How to Be a Person (20 page)

How to (Not) Be a Foodie

S
eriously, you do not want to be a “foodie.” You do not want to even use the word “foodie,” because it sounds so pretentious and stupid. And give up on finding a good substitute: There isn’t one. Here’s the thing: You are NOT a foodie—you are merely a person who has a modicum of knowledge about, and enjoys a variety
of, different foods. (This is very fashionable right now, and for good reason: It’s healthier than a fast- and processed-food diet, and being willing to put almost anything in your mouth is hot.) Where should you begin? Eat food! Try all different kinds! Colleges and universities are places where cheap and interesting restaurants naturally congregate—there’s a whole world of strange, delicious, inexpensive food out there. Look for places that are full and/or that have high ratings online, and go get some!

If you’ve never had dim sum (or even if you have), go with a bunch of friends. This is where you choose all kinds of crazy dumplings and noodley things and you-know-not-what from carts-on-wheels. The cart-wheeling ladies might be brusque, but don’t be afraid to say yes to lots of stuff—it’s all usually remarkably cheap, and the more you try, the more you’ll like. (There may be chicken feet, which are actually kind of gross, but they’re easy to avoid: They look like chicken feet.) Find a sushi place or a restaurant that serves oysters on the half shell (there’s no law that says you have to order a full meal), and take a date. Taking someone to a place with interesting food makes you seem even greater than you already are, and eating raw seafood together is a bonding experience. (And if your date is adventurous about this, it bodes well for what else they might want to try.) Eat Indian food, Ethiopian, Latin American, pho, vegetarian, whatever—pizza’s good, to be sure, but there’s ALL THIS too. Find all-ages happy hours; it’s a cheap way to eat at great places. Be ready with a wish list when someone else is paying or when you have some cash.

Always tip 20 percent when you eat in a restaurant, unless the server literally tells you to fuck off. Then you tip 10 percent. This is not a joke; servers work hard, and your tip is a large part of their pay—in some restaurants, it’s all they get paid. Tip well or stay home.

If you start to get into it, you can read up on the foods of different cultures (Wikipedia is a fine start). Read some food writing—restaurant reviews in local papers and magazines, the dining section of the
New York Times
online, the food section of
The Stranger
online, food blogs, books by M. F. K. Fisher and John Thorne …

If you get super into it, you might find yourself reading cookbooks just for fun, whether you make a lot of stuff out of them or not—among the most awesome are Julia Child’s
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
and anything by Marcella Hazan.

Marcella Hazan’s prose, embedded right in her cookbooks, is like your bossy but amazing and funny grandma—she knows everything about Italian food and wants you to DO IT RIGHT (and she also smokes tons of Marlboro Lights and drinks lots of whiskey).

Julia Child was a very tall woman with a warbling voice who devoted years of her life to making a French cookbook for Americans—you also HAVE to read her memoir,
My Life in France
, and watch some of her old cooking shows on YouTube (if you can find the one where she drops a duck on the floor while trying to prepare it, you will learn that being uptight is just not where cooking’s at—she pretty much invented the five-second
rule). Oh! And you have to watch the parts of the movie
Julie & Julia
with Meryl Streep. In order to play Julia Child, Streep ate Kermit the Frog: The voice—the chortle-yodeling, the vowels—is perfect. Streep’s physical embodiment of Child is perfect, too, both graceful and ungainly (Child towered, thick through the middle, over almost everyone). The moments in which Streep-as-Child masters the art of French cooking at Le Cordon Bleu are comedy nonpareil. And Streep-as-Child is sexy: When she looks down into Stanley Tucci’s eyes and pulls down his suspenders in a scene that stops just before their daily Paris nooner: hel-LO. (Tucci, as short, shiny-domed, bespectacled Paul Child, is weirdly, completely hot.) Every scene with Streep in it is endlessly engrossing. She opens an envelope on a porch, glancing slightly wildly over her shoulder, and it is magic. (But you should fast-forward through the Julie parts of
Julie & Julia
, because they are pretty terrible.)

