Almond Cake

I baked a cake this afternoon. A moist, densely packed almond cake from my well-worn copy of Baking with Julia. I didn't really have a reason to bake. But I wanted to try this one, which is an element of the cookbook's intense Wedding Cake recipe, because I am the designated pastry chef for a friend's wedding late this summer. And I'm nervous. So I'm practicing. Every single cake I bake, I tell myself, will make the finished product just that much better. I have over three months. That's a lot of cakes.

This one is nice. It came out of the oven golden brown and buttery. Almost too buttery, I thought as I sneaked a little sliver to eat with my late-afternoon coffee. But perhaps that will go well later on with layers of lemon curd or blueberry jam, swiss or simple vanilla buttercream. I haven't yet worked out the details. But I know that there will be no fondant. Definitely no fondant. Though lovely on its own, I have a different idea for this particular cake. I'm having friends over for dinner tomorrow and I plan to use it, cut into small disks, as the base for a fleet of individual Baked Alaskas. We'll see how that goes.*

I don't know a whole lot about the science of baking, despite the fact that I love to make and eat cakes of all kinds. I certainly don't know much about the architecture of wedding cakes. But if the testing and tweaking involved in the creation of this one offers me the opportunity to spend more afternoons like today's, procrastinating on thoughts of the real world in my warm apartment, which smelled of almonds and butter, I'm happy to learn.



*Update: They went well. A little too much cake to ice cream ratio. But what beats miniature rounds of almond sweet, topped with strawberry ice cream and a cloud of oven-brown meringue? In my mind, not much.


Dense Almond Cake
Adapted from Baking with Julia

I adapted this recipe a bit, mainly due to ingredient and equipment restraints. Instead of going to the store to buy the extra 2.5 ounces of almond paste, I just used the 7 that I had. Instead of cake flour, I used all purpose. I didn't have a working food processor, and used a hand-held mixer to beat in the eggs rather than a paddle attachment on a standing one. In retrospect, there isn't much I did do exactly according to the directions. This is most likely the reason for my only complaint: the almost too-moist texture of my end result. But either way, I imagine, it's nice. Julia's original recipe is below.

9.5 ounces, or 1 packed cup, almond paste
2.25 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
1 cup sugar
6 large eggs
1 cup cake flour, sifted

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Butter a baking pan -- I used a single 9" circular cake pan, while Julia's instructions are for a number of different sizes for the construction of a wedding cake -- and then place a sheet of parchment paper, cut to fit, within. Dust with flour, tap out the excess, and put aside.

Put the almond paste, butter, and sugar in a food processor fitted with a metal blade. Process for one minute, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed. The mixture should be mainly smooth, with a bit of a grainy edge.

Scrape this mixture into the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Add the eggs and beat at medium speed until the batter is smooth. This should take about 3 minutes. Scrape down the sides, again, as needed. Turn the mixer up to high in the final 15 seconds.

Remove the bowl and fold in the flour, a little at a time, with a rubber spatula. Spread into the prepared pan and smooth the top. Bake for 1.5 to 1.75 hours, until the top is golden, the edges begin to spring away from the pan and the top is springy to the touch. For me, this took only one hour.

Transfer to a cooling rack and let sit at least 25 minutes, then invert, remove the parchment paper, and enjoy.

News

As many of you know, I’ve been writing about the sense of smell since 2005. It was then, in the crack of my skull against the windshield of a quickly-moving car, that my olfactory neurons were damaged and I lost the ability to detect the scent of brewing coffee, freshly baked bread, or a ripe bag of garbage. For a while, I lost the ability to smell anything at all.

I began this blog before that, however, when I could think of little more than the kitchen, sauté pans and paring knives. While scent was important to me as the gateway to flavor, it hardly crossed my mind that without a working nose a sip of coffee was simply hot and bitter and that a bite of chicken similar to one of cardboard. I had wanted to be a chef, and I began this blog to write about my work prepping and washing dishes in an upscale Boston restaurant. I had hoped the job would be the first step in many on my way to the professional culinary world. I wanted to chronicle the journey.

Without smell, however, my ability to perceive the world around me changed and, with that, so did my plans. I’ve written about it all along the way.

My fascination with scent began out of necessity. After the accident I suddenly realized that its absence sapped the texture from both physical experience and memory. It implied the power of what was once there. In the last four years my sense of smell, as I’ve written here, has slowly returned. While it is not completely restored—skunk sometimes smells of almond biscotti and I often can’t tell the difference between sage and thyme—I’ve watched the details painstakingly crawl back into my sensory landscape. Throughout this process, my interest in smell has grown far deeper.

And now I’m very happy to announce my current project, which I’ve been working on for quite some time but that only recently became official. I’m writing a book.

“In Search of Smell,” an olfactory memoir exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and social history of smell through the lens of my own story of loss and regain, will be published by the HarperCollins imprint Ecco. I’ll be reporting and writing for a little less than the next year. I’m very excited.

I’m not sure how this will change ‘My Madeleine.’ I plan to keep writing as I have been—about food, about smell, and about how they intersect. But perhaps now that my days are filled with research and interviews on scent, this blog will veer more towards food. Perhaps not. I just wanted to let you all know what I’m up to. And if you have any ideas or any stories to share with me, please let me know. I’m looking forward to learning so much more.

Breakfast

I like to wake up early.

I work best in the pre-dawn, my dark studio lit only by the computer screen. I love the chilly moments before the sun comes up, before I begin to hear the clank and clatter of the rest of my building starting the day. I like to type with the radio on in the background, so low as to be almost inaudible. I like to move slowly, pausing to read the paper with a mug of coffee steaming on my desk nearby.

None of this is nice, however, when I’m hungry. My mind just doesn’t work without breakfast. As Lewis Carroll said so eloquently in Through the Looking Glass: “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

For me, breakfast is usually oatmeal, served with a dollop of milk and some combination of berries, apple slices or nuts. Sometimes it’s a bowl of cold cereal and yogurt. There is toast with butter and jam on occasion, oranges often, and always a piece of chocolate or two.

I made my first batch of granola this afternoon. It filled my apartment with the scent of brown sugar and cinnamon, ginger and almonds. Tomorrow morning I’ll eat it with milk and a sliced banana. Though I will admit: it’s pretty nice as a late afternoon snack.


Granola
Adapted from Orangette

I adapted this recipe from Orangette, which is a blog (and now book) that I often turn to for trusted recipes ranging from chocolate madeleines to chickpea salads. I changed some things here due to taste preference: cutting down on both sugar and the amount of nuts and seeds. I changed some things due to convenience: a lack of brown rice syrup resulted in a lovely swath of honey.

Dry Ingredients:
5 cups rolled oats
2 ½ cups slivered almonds
a heaping ½ cup light brown sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ginger
1 tsp salt

Wet Ingredients:
a heaping ¾ cup unsweetened applesauce
1/3 cup honey (I used raw wildflower honey, which I had picked up when in Tennessee.)
2 Tbsp canola oil

Preheat oven to 300 degrees F.

Combine dry ingredients in a bowl. Stir and set aside. Combine wet ingredients in another, smaller bowl. Stir. Add wet ingredients to the dry ones and stir to combine.

Spread mixture out on two rimmed baking sheets, and bake for 35 – 40 minutes on two racks set on the top and bottom third of the oven. Turn around the pans and stir every 10 minutes or so. When done, the granola should be a toasty golden brown. Take the pans out of the oven and let cool. It will still be a bit soft upon its exit, but crunches up while losing heat.

Store in sealed containers, or a plastic bag, as long as you like.

Everything

Ever since Matt was called back into the Army and my days were suddenly laced with heightened levels of anxiety, I have been able to smell more.

It’s not that I’m noticing the scent of new things. There are still smells lost to me, like that of water in a stagnant pond or of certain types of flowers, which remain imperceptible now four years removed from the accident that damaged my olfactory neurons. This heightened emotional state doesn’t make a difference there.

It’s the intensity that has changed.

