Say goodbye to Paradise (at least for lunch)

    Atlantis.  The destination resort on Paradise Island, connected by a pair of short, steep bridges to the small city of Nassau on the island of New Providence in the Bahamas. 

   It being a destination resort –- full of waterslides and aquariums and fancy shops and restaurants and game rooms and a casino and even an Indiana Jones-like “dig” of “the lost city of Atlantis” –- our group is content not to leave the destination.  Despite my occasional cajoling, no one wants to trek with me across the bridge to explore Nassau for a bit.  And so I go alone.

   I hoof over the bridge and onto the main drag that leads, in maybe a mile, to the center of Nassau.  It’s a strange walk, from the overgrown, rattle-trap, run-down outskirts of town past the occasional modern bank building and suddenly into a thriving, downtown scene of government buildings and luxury stores staffed with impeccably uniformed and coifed and utterly lovely Bahamian women.  I wonder what the little houses look like where they do their hair and makeup in the morning and where they go at the end of the day, after selling $5,000 watches to tourists from the cruise ships in the harbor. 

   Once I’ve seen the center of town, I wander up the hill and around a few streets behind it to see the big pink building at the top of the hill, which must be the governor’s residence, snapping pictures –- since lost –- of the big house and some other bits of Nassau that catch my fancy and my untrained eye.

   I’m not hungry, but the smells –- and my desire to live just a bit of the life of Bourdain -- draw me into a local café, where I have a fine cup of conch chowder, a half-dozen superb and piping hot conch fritters and a cold, delicious bottle of Kalik, the ubiquitous Bahamian beer.  I eat and drink and read the USA Today sports section that I had tossed into Rachel’s backpack along with my light fleece and camera and sunglasses and Blackberry, all of which makes me a bit less like my hero Bourdain and a bit more like the tourists around the corner shopping for jewelry and such.  

   Ah well.  Tony would have enjoyed the fritters, and the beer, and the local scenes on the walk between Nassau and Paradise.

The Greatest Job Ever

   The Greatest Job Ever belongs to Anthony Bourdain – the chain-smoking, foul-mouthed, ear-pierced, recovered addict, former head chef at Les Halles in New York, and then the celebrated author of Kitchen Confidential, which got him the Greatest Job Ever as the writer/protagonist of "A Cook’s Tour" on the Food Network, which became "No Reservations" on the Travel Channel, in which Bourdain roams the globe in search of authentic culinary greatness, almost never in the grand restaurants of big cities, but instead among the street vendors and beach-side shacks and backwoods establishments where real people eat.  And, clearly his favorite, in actual homes.

   The book that made Bourdain famous, Kitchen Confidential, recounts his experiences from his early days as a prep cook at a seafood joint in Provincetown to formal training at the Culinary Institute of America and ultimately to the head job in a series of New York restaurants.  The behind-the-scenes look at the restaurant business is captivating, and one chapter, which gives a play-by-play account of the kitchen in the full battle mode of peak dinner hour, builds more tension than most good chase scenes.  But what really makes the book are Bourdain’s honest, but restrained, revelations about himself.  He is candid about his past drug use, without either glamorizing or particularly regretting it.  He mentions, almost as an aside, that he knows what it feels like to sit on a blanket on the sidewalk in New York, with the snow falling, selling his books and records for drug money.  He tells just enough stories about other people’s quickies in the storeroom to make you think he has had his share of blowjobs from cute hostesses, but never suggests, much less says, whether he has sampled more than the food while on the job. 

   Bourdain also is able to explain why he thrives in the disciplined chaos of the professional kitchen, and why he is good at what he does – both the cooking and the commanding of the “pirate crew” that works for him – but also what ultimately separates the truly great chefs from him.  He is both proud of what he does and comfortable with his own limitations.  Not a bad way to be.

   If you haven’t read it yet, read this book.  It’s funny, raunchy, insightful, and makes you only want to eat really good food, wherever it is, drink lots, have good friends, sleep less, and screw.

