fall food in summertime

It's always disconcerting to go grocery shopping in late August and see that the entire front of the store is filled with ripened pumpkins and butternut squash. Surely those things shouldn't be ready until after Labor Day, at the earliest. We're talking about common decency here, and keeping fall things in their proper season, which is fall, which has no business starting in August. (Though last night's horrible weather at the Museumsufer Fest felt like a jump straight back into mid-winter; clearly Frankfurt has no sense of weather decency.)

And yet here I am contributing to this late August indecency, because I bought myself a butternut squash at the end of last week. For shame. I spent a while wondering Friday what I was going to do with it until finally stumbling on a recipe I'd seen before, on both Smitten Kitchen and Orangette, no less, which is pretty much the closest thing a recipe gets to an official stamp of "this is going to be delicious."

Warm Butternut and Chickpea Salad with Tahini Dressing
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen, who adapted it from Orangette, who adapted it from Casa Moro

Yield: four servings (more like two servings as a main dish, four as a side)

For salad:
1 medium butternut squash (about 2 to 2 1/2 pounds), peeled, seeded, and cut into 1 1/2-inch pieces
1 medium garlic clove, minced or pressed
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt
One 15-ounce can chickpeas, drained and rinsed (1 1/2 cups)
1/4 of a medium red onion, finely chopped (I don't love red onion and so used white onion instead)
1/4 cup coarsely chopped fresh cilantro or parsley (I went with parsley)

For tahini dressing:
1 medium garlic clove
1/4 cup lemon juice
3 tablespoons well-stirred tahini
2 tablespoons water
2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more to taste
sea salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 220°C/425°F.

In a large bowl, combine the butternut squash, garlic, olive oil, and a few pinches of salt. Toss the squash pieces until evenly coated. Roast them on a baking sheet for 25 minutes, or until soft (25 minutes was just right for me and my mini-oven). Remove from the oven and let cool a little.

Meanwhile, make the tahini dressing: In a small bowl, whisk together the garlic and lemon juice. Add the tahini, and whisk to blend. Add the water and olive oil, whisk well, and taste for seasoning, adding salt and pepper if you want. The sauce should have plenty of nutty tahini flavor, but also a little kick of lemon. I added a little bit of extra olive oil and water to balance things out, and a few cracks of pepper and sea salt.

To assemble the salad, combine the squash, chickpeas, onion, and cilantro or parsley in a mixing bowl. Add about a third of the tahini dressing to taste, and toss carefully, and serve with remaining dressing on the side.

I stored the leftover dressing separately from the salad and added it to taste just before eating. You can warm the leftovers back up in the microwave before dressing and eating, or so I hear; having no microwave, I can only vouch for the fact that the leftovers are also quite tasty left cold.

hurrah

I'm hoping this wasn't the last hot beautiful weekend, but if it was, it was a good one. Aperol spritzes and a rooftop BBQ, a long bike ride along the Main, two lakes*, one pool**, train rides, homemade Pfifferlinge salad, the most dangerous brownies (with sea salt on top), and a full afternoon spent reading my guidebook in preparation for Ann's visit (two weeks from Friday!) and plotting all of the things I still want to do in Germany. It's a good thing I don't have anything in the way of a departure date from Frankfurt yet, because I am in no way ready to be done with this country.

*Lake 1: Grüner See in Dietesheim, which a lot of Germans rate quite highly, but Megan and I found the algae a little off-putting, and I was cowed by the signs proclaiming swimming to be illegal (though apparently no one enforces this. Lake 2: Strandbad Spessartblick on See Freigericht-West in Großkrotzenburg, which was a seven-minute train ride from Hanau and was my favorite FFM-area lake yet. There's not much a view of the Spessart hills from the lake itself, but you can see the Spessart in the background a little bit as you approach, and the lake itself is lovely.
**Freibad Eschersheim was a delightful relief on Saturday after Megan and I gave up on trying to reach Strandbad Spessartblick by bicycle and decided we were not really interested in swimming in Grüner See.

