Category Archives: Food

Pie never did much for me. On my list of preferred desserts, it’s near the bottom. Not that I’ve ever turned a pie down if that’s the sweet treat to close out a dinner (Andy makes a mean one), it’s just not my favorite. For holidays, however, it seems that pie is often the choice for dessert – especially Thanksgiving and Christmas. For yesterday’s low-key non-celebration of the 4th of July, I picked up a small apple pie, because they say nothing is more American than apple pie. Whether that’s true or not, I have neither the energy nor the desire to investigate or argue – we’re talking about a fucking pie.

With some whipped cream and a double serving of softened vanilla ice cream, we made this one into apple pie à la mode, which sounds way more French than American to me, but what the fuck do I know? 

PS – I don’t hate pie because I’m gay. I’m gay because I hate the pie. 

Andy has been on a burrata bend of late, and I’m reaping the benefits of it in plates like this, which features a ring of heirloom tomatoes outfitted with fresh basil from the garden and a generous drizzle of a balsamic glaze. Taken with bites of burrata, it makes for a glorious combination to form a light lunch, or happy appetizer for a simple summer dinner. 

Simplicity is key for summer contentment. 

While I crave a daily sweet treat, that craving rarely comes in the desire for candy. That recently changed when the Swedish candy craze that’s been taking social media by storm deposited clips of colorful bunches of chewy, gummy deliciousness on my feed, dangling those delectable bites of sweet and tart along with their supplier links right at my double-click-to-pay fingertips. It was all too tempting to pass by, and so I ordered my first batch of sour candy mix from Bon Bon, a purveyor of Swedish candy based in New York City. Today they arrived, and they are just as enjoyable as they appear – a rarity when so much online food looks amazing until you get it into your mouth. 

This collection offers lemon, watermelon, cola, peach, and all sorts of combinations that straddle the mouthwatering line between sweet and sour, resulting in a gloriously-tart experience that explodes in the mouth like oh so many other sweetly scandalous things. 

Next up on my wish list is a sampling of their Summer mix, as well as their Jelly’Marshmallow mix. They will make for the ideal coquette sweet treat in this coquette summer. 

Life is too short not to taste the candy.

Full-disclosure: I’m posting this for my own reference. In the same way that I look up this tres leches cake or this holiday mocktail, or this Ghapama recipe, I will simply google my name and whatever the recipe I’m looking for, instead of searching through a pile of wrinkled, stained printed-out recipes that have been through the wear-and-tear of a kitchen season. This Mexican salad I made up the other day was such a winner that I’m doing my best to remember exactly what I put in it and how it was assembled. What follows is my best guess (and it’s all a guess since I can’t remember what happened two minutes ago, much less two days). 

Mexican Salad

1 heart of romaine lettuce, finely chopped

3 small tomatoes, chopped

1 ripe avocado, chopped

1 small can whole kernel corn, drained and rinsed  (or about 1 cup, fresh)

1 can black beans (drained and rinsed)

1 green pepper, chopped

Dressing:

1/4 cup olive oil

2 Tbsp white balsamic vinegar

1 Tbsp lime juice

1 big bunch fresh cilantro

1 garlic clove, chopped

Salt and pepper

Process:

Mix all ingredients in large bowl. Blend dressing ingredients with immersion blender and pour over salad. Toss and mix well.

Tuesdays with a good chance of rain call for something uplifting and simple.

Like this cake pop. 

Cake makes many of us supremely happy.

I’ve never actually had a cake pop (to my recollection) but my pal Betsy brought this one in to work for me and I had it for breakfast last week. That was on a Tuesday too.

Tuesdays call for cake pops. 

And easy blog posts. 

Right now my favorite cracker is the Organic Garlic Naan Crackers available at Trader Joe’s, but not everyone (anyone) wants to deal with that parking lot, and sometimes you just want something plain and simple. For those moments, I decided to conduct an entirely-unscientific poll on which bland cracker is the best and here’s how the results played out:

I figured the main battle would be between Triscuits and Ritz, and I’m not at all shocked that the Ritz came out on top. We are a bland bunch of cracker-eaters, but there’s something special about that salty and buttery Ritz that brings back happy childhood memories of crab dip and Cheese-whiz. We all started somewhere. 