Last Thursday night, for example, I walked into a hair salon in the East Village just as the sun was beginning to set. The anxiety, usually swirling somewhere in the periphery of my day, had moved front and center that afternoon when Matt told me his official deployment assignment: a year in the mountains of Afghanistan. Suddenly it throbbed in the back of my throat, and I decided to get my hair cut. I could use the gossip-rag-fueled distraction, I thought.

When I entered the salon, which had red walls and glittery lights, I was immediately hit by scent. It was pungent and floral with notes of jasmine and a lingering chemical twang. It filled my head like a honeyed cloud and I inhaled and exhaled slowly as I sat to wait on a bench by the window. I could almost feel the sweet, fatty globs of conditioner, which I watched the stylist squirt onto a customer’s head over by the sink, on the roof of my mouth. The salon has never been so intense.

Is it possible to have an increased sense of smell due to a keyed-up emotional state? I’m not sure. Of course, there are physical factors known to affect the one’s ability to smell. For example, changes in the level of hormones due to pregnancy are known to cause a heightened sense of smell in women. I’m not pregnant, so that’s not it. But I’ve been stressed out. More than usual. And the body reacts to stress in many intense internal ways, including the release of such hormones as cortisol into the blood stream.

In the years since the car accident I’ve noticed a strong connection between my emotions and scent. When moving through moments of depression—whether at the tortured end of a relationship or in the months after the death of a friend—I’ve noticed that I hardly register smell at all. Scents are there, of course. But they are muted, lacking all sense of intensity. Like my mood, the olfactory environment around me becomes flat and dim.

Similarly, during times when I’ve been happiest, like in the heart-flapping beginning to a new relationship, or in the brief nothing-months of summer before beginning graduate school, I’ve found that smell is all around me, striking in its strength.

Brown University professor Rachel Herz writes about the connection between smell and emotion in her book, The Scent of Desire. The connection, she says, “is not only metaphorical but also is founded on the evolution of our brain.” The limbic system, where emotion, memory and motivation are processed, first grew from a primitive olfactory cortex, she explains. “In other words, the ability to experience and express emotion grew directly out of our brain’s ability to process smell,” Herz writes.

I’m not sure what exactly is going on in my nose right now. But for the (big, scary) writing project I am currently working on, which I’ll certainly be telling you more about later, I’m jumping headlong into research on the sense of smell, and how the science and psychology of it all relate to my own experience. I hope to soon learn more.

There are some things I do know, however. I know that on an evening in February, a week after Matt had been called back into the Army and only a few days into the resulting, panicked search for a new apartment, I stood in a parking garage on the Upper West Side. I was on assignment for a long-term story on high school kids building robots and was reporting with a notebook and pen amidst a crowd of teachers, students and electrical wiring.

Inhaling and exhaling slowly against the back-lit scent of dank concrete, I caught a whiff of cologne, a hint of sweat and the strong aroma of motor oil. Someone to my left opened the plastic lid to a cup of hot chocolate and the scent—rich, sweet—hit me from several feet away. A moment later there was the peppermint breath of an interview subject chewing gum. Someone was drinking orange juice; I could smell the pungent citrus before I saw the container in a teacher’s hand.

Everything smelled. Everything. I could hardly concentrate in the face of so many scents. What’s going on here? I remember thinking. I was exhausted but alert, jazzed on anxiety and caffeine. I was in a dark, cold parking garage, but it had been a long time since everything seemed so bright.

Empanadas

I made empanadas on the first Saturday night of April. It was Matt's and my last evening together before he reported for duty in South Carolina, the first leg of a long journey that will soon take him to either Iraq or Afghanistan.

We had been staying at his family’s home in Tennessee for the week. It was just the two of us and we had no schedule. We spent days maneuvering the Appalachian Mountains in tennis shoes and evenings watching movies on the couch. We shopped at Walmart, ate pulled pork sandwiches in empty restaurants off the highway, and tried hard to avoid the rain. I cooked a lot.

But on Saturday night – our last night – I wanted something special. As the sun went down and the vaulted ceilings of the house grew shadowy and dim, Matt packed his deep green rucksacks with uniforms and combat boots. I needed to distract myself. I wanted flour on my hands and my head in a recipe.

We had eaten empanadas almost daily while in Argentina, where we had traveled in order to escape the manic schedule of New York, the thoughts of war and the empty bags waiting to be packed. While there I loved the dish with origins in Spain: rich, spiced fillings nestled within crisp pockets of dough. We ate them with beef, with chicken and with cheese. We ate them baked, piled on metal trays and plopped on the table at cafes. We ate them fried, wandering through antique markets in Buenos Aires, the whorls of my fingers left slippery with grease.

I started cooking late on that warm Saturday night. We had spent the afternoon hiking and were moving slowly. Thoughts of the next morning, when I would drop Matt off amid a long beige line of barracks at an Army base in South Carolina, were cold in the pit of my stomach.

In the kitchen I concentrated on the movement of my knife, the temperature of the oven and the scent of butter. First I mixed the dough – a sticky, soft thing immediately sent to chill in the fridge. I sautéed onions and garlic. I watched the pink fade from a pan of crumbled beef. Olives and hardboiled eggs came later when, combined, I let it all cool on the counter.

“It smells good,” Matt called out from the living room where he was packing, surrounded by boxes of clothes and stacks of books.

I rolled the dough into small, flour-dusted circles. I filled them, pinched them, and brushed the sculpted mounds with egg wash. They came out of the oven crackly and brown. We ate them later with our fingers sitting on the couch.

These empanadas were good, though not great. I had miscalculated the ratio of dough to filling and could have used a bit more spice. That couch felt far from everywhere, especially Argentina. On our plates, butter replaced lard; bottles of Sam Adams took over for those of Malbec.

I woke up the next morning, like every morning, with my head in the crook of Matt’s arm. He smelled warm, like soap and fabric. But the now-familiar chill soon emerged from my stomach as I took a few deep breaths and remembered the day.

Before we left I took one last look at the kitchen. I emptied the dishwasher and brushed some errant crumbs of empanada dough off the counter.

That’s the end of it, I thought. No more distractions left.

Argentina

Matt and I spent the better part of March in Argentina. We arrived in Buenos Aires on a bright Tuesday morning and spent the next couple of weeks exploring.

We paused in the city for a few days on both ends of the trip. There, on streets that often reminded us of Paris, we walked. We visited cemeteries and antique shops; drank espresso and wine.

Then we headed north, driving hundreds of miles in a tiny Chevrolet Corsa, often on dirt roads snaking through the foothills of the Andes. We visited the vineyards of Cafayate and the tiny mountain towns near Salta.

There were midnight dinners, eaten outdoors against the faint chill of a late-summer breeze. There was parilla - often steak, chorizo, or morcilla cooked over a wood-fired grill. There were tamales and empanadas, jamon crudo and queso fresco. Dulce de leche came on everything.

It was a wonderful, needed escape. Now we're back in the U.S., hit with the expected though unpleasant reality of Matt's impending departure. He is packing as I write. Stacks of books and clothes litter the apartment. More soon.

Enough

On a cold morning in March of last year, Matt and I rode our bikes down the West Side of Manhattan. We pedaled from his apartment on the edge of Harlem to Penn Station, where we hopped on the Long Island Railroad. We were escaping the city for a few days, on spring break from graduate school.

I watched the sun rise over the Hudson as we passed through Riverside Park. It was early and I was hungry. We hadn’t had breakfast and my fingers, in too-thin cotton gloves, were numb. But I remember feeling content. I was on vacation and going on a trip. I was entering the final months of a master’s program that I found both challenging and fun. I had borrowed my roommate’s bike and relished the smooth sound of tire on pavement. And I rode next to Matt, whose brown hair was long enough to poke out from under his helmet and who, everyday, I grew to love a little bit more.

When Matt and I had first met, six months earlier, his hair was still short. He had it cropped close to the skull, reminiscent of his life before Journalism school: as an officer in the Army.

