A night on the town with Aida

a new low in photography

Thank you for the funny and poignant comments on the last post. I loved them all. My grandmother, who is 100, has always hated having her picture taken and when forced to endure a photograph, turns her face in profile because someone once told her that it's her most flattering angle. In pictures she is often gazing worshipfully up at the person beside her, no matter how unworthy of worship that person is, as in the photo above which I took on Saturday night. You might need a magnifying glass because the light is dim and my grandmother has become so small, but she is gazing adoringly at Owen. Vanity is ageless.

About a year ago a commenter on this blog recommended Cafe Rehoboth, an Ethiopian restaurant in San Jose. Owen, Isabel, and I made a date to take my grandmother to dinner there on Saturday and when we got to her house we rang the bell repeatedly, then I called on the phone, which no one answered, then we rang some more before she finally appeared at the door, tiny and dear. This is standard operating procedure. She was dressed in a gray skirt and sweater with a scarf and a barrette in her hair and she looked snappy, but she immediately said, "I feel so sick and tired! I don't know what is wrong with me. Suddenly I was getting dressed and I felt exhausted. I am so glad you are here because I thought I was going to faint."

I never know whether to take her seriously or cajole her. I said, "Why don't you sit down and I'll get you a glass of water."

Grandmother: "Maybe a little glass of rum? It is good for the heart."

Cajole.

I brought her a tablespoon of rum in a tiny crystal glass with an ice cube, the only way my grandmother drinks anything, including wine. She sat in her wing chair, took bird-like sips, fretted.

Grandmother: This might be my last day, you know.

Jennifer: Then let's make this the best day ever.

Owen: Maybe you should take her pulse.

Jennifer: Ok. . . oh no, I can't find it. She must be gone.

Ha ha ha.

She wanted me to write down the number of a specific ambulance company in case she fainted at the restaurant. She made me look in a drawer for the number, but the drawer was full of Christmas napkins.

Cafe Rehoboth sits in the middle of a half-abandoned street and the carpeted dining room, very humble and homey, is tucked behind a defunct bar. The hostess treated my grandmother like a queen, which made her happy. My grandmother is soft-spoken and gentle, but very regal; my grandfather used to say that her political leanings were "monarchist."

She was disappointed that the restaurant did not serve cocktails, so she ordered mango juice. It came in a pint glass without ice and this bothered her deeply. As I said, she likes to take liquid from dainty glasses, with ice and she could not stop talking about that enormous, stupid pint glass.

By the time the food came, she'd almost finished the juice.

The food was fantastic, spicy and rich, and the injera, made with teff, was tangy and spongy and all was exactly as it should be. My grandmother ate, ate, and ate, and was eating long after the rest of us were stuffed. Owen began teasing Isabel and doing irritating things with his feet under the table and the bickering started.

I hissed at Owen, "If you do that one more time you are going outside to wait for us on the street!"

My grandmother said, "He's just having fun. Be nice." Then she reached for another piece of injera and Owen started teasing Isabel again. It went on like this for about 20 minutes and I too wished that Cafe Rehoboth served cocktails.

beef, beef, chicken, cabbage, garbanzos, homemade cheese, salad

Eventually, my grandmother decided she'd eaten enough, I paid the bill (she asked how much it was and gasped -- standard operating procedure), and we drove away. "I didn't like that so much," she said. "It was not very delicious."

In the backseat, Isabel laughed. My grandmother always complains about restaurant food after she eats us all under the table and we wouldn't want it any other way.

To finish the evening, we went to Nirvanaah, an Indian ice cream shop I'd read about on Chowhound. If you are ever within 100 miles of Sunnyvale, California you need to come here. I ordered a scoop of thandai ice cream without knowing what it was. What it was: a wildly delicious fruity, nutty, aromatic dessert that I must eat again soon even if that means replicating it in my own kitchen. There were other seductive Indian flavors, but  my grandmother ordered a vanilla ice cream cone which she ate with relish. She seemed to have forgotten all about fainting and dying. 

Baby, I'm a firework

rustic beauty

I'm cooking from Clotilde Dusoulier's Chocolate and Zucchini. It's the right book for right now with lots of sandwiches and salads and small, simple meals, exactly the kinds of things I want to cook for the three of us this summer. (Isabel stays in New England until August.) I already know I love this book and have baked the yogurt cake a half dozen times. I'm not planning on critiquing, just exploring and enjoying for the rest of July.

Sunday night my father and sister and her family came over for dinner and I made Dusoulier's tuna mousse for an appetizer. My mother was famous for her tuna mousse, which was a silky, putty-colored melange of tuna, mayonnaise, and gelatin that you chilled in a mold and then presented on a platter surrounded by Club crackers. Very theatrical. She used a big copper fish mold and put pimento olives where the eyes would be and it was sort of kitschy but it was hard to make fun of the kitschy tuna mousse when your mouth was full of tuna mousse and Club crackers. That tuna mousse was delicious.

