Eat the Sunchoke

We had nearly given up hope. This winter, like the winter before, and the winter before that, has moved us all one tiny step closer to packing up and moving to Los Angeles. (Unfortunately, the distance between us and that move merely splits in half every year; we get closer, but we will never actually leave our garbage ice city.) But the sun is beginning to shine. We have swapped our winter coats for spring coats. We look confusedly at our windows and remember they open, and that it is a nice thing to open them. We start to believe that we will survive, yet again. And yet: There is nothing to eat. March blows.

The entire period between late February and mid-April is the worst time of the year, culinarily speaking. The hardiest members of the squash and brassica families, among them winter squash and Brussels sprouts, have given up; they were harvested months ago and are now stale and dry. Citrus season, those cheerful few months in the middle of winter in which we all eat between two and six clementines per day, is waning — grapefruit and some tangerine varieties are still pretty good, but even they are starting to yield to the melting of the frost. Anyone who tells you that classic spring vegetables like asparagus and peas are available in March either lives in a place that doesn’t have winter or is a god damn liar.

But there is one vegetable that thrives in this terribly confusing frost/melt/frost/melt weather: the sunchoke. And it’s actually pretty good! The sunchoke is also known as the Jerusalem artichoke, which is a bad name for two reasons: It is not an artichoke, and it is not native to, nor can it even be grown in, Jerusalem. It is in fact the tuber — so, technically, not a vegetable, but I think I can stop issuing caveats like this to prove that I know the difference, because you know I know — of a variety of sunflower, and it is native to North America, where it is more specifically endemic to the northeast. It was a fairly important crop for the American Indians of the region, and when Europeans came over, they found it, alternately, either very tasty (the French) or fit for livestock (the English, predictably).

The name “Jerusalem artichoke” comes from the Italian word for sunflower, girasole, and for the fact that the French explorer Samuel de Champlain, who was the first to export the sunchoke to Europe, thought they tasted a bit like artichokes. (Probably.) Thanks to the French, who very much love the vegetable, the sunchoke became very popular in Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But, because it’s one of, like, two things that grows in the early springtime in northeastern North America, it developed a reputation as a poor man’s food by the middle of the nineteenth century. It languished there, uncool for the wealthy, for another hundred years, until the name “sunchoke” was given to it in the nineteen sixties by Los Angeles food wholesaler Frieda Caplan, who was trying to come up with a more appealing name. It’s an okay name, I think!

Sunchokes are best in February and March; for some reason, they taste best when harvested immediately after a frost, which you can really only do in the springtime, when the temperature is fickle enough that the day after a frost might be warm enough to dig up some tubers. They look mostly like young ginger: knobbly, pale tubers, rarely bigger than a golf ball, with a thin beige skin. I like them because they’re a multipurpose food. Unlike potatoes, to which they are often compared, you can (and should!) eat them raw, but they also roast and mash well. And they’re healthier than potatoes, with high levels of potassium and iron.

To shop for sunchokes, opt for the smaller ones, which tend to be sweeter and more flavorful. Avoid any that look, like, wrinkled, or soft, or any that have that greenish tint tubers sometimes get. Like potatoes and most other root vegetables, you can and should eat the skin. Don’t bother peeling it; it is thin and won’t notably impact the flavor of your final dish (though it may turn purees slightly greyish).

Escarole and Sunchoke Salad

Shopping list: escarole, sunchokes, almonds, olive oil, lemon juice, shallots, honey, ricotta salata

This is a super easy salad I have stolen basically intact from the New York restaurant Otto. First things first: make the dressing. Finely mince a shallot, put it in a container, and cover it with lemon juice — and god help you if you use that shelf-stable lemon juice in the plastic bottle. Let that sit while you do the rest of the prep.

Any bitter green will work for this salad; frisee would be fine, as would watercress or endive or chicory. Take your head of escarole (or whatever), slice off the root and discard, then slice width-wise into pieces no more than an inch or so across. Wash thoroughly (often escarole has dirt in it) and dry. Wash sunchokes and slice thinly into rounds. Otto peels them first; I do not, and nor should you. Nor should Otto, really, but they invented the salad so they can do whatever they want, I guess. A mandoline would be best for this, although sunchokes are easy to slice with a knife as well. Put in a bowl with water and a little lemon juice if they’re going to be sitting out for any length of time; they’ll brown, like potatoes or apples. If not, throw them in a big bowl with the escarole. Chop a handful of almonds and add those too. Crumble a whole mess of ricotta salata (or feta, or, I guess, parmesan, though it won’t be as good) over the top.

Mix in olive oil with your lemon juice and shallot mixture in a ratio of about 1:1, then add a small squeeze of honey and shake thoroughly. Pour over salad and toss thoroughly, adding salt and pepper to taste.

Sunchoke Soup With Hazelnut Gremolata

Shopping list: sunchokes, chicken stock, garlic, onion, olive oil, vegetable oil, smoked paprika (sometimes labeled pimenton), thyme, parsley, lemon, hazelnuts

In your tiniest saucepan, heat up a few tablespoons of vegetable oil and add in a pinch or two of smoked paprika and a sprig of thyme. Heat over medium heat for about five minutes, then remove the thyme and keep the oil. Put the hazelnuts — you should buy pre-peeled hazelnuts, since peeling them is horrible — in an oven of some kind at about 400 degrees for ten minutes, checking frequently, until aromatic and golden but not burnt.