I knew about Matt’s past. I listened to his tales of studying as a cadet at West Point, of being stationed as an officer in Germany, of spending 2 years fighting in Iraq. But it was a foreign world to me, and difficult to imagine much beyond his words. When we met, the sand storms of Ramadi were thousands of miles away. Matt’s uniforms and combat boots were packed in boxes at his parents’ house in Tennessee. He wore jeans and T-shirts. His hair was soon long.

We rode our bikes quickly, gliding down 8th Avenue with wind at our backs. I followed as we weaved among cars and stopped at red lights. When we passed a large truck, double-parked on the west side of the street a few blocks above Times Square, Matt turned his head back towards me.

“That smells like Iraq,” he said.

I sniffed.

The scent of diesel permeated the air. It reeked of gas and metal and didn’t leave my nose for a few wind-swept blocks. For a brief moment, breathing in those thick and noxious fumes, I could imagine a world far away. One of sand and stone, heat and violence. One that smelled of fuel.

I told Matt about that moment on our bikes, late one night last week. I sat at our kitchen table while he stood nearby. We were drinking wine and talking about the war. My head felt encased in a cloud and I couldn’t breathe out of my nose. The wine tasted vague and sweet; the grape fell flat on my tongue.

A few days earlier Matt had received an envelope in the mail. It held a packet of papers: orders from the Army, written in a screaming capital-letter font. He’s been called back into service and will soon deploy to Iraq for his third tour of duty.

When he first told me we were sitting on the steps of our apartment building, one night after work. I immediately thought of that truck. Of that smell.

It was a scent that Matt knew well by the time he returned from his first tour.

“Iraq smells of diesel exhaust and human waste,” he said. “It’s like nothing else.”

Even between deployments, the scent was never far from his mind. Matt lived in Germany and would pick up whiffs here and there. But when he went back to Iraq for the second time, two years later, and he breathed in the burning oil, the gas, the waste and the sand it hit him hard. He immediately remembered things that had happened before, things that he hadn’t thought about since he last stepped foot in that country, things that happened back in 2003, when the US first surged into Iraq.

“It felt like I had never been gone,” he said, leaning against the kitchen counter.

Matt told me about the mornings in Iraq. Away from the baking sun the temperature would drop. The sun would rise, pink over the horizon. He would see birds flying into the palm groves near his base. The scent was still there, but it was better in the coolness of dawn.

“It was beautiful,” he said.

I listen. I try to imagine what it’s like. But sometimes words just aren’t enough.

Beignets

A cloud of powdered sugar at Cafe Du Monde in New Orleans, where Matt and I spent Mardi Gras weekend.

Dinner party, February 7: Hamachi tuna, pomegranate, toasted green wheat.

Pink

On Friday morning I took the train out to Brooklyn, near where I used to live, to help my friend Ben in the kitchen. He occasionally sidelines as a chef, and we've worked together in the past. He was preparing for his most recent gig: an 80-person dinner party.

We cooked in the large, professional-style kitchen of the building where Ben holds his day job. I wasn’t there for long because I had to head off to an interview, but he remained the rest of the day, and the next.

Ben moves with confidence in the kitchen – bending over the stove, tasting sauces from steaming pots, maneuvering sharp knives as he fillets large cuts of fish, which are riddled in pink and red. I was not nearly so comfortable. It’s been a while since I last cooked under pressure, or for a group of more than 4 or 5. It’s been a while since I was last in a kitchen larger than the size of a breadbox, period. There, in the bright room that smelled of swordfish and lemons, the knife in my hand felt heavy and awkward. The pots were ungainly, and the stove, too hot.

I didn’t do a whole lot that afternoon. I pitted a crate of dates and helped to churn some ice cream. I seasoned ricotta with lemon zest, nutmeg, and salt. I poured a heavy-scented pot of garlic confit into plastic tubs to store. When I left, a couple of hours later, I took a deep breath. Everything felt unfamiliar.

I walked back to the subway on a street lined with brownstone apartments in Park Slope. I used to walk that way everyday, back when I lived in the neighborhood. The buildings are uniform in their russet-colored brick, locked together like a row of soldiers at attention. There is one block, however, where something is different. I had forgotten about it in the year and a half since I had moved. But walking by on Friday, I recalled: There is one building, toward the end of a block, which is painted a bright, screaming pink.

I stopped in front and smiled. I had forgotten about the pink.

A few years ago, on a Saturday afternoon in the fall, I strolled down this very block with a few friends, on our way home from Prospect Park.

“Why would someone paint their house that color?” a skeptical friend asked when we passed the home.

I shrugged. “Who knows,” I said.

“The people who live there must be crazy,” he concluded.

Secretly, though, I loved the house. It reminded me of summer and, perhaps, my childhood fascination with flamingos. Sometimes I even went out of my way to walk by its birthday cake-like exterior. It made me smile when I passed.

But this last Friday, heading away from the kitchen, I was surprised by the vivid pink. It didn’t seem right, bursting in color there in the leafless cold of a New York winter. It looked strange and slightly awkward. Like the way Ben’s chef knife had felt in my hand a few minutes earlier.

“I wonder who lives there,” I thought. I kept walking.

Winter

I walked through the farmers market in Union Square yesterday morning. I was on my way to work, and wanted an apple to eat on the way. I passed candles and yarn, fresh eggs and loaves of bread. I passed plastic-wrapped slices of banana bread and vacuum-packed cuts of lamb. I stopped at one of the many stalls selling apples. There were long tables covered in boxes of fruit: green, red, and yellow. The air smelled of hot cider and of smoke, wafting up from a nearby cigarette.

I took a bite of a Macintosh as I walked west towards the subway. It was tart and sweet and my fingers soon grew numb. As I walked, I realized that I could also smell something else. It was something familiar, yet unknown, something biting and faintly metallic. Perhaps it came from a trashcan, overflowing on the sidewalk. Perhaps it was the exhaust from a taxi driving by. Like many new smells for me these days—smells that are there but not, recognizable but unknown, and perpetually on the tip of my tongue—I just couldn’t figure it out. Perhaps, I thought, it is just the scent of cold.

Break

My family was in town last week and on Saturday we went to Peter Luger, a wood-paneled steak house next to the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn. There were plates of hash browns, bowls of creamed spinach and pitchers of mahogany-colored steak sauce. The slabs of bacon, plopped down on our plates by an appropriately uninterested waiter, were simultaneously crisp and tender. The porterhouse steak arrived sizzling and the “shlag,” a thick pillow of whipped cream that accompanied the key lime pie, was divine.

I have been a vegetarian in the past. I shunned flesh for a few years back the heart of my awkward teenage phase, straddling the transition from junior high to high school. I don’t really remember why I decided to stop eating meat. I think it had to do with learning the source of foie gras, or perhaps it was about veal. It had to do with rebellion, too, and the knowledge that my choices at the table could say something, even if I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. It certainly stuck with some people. Members of my extended family to this day, over a decade later, still ask me with their eyebrows raised: “So, Molly, are you eating meat yet?”

I also don’t remember why I later halted the vegetarianism. But I do know that it was on a cool fall afternoon in suburban Boston, circa 1997. It had something to do my friend Ashley, McDonalds, and a chicken sandwich. Perhaps I just remembered that I like meat.

Peter Luger's Steak House is a place for people who like meat. And we ate a lot of meat that night last week. The porterhouse – a tenderloin and a strip steak separated by the thick, T-shaped bone – was served, sliced and glossy pink-in-the-middle, with a spoonful of buttery pan juices. The bacon was slathered in sauce. We took some of the leftovers home with the intention of eating them for lunch the next day.

But the next day around noon we took the bag from the fridge and opened it. I could smell the salty fat, the thick flesh, and the buttery pan juices. I closed it again. Sometimes, meat and I? We just I need a break.