Anyhow! Go to the farmers’ market, browse, talk to people. Learn to cook some simple, tasty things—it really is easy, don’t be afraid! (See the following recipes and get a good, simple cookbook to start—the ones from
Cook’s Illustrated
are neat.) Maybe learn a little about wine (see
Wine, What the Hell’s the Deal?
). In general, with food—as with all things—do not bloviate. Rather, share your secrets. Be excited. Bring a date, or make some food for one. They will love you.

So You’re a Vegetarian!

Good for you! Don’t be an asshat about it. It’s easy: Don’t preach, and if you get invited to eat food, let your host know, but tell them you don’t need any special treatment (then don’t need any special treatment).

A Really Easy, Really Pretty, Really Good Soup You Can Make With a Butternut Squash

Butternut squash is a hilarious-looking vegetable with fucking delicious insides. Find the biggest one at the grocery store, all beige and giant-peanut-like.

Then take it home and cut it in half. Each half will have a little bowl of cute seeds in it; scrape out these seeds. Then drizzle olive oil on the orangey insides, set both halves in a pan filled with a half inch of water, and put the pan in the oven at 400 degrees F for 45 minutes. While the oven softens up the squash, dice up a huge onion and toss it, along with some butter, in a stockpot, with lots of salt and pepper, and cook it (stirring some) over medium heat until the onion is soft. When you take the squash out of the oven after 45 minutes, it’ll be all hot and mad, but pretty soft and nice-smelling. Take a spoon and scoop all the squash out of its skin and put it in the stockpot with the onions, and then pour a container of organic chicken broth over it (regular chicken broth is fine, too). Then just let it bubble on low heat for a while. Bubble, bubble, bubble.

After a while bubbling in that chicken broth, the squash will get really soft. The orangey hunks become a chunky puree. Put in some more pepper, and a little cinnamon, and if you have any, some nutmeg and fresh herbs. Try it with a spoon. Goddamn! Good, huh? You can eat it like this if you want—a very chunky butternut squash soup—but you might as well go all the way and fancy it up by putting it in a blender and blending it. You might have to do it in batches. If you don’t have a ladle to get the chunky soup into the blender, use a coffee mug. Once all of it has been blended into golden smoothness, pour some into a bowl, put a plop of organic sour cream in the middle, and eat it.

With any luck, it’ll be raining outside. Eating butternut squash soup while it’s raining is the best.

How to Make Tacos

If you’re a know-nothing, talentless bore, you can just go to the store and get one of those packets of taco seasoning and add it to any meat you like. But who wants to be a know-nothing, talentless bore? Don’t you want to have a “specialty”? Don’t you want to impress you-know-who? If so, make this your specialty: spicy shredded chicken tacos from scratch. You-know-who will
definitely
want to make love to you after you’ve made spicy shredded chicken tacos from scratch.

Here’s what you do: Go to the store and buy some boneless, skinless chicken. Also buy a large onion, one or two containers of
chicken broth, chili powder (note: don’t confuse chili powder with chili flakes), tortillas, and whatever other taco fixings you like—salsa and/or fresh tomato, avocado, cheese, sour cream (a must—organic tastes way better!), black beans (for maximum goodness, fancy ’em up with cumin, also found in the spice aisle), and cilantro.

When you get home, put the chicken in a large pot and add the chicken broth, enough to cover however much chicken you’ve bought. You are going to very slowly simmer that chicken in that chicken broth until those breasts fall apart on their own. This takes some time—about three hours (and if three hours have gone by without noticeable falling-apart, pull apart the chicken with two forks). While three hours of slow cooking sounds like a pain, imagine how nice and warm and chicken-y your place is going to smell by the time you’re done. Keep the heat on the low end of medium, and put a lid on the pot, with a little breathing room for steam to come out.

But wait! Right away, chop up a large onion and add it to the simmering pot—the onion plus the broth are going to do the bulk of the work, flavorwise. Then add salt, pepper (freshly cracked, if possible), and chili powder. The amount of chili powder is directly related to how spicy it will be, so just use a little at first, and later, when the broth has mostly boiled away, leaving delicious, falling-apart chicken, you can dip a fork in, taste the chicken, and add more chili powder to your liking.

Final tip for maximum greatness in your mouth: Heat the tortillas in a skillet covered in salt.