sweet, soft & lazy

I spent this past weekend visiting Mandie, who just moved to Hannover to do an eleven-month business school program. We spent Saturday eating large German breakfast, visiting Maschseefest (a city festival on the lake, featuring a mini regatta and introducing us to the possibility of renting a paddleboat in the shape of a VW Bug), and walking all over the entire city. Our feet hurt intensely on Sunday, so it's a good thing it was cold and pouring rain and we could spend the day huddling indoors and watching a movie that turned out to have been partially set on Sylt ("I recognize this place!!" I hollered at the screen at one point). We finally emerged in the late afternoon to eat at Mister Q's, which claims to be "a culinary trip around the world", and is something of a trip, all right: think a German version of Applebee's with vaguely Asian decor and the added bonus that what you think you're ordering will not necessarily be what shows up on your plate. Empanadas and fried calamari strips are totally the same thing. Mister Q's: where ordering is always an adventure! Just not necessarily a good one.

summer goal: complete

I only had one official goal for summer 2010 in Germany: find an outdoor place in the Frankfurt area in which one may swim and that is reachable by public transportation, and swim in it. It might seem like I was setting my standards low, but this is not the case -- fulfilling all of those requirements was a surprisingly difficult task, requiring many rounds of questioning locals. As far as I can tell, the entire idea of "it is summertime, so let us go somewhere outside where there is cool, refreshing water, and submerse ourselves in it!" is a foreign notion for the immediate Frankfurt area.

But I persevered in my quest, and so on Saturday Megan, Lucy, and I went to Langener Waldsee, just to the south of Frankfurt, which is a former gravel quarry turned lake, and is fantastic and beautiful and bizarre. Where else in the world can you see, all at once, a beach, a nude beach, a yacht club, gravel quarry equipment, and planes taking off and landing at an international airport? Re: the nude beach, we'd been aware that Langener Waldsee had an FKK area (FKK = free body culture = clothing decidedly optional) but we hadn't realized that said FKK area would be separated from the regular beach by nothing but a flimsy little fence. See the sandy area in the picture above? That's the normal beach. See the grassy area just around the curve of the lake? That's the nude beach. Constant entertainment! Every time we looked across the way, we'd find something new to stare at: nudists sunning themselves on the wooden bathing platforms in the middle of the lake, for instance, or wearing nothing but hats and flip-flops to walk to the bathroom. Thanks, greater Frankfurt area. Stay weird.

summertime and german pie

Tonight is cool and rainy and fairly miserable, but these are some of the things that have been good about Frankfurt lately:

Balcony brunch that ended with raspberry brown sugar gratin (Greek yogurt, half the brown sugar, mixed with blackberries -- perfection). Writing while sipping Eiskaffee on the Freßgass, on days that sent me running for the shade. (Re-)breaking in Katherine's pie plate (best part of today, and sure to be an excellent part of tomorrow, too). Sipping a mojito on the roof at Deck 8, with my feet in a wading pool and the skyline all around. Lounging by the Main on a lazy Sunday, with the hopes of more such summer days to come.

the trip down south

Last summer was a little bit magical in that I had a stretch of ten weekends in a row in Stone Harbor, starting the weekend after the Fourth of July and continuing well into September. Somehow, every one of those weekends, Friday would roll around and there wouldn't be a single thing that I needed to stay (too) late for or that required weekend work. And so I'd ride the A train up to Port Authority and then catch the late-evening NJ Transit bus number 319 down the Garden State Parkway, first to Toms River and then to Atlantic City (a city that's best from a distance, a horizon mirage from Stone Harbor or bright lights over marshlands, curving in on the expressway). South of Atlantic City, the bus winds along island roads, stopping in Ocean City and Sea Isle City before crossing the rusted, impossibly narrow bridge over Townsends Inlet and onto Seven Mile Island, where I'd get off at the corner of my street in the middle of the night and walk toward the wet-salt smell of the ocean.

I spent every Friday night for ten straight weeks on a bus last year, but here's a secret: I love that ride. Both going and coming, I love the looping entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, how it circles the Weehawken football stadium like a snake and rises up to reveal the Manhattan skyline from afar. I love the flat wide expanse of the Garden State, the views of suburbia down the roads that intersect with it, and the moments when the constant trees give way to water and bloody orange sunsets. I love cutting between the Garden State and the islands on causeways, water and marshland and houses on stilts, roadside diners and seafood stores. And at the end of the ride, the payoff: Stone Harbor, a weekend or longer on the shore. It can't be beat.

en why see

Oh, New York. This was the first time I'd been back since moving to Frankfurt, and I was a little bit worried that it would have changed, or (more likely) that I would have changed, that the fact that I like Frankfurt now would have lessened my love for New York in some way, as if there were only a certain amount of city love to be doled out from the pot. Ridiculous. On its own merits, NYC is still pretty much uncontested for my favorite city, and there are some other undeniable advantages to living there, proximity to Stone Harbor and therefore my family being chief among them. I'm immensely, ridiculously lucky to be living in Europe right now, but I'm certainly keeping New York in the back of my mind.