Gingerbread

I am sitting in an unfamiliar apartment. There is the hiss of a radiator, the clunk of shoes on the stairs outside. Through the window next to the kitchen table, where my mug of now-cold coffee sits, I can see pigeons and a light flurry of snow. The scent of both diesel and sweet-roasted nuts; the crowded, delayed Q train and the piles of discarded Christmas trees on the sidewalk scream it out: I moved back to New York. I am still getting used to the newness of it all.

It’s been a while since I last wrote, despite my promise to do so more. Between travel and freelancing, holidays and packing, I haven’t had much time to myself.

I did bake a cake, though, on a cold December morning before Christmas. It was a gingerbread cake: Moist, spicy, and studded with hunks of Bosc pear. It smelled sweet and rich. Familiar. We ate it warm, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream while watching a movie on a Monday night. We ate it cold, for breakfast one day and for lunch the next. It was gone before I realized that I hadn’t taken a picture. But it did make rounds through the Internet, leaving many beautiful images in its wake.

Dark Gingerbread Pear Cake
From Gourmet, October 2008

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon ground allspice
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 stick unsalted butter
1/4 cup water
1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar
1/2 cup molasses (not robust or blackstrap)
3 large eggs
1/4 cup grated peeled ginger
1 Bosc pear

Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter and flour a 9-inch cake pan, knocking out excess.

Whisk together flour, baking soda, cinnamon, allspice, and salt.

Melt butter with water.

Beat together brown sugar and molasses with an electric mixer until combined. Add eggs 1 at a time, beating well. Beat in flour mixture at low speed until just combined. Add butter mixture and ginger, beating just until smooth. Pour into cake pan.

Peel pear and cut into 3/4-inch pieces. Scatter over batter. Bake until a wooden pick inserted into center comes out clean, about 35 minutes. Cool slightly.

Scent of the City

I'm very happy to announce that I have a piece in the City Section of today's New York Times. It's about smell and it's about the city. But mainly it's about the life that each one gave to the other--and to me--as I recovered from the effects of the car accident in 2006.

Translation

I took an elevator to the 40th floor of a building in lower Manhattan on Tuesday evening of this week. When I stepped into the lobby, I saw small groups of people chatting and filling out nametags. I saw them sniffing at little brown vials of scent and recording their perception online. This is my kind of event, I thought with a smile.

I found a seat in an adjoining, window-lined room that soon filled to capacity. I was there for a lecture—A Rose by Any Other Name: the Science of Smell—hosted by the New York Academy of Sciences as part of their series “Science and the City.” For the next hour and a half I listened to Avery Gilbert, author of the recently published book What the Nose Knows, and Leslie Vosshall, head of Rockefeller University’s Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior, speak about the sense of smell.

Though interesting and casual, sometimes even verging on goofy, there were no glaringly new insights for me. I already understand the basics of olfactory science and am familiar with the references to scent in pop culture. As you know, I have been consumed by smell for the last three years. But there were a few things that grabbed me.

A sense of humor, for one. There were images of Daredevil, the blind superhero with a highly tuned sense of smell, and Andy Warhol, who valued the memories attached to each of his colognes so much that he often retired them after only a few months. “… I realized I had to have a kind of smell museum so certain smells wouldn't get lost forever,” Warhol once said.

The theory of human pheromones was illustrated by a study done on strippers: tips earned from men while the pole dancers were ovulating were significantly higher than when they were not. Their tips fluctuated much more than the dancers on birth control, whose hormone levels were stable. It implies the power of our body’s chemicals, and the ability to perceive what we don't know is there.

In one moment, every member of the audience was asked to pinch his or her nose completely shut, place a jellybean on the tongue, and begin to chew. After a few seconds, everyone released their hand and exhaled. I watched as, one after another, the audience began to nod. Many smiled. While restricting the ability to smell, a jellybean is nothing but sweet and gritty. With an unclogged nose, however, flavor comes rocketing through. The sudden shot of vanilla, grape, or pineapple can be surprising.

At another point, Vosshall spoke about the different scent perceptions people have of simple, everyday items. It has to do with the olfactory receptors, which detect the odor molecules that arrive in all noses. Everyone has a different combination of receptors, she explained. Some of this difference is due to genetics, some due to wear and tear. It explains why some people love the scent of cilantro and others can’t stand it.

I remembered a professor I had in college, who taught child psychology early on Tuesdays and Thursdays. One morning during a lecture, she told my class that she loved the smell of skunk. “I would wear it as perfume if that wouldn’t be so socially unacceptable,” she said. I thought that was disgusting. I thought she was insane.

But now, over three years after I lost and regained my sense of smell, I too love the scent of skunk. To me, now, it’s sweet and nutty. It reminds me of baked goods.

“If you lose little bits,” Vosshall said on Tuesday, referring to the olfactory neurons, “things can get lost in translation.”

Nutmeg, paused in the midst of some hectic Thanksgiving kitchen work. More soon.

"Cake"

Sometimes the slow moments sneak up on me.

I had been spending my days working away, lost in reams of Word documents and stacks of library books, feeling little but the adrenaline of deadline and excitement of production. But then, suddenly, the articles were filed. The revisions were made. The endpoint never ceases to surprise me.

I woke up on Sunday morning with nothing more pressing than the newspaper, wrapped in plastic and the damp red leaves that had fallen from trees the night before. I’m really not used to free time. I baked a cake to take off the edge.

I have been transfixed by Suzanne Goin’s cookbook: Sunday Suppers at Lucques. Her “pumpkin” cake—understated and sweet, made with roasted butternut squash and a whiff of honey—transformed the house with scents of pecans and butter. It spoke to late autumn, early dusk, and lazy afternoons in the kitchen.


“Pumpkin” Cake with Pecan Streusel
Adapted from Sunday Suppers at Lucques

1 butternut squash
8 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 vanilla bean
2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon dried nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1 1/2 cups whole milk
1/4 cups heavy cream
3 extra-large eggs
1 tablespoon honey
Pecan streusel topping (recipe follows)

Preheat the oven to 400F.

Cut the squash in half lengthwise and place on a baking sheet, cut side up. (Don't remove the seeds yet; they give extra flavor.) Cover with foil, and roast about 1 hour, until very tender. Let cool 10 minutes, and then scoop out the seeds and discard them. Puree the warm squash through a ricer or food mill and measure out 1 1/2 cups.

Turn the oven down to 350F.

Butter and flour a 10-inch pan (I used a springform)

Place the butter in a medium saucepan. Slice the vanilla bean in two and scrape out the seeds with your knife into the pan. Add the seed pod as well, and cook over medium heat 6 to 8 minutes, shaking the pan occasionally, until the butter browns and smells nutty. Remove the pod.

Sift together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, sugar, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg into a large bowl. Add the salt. Make a well in the center.

In another large bowl, whisk the reserved 1 1/2 cups squash puree, milk, 1/4 cup cream, eggs, and honey to combine. Pour the liquid into the well in the dry ingredients, and whisk until incorporated. Stir in the brown butter.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake 25 minutes, then remove the cake from the oven and sprinkle the streusel evenly over the top. Bake the cake another 45 minutes (or longer--mine was in for an hour), until the topping is crisp and cake has set. (The center of the cake will still be somewhat soft and won't pass the toothpick test.) Cool the cake on a rack for at least 15 minutes.

**Update: Originally, I had listed the quantity of heavy cream needed as 1 and 1/4 cups. The cake recipe calls for 1/4 cup, with the additional cup meant to be whipped and served along side the cake. I didn't make the whipped cream myself, and neglected to remove the measurement from the recipe when I wrote it up here. My apologies for the confusion!

Pecan Streusel Topping

1/4 cup pecans
1 teaspoon vegetable oil
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
4 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into cubes
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon dried nutmeg

Preheat the oven to 375.

Spread the pecans on a baking sheet, and toast them 8 to 10 minutes, until they darken slightly and smell nutty. When the nuts have cooled, chop them coarsely. Toss the nuts with the oil and salt.

In a food processor, pulse the butter, sugars, flour, cinnamon, and nutmeg until just combined. Remove to a bowl, stir in the salted pecans, and chill until ready to use.

