Breakfast with Pandora

A dance in magic Asheville

A very quick pilgrimage to the NC mountains over the weekend, and a visit to Asheville, where I was honored to dine with blogging colleague Genie.

Genie steered me to Zambra, a Spanish tapas restaurant in the heart of downtown.

"That meal was so good, I don't know if I could describe it in words," I told her as we took a post-prandial walk to Pack Place.

"You're a writer," she said. "You owe it to yourself to do it."

Asheville itself has an indescribable character for me. Genie, who lives there full time, raised an eyebrow as I stammered about how the place makes me feel.

Some places just have resonances. Greece irradiates me as did the vial of radium the bosom of Pierre Curie. As soon as I step off the plane, invisible rays of shared humanity bombard me. Paris pumps me full of Western Civilization, the good, the bad, the warts, the beauty.

Asheville is similar, and different. Descending into the valley cut by the French Broad River, I enter a sacred precinct. Mountains whose outlines bleed blue into the hazy sky form a palisade around the city. Even as my pulse quickens, my blood pressure slackens, and it is suddenly easy to believe that the world has a gentle heart, and I have arrived inside it.

In my oral rough draft in Genie's presence, I likened Asheville to Oz's Emerald City, the urban fantasyscape that is the escapist vision of the best of all other cities.

But now I make my inevitable revision.

When I come to Asheville, an idea suggests itself, as certainly as if somebody had planted a chip in my brain. Or perhaps it is the Asheville muse. Or a benevolent bewitching.

The thought: Here, a humane life is possible.

My definition of humane, that is. The best of humanity, to me, is found in art, music, food, wine, architecture, market gardens, flowers, dance, family and community, and love.

I know chemistry is necessary. Business administration is useful. Steel smelting makes the world go round. And the stock market creates the possibility of a secure retirement.

But Asheville, at least the tourist Asheville I know, has nothing to do with the necessary and expedient and everything to do with the creatively human.

Take the restaurant Zambra, whose name comes from a genre of Spanish flamenco dance first practiced by gypsies.

First, you must approach the city by climbing a hill topped by glittering art deco skyscrapers. "Downtown wasn't always like this," Genie tells me as we negotiate for a parking space in the crowded streets. This is what the city at night should be: a university of relaxation. This group goes to hear music. That one goes to an art gallery. Another to Malaprop's Bookstore. And the rest of us to dinner.

Class is in session.

Zambra is cave-like: you enter at street level the dimly-lit dining room with its walls golden and caramel. But the street itself continues to climb, so that when you are escorted into a secluded alcove at the back of the room, the half-window to the outside above your head shows only the legs of passers-by.

The jazz combo that plays in the main room is muted but pleasing, making conversation possible and eavesdropping on other tables nearly impossible.

The menu is tapas, the Spanish equivalent of Greek mezes, or small plates. Instead of ordering, say, an appetizer, entree, and dessert, you order a selection of tapas, from which you eat in community.

The server, a classic organic Ashevillian beauty, asks if you know what tapas are, and adds that there is a special today, but "no pressure" to order it.

As a mythology geek, you must order the pomegranate-braised pork spring rolls, creamy candy cigars topped with guacamole and served with a poppyseed and mango dipping sauce. Persephone would have partaken.

Paella of shrimp, chorizo and chicken takes a full thirty minutes to make, but time has ceased to have meaning, so you order it without hesitation. When it comes, every bite is like a conversion experience. You want to raise your hands to the sky and taste in tongues. You feel as if you could eat the whole shrimp, shell and all.

Other dishes are just as rewarding.

"They try to buy local," explains the server.

You never get dessert or coffee, but tonight the exception is happily made. You have never heard of putting goat cheese in a chocolate brownie, but you descend through several layers of flavor and then are resurrected, alleluia.

Alamos Malbec, an Argentinian red, lubricates the experience from start to finish, but-- unless I miss my mark completely-- it isn't alcohol that makes this magic, only complements it. Dionysus, a gentleman. What a concept.

Finally, you seal the deal for a painting from Genie's oeuvre, because in Asheville, original art is as natural to possess as surveying equipment to road builders, and just as useful for finding equilibrium.