In hindsight, I should have included Saltines in this survey, and maybe I will try again in a few weeks to see if that changes anything. Saltines for me were for sickness. Paired with ginger ale they seemed to be the cure-all for whatever we had as kids. That nostalgia factor might shake things up in the next poll… 

The Beekman Boys have brought a sense of peace and calm and, of course, kindness, to this blog, and to the rest of the world, since they first moved upstate and started their goat milk business. This year they posted this Kindness Cookie recipe, which I recently made on a dark Sunday afternoon and evening. It filled the house with a heavenly aroma, and looks to be one of the workhorse cookie recipes that forms the base of any Christmas cookie platter that wants to stand slightly apart from all the others. 

This recipe uses only dark chocolate, but gives some extra sweetness with its diced dried cherries – a sweetness that is not cloying or too much (as sweetness tends to be at this culinarily-perilous time of the year). It’s a subtle shift into the next level of sophistication, as far as chocolate chip cookies go, and it’s a lovely treat to make in the next few weeks. Try it and see how you like it, then spread the joy among all your neighbors. 

This fall marked the 25th anniversary of when I first met Kira. Our friendship has been an unlikely one in many respects – we actually lost touch for almost a decade when she moved to Florida – but when she returned and we found our way back to one another, it was one of those nudges of the universe that we have, despite some obstacles, managed to heed and nurture. When I first met her, she was one of the quietest people I’d known; shy and almost painfully introverted, she made me feel like a brash extrovert – something I most certainly wasn’t, even as I acted it out with precision. I must have brought out the fighting spirit in her too, as we soon engaged in battles of our own: she fought with me unlike she would have fought with anyone else at work, and I took it as a sign of friendship and trust, as she reserved those entanglements for her family. In the weird and twisted mindfuck that was my habit, I was flattered that she considered me family that way. Remember, we were both in our early-mid twenties, and knew little to nothing of how to behave in the world. Making the journey into maturity continues to be a theme in our adventures. 

For our musical accompaniment, I’ve chosen Shirley Horn’s ‘The Main Ingredient’ for its culinary references to go along with our Friendsgiving feasts, and an underlying hint of blues to go with our states of mind. First up is opening track ‘Blues for Sarge’, which sets the scene for the feast of charcuterie and appetizers which formed our first meal.

Now that Kira has managed to switch her work hours, she finishes up just a little while after I arrive in the city. On this night, we had a quick cup of Earl Grey tea, then went back out for some final ingredients for dinner. An intentionally campy collection of appetizers from my childhood formed the pillars of the meal – these campy meatballs, a cheesy crab dip, and some white bean bastardized hummus – and we finished it all with the cutting board of meats and cheeses you see here. For too many nights, Kira and I had feasted on something similar, only to have to struggle through reservations for dinner later in the night; we finally figured out, twenty five years into this, that our appetizer prelude was enough for the first evening. 

Catching up after a year apart only feels like a daunting task if you try to cram it all into the first hour of being together. We have enough experience coming together after extended periods away to know that such sharing unfolds slowly and naturally over the course of a weekend. For the first night of this Friendsgiving gathering, which would mostly consist of just the two of us, we settled back into our usual groove. 

Outside, the Braddock Park fountain was still running – we didn’t know it then, but this would be the last weekend it ran before being drained and shut down for the winter. We’d made it back just in time… 

Back in the days of hosting extravagant parties and wild soirees, I would channel Rosalind Russell in ‘Auntie Mame’ to strike just the right note of eccentric hostess pizzazz to help me get through the damn evening. Now that we no longer have big parties, I get to enjoy smaller and more intimate dinners and gatherings, but I still use Auntie Mame as a starting point of inspiration. 