Tart

I’m in the middle of an overwhelming writing project. It consumes my days, and some of my nights. I spend a lot of time at my desk. I'm sitting there now. Through the window, I can see a big, gnarly oak tree. It’s leaning to the left, stretching to touch its very last branch to the roof of the house below. Over the past two weeks I’ve watched the red leaves fall, one by one, and now it’s bare.

The excitement of this past week has been surreal, especially when experienced against long hours of concentration and Word documents, watching autumn slowly melt away.

But it has been exciting. I sold some freelance work and found a yoga studio near my house. I baked Edna Lewis’ Fresh Apple Cake with Caramel Glaze, and under-seasoned a mediocre pot of cauliflower soup. My car got a flat tire. I avoided fixing it for as long as possible. And, of course, Obama is President-Elect.

I cooked dinner for my family last night. It was a calm Sunday evening to prepare for another week—a calmer week, but one still laced with hope and change. My favorite part of the meal was the Julia Child’s Alsatian Onion Tart.

Now, I took a short cut. I admit it. I used frozen puff pastry rather than the "from scratch" Julia would have wanted. But I have no regrets. The sweet onions melted against its flaky crust just right.




Alsatian Onion Tart
Adapted from Baking with Julia

1/2 pound puff pastry, chilled
4 very large onions, peeled and diced
1 cup chicken broth
3 tablespoons heavy cream
salt and pepper to taste
1/4 pound bacon

-Roll out the puff pastry until very thin on a lightly floured surface. Julia recommends cutting it into a circle using the lid of a pot as a guide. I left it as a rectangle. Place it on an un-greased baking sheet, and prick dough all over with a fork. Refrigerate until needed.

-Put diced onion and chicken broth into a saucepan and cook over medium heat for around a half hour, until onions are soft. Drain, discarding liquid, and let cool. When cool, add heavy cream, season with salt and pepper, and stir.

-Cut bacon into 1/4 inch cubes. Blanch for one minute in boiling water. Drain and rinse with cold water. Pat dry with paper towels. Then, heat a medium skillet over moderately high heat, and cook the bacon pieces for a few minutes, making sure they don't get too tough. Remove from heat, and drain on paper towels again.

-Preheat oven to 350 F. Remove pastry and top with the onions, spreading all the way to the edge. Scatter bacon over top. Bake for about 30 minutes, or until golden brown. (I cooked mine for closer to 45.)

Alinea

Today I bought Alinea, the new cookbook by Grant Achatz. There are hundreds of recipes, which are based on tasting menus at his Chicago restaurant of the same name, and stunning photographs. Many of his dishes are out of my league, as I don't own a Vita-Prep blender nor do I have any calcium ascorbate lying around the house. But I couldn't help myself: There is a short section on Achatz's use of scent in cooking.

Aroma, he writes, offers two possibilities for the chef. "The opportunity to flavor a dish by way of smell, and to add a layer of complexity to a concept by triggering an emotional response to a familiar smell. These two facets of the technique became so important in our cooking that the idea of aroma itself became a creative avenue."

Achatz has fought a well-documented battle of his own in the last year. Diagnosed with tongue cancer in 2007, he underwent radiation and, as a result, temporarily lost his ability to taste. I've followed his story with great interest. My own experience of sensory loss and regain has changed the way I look at food and cooking, taste and flavor. I can only imagine what it has done for one of the country's best chefs.

New York

I took an early morning train to New York last Wednesday. I was in the city for only a few day. They were crisp, fall days that reminded me how much I miss it.

I stayed with my little brother, Ben, who wears suits everyday and took me out for pizza, prosciutto, and wine at Mario Batali’s casual restaurant, Otto. I walked around Prospect Park in Brooklyn and, later, paused for cappuccino in a warm West Village café. I window-shopped, pressed into crowded subway cars, and perched on a stool at a bar with friends. I sat in a leather chair at a small paper-scented bookstore, reading food magazines before a more business-oriented meeting nearby. A plum tart, split in two with a plastic spoon at Patisserie Claude, tasted of sweet cream and powdered sugar.




I had dinner at Barbuto on Thursday with a couple of friends with whom I often used to cook. A pumpkin bruschetta and linguini laced with swiss chard and garlic spoke to fall. Afterward I met my brother and his girlfriend at an odd little wine bar that projected its menu onto the tabletop from a motion sensor lodged in the ceiling.

It was New York but it wasn’t. It was cool and calm, filled with good food and a lot of walking. But it was quick and nothing feels very real for two days that flew by.

Last night, back in Boston, I cooked for my family. I wanted something that felt like fall and, perhaps, a bit like New York. I made a bronzed set of pork shops, served over a cabbage and apple slaw. I saw the recipe on The Cooking Loft, a Food Network show with chef Alex Guarnaschelli. I met her once, when I was reporting for a story last year in New York. She and I sat in the dark front room of her restaurant, Butter, and spoke of being a woman and a chef in the city.

“It’s like “Rocky”,” she had said with a laugh. “You have to get up and drink the egg yolks. Every day I drink the egg yolks.”

This recipe, however, was quite easy.




Stovetop Pork Chops with Cabbage and Apples

2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 teaspoons cumin seeds
2 teaspoons caraway seeds
2 teaspoons crushed coriander seeds
2 small heads savoy cabbage, cored and thinly sliced
1 tablespoon salt
2 teaspoons white pepper
2 knobs fresh ginger, peeled and grated
1 teaspoon dry ginger
1 14oz can whole, peeled tomatoes
1 poblano pepper, cored, seeded, and cut into thin slices
3 tablespoons chopped cilantro
4 pork loin chops (bone-on)
1 teaspoon paprika
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 green apples, cored, halved, and cut into small slices
2 teaspoons red wine vinegar

-Melt 2 tablespoons butter over medium heat, and toast the cumin, caraway, and coriander seeds for 30 seconds. Add the cabbage, and toss to coat. Season with salt and white pepper. Cook for 10 – 15 minutes, stirring often.

-Add fresh ginger, dry ginger, tomatoes, and poblano pepper and stir to blend. Cook 5 to 8 minutes, until tender. Add cilantro and bring to a simmer. Remove from heat and keep warm while cooking pork.

-Sprinkle pork chops with salt, pepper and paprika. Heat large skillet, and pour in oil. When the oil begins to smoke slightly, add the pork, arranged in a single layer. Brown on first side 2 to 3 minutes. Turn and brown on the other side for an additional 2 – 3 minutes. Reduce the heat and cook 5 to 6 minutes and then turn and finish up with a further 5 to 6 minutes of cooking time. Season again, lightly with salt and pepper.

-Heat the cabbage, add the apple slice and red wine vinegar. Arrange the pork on top of the cabbage in a dish or on a plate, and serve.

Endpoint

It is Sunday afternoon and I am sitting at my kitchen table. I’m drinking tea and eating one of the many apples I picked yesterday at an orchard in Harvard, Massachusetts. A big pot of chili is bubbling on the stove; cornbread spackled in sage just emerged from the oven.

I am unemployed and therefore my boxes of books and pots and pans are all stacked in the basement of my family’s home in Boston, where I am pausing while I figure out what comes next. I have time, which both scares and inspires me. I am writing a bit and cooking a lot.

Even within my few week without a job, however, I realized something: I like deadlines. I like the pressure and the excitement that comes with an endpoint. I like the concrete. And so I am making a schedule and my intentions known: I will write for this blog every week. I will post on or by Monday evening. And look, I’m already way ahead of schedule.

In other news, this is a watermelon grown in the garden where I used to live in Point Reyes, California. It perched on the seat of my car as I drove across the country. I ate it in Ann Arbor with Becca, late on a Sunday morning standing at her kitchen counter. It was small and sweet. I have never seen such large watermelon seeds.

Tea

I left California early on a misty Monday morning. I left with a car full of books and clothes. A pumpkin, given to me by my landlord, perched on the front passenger seat. I left with both anxiety and excitement; I’m not quite sure what will come next.