Maybe someday I will come to see Asheville as less magical and fantastic and more practical and mundane, as our world has to be in order for civilization to go on. But until then, Asheville makes it much easier to agree with the words of Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo Del Toro, who states simply, "I believe that the spirit world exists. It is just as real as what we call the real world. Some people are able to see the spirit world, and others aren't, but that doesn't make it any less real."

Asheville, I wish you sweet spirits.

Photo is here.

Attractive food, attractive people, attractive stories

Readers will need to help me out on this, but I don't think it's my original observation that the most important thing to the French is food and sex, probably in that order. And now, with the rise of the "food porn" phenomenon-- gorgeous online photos of food drooled over by countless web users-- food and sex are starting to merge conceptually more than ever.

Case in point: Chocolate and Zucchini, the food blog of the sexy-French-girl-next-door Clotilde Dusoulier, a twenty-something Parisian and former Silicon Valley visa holder, who has published her own gorgeous cookbook with perfectly sexy food photos and not enough photos of her.

Equal opportunity case in point: the Take Home Chef, hunky Ozzie Curtis Stone, who waylays crushingly beautiful (mostly) Southern California women in supermarkets, buys them groceries and makes them dinner at their home, with much flirtation and suggestiveness until Significant Other returns home.

First, Clotilde, a classic French beauty without the stereotypical French 'tude. She has those huge Anne Hathaway eyes with that erotic Anne Hathaway mouth, and one look at her un-mascara-ed peepers tells you she is perfectly genuine, generous, and guileless. She also writes English with a beautiful French savor. Her grammar and vocabulary are precise and her style is friendly, but you can't mistake that second-language feel, which is so winning.

Here's an example from her cookbook:

There are laws that regulate the hunting, so fresh game is only available during the official hunting season, between September and January.

It's clear her editor at Broadway Books missed that Clotilde translated "la chasse" directly from her French brain into the English "the hunting," which no native speaker would use in this context.

And, by the way, the food. My friend Todd, the steadiest and calmest MD you will ever meet while sighting down a perking thermometer, reacted to the photo of the Tomato, Pistachio, and Chorizo Loaf as if he were a teenager seeing his first Playboy centerfold.

On to Curtis. Chicks dig Curtis. He is tall, flat-stomached, sparkly-eyed, chisel-jawed, spiky-haired, be-earringed, a conspiratorial charmer and flirter while remaining outwardly surprised that anyone would think anything extracurricular about him. And that accent, folks. Everyone loves a guy who calls all men "mate" and whose opening line is often "Doing a bit of shopping?"

Take Home Chef is the perfectly virtuous adultery fantasy come true-- if your fantasy includes being in a cooking reality show. Curtis finds a "random" woman in the supermarket, explains what he wants to do, then buys a bunch of organic, expensive groceries-- including whatever alcohol the lady desires-- all the time asking her her favorite food preferences. Then he buys a special cooking gift, like ramekins, margarita glasses, or a specialty skillet. He encourages the woman to call her SO and make sure she and Curtis can remain alone for hours and spend some real quality time together. Talk about the Five Love Languages.

But it's all for the SO, don't you know. They spend their time at home making dinner, and surprise the guy when he comes home. The woman may be draped all over Curtis during the food preparation phase, but this is innocent. Vachement.

And, by the way, the food. Curtis is the total package. If the shtick of the show is accurate, he usually has a half-hour or less of no-flirt zone to put his dinner together, and it's always terrific. He sticks to simple, easy-to-prepare stuff highlighting high-end ingredients, and his tips and technique make everyday sense. If you have the money to afford jarred, chipotle-roasted red peppers, you too can put together a great dinner while being given sips of wine by an enraptured heterosexual female.

(Asterisk on the "randomness" of the female: do they really just "pick up" these hotties, who come home and change into cleavage and strapless as if they were a housecoat? Maybe so. One of my female friends used to live in Southern California, but had to move away because "It was just too much work to have to look good all the time.")

The greatest reward for men who watch this show is not the beautiful women, however, who often give off a clueless, airhead vibe. No, it's that the SO's are most of the time pretty schlubby-looking, and you can see the jealousy, even as they are about to be plied with world-class food and wine. That's what you get for marrying out of your league, mate.

(He: "What did you do with him?" She: "We just cooked." He: "Just cooked?" She: "Yes, what are you suggesting?")