Having said that, New York is easiest to love when you have unlimited free time and unlimited money (the combination that is almost certain never to exist when you actually live there). For the days that I was there, I shopped and ate and hung out with some of my very favorite people. I went to Amanda's house for the Super Awesome Fun BBQ of Pan-Asian Delights, which was exactly as advertised! (I was the one who came up with the name, but Amanda and her family made it happen.) I spent a rainy afternoon at my favorite coffee shop in New York, 71 Irving Place. I gorged on guacamole and an it's-five-o'clock-right-freaking-here margarita at Dos Caminos SoHo, and inhaled three tacos at Pinche Taqueria as Frida Kahlo and her ever-elegant unibrow looked on. Most excellent of all, Amanda and I waited for Shakespeare in the Park tickets in Central Park on an unbelievably perfect morning, sipping iced coffee and gnawing on an H&H bagel and listening to a man play the Star Wars theme song on his flute as a parade of uptown dogs and their owners strolled past -- a uniquely New York morning in all possible ways.

We feared rain that evening -- if it rains, that night's show is canceled, and there are no rain dates -- but the weather held, and so we got to watch the bizarreness that is The Winter's Tale. Though long, it was a surprisingly entertaining show, and we were amused to note that the humor of mooning an audience is timeless.

baseball, ray.

When I was little, the rule was that once you arrived in Stone Harbor, you did your absolute best to stay on Seven Mile Island for as long as possible, uninterrupted. Trips to the ACME in Cape May Court House were allowed, but only because food was wildly overpriced at the grocery stores on the island; beyond that, leaving the island for any reason, even to go for lobster at Carmen's in Sea Isle City, was to be done only with great reluctance or, ideally, not at all. In recent years, starting around the time when my brothers and I could drive, and increasing dramatically once I started taking the bus to and from New York, we've begun to explore the area more, from going for high tea at the Carriage House in Cape May to visiting Lucy the Elephant in Margate, but before that we kept to Seven Mile Island, and the southern three miles of it only, at that.

But there's always been one exception to the park-your-car-in-Stone-Harbor-and-do-not-move-it rule: the yearly pilgrimage to Philadelphia for a Phillies game. In spite of spending all my summers an hour and fifteen minutes from Philadelphia, I've been to Center City on exactly two occasions; but I've been just over the Walt Whitman Bridge to Citizens Bank Park and, before it, Veterans Stadium most every summer for as long as I can remember. We'd leave the beach early and drive to Philly for an early dinner, first at Medora's and now, in recent years, at Chickie's & Pete's, a sports bar/restaurant chain whose crab fries (crinkle-cut, spiced with Old Bay, and served with molten cheese for dipping) are so good that, when an acquaintance and I discussed them at Frankfurt's Christmas market last year, we nearly cried for the fact that we couldn't have them right that moment.

And then there's the game itself. I'd long looked forward to the first time I'd be over 21 at a Phillies game (and had not been at a Phillies game since I was 20) but the night was too hot to drink anything but water. No matter: we shared lemon water ice and bottled water and, stuck to the plastic of our seats, watched the Phillies royally stink against the Atlanta Braves all the way into extra innings.

true vacation

I recently spent two weeks in two of my favorite places in the world: New York City and Stone Harbor, New Jersey. I was in Stone Harbor for the Fourth of July and for my 24th birthday, on the tenth, bookended by a few days in New York. Stone Harbor was excellent. There was the usual Fourth of July barbeque at McGucks', with bonus bay swimming; three days of hanging out with Amanda; a truly awesome 15-mile bike ride with Dad to the Wildwood boardwalk and back; beach days that continued until eight at night, because it was just that beautiful out, and the usual five p.m. Stone Harbor breeze switch didn't occur to chase us off the beach, shivering; Backbays crabcakes and Henny's chowder from the new take-out location and Springer's ice cream; all the classics and more. As Bethany said, being in Stone Harbor is like being at home and being on vacation all at once -- perfection.