So is Dusoulier's, but in a totally different way. Hers is a puree of tuna, green apple, shallot, ricotta, cilantro and cayenne and it's fresher and brighter, earthier and easier (no need for a mold). It's a bit homely; it would be hard for even a professional to style that mousse. I'd definitely make it again, but I think I have to revisit my mother's recipe first.

For dessert, I baked Dusoulier's ricotta cake with apricots and pistachios. What a robust and beautiful dessert! Make it before apricots go out of season; the recipe is here. (If you don't have a 10-inch pan, 9-inch works fine.)  Unfortunately, it was over cake that I shared with the guests my plans to build a cob oven in the backyard over the next few weeks. Certain members of the party let me know they found this very foolish and naive. Tempers briefly flared.

After cake/conflict, I tried to teach little children how to milk a goat.

futility

Then everyone went home and my husband and I watched the season premiere of Breaking Bad and I told him about the cob oven conflict. I suspect he secretly agrees with the naysayers.

To prove everyone wrong, Monday morning I signed up for this.

Monday night I made Dusoulier's spinach and chicken salad with peaches and toasted hazelnuts. It took about five minutes, which I loved. I also loved the salad and you can find the recipe here. (In case you don't know, which until recently I did not, this is the only way you should ever skin hazelnuts.)

I was going to make Dusoulier's curried turkey sandwiches last night, but for lunch Owen and I went to Cafe Colucci in Oakland on a nominally work-related excursion and gorged ourselves. It was a dinner-obliterating lunch. We consumed several pounds of kitfo, lentils, greens, Ethiopian cheese, and injera and then waddled off to see the Katy Perry movie, which was not even nominally work-related.

a very lucky indentured servant

Apparently, I'm still on vacation from grown-up life, if not blogging.

Club Waziema

As I wrote in my last post, Mark's aunt is visiting us from Fairbanks, where there is apparently a dearth of good Ethiopian food. Nancy's one culinary request while in town: To track down some injera. I know nothing about Ethiopian restaurants in San Francisco, but after a few minutes of online research discovered a fondly reviewed spot called Club Waziema. 

I stole that picture at left and I would like to steal another of the interior but can't find the right shot to capture the red velvet flocked wallpaper, the sparkly pebble dash ceiling, the slightly grimy, louche atmosphere of this bizarre and rather wonderful place. 

When we walked in, the jukebox was playing the Pogues (or something fast, Irish and Pogues-like) and the Ethiopian hostess seated us across from the bar, underneath a television set. There was a pool table in the back and Mark is always happy to be in an establishment with a pool table, even if he doesn't get to play. Nancy ordered white wine and I ordered a manhattan, which made me instantly festive and I began eavesdropping on the conversation of a nearby table where three chunky young women in small, rectangular glasses were earnestly discussing "sexuality." That's all I kept hearing: "sexuality." It's a kind of terrible word, no**? I realized that no one my age ever uses the term except in the rare nightmare scenario when a husband (or wife) discovers his (or her) true "sexuality." And even then the conversation is less about "sexuality" than the marital horror show.

We ordered two combination meals -- one vegetable, one meat -- that arrived on a single enormous round platter. We each got our own smaller plate upon which was neatly folded some sour, spongy injera for scooping. There were maybe ten little piles of mushy stew on the platter -- potatoes, lentils, collard greens, chicken. Mushy in a good way! Until. . . 

I happily popped what I thought was a chunk of potato into my mouth. It cracked between my teeth. I had bitten into the knobby end of a chicken drumstick.

Everyone is squeamish about something. I will cheerfully eat steak tartare, tuna heart, cheese-peanut butter crackers from a vending machine, liver. But chicken bones, particularly drumsticks, make my skin crawl. 

I spat the knob of drumstick out, and had to remove every last bit of bone from my mouth. I'm sure it was fun and appetizing for my companions to watch, but there are times when you just can't be ladylike. As it was too dark to know that I wasn't going to inadvertently pick up another bone, I stopped eating. But I don't hold it against Club Waziema! Most people are not freakishly repulsed by chicken bones. I want to go back, and next time will only order vegetables.

UPDATE/CLARIFICATION: Terrified that I might be branded a prude, I feel compelled to explain that it is not the topic of "sexuality" that I resist, it is the icky word, which seems academic and euphemistic. Sometimes one or the other, often both. It seems to me that one is always talking about something more interesting and specific than "sexuality" when one talks about "sexuality" so why not be more interesting and specific?