We are about three weeks away from Thanksgiving (yeah, that left a sting thinking about it) and the start of the holiday season, so now is a good time to put a dent in my planning and preparations for whatever the fuck Christmas will be like this year. To that end, an appetizer is a great item to bring to whatever event you may be attending with friends and/or family. Below is a recipe for some appetizer meatballs that might be the easiest cheat recipe that still tastes good. First, a look at the super-secret ingredients that can be found in most decent markets (and every indecent market).

This dish once stood on a corner table, largely neglected by the crowd at our friend Bob’s Night-Before-Thanksgiving party that he used to hold in his place overlooking Washington Park. It was one of my favorite parties of the year, because it signaled the kick-off to the holiday season, and was hosted by one of the kindest and sweetest guys I know. On this particular evening, a crock pot of appetizer-sized meatballs bubbled away quietly, while the rest of the gay men ignored it, beelining for the bar. One gentleman stood nearby as I took one, and then two, and then multiple meatballs, marveling at their flavor. 

It was Bob’s Uncle, the man who had made them, and he whispered the recipe in my ear: one part grape jelly, one part chili, and one big package of bite-size frozen meatballs. My mind was blown, that such deliciousness could come form such an unlikely combination. It was one of those recipes that someone clipped from Good Housekeeping or Ladies Home Journal in the 50s or 60’s, then passed down through the generations because it tasted so good, but kept secret because its make-up was so basic. Over the years, I added some additional flavoring to bump things up, but the core remains the same, and the meatballs remain store-bought and frozen, because the flavor is enough to mask any shortcomings there. Try it out and see. 

RECIPE: The Holiday Meatballs of Bob’s Uncle

• 1 large package frozen cocktail meatballs
• 1 large container grape jelly
• 1 large can chili (without beans)
• 1/2 cup soy sauce
• 1/2 cup rice wine vinegar
• 1/4 cup white or brown sugar
• 1 Tbsp chopped garlic

Combine ingredients in crock pot and cook on low for six to ten hours, stirring occasionally.

That’s it. That’s all. Auntie Mame would be proud, even if it’s not fishberry jam.

The featured photo here, of a fabulous slice of cinnamon bread from Bella Napoli (quite simply the greatest cinnamon bread in all of creation, no exaggeration) has been hovering about my desktop for the past two months. For all my limited efforts at finding a blog post in which it was utilized, I’ve come up empty-handed. I genuinely cannot remember if I’ve written a post about it, or put it on display here or somewhere on social media, and so it goes on the list of items that I’ve forgotten or never even knew – that tricky growing collection of things that prove I’m older than I ever intended to be, the mind rotting on its downhill trajectory, and gaining speed in the worst way. 

It looks like the picture was named ‘rainy day’ so I may have been planning a post that referenced that, and the cozy aspect of a piece of toast might have been the impetus for that. Or maybe I wanted to go into the many joys of a cinnamon bread so delicious – French toast and bread pudding and whipped room-temperature butter. I honestly don’t recall. 

So I Google myself. To be precise, I google “Alan Ilagan cinnamon toast” and this memory of my Gram is one of the first on the list. It’s followed by this memory from my days at Brandeis comes up. The next entry that appears is this write-up of a family brunch that went off with some work but no hitches. Happy recollections all of them, though I dare not press my luck by traveling any further down the Google path. I’ve seen what lies ahead, and none of it is pretty. 

Enjoy the toast.

“I have emptied a pot of lentils into the ashes for you. If you have picked them out again in two hours’ time, you shall go to the ball with us.” ~ Into the Woods

This wonderful lentil soup recipe makes for a perfect fall meal. That something as simple as a pot of lentils, through heat and seasoning and some supplemental ingredients, should become something as delicious and sustaining as a soup is a wonder that will never disappoint me. Fall brings me back into the kitchen, back to the stove from which I generally shy away during the warm summer months. There is a comfort in that, and it reminds me of winters when a broken heart would only be healed through the warmth of a pepperoni tomato sauce. Food can heal that way. Cooking too.