I spent the next four days driving across the country alone. I passed through the Sierra Nevada mountains and Iowa’s rolling fields; I skirted the Great Salt Lake and Great Lakes. I didn’t find much good food, but plenty of scenery.

I arrived in Ann Arbor on Friday afternoon, bleary eyed and antsy. Becca, who I have known since our first week of college, met me after she finished work and we commenced what would be a restful weekend with a glass of wine.

Over the next couple of days we went on many walks – to the farmer’s market, along the river, to the bar. On Sunday, our morning stroll took us to a tea store in downtown Ann Arbor. There, the walls were stacked with rows of metal tins. Each held a different type of tea and their labels ranged from the familiar (Earl Grey) to foreign (Ayurveda Kapha).

The man behind the counter was passionate and verbose. He had a delightfully waxed mustache, a monocle dangling from a chain around his neck, and gave us an impromptu lesson on the spice and herb of all sorts of tea.

During the lecture, he held scoops of tea leaves beneath our noses. One at a time, Becca and I inhaled.

I was surprised by how much I could smell. Not only could I smell each tea held beneath my nose, I found that I could detect subtleties. I could pick out the rose in the Victorian Earl Grey. I could smell the orange in the Royal Grey. The peppermint tea nearly bowled me over. It was cold and deep. I couldn’t help but smile.

I remembered the first few months after the accident, in the fall of 2005, when I spent my time lying in bed at my mother’s house. I was recovering from a broken pelvis, open knee surgery, and the scull fracture that caused my loss of smell. Every morning my mom would bring me a mug of tea, sometimes laced with milk and sugar and sometimes just plain. She would ask me if I could tell what kind it was. I would inhale, willing myself to register something, anything. But there was nothing – just the wetness of the steam, the sharp heat of the mug. I could smell nothing; I could taste nothing. It may have well been hot water.

“Jasmine?” I would guess. “English Breakfast?”

But last week there was no question. I could smell the cardamom, the licorice and the lemon.

Towards the end of our lesson, Becca and I smelled a sweet variety of Rooibush tea. I inhaled over the scoop. The first whiff – burnt sugar, caramel – immediately conjured the hard black countertop at a tea shop in Providence where I used to go my freshman year of college. I went there all the time to read, to talk, and to drink Creme de la Earl Grey, a sweet brew that held blended blue flowers and a twist of cream. The similar scent in Ann Arbor sent me straight back – the uncomfortable stools, the constant cold draft sneaking through their large windows, the way going to college made me feel for the first time like I belonged.

Though I know much about the visceral memories that a single scent can conjure – I have them; I want them; I've read as much as I can get my hands on about them – they never cease to shock me with their suddenness and strength. And it made me think, standing there in that tea house last weekend, about how much I may have lost living for for those years without smell. Would I feel differently about those scent-less years if they had odor attached? Would my memories be stronger? Would they be different?

I was shaken from my reverie by the tea man, asking if I'd like to buy anything to take home with me. I thought about the Rooibush, and the way it hints at both caramel and my past. But then decided to go for a Chai instead. Might as well start fresh.

Bavaria's best

My plane landed in Paris early on a recent Friday morning. Matt, who I last saw over three months ago in California, met me outside of baggage claim. He looked different, yet utterly the same. We rode the train into the city, dropped off my bags, and paused for breakfast at a nearby patisserie. The espresso was thick and nutty; the croissant was buttery and flaked with almonds. Women in heels and men in thin-legged pants walked down the sidewalk on their way to work. The street smelled of cigarette smoke, of coffee and baguettes, of the rotisserie chickens spinning outside of a butcher shop nearby.

I spent ten days in Europe. Matt and I walked all over Paris—exploring the Marais, fighting crowds in the Louvre, tasting coconut macaroons near the Pompidou. We drove to Germany, in a spunky little car that struggled to keep up with the BMWs and Porsches flying down the Autobahn, and stayed for most of the week on the cobble-stoned streets of Bamberg, a medieval town where Matt once lived.

The timing of the trip was perfect. Fall was just beginning and the air was often crisp, the light sharp. There were picnics in parks and walks along rivers. There was the scent of bakeries and chimneys, of smoke and water.

It was also perfect because I needed a break from reality. The financial struggle gripping much of the U.S. has long been biting at the heels of print journalism and, therefore, I recently encountered my first lay-off. In the face of unemployment and an uncertain future, baguettes brought straight from the oven have never tasted so fresh.

In Germany, Matt and I ate in local breweries every night, where thick glass mugs of beer were plunked down before us on the communal wooden tables. There was bratwurst, sauerkraut, and brown bread. There were even sightings of lederhosen and felt caps.

One evening we went to Brauerei Hoh, a small pub tucked in a hamlet near Bamberg. We sat at a table near the back of the main room, warm and filled with people, drinking a fizz-less brew available nowhere but there. We ate pfefferhahnchen, an impossibly delicious half-chicken with skin that was crisp and tender and covered in a bronzed mix of pepper and spice.

“How is this so good?” I asked.

“It’s the best,” Matt said.

That soon became the mantra of our time in Bavaria. It’s the best, said Matt, at least once every day.

Sometimes it was the perfect sweet-sour twang of sauerkraut; sometimes it was the smoke, cascading from a chimney at sunset. Mainly, though, it was the beer. I haven’t always been a fan of beer. I’ve often found it tasteless, needlessly filling. But this beer was different. It changed with each brewery—from flat and tangy to smoked and hammy. But no matter what, each had a depth of flavor I hadn’t realized was possible.

And every night we would sit, order (zwei bier, bitte!), and take a sip. “This is the best,” Matt would say. I would nod. It was.

Until the next night, of course, when that was the best.

Slow

I covered Slow Food Nation, the gargantuan food festival that took place over Labor Day weekend in San Francisco, for my paper (here) and (here). It was a whirlwind of farmers and chefs, pickles and produce—an event that aimed to teach and entertain, feed and foster awareness of food that is “good, clean, and fair.”

I had a wonderful time at the festival, wandering among the booths at the market on the Civic Center Plaza and sampling Gruyere and oak barreled brew at the Taste Pavilion. But it was difficult to work through the anticipation for the event, born of media hype (mine included, yes) and their own massive expectations, which touch upon changing the face of the American food system. Hard to pull off over the course of a three-day party.

Many of the ideas behind this celebrity and celebration, however, have been present where I am living here in West Marin for a long time, and I find myself running into living variations on a daily basis. I interview farmers and ranchers; I shop at the market filled with local produce and personalities. There is an open-air, 24-hour stand a bit south on Highway One where I can buy chard, potatoes, or vibrant-hued flowers at any time of day. Raw honey, plums plucked from the tree, barbecues glowing in an otherwise pitch-black night. Food, both the growing and the eating, sustains and brings people together here in sharper focus than New York or Boston, perhaps because of the community’s heavy reliance on agriculture.

Just the other day I was given a container of eggs so fresh tiny feathers poked out next to the pastel-tinted shells. Poached, on a bed of sautéed swiss chard: perfect.

Memory

I met Sarah when I was only a few years old. It was in gymnastics class. I was a shy toddler with a head of bright red curls; Sarah was outgoing and blond. My mom, who immediately hit it off with her mom, has told me the story many times. I don’t remember a thing.

But I was probably drawn to her then for much the same reasons as I am today: Sarah’s vivacity has always been coupled with as much grace as goofiness. And she sings a mean rendition of "Memory."

Since then, Sarah has always been present in my life. We navigated the halls of elementary, junior high, and high school together. For years I helped to decorate her Christmas tree. We spent many an afternoon in her backyard, pretending to be characters from Andrew Lloyd Weber musicals, and there were countless weekends with our families skiing in Vermont. We marched together, wearing suspenders and plumed hats for four years of band.