Consider the lobster

   The lobsters, cold and squirming, go head-first into the big pot of boiling water on the stove.  Twenty minutes later, hot and red, the shells are broken open with knives and nutcrackers and our bare hands.  We pull out chunks of white and pink meat from the body cavity and the legs and the preposterous claws, savoring especially the green liver that we find in the bellies and, if you are especially lucky, the chunks of bright red roe. 

   Which lead me to this hypothesis:  If you take a food that otherwise would be considered bizarre, like a bug, and just find one that is big enough, like a lobster, the bizarre part somehow disappears.  You have to break the lobster down and eat it like meat, and so it seems like meat and not a bug.  Indeed, it is a delicacy.

   Rodents are the same way.  Nobody -- at least nobody around here -- wants to eat a mouse or a rat.  But by the time you get to something as big as a rabbit, and certainly venison, it becomes not merely edible but a gourmet food.

   Not a great hypothesis, perhaps, but I stand by it nonetheless.  

My old shoes

   A woman with whom I work says, "Anybody can look decent in a suit.  But you can tell a lot by looking at someone's shoes.  Whether they really care, really pay attention to detail.  You know."

   So these are my old shoes, which I have been wearing to the office -- not with suits, but on "business casual" days -- for many years.  I would have worn them for a while longer, but the sole on the right one was starting to split on the side. 

   Are these the shoes of someone who doesn't care, someone who doesn't pay attention to detail?  Or maybe someone who likes to get the most out of something.  Someone who doesn't like to shop, especially for himself.  Someone who likes making a nice meal out of some leftovers.  Someone more inclined to daydream than to worry too much about his shoes.  

Thai Jarearn Express

   I am, if nothing else, a man of simple pleasures.  Witness the spicy bowl of udon noodle soup (on the menu, it comes off as spicy "uduong" soup) at Thai Jarearn Express on College Street in Lewiston on a cold sunny day in January. The chunks of chicken are tough.  The carrot slices and few bits of broccoli are irrelevant.  But the noodles are pleasingly al dente, not overcooked and mushy.  And the hot, spicy red broth -- well, that's what it's all about.  

For the first few bites, it is overwhelmingly spicy.  But I forge ahead and it starts to taste better, maybe I'm numbing to it a bit.  And then, maybe a third of the way into it, I pass some sort of barrier, like a runner whose muscles start releasing the right chemicals, and the flavors become blissful.  The heat is there, but now sitting lightly atop some deeper range of flavor.  The undertones seem, to my untrained palate, to taste of peanuts.   I slurp away on the broth, plucking out the noodles with my chopsticks, warming from the inside out, feeling the lightest sweat break out on the top of my head.  I can't get enough of it.  Happy and warm, smiling like a child with a new toy.  

Megan laughs and takes my picture.  

I'll be back.

More good. Less pretty.

   One way to take better pictures is to stop trying to take pretty ones.  Stop looking for the aesthetic shot, and start looking for the one that tells a story.  Or the one that just captures the moment.  Like this one, taken with my first Canon Powershot, right after Megan's high school gymnastics team won the divisional meet at Needham.  As a matter of technique and equipment, it's awful.  But it's a favorite of mine.  It captures a bit of the emotion, the delirium, that exploded when the meet results were announced, with teammates and family mobbing each other, seeking each other out, some in tears.  That the team logo on the sweatshirt at left came out so well is a bonus.  It's this sort of thing, not the athlete in action that I'm always trying to capture, that makes a good sport pic.  

Trophy

   A Sunday afternoon in January.  You take your daughter to volleyball, shop for groceries, read a good chunk of the Sunday Times instead of watching sports on TV, roast several pans of vegetables for the week, and decide, at about 3 pm, that while none of this may get you in the Husband Hall of Fame, a small trophy just might be in order.   

Magic cold

   It's cold here, finally -- low 20s, with a wind chill around 5 degrees.  But not amazing cold, stunning cold, like it seemed to get every winter when I was a boy in Vermont.  Like 20 below.  That's when you learn it's all about the wind.  There would be days when it was well below zero, but still, and when the mailman had come and put whatever was in the box across the street, you could run over without your coat on and grab the mail and run back and feel the deeply cold, dry air, but not be hurt by it at all.  It was like running your finger back and forth through a candle flame and not getting burned.  Like a little bit of magic that you did.