But, to circle back to the original blog topic (yes, we are on topic!), the attractive food and people described above would never have gotten so popular unless they were mixed together inside a compelling story. Clotilde is that young lady you want to be your daughter, your sister, your wife, your friend, who lives an interesting life and who is destined for food-stardom, or whatever success she is interested in achieving. Irresistible.

Take Home Chef keeps its storyline formulaic, exactly as all good mythology does. If you find a story everyone wants to hear over and over, run it into the ground, make as much money and get as much fame as you can, and then move on to the next. Did people really like to hear the Iliad-- the same old Iliad-- over and over again, even though they knew the ending and probably most of the words by heart? Well, if you live to hear Curtis Stone say over and over again at the end of his show, "When you're out shopping, you never know who you might meet. So dress up", then you should have no trouble seeing why the Greeks loved their myths.

Photo of Clotilde from chocolateandzucchini.com, of Curtis here.

Torta al testo, photographed

During the Harry Potter reading phase, we have a light diversion of the culinary kind. Please consider the torta al testo, a traditional Umbrian flatbread which was part of a sublime experience I had in the city of Assisi, and about which I wrote recently.

This spring I had dinner with a friend and we documented the making of the light torta al testo supper we shared.

The recipe for torta al testo is simple, but there are a couple of catches. The link above has my recipe, but this website has photos. Scroll down-- there are a number of recipes on the same page.

Last night I sauteed boneless chicken thighs with zucchini, red peppers, and fresh herbs. If you try this, you will not be able to stop eating, unfortunately.

For the photographed supper, I chose whole-milk mozzarella and browned sweet Italian turkey sausage. I grated the cheese and scattered some on the inside surface of the torta, then put the torta back into the oven to melt the cheese.

When everything is brown and hot and bubbly, you can put in whatever else you like. For this supper I used baby salad greens.

Then, if you like, you can drizzle with extra-virgin olive oil. This is only if you want an extra-rich taste. Some, such as Rachel Ray, the TV cooking diva (and whom I can't stand for some reason), call for using "EVOO" to cook with in most recipes. But I use regular cheap olive oil for cooking-- even in pancakes, as Andy of Andy's Diner once suggested (tastes terrific and is healthier than butter)-- and only add extra-virgin as a flavor-enhancer or as the oil in a salad.

(By the way, if you use balsamic vinegar as the primary vinegar in your salads, you should know that many Italians are against this practice. It is too strong a flavor for such a light dish, and I must say after comparing that I concur. No less an authority than Marcella Hazan writes in Marcella's Italian Kitchen [p. 6] that "a few drops" of balsamico "ennobles" a regular olive-oil and vinegar dressing. In this case, as in so many others, less is more.)

As you can see, this makes a tee-rrific presentation with fresh strawberries and red wine. I suggest Hacienda Pinot Noir or Mark West Central Coast Pinot Noir if it is available. And if you are not fussy like Miles Raymond in Sideways (love you, La Madsen!), Hacienda Merlot is also an excellent choice. Or maybe a nice Chianti, with or without fava beans.

Torta al testo, two years later

In February of 2005 I took a student group to Italy, where we did the student trip trio of Venice, Florence and Rome.

It was cold in the Appennine mountains, and on the razorback spine between Arezzo and Perugia, the tour bus ran into an old greybread wind god spitting snow.

As the flakes buried the highway, a man sat in his car reading instructions on how to put chains on tires. "If you don't know," said Mario, our bus driver, "Now is not the time to learn."

We descended from the summit of the Appennines into the the foothills above Lake Trasimene, site of one of the worst defeats ever of the Roman army. Assisi was near here, the home of St. Francis.

I have always fancied that of all the monastic orders in the Roman Catholic tradition, I would have chosen the Franciscan, because I have no attachment to possessions, but I value the beauty of everyday things. Poverty is not a biggee for me, chastity I know how to do, and obedience I could get.

But if the monastery didn't include good food and wine, I think I might go stark raving mad.

All this I was put in mind of around noontime, when we finished the tour of the frescoes in the chapel at Assisi. The town was set on a very steep slope, and the tour manager told us there would be an excellent cafeteria at the summit of the hill.

I was with Trevor, a companionable Lumbee Indian from Robeson County, North Carolina. We navigated over slick cobblestones as big as speed bumps, and dodged sleet.

"This wind will cut you in two," he said, and I agreed, my nose frozen. We gave up the climb to the hilltop cafeteria, ducking instead into a place called Pizzeria Flipper.

