New Year's sushi: a new tradition

My kids and I decided to start a new tradition this year: New Year’s sushi. It was my son’s idea (he will pretty much come up with whatever excuse is necessary to talk me in to making sushi), but he didn’t have to do much persuading.

To put it bluntly, this year was a bit of a stinker. There were some wonderful moments, but there is no pussy-footing around the fact that if I could toss a year back for a do-over this one would be a contender.

And yet, on this last day of the year, I found myself laughing. Scrubbing my house for six hours, chasing the twins as they streaked up the stairs with underwear over their heads (they were pretending to be Cyclops), watching the snow fall and then fall some more. And somehow it all finally felt OK. Like things were shifting, settling. Maybe it was the snow forcing a quiet peace. I don’t know, but I can tell you that deep down inside things just felt right for the first time in a long, long while.

So we made sushi. Not at all weather-appropriate, but it matched our cheer.

I love spicy tuna. My friend, Mrs. Kim, taught me to make the sauce.

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Four Seasons Natural Foods Cafe, Saratoga Springs, NY

Here is a link to my review of Four Seasons in the Albany Times Union.

Many thanks to Mary D. and her extended family for getting me this picture so I could put up the link.

Talk of pizza and homemade pizza dough

So a sad, Jewish lady walks in to a bar….

Yeah, that was me. And the bar was in, of all places, Albany, California. Like there is something about places called Albany, and how I have to find them when all else goes to hell.

Yes, I am here in California, which is why Celinabean has been a bit too quiet for the last few weeks. I wish I could say that I was taking long walks on the beach and otherwise pretending to be a personal ad, but I’m out here to deal with a family emergency. I’m not ready to write about it yet, I’m pretty much just trying to get through the day, but, for the sake of this story, let’s just accept the fact I was one sorry sucker walking into the bar last night.

This being me and all, the bar was a sushi bar, and that is yet another story. I promise to tell you all about it soon because really the place is part of how I survived my trip out here. But for now I am trying, in the middle of all this mess and confusion, to work my way into a story about pizza. So here it goes.

Where was I, oh yes, sad lady walks in to a bar.

And soon I had a bowl of udon in front of me and a row of regulars asking me questions and pouring me drinks. The guy next to me, Aaron, finds out that I am from New York and immediately launches in to the one sure conversation starter when talking to a New Yorker: pizza. And like everyone else I’ve ever met, Aaron has his own vision of the perfect pie, which he described for me down to the last misty-eyed detail. Thin crust, wood-fired, charred bits, and on and on.

In the restaurant review side of my life, I’ve been writing a lot about pizza recently. And that got me thinking about my own vision of pizza perfection. It can be summed up pretty quick: crust. Yes, yes, sauce matters and too much goopy cheese can be a bummer and so and so forth. But, for me, perfection is found and lost in the mix of yeast and flour and air. It is that yin-yang balance between crisp and pillowy, between chew and empty pockets of warmth, between thick and thin. And because in Albany (New York, that is) it is possible to find bright and lively sauce, and wonderful toppings, and pizza made with heart, but it is not possible to find a crust that would bring a pizza anything close to perfection, about a month ago, I decided to quit my belly-aching and learn to make my own.

There was one major problem with this. Yeast and I don’t get along.

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