Comfort Foods and Indulgences

This Sunday night is the Oscars, the night when millions of Americans will tune in to see which actress is wearing the ugliest gown. Since this event will drag on for hours, you'll need lots of snack foods, like my Maple Walnut Popcorn. This New England inspired popcorn is everything a snack food should be: sweet, salty, sticky, and crunchy. Since the Oscars are at least three hours long, you might want to make a double batch.

Maple Walnut Popcorn
Yields 10-12 cups

3 tablespoons canola oil
1/2 cup popcorn kernels
1 cup coarsely chopped walnuts

1 cup pure maple syrup
2 tablespoons butter
1 1/4 teaspoons salt

1. Preheat oven to 325°F.  Coat two large rimmed baking sheets with cooking spray.

2. Pour oil in a large saucepan over high heat and cover. After 1-2 minutes, toss a couple of kernels inside. Listen for the shimmering oil as it heats up, then drop a couple of kernels in the pan. When they start sizzling and spinning, the oil is ready. Add remaining kernels. Cover the pan, and give it a couple of shakes so the kernels get coated with oil. Now listen for the popping. Once it really starts popping quickly, listen carefully. Remove the pan from the heat once the popping slows down to every few seconds, or it could burn quickly. Pour popcorn into a big bowl coated with cooking spray, and add nuts.

3. In a small saucepan over medium heat, bring maple syrup, butter, and salt to a boil. Cook 1 minute. Lower to a simmer for 2 minutes. Pour syrup over popcorn and nuts, stirring to coat. Transfer popcorn mixture to prepared baking sheets. Bake for 10 minutes. Remove from oven and cool. Break into small clusters.

– Recipe courtesy of Food Blogga

Growing up, summer time meant spending time on Balboa Island.  Some summers, we would rent a house.  Sometimes with another family, yet most summer’s we just rented our own home. We participated in many daily activities; fishing in the bay, riding around the island in a small motor boat, and riding our bikes until the moon was our only light source.

The most important daily activity was eating a “bal bar”.  A bal bar is basically a brick of ice cream with a stick in it.  Then it is dipped in the most amazing chocolate sauce and covered in either nuts or jimmies.  I always went for the nuts (see original ice cream here).

This dessert reminds me of my childhood. For me, it’s all about the nuts. The original bal bar didn’t have cake in it.  However,  topping this dessert off with roasted, salted peanuts brought back some darn good memories!

It was a two-line email—the kind that makes you sit up and think—because it addressed an issue faced daily by millions of grill masters around Planet Barbecue:

“Sometimes we buy cheap beef because we are on a budget,” wrote Diane Q. “These steaks are often tough. We have tried salt, meat tenderizer, and marinades. Could you please tell me the best way to tenderize the steaks?”

I immediately thought of my last trip to Southeast Asia, and in particular, to steaks I ate hot off the grill in Siem Reap, Cambodia, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Both were explosively flavorful thanks to complex marinades and polymorphic condiment spreads. And both were tough as proverbial shoe leather.

We North Americans and Europeans are spoiled when it comes to steak. Our notion of a “fork-tender” filet mignon or a “silver butter knife” sirloin (the signature steak at Murray’s in Minneapolis—so named because it’s so tender, the steak knife glides through the meat as though it were butter) are the stuff of dreams on much of Planet Barbecue.

I resisted Facebook for years, but the ease with which I could share and view pictures of a high-school reunion compelled me. So like most people my age, I found myself using the site to reconnect with a past I had previously ignored or forgotten. Then, when my husband passed away suddenly a little more than a year ago, Facebook became a strange lifeline during my first year of grief. Frankly, being on Facebook makes me think about what it must be like to be dead, floating like a ghost into and out of people’s lives, into and out of all the worlds we’ve inhabited. The compression and conflation of time that Facebook provides makes way for the beguiling draw of nostalgia.

Nostalgia, like grief, is essentially homesickness, and we tend to get homesick when we want to restore the parts of ourselves we think we are losing or have lost. Soon enough, I found myself looking up my old summer camps, my old junior high school (that’s what we New Yorkers called middle school), and inevitably I discovered a Facebook page dedicated to Riverdale, the small northwest Bronx neighborhood where I spent my formative years.