Blessed warmth inside. The chef and cashier was a fresh-faced Italian teen hero who, I think, was hoping to close up so she could sit down to the hot meal her mother must then have been putting on the table in the dining room above the shop. But she waited patiently as Trevor ordered a continent of sausage pizza and I pointed to a sandwich made from a crisp flatbread, stuffed with prosciutto and spring greens.

This food was nothing short of an inspiration, so extremely simple and yet perfect: salty, bitter, creamy and warming all at the same time.

When I got back from Italy I searched for that flatbread, and found it via the food blogger Alberto, whose blog Il Forno has unfortunately gone into indefinite hiatus (click here for his wonderful posts on flatbreads and pizza, however!).

Torta al testo ("flatbread on a stone griddle") is native to Umbria, the region between Tuscany and Lazio, and especially the city of Perugia. You might call it the Italian tortilla, chapati, or pita bread. I call it a revelation.

This weekend was cold, and I spent much of it walking the dog and not eating hot food because my schedule was out of whack. So for Sunday lunch it was a torta al testo sandwich, the ultimate comfort food.

Herewith my version of the recipe:

16 oz. of flour, 1 tablespoon baking powder (optional), 1 tablespoon salt, 2 cups or less of water, depending on the flour. Combine the dry ingredients, then add water till a soft, pliable dough is formed. Let the dough rest for 15 minutes. Roll out a piece on a board to a circle about six inches in diameter. Throw the circle onto a hot pizza stone in a preheated 450 degree oven.

When the torta puffs up (about seven minutes), take it out of the oven, cut it open, and fill with grated whole milk mozzarella (not part skim-- and use less, because whole milk mozzarella tastes so good, you don't need to eat so much) and your choice of meat. I like real prosciutto, or browned sweet Italian sausage with lots of anise flavor, or bits of leftover fried pork chop.

Put the sandwich back in for five minutes or until nicely browned and the mozzarella is melted.  Fill the sandwich with baby spring greens or whatever other vegetables your heart desires, such as steamed asparagus, or zucchini sauteed in balsamic vinegar and extra virgin olive oil.

Optional: drizzle with extra virgin olive oil.

Eat as a sandwich or slice crosswise into finger food.

Warning: you will eat too much of this.

Note: if you omit baking powder, the torta will not puff up as much. In this case, you can fold it over to stuff.

Next week I am going to Greece, and I hope to have more food adventures. If I do, I will blog about them.

Buon appetito and pame na fame.

Why I seldom watch network TV

On a quiet night-- rare for the last several weeks-- I alternated between tending a pot of Florentine Beef Soup with Barley and Vegetables (recipe below) and the television, where no satisfactory sports were playing.

So I thought, what's on regular TV these days?

On NBC, Chris Hansen and his Dateline crew were doing executions of pedophiles-- or I guess you could call it a sexual predator fishing show. Decoys posed as young teens online and gave sexual predators the opportunity to come to a house crawling with cameras and police. I kept thinking, "Is this real? Are those actors? Who would do this? Do predators think it's this easy to meet kids? And why do they make such dumb excuses when they're hooked?" I couldn't tear myself away. It was a surreality show.

(And, by the way, go here for an amazing short film on contemporary "beauty"-- thanks for the link from MLight)

Then on CBS, an episode of the Unit with that trustworthy man from the Allstate commercials playing a trustworthy commander of an elite squad of specialist soldiers fighting Middle Eastern types in the hills of Ventura County, California. Much of the show was taken up with a firefight in which a billion bullets were shot in order to knock down 25 extras. When one of the soldiers said, "They're in the wire!" I flashed back to the John Wayne film, The Green Berets, a positive movie about Vietnam.

Then, still on CBS, Mandy Patinkin was interviewing a Postmodernist Literature professor for her links to a mad bomber. I kept waiting for him to go up and down escalators saying that a certain pill could lower bad cholesterol and raise good. Then at the end, the Postmodernist Literature professor, who feels pity for the mad bomber because he mistakenly thinks he is her long-lost son, takes a bullet meant for him. Who says Postmodernists aren't compassionate?

So the night was, pun intended, all about "potboilers."

