Still life with cockroach 🐛*

*That’s not a cockroach.

Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week, we do battle with the local megafauna. Check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.

Smoked salmon trimmings at Zabar’s

2245 Broadway, New York, NY 10024

As a kid, my entire vision of New York City, that mysterious metropolis a 40 minute drive but cultural light years away from our house, was represented by the magical grocery store called Zabar’s. Every few months, my chic aunt, with her perfume and Louis Vuitton bags and hair dyed a permanent shade of unnatural red (in our shabby-chic house, all those things were strictly frowned upon), would drop off bags of lox and babka and bagels at our doorstep. I vowed to live there one day, New York, land of smoked salmon and babka. And I did. The very first thing I did last weekend after hauling the final box into my brick-wall-facing, small studio apartment in the Upper West Side was go directly to Zabar’s, where I purchased a tub of salmon scraps, all to myself. Then I went home and was immediately confronted by the largest and most invincible cockroach I’ve ever met in my five years of New York cockroaches.  

New York cockroaches: A brief interlude

Skip this, if you want to keep your appetite.

To be confronted by a cockroach in New York is to be confronted with your very sense of personhood. For here you are: Galavanting around in the Upper West Side, thinking that you are at the very peak of culture, even if your bedroom does smell very oh-so-faintly of garbage from the alleyway. The green market across the street is organic; the shelters are no-kill, and there’s a years-long petition just to keep the construction noise next door contained between the hours of 9 am and 5 pm. But ah, the cockroach. It does not care that you are a sensitive, empathetic, non-profit-working, ballet-viewing, poetry-red and Ivy League-fed soul. It does not care for your sanitized view of the world, it does not at all. There is no clean way to kill a cockroach. It laughs at bug spray. It cannot be drowned. You cannot even swat at it lightly. You must use force to kill a cockroach. You must declare warfare on every single invading body in your home. You have to use the sole of your swift, hard, cruel boot. The heel of your hand, a smack of your palm, swaddled in paper towels. To confront a cockroach is to confront the very kernel of your animal soul: Reminding yourself that you, too, are capable of blood on your hands; even if the blood is clear and white and mixed with bits of smashed shell.

Lemon raspberry tea cake at home

Recipe from, fittingly, Taste of Home

If I was cursed by a cruel witch to only make one cake recipe for the rest of my life, it would be this humble yogurt loaf, which has never, ever failed me. I’ve made it in half a dozen tiny kitchen apartments in the Northeast Corridor in the past decade and it always turns out soft, moist, and delightfully domed and browned on top, with the texture of my beloved Entemann’s butter loaf from the childhood CVS, and none of the funky ingredients. The original recipe is for a lemon cake, but I’ve done every variation from black sesame to green tea to blueberry. My favorite combination for teatime is lemon raspberry, where you follow the original recipe and add a cup of fresh raspberries, gently stirred in at the end. 

No-frills miso dressing at home

Recipe from Food52

Long-time readers of Five Things I Ate, or probably even short-time readers of Five Things I Ate know that I’m crazy about miso-- it’s one of the most versatile ingredients in my kitchen, which I use in everything from broiled salmon to peanut butter cookies. It also makes a great, simple salad dressing. Miso is salty and savory, so all you need to add is acid (vinegar), sweetness (honey), and richness (oil) to make the balance of flavors complete. I use approximately this recipe from Food52; and stir a double-batch together in the mason jar in the beginning of the week (or mid-week, as the passage of time is merely a circle now) for quick lunch salads.

Roses at 82nd Street Grocery Inc.

454 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10024

As a reward for making it to the end of the week, I like to buy myself a bouquet of flowers. It’s one the nicest things about being an adult and having your own place, no matter how small, or cockroach-infested. In New York, you can get a really lovely bouquet of roses on the corner market for ten dollars. When I’m feeling luxurious with my time, I like to walk down Amsterdam and then Columbus to check out all the flowers on display at the corner bodegas and choose my favorite ones for the weekend. I especially like 82nd Street grocers, which has the most vibrant display of sunflowers, carnations, dahlias, and chrysanthemums. Still, I almost always end up walking away with a bouquet of blush-pink roses, which are, to me, the most beautiful flowers of all (maybe aside from peonies, which are rarer to find).

Have a good weekend!
Soph