In every relationship, there inevitably is that one early thing that you disagree on.
Ours was pancakes.
Mike, he’ll eat them any and every day of the week for breakfast, lunch and/or dinner. Me, I love me my sweets but even at brunch, give me noodles or a hunk of red meat and eggs over pretty pancakes anytime.
You learn to compromise, of course. And so over the last eight years, Marion Cunningham and I have become well-acquainted.
It always comes to this, a mad race to the finish.
I knew I was in trouble when I found myself slurping up the remnants
of a big bowl of beef ball noodles last week while plotting, mid-bite,
to have a second dinner at Swee Kee, a Hainanese chicken rice joint that’s been drawing crowds for decades.
There’s never enough time when it comes to eating in Singapore. And my last days there before heading back to New York are always filled with crazed eating marathons as I frantically squeeze in that one last bowl of prawn noodles, that one last dish of Hainanese curried squid, all to tide me over until my next trip back.
Inevitably, when I return to New York, there has to be a break.
The palate must be cleansed; the body needs a rest.
This time, I’d come back eager to rev up my stove again after weeks of squatting in my aunties’ kitchens. But, what to make?
I have been on a fried chicken bender.
It began with the ladies-of-the-night Thai chicken wings and continued the next day with bright-red Indian fried chicken for lunch and then a dinner of Indonesian nasi ayam penyet, a dish of rice and gloriously crunchy cumin/coriander/lemongrass-seasoned fried chicken that I’m still hoping will make its way across the ocean to New York City.
By the time I sat down to my next meal and saw the Malay fried chicken wings on the table, I knew it was time to admit: I have a problem.
Everyone has a comfort food and mine, somehow, is fried chicken.
There has been a frenzy of cooking in our little Brooklyn Heights kitchen.
There were the cardamom cookies. There was the mammoth spicy-sausage lasagna that we barely made a dent in. There has been the making of stacks of sandwiches for lunches present and future.
And then even after the Hubbs said, “Enough,” there was the sneaking out to the store to purchase a beautifully pink pork tenderloin and a head of garlic to make one of the simplest yet tastiest of meals: Filipino Pork Adobo.
I've had cardamom on the brain recently. And I blame Padma Lakshmi.
We weren't even talking about food–we were discussing jewelry for a Wall Street Journal fashion piece, for heaven's sake.
But then the "Top Chef" host started describing a long gold chain that she liked that's flecked with little gold nubs. "Like cardamom pods," Padma explained.
I immediately began thinking about cardamom cookies and haven't stopped since.