*

Florentine Beef Soup with Barley and Vegetables

2 lbs. chuck roast cut in small cubes
1/4 cup olive oil
kosher salt and ground black pepper
1 1/2 medium onions, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
8 cups water
1 28 oz. can Furmano's Chunky Crushed Tomatoes with Garlic, Oregano and Basil
1 cup uncooked barley
2 tablespoons minced fresh rosemary or 2 tsp. dry
1 bay leaf
1 (16 oz.) package frozen Italian vegetables (broccoli, zucchini, carrots, Italian green beans, baby limas)
1 (8 oz.) package frozen petite peas

In large soup pot brown liberally salted and peppered beef in olive oil. Add onions and garlic, stir, and sautee until onion is limp. Add tomatoes, barley, rosemary, and bay leaf. Stir and incorporate. Add water while stirring mixture. Bring to boil, then simmer for one hour, stirring occasionally. Add frozen vegetables and cook for an additional 15 minutes. Serve with corn bread or polenta cakes and a hearty red wine.

The French Way of Thinninity

This post is posted in thanksgiving for the acceptance of my humor piece, The neurotic's recipe for perfect (okay it's crap) teriyaki chicken, in the food writing journal Alimentum. Sound the trumpets.

Somewhere on Saturday of my trip to Paris, I realized how the Parisians stay so thin, despite their inordinate intake of white flour, butter, and eggs. A list follows, but really, the only item that matters is the last.

Exercise: Not only is the city walkable, but you want to walk. Everywhere you turn, something new and exciting catches your eye. The architecture, the landmarks, the skyline, the shops, the wom-- um, the people. Everything and everyone merits a second look. Pretty soon you've burned off your morning pain au chocolat and then some. Who could be a couch potato when you have Audrey Tatou lookalikes treating the sidewalk like their own personal runway?

Portion sizes: It seemed on Saturday at noon everyone was walking around with a sandwich or a crepe in their fist. That's it. No double cheeseburger, no large fries, no twenty ounce Coke. In fact, the young family of three speaking a Slavic language who sat down next to me in the Tuileries gardens were sharing their McDonalds Value Meal among the three of them.

Hip teenagers into the latest American stuff were jauntily tipping 12-ounce cans of Coke. That was excess, French style.

At dinner, you might have two or three courses. I had asparagus-and-pecorino ravioli, steak, and French fries one night, two courses, and skipped dessert. Sound like a lot of meat and carbs? It might have been 4 ounces of steak, 6 fair-sized ravioli, and a reasonable mound of fries, some of which I left on the plate. And I was satisfied.

Red wine: Besides having all those anti- and uncle-oxidants, red wine gives you a feeling of fullness and encourages you to savor your food. You eat slower and therefore eat less, because you give your tummy a chance to signal to your brain that it's had enough.

Dark chocolate: Wow. The best kind is so good you sit there dazzled and just take it in for a while. Eating a thousand calories of this stuff would be incredible sensory overload. One truffle turns out to be enough, two if you're really greedy.

Taste in general: When everything tastes good, you pay attention to it, eat slower, and eat less. There's something gross about a Krispy Kreme raised glazed doughnut that makes you want to eat a half-dozen even though the first one stopped tasting good about halfway through. My theory: when something tastes sort of good but sort of gross, you eat more for the sake of the texture in your mouth or the fullness in your stomach.

And most importantly,

French Coffee.

At noon Saturday I drank one small cup of cafe noir with a packet of sugar, calorically insignificant but enough to keep me up till 2 AM and stave off my appetite almost completely, so that when dinner came with its small portions I thought I was eating a feast. I liked everything and still left half my dessert.

My theory: Drinking a cup of French coffee is like popping a half dozen barbiturate-laced diet pills.

(See chocolate above, which has caffeine, too.)

So there you have it. I think there may be a book about this, but now you don't need to buy it. I have lived the French Way of Thinninity, and It Is Good.

Searching for a new food blog to link

Alberto, the first food blogger I discovered, corresponded with, and read regularly, has decided to take a pause from blogging for the forseeable future.

That means that I am light one link in my blog list.

Anyone out there know a must-read food blogger? I have done some surfing but nothing's caught my fancy yet.

Mediterranean-oriented a plus, but anything with good writing and interesting food will do.

Whirley Pop! (not mythology)

Today my friend Mark stopped by the house to thank me for dogsitting Tucker, an irascible and utterly lovable Corgi.

My gift for the time with Tucker was a Whirley Pop popcorn machine.