My childhood is laced with the dull scent of leather from her family’s living room chairs. It is filled with the aromas of wood and paint from the playhouse her father built in their backyard. It sounds of Christmas carols, of Ace of Base and Enya. It feels of steam from mugs of hot chocolate at her family’s home in Vermont and the cold metal mouthpiece of our flutes during shared lessons. There was our first sip of alcohol, in a friend’s kitchen a few weeks after my parents divorced. There was the fuzzy sound of her voice, simultaneously worried and cheerful, when I was recovering from a car accident three years ago.

I thought about all these things as I watched her walk down the aisle this past weekend, glowing in her white gown and veil. I sat between my mom and my brother, wearing a bright yellow dress, and thought of the weddings we had once set up for members of our Barbie doll collections.

Sarah married Joe, who is perfect for her in every way. Their wedding, which was elegant and merry, was rife with both memory and fun. It was almost as if the church carried the faint scent of leather; the dance floor, perched under a tent in rural Vermont, smelled of wood and paint.

More

This evening I went on a walk. I was in the midst of writing an article for work, the sun was just beginning to set, and I needed a break. I’ve always called this time of night the gloaming, and loved it for its glowing light and sinking shadow.

A few deer watched as I passed them on the side of the road; blackberries filled the bushes, ready to pluck. I wore a pair of yellow sandals, which I could see in the periphery of my vision whenever I took a step. They matched the golden patches of grass that stand dry on the side of the road.

I listened to Miles Davis as I walked and I let thoughts ricochet about my mind. I thought about Alice Waters, who sat gracefully at a long garden table for an event I covered on Saturday afternoon. I thought about my mom and her boyfriend, who just left after a lovely wine-soaked visit. I thought about Matt in Paris and Russia in Georgia. I thought about reporting: in a small town, in a large city. I thought about an almond cake I recently made, the blackberries I picked before breakfast, and my landlord’s chihuahua Louis. I thought about my transition to this new place, one filled with quirks and conundrums and truly excellent cheese.

I miss writing for myself; I’m going to try for more.

Fresh

Figs and plums, picked yesterday by my landlord. He gave them to me today, after we weeded the rows of corn growing kitty-corner to both my apartment and his photography studio. I just put them on my desk. They look nice next to my mug of coffee, which steams next to my computer while I write.

Rising

My grandfather Morris didn’t sleep at night. He would stay up until dawn, filling the dark with books and television. He was an artist as well as businessman, and would spend time painting in his studio—oil on canvas until his 80s, when arthritis overtook his fingers and he taught himself to make art on his computer. And towards the end of his life, when he was confined to a wheelchair, he would talk with Joel, a soft-spoken man from Peru who was hired to help.

I met Joel for the first time on Monday of this week, when he stood at the bima of an earth-colored synagogue to give a eulogy at my grandfather’s funeral. His English was hesitant; he had spoken only Spanish until he began these late-night talks with Morris.

There were a few things my grandfather had taught him during their hours together, he explained. First, Joel said with a laugh, he had learned to eat and appreciate smoked salmon during those nights with the 93-year-old man. He learned to watch baseball, especially the Yankees. He learned that his wife is boss of the home. He learned to say I love you.

There was smoked salmon at the gathering in my grandparent’s house after the funeral. I looked at it, sitting on a plastic platter next to the bagels on a table piled with food, but couldn’t remember my grandfather ever eating it. I can't remember much of what he ate at all; there are only a few things that stand out.

I remember the salt—he used a lot, on everything. I remember the gefilte fish—I was entranced by the gray blob his plate during childhood Passover Seders. My family always brought an offering of dried apricots when we visited. Strange bottles of alcohol stood like one of his still-life paintings in the dining room there. And there was always that china container of M&Ms on the counter, waiting to be raided by me and my brother.

I only spent 48 hours in upstate New York before hopping on a plane to come back west. It’s all a fog now, punctuated with scenes of suits and nice shoes, dining room tables and my aunt’s tiny dogs, noodle kugel and roast chicken.

I didn’t have a chance to process anything—the funeral, my grandfather—until I returned home to California. I thought about it all for a while last night, while baking bread. There’s something comforting about the act of kneading. The rhythmic, constant movement relaxes me. Around dusk yesterday evening my kitchen counter was strewn with bowls and wooden spoons, bread pans and thermometers. The flour, which flew around the room as I wrestled with dough, reminded me of the smoke rising off the land around me, remnants of California’s current fires.

My grandfather, a man large in both personality and girth, was a powerful force in my family. Like with the dough, I suppose I’ll always wrestle with my memories of him. Patience is key. It all needs time to rise.

California

After graduation Matt and I drove across the country - a trip filled with bumpy back roads and gas-station coffee, crawfish gumbo and BBQ pork, wrinkled maps and unfamiliar accents. There was the humidity of Louisiana's bayou, the deep-red sand of Arizona's canyon, and the rhythmic movement of oil pumpjacks spanning the Texas landscape. We arrived in northern California last week, just in time for me to begin my new job and Matt to hop on a plane and begin his own. Though the change is disarming, it's good. My new home smells like eucalyptus and the ocean. There are farmer's markets, dairy farms, and bread dough already rising on my counter. More soon...

Plans

I cooked dinner the other night for Matt and I, in the kitchen of his small New York studio apartment. The meal had definite potential: a roast chicken with cherry tomatoes, garbanzo beans and paprika. The garlic, seeped with olive oil and red pepper flakes, filled the room with its warmth as it baked.

But something—and I still don’t know what—went wrong. A frustrating hour and a half later, I slid the entire contents of the roasting pan into the trash. Rubbery, undercooked chicken had slouched next to a blackened, asphyxiated pile of beans and tomatoes. Grease flowed off the pan. It was my first experience with such surprising inedibility.

I’ve been feeling anxious lately, because graduate school is reaching its end and I’m moving to California in less than a month. My apartment is a mess and deadlines refuse to stop hanging over my head. I'm allergic to everything this time of year, which makes it difficult to breathe, let alone smell. Usually my stress manifests itself in small ways: forgetting my wallet, milk in the cupboard and cereal in the fridge. Occasionally bigger ways: picking fights with my mother on the phone, deciding to cut off half my head of hair. But my anxiety had never yet entered the kitchen.

I made a half-hearted attempt to carve the sad little chicken while Matt chuckled off to the side. I was frustrated and, true to form, began to pick a fight. I like when things to according to plan. The thump as it all hit the bottom of the garbage bin was satisfying.

Luckily, Matt is patient. We resuscitated the evening with the asparagus I had picked up from the farmer's market that morning - simply roasted with olive oil, salt, and pepper. I made toast and Matt pulled out a delightful container of foie gras that he had brought back from France over a year ago.

"I was saving it for a special occasion," he said, prying open the thick sealed lid with a knife.

We sat around his small coffee table, perched on a desk chair and a corner of the bed. We drank red wine and plucked asparagus stalks off the plate with out fingers. Sometimes, I suppose, things are OK when they don't go according to plan.

Stories

I've been talking about scent a lot in the past few weeks. New smells, which continue to come back at an increasingly rapid pace, are exciting. I didn't think I could ever completely forget the scent of spring, but now it hits me when I walk out of my apartment and I am surprised anew by the depth of flower and grass. I spoke to an editor at my alma matter's alumni magazine about a new book, The Scent of Desire, and Dick Gordon, the host of American Public Media's The Story, interviewed me last week.

Here is just a short list of my favorite smell-related essays that I've written here, to help orient anyone new:

When I worked as a dishwasher:
Sardines and Frying Pans
Surprise Encounter

When I lost my sense of smell:
Unexpected Changes
Kind of Blue

Living without scent:
Bittersweet
Rosemary and James Bond

Recovering:
Holding My Nose
Evening, New York

Change

My family came to the city this past weekend. My mother and her boyfriend Charley, my brother Ben and his girlfriend Ashley, and Matt and I went to Annisa, an American-eclectic eatery in Manhattan’s West Village.

