home and homesickness

i’ve been kind of grumpy lately, because i’ve been trying to figure out whether or not to take a semester off, but more, i suspect, because i’m starting to get homesick. don’t get me wrong, new york: i like you fine. even more than fine, really. i really like you. but living out of a suitcase for a few months, regardless of how much of your stuff you’ve surrounded yourself with, just can’t compare to being home: there’s this permanent sense of your life being temporary.

i think i’ve felt as much at home as i can this summer, and in truth it really has felt like a vacation. you know, a vacation where i’ve got multiple jobs, but a break from school is a break from school. so now that i’ve finally had enough vacation, i’m starting to get antsy about feeling like i’m at home. part of this is cooking, and it’s just been so long since i’ve gotten to do any therapeutic cooking. this sounds pretty stupid, but it’s actually a great way to relax: basically i just do something that’s really complicated or unnecessary, just for the sake of doing it. my standby is roasting a chicken to use the meat for chicken pot pie; usually people just buy a rotisserie chicken from the supermarket (ugh) or poach some chicken breast (uninspiring). after you roast the chicken and pull all the meat off the bones, you get to make chicken stock. and somehow the chicken and the food it’s turned into all disappears within a day or two, courtesy of your friends.

i like the involved nature of doing something like this, and also the physical exhaustion that comes with it after you’ve been on your feet for hours. your kitchen smells good, and you’ve washed all the dishes so there’s no mess, and you can go to sleep feeling that you’ve done something for the day. all of this is very satisfying.

so i’m making dinner for the roommates tomorrow, as you know, so today i made dessert (chocolate pudding) and the chicken stock for the risotto. really i should have made veal stock, but i’m sure the flavor of the sausage will overtake the risotto anyway, so it doesn’t matter. anyway, i roasted a chicken while making the pudding, and then put the stock on the stove to simmer after finishing the pudding. i also made some peach iced tea, which i picked up at balducci’s – it’s harney + sons, and it’s really quite good (it’s a blend of fruit infusion and black tea).

i’m actually pretty excited about the risotto (which will be have to be timed carefully to be done in time for dinner). i was too lazy to make the oven-roasted tomatoes, so i’m going to do a tomato relish with lemon zest that’s cold, to go with the warm risotto. the risotto will have sausage and morels in it, with fennel and sage. so the meatiness gets balanced by the fennel and sage, and the morels and the creaminess of the risotto get balanced by the acidity of the tomatoes and lemon zest. i think it’ll be pretty good.

i did my shopping at fairway this time, and frustratingly came away with fennel (an impulse buy) but without cocoa nibs. i’ve now been to whole foods, citarella, and fairway, without success in sourcing cocoa nibs, and their unavailability is really starting to bother me. what gets me is that i know exactly where to get them in cambridge (christina’s) and although i know i can get them at the scharffenberger store, i don’t actually like scharffenberger chocolate, so that’s kind of a no go. ah well…i guess there won’t be any buckwheat cookies this week unless i suddenly acquire cocoa nibs. it’s actually possible that fairway had them (they’re the only grocery store to carry my callebaut bittersweet – whole foods and citarella only carry unsweetened and semisweet), but it was such a madhouse that i didn’t really try that hard to look. in general, i like fairway, but apparently when you go after work, you catch the after work crowd. i never really mind waiting at the cash register, but i do mind having to navigate around people constantly because i like to do a nice, leisurely circuit of the whole place so i can remember what’s on the shelves and what they don’t have, for future reference. fairway seems to be organized so that people are always banging into each other – it’s some combination of what’s on the shelves and where, and the narrowness of the aisles. i wonder if it would be better if i went early in the morning? i’ll have to see.