(First pump!) Just what I wanted.

This simple construction consists of a light aluminum pot with a lid that clamps on. The lid has two hinged sides that allow you to peek into the pot. Attached to the lid is a crank that makes a wire sweep along the bottom of the pot. If you put oil and popcorn into this contraption, put it over a burner at medium high, and crank away easily, in three minutes you will have perfect popcorn and almost every kernel will be popped.

I am not really a popcorn connoisseur, but I love my bowl of corn at the proper time, and I cannot stand microwave popcorn. It has goo and salt and artificial junk that will kill you. Making popcorn fresh takes very little extra time, tastes better, uses less packaging, is better for you, and costs less-- once the initial popper investment has been made back. Since this machine should last pretty much a lifetime, that will end up being a lot of savings.

Viva the Whirley Pop popcorn maker company. Another blow struck for real food.

As they once said in the seventies, "Yowza Yowza Yowza."

A peach of a story (not mythology)

Years ago I hosted an old friend who never quite got Carolina on his mind. He married here, at a historic inn in Hillsborough, even lived inside the Raleigh Beltline, but he and his bride went back to his native California before any of their progeny could boast of being Tarheel born.
I shouldn’t have been surprised at my friend’s detachment from the gifts of the Pine State. Brad defines the phlegmatic type. Unemotional doesn’t describe him. Enthusiasm, for Brad, is only a temporary daemonic inhabitation.
But I couldn’t help being surprised, even disappointed, when he and his five-year old son were visiting from California. I offered him a peach from the Farmer’s Market, one that I had bought the day before, approaching the peak of ripeness.
“When will they be ready to eat?” someone at the Pee Dee stand had asked.
“Tomorrow,” pronounced the kind lady who transferred my peaches from basket to plastic. “Look at those, sir,” she said, beaming like a waiter at a four-star restaurant holding out a two-and-a-half pound lobster.
“How’s the peach?” I asked. Brad’s lips were glistening. The flesh of the peach was bright yellow-orange. He had to suck on the fruit to keep the juice from pooling in his palm.
“All right,” he allowed.
All right? It was, I wanted to inform him, a freestone Winblo, developed at NC State University, the best variety of eating peach I have ever tasted, miles better than any peach I’d ever had growing up with him in the San Francisco Bay Area. With the zeal of a convert I wanted to demand what devil had put scales on his taste buds. But like a good host, I held my tongue, and let it taste a Winblo to salve my spirit.
The peach episode set the tone for the visit, and my frustration. He refused a peach on Sunday afternoon because he had had two the day before (Imagine! Three peaches in two days!). Then at dinner he quietly put away three cobs of sweet Fantasia corn, corn that had been pulled perhaps 36 hours before.
“Give me nine,” I had said to the pretty woman standing next to the corn-laden trailer at the Farmer’s Market.
“For the same price, you can have fourteen,” she said. “We’re running a special today.”
“I don’t think we’ll eat that many.”
“That’s all right. They’ll keep, and you can give the extras to your neighbors.”
I came home, somehow, with seventeen ears. I shucked seven and gave them to the neighbors. They said, with some urgency, “We’ll eat them tonight.”
Not even the ugly but delicious dollar a pound tomatoes (the best at the Farmer’s Market, bar none) prompted a peep out of him. Without a word, he consumed roast-beef-and-tomato sandwiches the entire visit, and took two more sandwiches with him on the plane.
But Brad didn’t leave me completely unsatisfied. As in the old chestnut about the Soviet woman who toured all the splendors of America and was completely unimpressed—except with the supermarkets, where she broke down in awe-filled tears—Brad cracked a teeny bit, just once.
“Yeah,” he said, leaning over the bowl of peaches on the kitchen counter, “Sharon [Brad's wife] sometimes wonders whether we made the right choice going back to California.”
Brad comes from old-time Californians, folk with land in Sonoma County, wine country. His ancestral summer home has an apple orchard with fruit that tastes like it comes from the Land of Life and Death, and confers immortality to the eater.
Many people, when they hear I come from California, say, "Why do you live out here?"
It's the peaches.

Marinahdes and Homer

Last year on the Fulbright trip to Greece and Cyprus, I found out that no one in the world except me pronounces the word "marinade" with the second "a" as in "father."