How to Make Very Tasty Pasta

There are so many ways! The most basic, a.k.a. Emergency Pasta, goes like this: Put a big pot of water on the stove on high, and put a handful of salt in the water. (Truly, a handful: Don’t be shy! Unless you have extra-giant hands.) Choose your favorite pasta shape of the moment (the brand Barilla costs a little bit more, but it’s worth it). When the water boils, put the pasta in and wiggle it all around with a big spoon so that none of it sticks together. Then grate some decent-quality Parmesan or, really, whatever cheese you happen to have around. If you have some pine nuts or other unsalted nuts, toast them (without any oil) in a pan on the stove on medium (watch carefully, they like to burn!). If you have some tomato, dice it up. Cook the pasta for the lesser amount of time on the box, then dip a piece out and taste it; repeat every minute or so until it’s the way you like it. Drain it and toss it in a bowl (or top it on a plate) with a good drizzling of olive oil, the cheese, the nuts, the tomatoes, and some fresh herbs if you have any (or dried if not—smell ’em and find one you like), plus lots of salt and pepper. Voilà! (A tip: If you’re serving it to a date, don’t call it Emergency Pasta.)

Sauce is almost as easy. You’ll need: an onion, garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper, a big can of plum tomatoes, half a little can of tomato paste (optional), and some dried or fresh oregano and/or basil. Dice up the onion into pieces about an inch big, smash/de-skin a few cloves of garlic, and put it all in a skillet with a good splash of olive oil on medium heat. Salt and pepper it well. Cook until the
onion is golden-translucent and floppy. (If you like meat, you can cut up some sausage or crumble some ground beef, and cook it with the onion.) Pour in the plum tomatoes (and the tomato paste if you want), and kind of chop/mangle up the big pieces. Add a spoonful of dried oregano/basil if you’ve got ’em; if you have fresh, wait until before you serve. Now it can simmer on low heat for anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour—it doesn’t really matter, though it gets more reduced and richer with time. Cook your pasta as in the paragraph above, and serve it with lots of grated Parmesan (not from a green can). Voilà!

How to Make the World’s Best Macaroni and Cheese (With a Monogram on It!)

This recipe takes some time, but it is completely worth it. Get all your ingredients out and ready (professionals call it, Frenchily,
mise en place
, or “everything in place”) before you start. Consider smoking some marijuana first, if you’re into that and won’t lose track of what the hell you’re doing.

1 pound large elbow macaroni (penne if you’re feeling fancy)

5 tablespoons butter

¼ cup all-purpose flour

2½ cups organic whole milk

About 5 ounces cheddar, sliced: sharp is good, as is Irish cheddar
*

About 4 ounces Gruyère, sliced

About 2 ounces Parmesan, sliced

Pinch of ground nutmeg

Dash of Tabasco or Tapatio

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

About 4 ounces mozzarella, cut into ¼-inch cubes

About 2 ounces Parmesan, grated

Paprika

Bread crumbs, preferably homemade, but whatever

A couple slices of better-quality presliced white bread

Melted butter, for brushing bread

*
You can use pretty much any cheeses for this recipe, just the same overall amount. Organic is better; organic Monterey Jack sounds boring but is delicious (and could be used in place of the mozzarella). Parmigiano-Reggiano is nice, but really, this is just mac and cheese, people
.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly butter a rectangular baking dish (you might have enough for a little round casserole dish, too).

Cook the pasta until just al dente (that is, not quite all the way done). Drain and rinse with cold water.

Get yourself a beverage. The roux/whisking-in-cheese takes a while and can get hot.

Melt the butter in a large/deep skillet or saucepan over medium heat. Whisk in flour and cook, stirring constantly, for one minute.
(Look, you made a roux!)

Slowly whisk in milk, then cook for one to two minutes, or until lightly thickened to the consistency of cream.

Drop in the slices of cheddar, Gruyère, and Parm one or two at a time, whisking constantly, letting them mostly melt before adding more. Season with nutmeg, a dash of hot sauce, and salt and pepper. Remove from heat.

In a large bowl, combine cheese sauce and pasta. Stir in the mozzarella. Transfer to the prepared baking dish. Sprinkle with grated Parm, paprika to your liking, and bread crumbs ditto.