I’ve spent the last six months or so writing about Anita Lo, the chef there, for my Master’s thesis on gender in the professional kitchen. It was odd to sit in the chic cushioned booth of her restaurant, surrounded by the chatter of family and clink of silverware. I was suddenly an intimate part of a scene I had recently spent late nights pondering over a Word document and my laptop.

And the food took on a different persona when placed delicately down in front of me on a wide white plate instead of just a bite, quickly handed over on a battered spoon in a corner of the sweaty kitchen. The elegance of the dining room was charming, but I missed the character that came when eating with the heat and gurgle of a deep fryer half a foot away.

But out at the table, everyone agreed, the soup dumplings topped with foie gras were especially magnificent. The line cooks, I remembered, threw them frozen with a hunk of butter into a steamer to create their delicate liquid center. The goat cheesecake was soft and rich, with a perfect sour twang. The thin slices of candied beets served underneath had entranced me since February, when I helped plate desserts one evening, my reporters notebook tucked in my back pocket.

Mainly, though, it felt nice to have my family together. I recently accepted a job in California, to write for a weekly paper near San Francisco. I’ll be away from the East Coast for at least a year; it will be a while before we are all together again.

I’m going to miss New York, with its nooks and crannys, faces and melodies, perfumes and stenches. But there’s a lot going for the change. Without a doubt, I’ll have more time to write.

Break

They sky was still dark as Matt and I rode our bikes to Penn Station early on Monday morning. I watched the sun slowly rise over the Hudson while we pedaled down Riverside Park. The industrial buildings across the river looked soft in the trickle of early light. I wore a thin pair of black-and-red gloves that my mother gave me years ago; my fingers were numb by the time we hauled our bikes down the stairs that led to the Long Island Railroad.

Technically we are on “spring break” from graduate school, where both Matt and I are studying journalism. Unfortunately, as you’ve seen from my lack of activity here, there is very little break involved in a 10-month master’s program, no matter what the season. Thirty-six hours in Long Island would have to do it.

We arrived in East Hampton around 11 a.m., dropped our bags off at the Inn, and began to explore. It didn’t matter that the grass was brown and the trees gray. The windmill standing on a grassy plain off of Main Street was crisp against the cloudless blue sky.

The wind pushed against my puffy down jacket as we rode down Further Lane and gawked at the mansions overlooking the water. We parked our bikes and walked along the beach. I could smell the ocean. It was thick and salty.

That night, my face warm with the day’s resulting windburn, we went out to dinner at a nearby restaurant—which, I thought happily as we walked down the empty street, was probably the equivalent of 4 Manhattan-length blocks from our Inn. Then I realized that I was thinking in terms of Manhattan-length blocks, which disturbed me. As did my unfamiliarity with the sky’s blackness, as I’m so used to New York City’s perpetual light. Birds had been chirping all day; a stark contrast to the ambulance sirens and subway trains usually grinding in my eardrums. It’s been too long since I’ve taken a break, I thought.

We sat at a side table in the dining room of Della Femina, a graceful Italian joint filled with flickering candles and beige tablecloths. The food arrived on our table in unassuming combinations of the familiar yet interesting. A curried carrot soup with golden raisins, lime crème fraiche, and a drizzle of a spicy oil. Seared salmon with lemongrass syrup. Matt’s warm croissant bread pudding with white chocolate mousse disappeared quickly.

The meal meandered in a slow, even tempo. The simple act of sitting, sipping wine, and talking about subjects far from graduate school was delicious.

And now, back in the city, I am avoiding the Word document that holds the final draft of my master’s project. I am attempting to tune out the rocking bass of what I can only assume is my next-door neighbor’s perpetual dance party. It has been raining all day and I can smell its wetness, soaked into the brick outside my window. It’s thin and musty, very different from the ocean.

Consumed

Lately I’ve been taken by spice.

Cinnamon, rosemary, thyme.

Turmeric, cumin, curry.

Ginger, especially, and garlic, inevitably.

I linger at the shelf of spices in my apartment, opening each bottle and inhaling. At home in Boston for New Years, my mom’s collection of vanilla beans was captivating; the paprika she brought back from Hungary, titillating. I find myself choosing recipes based purely on the pungency of their individual flavors.

My ability to detect the scent of spice isn’t remarkably new. I remember in the days after the accident when my father would hold bottles of curry or garlic powder or nutmeg under my nose and ask imploringly if I could smell anything. Nothing registered for months; each bottle filled with a monotone nothingness. But within a year that began to change. My sense of smell has been returning at an especially rapid rate for the last 6 months or so. The spice rack has registered for a while; I’m not sure why it’s suddenly consumed me.

Perhaps it is for scientific reasons: I recently spent a day at a Taste and Smell Center in Philadelphia for a project that I am working on. A doctor there told me that there was a scientific study in Germany which showed that those who sniffed spices each night before bed over time improved damaged senses of smell. Practice makes perfect.

But, really, my spiced obsession is less of a conscious decision to spruce up my olfactory neurons than the simple desire to feel alive. And detecting the cinnamon twang to a cup of coffee or the subtle wash of red wine in my mom’s braised short ribs gives a depth to my experience that is new and exciting. I used to revel in the fact that I couldn’t smell skunk, spoiled milk, sewage, or any of the many facets of New York City’s rancid summers. My friends said I was lucky. But even those, I suppose, are exciting in their own way.

So now I'm obsessed with my spice rack. How fitting, then, that I recently discovered Ana Sortun’s cookbook: Spice, Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean.

I spent an evening at Sortun’s restaurant, Oleana, last week when I was in Boston to do research and reporting for my mater’s thesis project. She twists western techniques with Middle Eastern cuisine to create a modern menu both comforting and innovative. Her food is filled with new and unfamiliar flavors. Her cookbook is organized by spice. I love it.

I made her Spicy Fideos with Chickpeas, Kale, and Lemon Aioli this weekend. Toasted angel hair pasta is broken into small pieces and cooked in a concentrated sauce made from tomatoes and cumin, vanilla beans and bay leaves, ancho chili peppers and cocoa powder, saffron and cinnamon, chickpeas and kale.

The complicated flavor combined the scent of spices, the feel of spicy, and a texture both soft and defined; it was an exercise in smell and taste. And so good I had it for breakfast the next day as well.

Practice does indeed make perfect.

Evening, New York

It was a brisk Monday evening. Matt and I had been walking around the city for an hour. The sun was fading and lights were beginning to glow from shop windows in every nook and cranny of the West Village. I was carrying my laptop in a bag over my shoulder and there was a cold slush coating the ground.

We stepped into McNulty’s Coffee and Tea Company on Christopher Street. The bronzed wood shop was filled with burlap sacks, glass containers of loose tea, and coffee beans that were so fresh they shone. It smelled thickly of cocoa and coffee. The scent was so rich that the flick of a finger could indent the air.

“You must love to come into work everyday,” said Matt to the man behind the counter, inhaling. “It smells so good.”

The coffee-purveyor smiled as he ground us a pound of “Java Mountain Supreme.”

“We do love it, but not because of the scent. We just can’t smell it anymore,” he said with a quiet laugh. “You get used to anything. One week here and the smell is gone.”

“Oh, sad.”

We left and took a turn through the nutty yellow rounds piled on the shelves and behind the counter of Murray’s Cheese Shop on Bleecker Street. I bought some Marcona almonds in honey and yogurt from Iceland, nestling them between the books in my bag.

Outside and around the corner, a man in a thick brown coat was wrapping a pine tree in mesh for a couple to take home. We walked by the forest-like stack of dark trees leaning against a makeshift wooden fence, some festooned with red ribbons.

I took a deep breath. A new scent.

“Can you smell that?” Matt asked, sticking his face near the pile of pine.

“Yes,” I said, surprised by the sudden and new. “It’s Christmas.”

Later that night I sat in the subway on my way back to Brooklyn. The brown paper parcel of coffee from McNulty’s was in the bag between my feet. I was trying to read my book but I couldn’t concentrate. I was too distracted by the scent of coffee.