I was talking to Pam about it, and she laughed uproariously at my usage. I then went to every other participant in the seminar and asked how they pronounce it. Everyone said "Mayr-ih-NAYYYYD," as in parade, lemonade, and made-in-the-shade. So does dictionary.com, for that matter.

Maybe this is a product of my French-Swiss grandmother, for whom English was a second language, and who always pronounced "mayonnaise" as "My-oh-NEZ." But I never pronounced marinade with a long second a. Is there anyone out there who says it the way I do?

Regardless of the pronunciation, the book Marinades by Jim Tarantino is my favorite cookbook and has just been reissued by Ten Speed Press in a new, expanded edition.

I am a griller from way back. As a newlywed I marched out to the back porch of our apartment and began my education with hamburgers on a Weber charcoal grill. One tip: don't use pine straw as a starter for the coals. Three reasons: the smoke, the smell, and the bad taste on the food afterwards.

I soon graduated to barbecued chicken, and made the mistake of letting it sit on a hot grill covered in sugary, tomatoey barbecue sauce. Burned to a crisp.

But that first Easter we tried a family recipe for marinated leg of lamb, and it was magical. Rosemary, brown sugar, olive oil, and most importantly, aged wine vinegar went into that graceful brew. It has never failed to amaze guests at Easter dinner. 

During the early part of my education we acquired the first Marinades, which was published in 1992. The greatest virtue of this edition was a thumbnail guide for which marinades went with which kind of meat or fish, and-- most importantly-- for how long the grill food would have to soak. I love coming home from work a little early and throwing together a spontaneous meal, so I scoured the book for 2-3 hour marinades, and eventually had more and more grilling success.

This book is bigger, longer, with smaller print, more recipes, and added sections on things called "brines," "cures," "rubs," and "glazes." Brines are salty solutions for dunking meat, cures and rubs are mixtures of ingredients rubbed on to the meat, and glazes are (often sweet) sauces brushed on at the end of grilling.

There are also out-and-out recipes, such as Grilled Iberian Pork Tenderloin with Blood-Orange Sherry Sauce.

Tarantino is a purist and a perfectionist. He minutely dissects his subject, getting into the chemistry of meat tenderization and freezer burn. He is the king of the specialty ingredient; if you want to run with the big dogs of grilling, you have to be willing to find and buy such things as juniper berries, banana leaves, and Coco Lopez cream of coconut.

But if you just want to grill some chicken legs on the back deck and sip wine at sunset, Jim Tarantino is still your man. There are simple recipes, and you don't have to add every single ingredient for a marinade to make its object taste good. Plus, it is such a high to create your own barbecue sauce (now we must call it "glaze") instead of relying on the bottled stuff that is so expensive and yet consists mostly of corn syrup, tomato goop, and MSG.

Tarantino is also a student of history, which pleases this student of history. He reports that sauerkraut comes from the Mongols, who invaded the West with crocks of pickled cabbage in their saddle bags. Reading Marinades puts me in the mood to share conversation and Grilled Beef Tenderloins with Ancho Chile Sauce with a food historian.

As Tarantino accurately points out, grilling is the oldest form of meat cooking technique; when first one of our ancestors stuck a piece of meat on a stick and held it over a campfire, grilling was born.

In ancient Greece, grilling was done kebab style, by cutting meat into chunks, spearing the chunks on skewers, and suspending them over a fire. Here's one of Homer's many descriptions of the ancient grill-out:

They slaughtered and flayed the oxen,
Jointed the thighbones and wrapped them
In a layer of fat with cuts of meat on top.
The old man roasted them over charcoal
And doused them with wine. Younger men
stood by with five-tined forks in their hands.
When the thighpieces were charred and they had
Tasted the tripe, they cut the rest into strips,
Skewered it on spits and roasted it skillfully.

(From Book I, Lombardo translation. Buy the newly released audio book)

Homer describes the essential elements of a marinade, fat and acid (wine): the fat melts on the fire and keeps moist the meat lying on top of it. The wine flavors the meat and tenderizes it. The marinated meat is then finished on kebabs.

We tend not to eat organs anymore, but the ancient Greeks had a meat-poor diet, and so tripe was considered a delicacy.

Homer also accurately depicts the scene around the grill. If there are men at a cook-out, they are all there with five-tined forks, putting in their two cents' worth.

Happy summer and happy grilling, everyone. You are engaged in an age-old pleasure.