Fresh orange juice

From my mom-mom's 1950's juicer (that would be the fanged thing on the left). Oh, so sweet and tangy! Would that we were in Jersey.

Ina's Berry Pavlova

I love raspberries. When Weshop inexplicably stocked them last week I scooped up a half-pint of them. I thought I would try out my new 4-inch tart pans with them, but then I saw this recipe on Barefoot Contessa, Ina Garten's Food Network show, today.


A Pavlova is a meringue with whipped cream and fruit on top. It's named after the famous Russian ballet dancer, Anna Pavlova - probably after she visited the Southern Hemisphere on her world tour in the 1930's. Both New Zealand and Australia take credit for the dessert. Ina Garten says it was inspired by her tutu. All I know is it's deadly. The meringue is baked slowly at a low temperature so that the inside is perfectly light and fluffy - not as hard as most meringues. In fact, it's very light while you're eating it, but then you realize you've just downed a lot of eggs, sugar and heavy cream. Ha! Here it is before I baked it:


And then you add fresh whipped cream and berries you have made a sauce of, and it looks something like this, a deflated blimp:


Especially if you put it back in the oven after it's cooled and you don't have time to cool it again and the whipped cream melts and the berries look lurid and red, but it's all okay because it's just you and your parents and they love nearly everything you make and it's been that way since you smeared paint on paper (or the carpet, the kitchen table, etc.) for the first time. A far cry from these French beauties I once spotted in Provence.

Sigh. If you're interested in making the Pavlova, however, I'll refer you to the Food Network site itself for the real deal. You'll note their picture is also pretty messy. Phew. Click here.

Turkish delight

A windy day in the city. Two people sit in the window on the corner of Second Avenue and 74th Street, the sunlight reflecting off a neighboring tower and onto the table in front of them. The restaurant is A La Turka, and the table is covered in an easy sprawl of what has become finger food. Hands are dripping the oils of eggplant and olives, weaving in-between tall glasses of ice water and occasionally smearing each other with yogurt dip, at which laughter, as hazy as the afternoon light, wells over onto the plates below.


That's right! This girl finally got off campus and planed, trained, and automobiled down to the city for the weekend with her boy. We ate very well. Breakfast at the Whitney before the biennial. A two buck slice of pizza. A Spanish meal with the family in the Village. And then, then we ducked into an alluring red restaurant, called A La Turka, for lunch on Sunday afternoon. We paid 18 dollars for a mixed appetizer plate and 8 for grilled calamari. Each tiny Turkish coffee was 4 dollars. Thank God we weren't paying in euros, although something tells me this would be cheaper in Turkey than on the Upper East Side. That said, it was totally delicious.

We got the appetizer plate so we could try a little of everything. Humus, char-grilled eggplant salad, spinach tarator, cacik, tarama salatasi, eggplant with tomato sauce - all swept up with a tortilla-like flatbread. The only thing I wasn't crazy about was the tarama salatasi, a spread with red caviar, lemon and olive oil. It was too fishy a flavor for me, and by comparison the grilled calamari were fleshy and buttery, with so delicate a flavor of lemon.

And the Turkish coffee? It reminded me of drinking an espresso in Florence before morning classes at culinary school. I don't drink coffee, so I can't really say more about it than this: I liked it, and I don't drink coffee. I highly recommend the place.


A La Turka
1417 2nd Avenue
New York, NY 10021
(212) 744-2424