spleen

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May 18, 2002 – 11:05 pm

Whenever spring sets in and the weather begins to improve, I invariably crave either Thai food or Vietnamese food. When it's high summer, I always crave Mexican food. Unfortunately, the Mexican food in Fargo is largely quite bad; the one Vietnamese restaurant here has lost its edge and now serves watered-down dishes, and there are no Thai restaurants at all.

Currently I'm making a lot of Thai. I can make three main kinds of peanut sauce, two types of red curry, several kinds of relish, a number of salads (the mango and papaya salads are the best, I think), a few kinds of soup, and of course, rice. I make rice in the Japanese fashion, though I don't wash it first (we lean college kids need all the nutrients we can get). I want to learn to make a good green curry, but it's hard to get good fresh lemongrass here (and a lot of the recipes call for kaffir lime leaves, which are all but impossible to get).

I have a pile of Mexican recipes. I spent a lot of time in California nagging people from restaurants, and when I used to work for the county, some of my clients would bring me food to thank me for preparing their resumes and I would ask them for the recipe. The one thing I never mastered, though, were the amazing tamales. There are women in southern California who spend all night making tamales (it's a several-hour affair) and all day walking around and selling them for a dollar each. I used to have them for lunch all the time when I worked at this junk store in a bad part of town. You buy a couple of these things, open up the foil, and see a corn husk wrapped around a blend of meat, masa and spices. It smells exactly like childhood.

The tamales in New Mexico were amazing, too, but quite different. They were made with chicken, corn, olives, raisins, peppers and spices, and were so exotic that I believed, at least for one meal, that I was in another country.

I make very good chili verde. I also make fine tacos (real tacos, mind you), carnitas, huevos rancheros (of course), homemade chorizo (without casing), and passable al pastor. My favorite thing, though, is Cuban quesadillas. These are nothing like the Americanized quesadillas we've all had. They're made with mashed potatoes wrapped in a ball around a mix of refried black beans (or meat) and cheese, then battered and fried. I learned to make them from a Cuban family in Fargo years ago. They're amazingly good.

I would love to learn to make paella, but I can never afford it — all that shellfish costs too much out here in the hinterland. I've never even had paella, as I've always been too poor to order it; I've seen it and smelled it in passing, though, and it looks quite good.

I've never made Vietnamese food. Maybe I'll learn a bit of that over the summer.

In the autumn, I make a lot of soul food. I grew up on soul food and other Southern cuisine so it's a nice hearkening back to childhood. I have yet to encounter another soul here who can make good collard greens, by the way. Winter is mostly Italian and French cuisine, probably because I crave all that fatty stuff when it's cold (I crave wine, too, and Italian and French food demand wine). I also love to make bread and killer desserts — cheesecake, tiramisu, pastries, truffles from scratch. I actually don't have much of a sweet tooth anymore, and tend to prefer the subtler Southern treats, like hot milk cake.

Anyway, the point is that I love to cook. Strangely, I think I love making food even more than I love eating it (and I really love to eat).

Eventually, I'll be off to watch movies. Meanwhile, you get to hear all my trivial cooking nonsense. Feel lucky I didn't go on about the history of the peanut, with which I can fill several pages.