than much of what you can get even at New York’s other top-rated pizza joints. But neither sent me into full-blown pizza reveries. Maybe it was an off night for each. And it isn’t that I want a stiff crunch through the whole pie - I’m ok with some yield in the center. But soupy and moist, after so much ink has been spilled about their wood-fired superiority, was a tiny bit of a let down.

Perhaps they - or I - suffered from heightened expectations. Is it possible that all of the voices in print and putting forward opinions online have undermined my ability to experience pizza for what it is, rather than for how it compares to everything else and everyone else’s experience? What a weird shame, if so. And a bit of a catch - how, for example, would I know I want to make a New Haven pilgrimage if not for the pizza-obsessed writers I read? With so much pizza choice in these five boroughs alone, how else would I know where to begin?