The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [159]
Saha waved his hand in apology. “I can’t. But I know a lot of great designers who probably could if you asked them.”
Mark Isreal’s face dropped.
“I’m too busy right now,” Saha quickly replied. “But seriously, if you want any of their contact info, I’m sure they’d love to do it.”
Mark looked at Luis in shock and turned back to Saha. He gave him a cold glare as if to say, How dare you not stop everything to help out with my doughnut website? Although the look was exaggerated, I felt like he was being half serious. I was beginning to feel a bit uncomfortable.
“No, really; they’d be great,” Saha went on. “I’d work on it, too, but—”
Mark gave up on the topic with a wave of his hand. He turned his attention back to Luis and began asking him a question about the daily operations.
“Yikes,” I said to Saha. “How come you don’t want to work for the doughnut website?” I teased. He shook his head and kept quiet. I snapped some photos of the doughnuts on the racks and of us eating doughnuts as we chatted and finished our breakfast. For a while, Saha and I had been throwing around the idea of starting up a new food newsletter, with recipes and anecdotes about the dinner-party series that we also intended to start up. We were both so busy with other projects, though, that it looked like the collaboration might have to wait.
Luis gave Saha the cup of chai on the house. We each paid for our doughnuts; mine had cost $3.25. Not a bad deal for such a tasty, carefully made work of doughnut art. But it was still a sticky, greasy, sugary, and most of all, empty calorie-filled breakfast. I was still a little bit hungry after I left. On my way back to the subway, I popped into a bakery a few doors down. It was Kossar’s, a real New York legend of a place, the oldest bialy bakery in the country, opened in 1936. In fact, it was the place that had put bialys on the map in the United States. But because there was no seating and the place was strictly for takeout bialys—often by the dozen—I couldn’t quite qualify it as a real eating-out experience. I ended up buying a bialy to go and brought it home with me in a bag. This I planned to eat once Sunday rolled around and my opposite week was officially over.
On Saturday, I’d need to bring a huge pot of chili over to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for the Chili Takedown. Whether or not I ate the chili I cooked during opposite week was one thing. But I knew I’d be surrounded by the chilis of my fellow contestants at the Botanic Garden’s Chile Pepper Fiesta, and probably a lot more homemade food, too. I’d also be attending Jordan’s birthday party that Saturday night, and on Friday, I planned to go to my friend Nora’s birthday party. Both would likely be filled with homemade treats.
So I gave up on trying to make Saturday a strictly restaurant-food-only day. It was just as well, though. I couldn’t go a full normal week without encountering restaurant-made food (at the Edible Manhattan launch party), and I couldn’t go a full opposite week without some homemade food. The two worlds had melded into my life inextricably. Once the week was done I was glad I’d made the choice to lose the not-eating-out gimmick.
I spent most of Friday making my chili. I took the pork shoulder from Tom Mylan’s butchering class out of the bag of brine it had been sitting in for the last couple of days. Before leaving the class, I’d grilled Tom for some insight on how to cook it into chili, and he’d suggested brining it first. I also asked Michael for some advice and ended up borrowing from his mole-braised duck legs cooked at the Hope Lounge barbecue. After the brined pork was patted dry, I browned it in my biggest pot. I then filled the pot to the brim with a mixture of liquids—pork stock made a week before from bones from the same Berkshire pig, left over from the butchering class, the water I used to soak some dried ancho peppers, beer, and a cup of strong coffee. I tossed in onions, garlic, bacon, the soaked anchos, and a number of spices, and