This is pretty much the most basic pureed soup recipe there is; you can replace the sunchokes with any variety of root vegetables and end up with a nice soup. But today is sunchoke day, so: In a Dutch oven or soup pot, saute chopped garlic and onion in olive oil until translucent. Wash sunchokes and chop into small pieces, then throw into the pot. Stir around for awhile until sunchokes have a little color, maybe ten minutes. Add in chicken stock just about to the level of the sunchokes, cover, and raise heat to a simmer. Cook until the sunchokes are soft enough to piece easily with a fork, then stick in your immersion blender and blitz until smooth (a food processor or blender will work but be awkward and create more dishes). When you think it’s done, blend it some more, and season to taste with salt and pepper.

Make your gremolata: Chop hazelnuts into very small pieces. Using a microplane, grate fresh, raw garlic, no more than a clove, into a pile. Get about twice as much lemon zest as garlic. Chop a whole bunch of parsley and combine all this stuff together.

To serve, ladle the soup into a bowl. Place a heaping pinch of gremolata in the middle, then drizzle the smoked paprika oil around it in a circle.

Fuck It, Just Roast Them

Shopping list: sunchokes, olive oil, onion, garlic, thyme

This is the laziest recipe. There are plenty of ways to make roasted sunchokes, or roasted anything, much more complicated: you could par-cook by boiling or steaming; you could brown in butter on the stovetop first; you could roll in a seasoned flour mixture; or you could roil them around in an ultrasonic bath to create minute peaks and valleys for a crispier texture. But you don’t really need to.

Pre-heat oven to 380 degrees. Wash sunchokes and chop into chunks maybe an inch on each side. Throw in a big bowl. Slice onions in half through the root and then thinly width-wise, giving you single half-moons. Chop garlic into a few pieces per clove, and throw garlic and onions into the sunchoke bowl. Throw in a few sprigs of thyme or a hefty sprinkling of dried thyme. Pour oil in bowl, mix up until well coated, then pour onto a baking tray. Space them out so they’re not touching; if they’re touching, do two rounds. Do not overcrowd the tray. Roast until a knife pierces through the sunchoke without resistance. Eat with salt.

I can tell when winter is almost over because I have totally forgotten any other state of being; can you remember wearing shorts? Or sitting on the ground for fun? I cannot, which means it must almost be time to do that again. Another way to tell that winter is almost over is that I legit got excited this week about sunchokes. I mean, they’re pretty good! But like, remember peaches? When is summer ag —

Photo by Walter Parenteau

“Ad-Rock and Num Pang Share a Recipe for Their New, Charitable Banh Mi”

“U.S. authorities are considering imposing tougher restrictions in Arkansas to contain a virulent strain of avian flu in the heart of America’s poultry region in a bid to minimize international trade disruptions and contain the virus. The H5N2 flu discovered in Arkansas last week is the state’s first case of a strain that causes massive internal hemorrhaging in poultry, can kill nearly every bird in an infected flock within 48 hours, and is prone to mutate. Such strains are sometimes called ‘chicken Ebola.’”

“What accounts for our fascination with Cuba? It is not the tropical Havana nights, or the shows at the Tropicana that truly capture the American imagination. It is Cuba’s economy that is the most stunning thing the nation has to offer. It is the way things are set up. Far more novel than all of the well-preserved 1950s cars driving around are the mansions that are full of poor people. Far more novel than the fact that Havana has old buildings is the fact that few of them have been bulldozed to make way for new buildings. Cuba is socialism, real socialism, on display, a short flight from the decadent Miami malls.” — An American visits Cuba in 2015.

August:

“You’re waiting on your job to control your life,” she said, with the scheduling software used by her employer dictating everything from “how much sleep Gavin will get to what groceries I’ll be able to buy this month.”

Last month, she was scheduled to work until 11 p.m. on Friday, July 4; report again just hours later, at 4 a.m. on Saturday; and start again at 5 a.m. on Sunday. She braced herself to ask her aunt, Karina Rivera, to watch Gavin, hoping she would not explode in annoyance, or worse, refuse. She vowed to somehow practice for the driving test that she had promised her boyfriend she would pass by the previous month. To stay awake, she would formulate her own behind-the-counter coffee concoctions, pumping in extra shots of espresso.

March:

Starbucks published a full page ad in the New York Times on Sunday — a stark, black, page with a tiny caption “Shall We Overcome?” in the middle, and the words “RaceTogether” with the company logo, on the bottom right. The ad, along with a similar one on Monday in USA Today, is part of an initiative launched this week by the coffee store chain to stimulate conversation and debate about the race in America by getting employees to engage with customers about the perennially hot button subject.

★ Softly lumpy clouds — distinctly and individually rounded, but packed together solid — darkened the morning and midday. The wind made guttural noises against the building. Suddenly and briefly after lunch, blue spaces opened among the drifting white and gray masses and the sun came through. Then the blue closed up again, before the three-year-old could finally be gotten out the door with his scooter. Dark fissured ice still clung to the parking spaces on 70th Street, in the shelter of cars, and more ice lay along the fence between the outer playground and the inner concrete schoolyard. A girl in pink earmuffs and pink-wheeled old-fashioned roller skates gingerly walk-rolled over the pavement. Children and parents practiced soccer and then gave up and went away; more children and parents arrived and tried playing catch. The wind was nagging, unforgiving of the decision to try a t-shirt under the heavy wool coat. The turnout on the playground stayed sparse, though not sparse enough to keep the three-year-old’s scooter path from converging with an older girl’s wobbling progress on a pivot-centered skateboard, in a sideswipe that sent both tumbling. By departure time, his old tan corduroys were speckled up past the knees with sooty flecks of meltwater. The clouds kept looking dramatic; faint colors seethed in the indentations between them toward sunset. All they brought to the world below them, though, was odious toil.

“Early on in A Complicated Life, Johnny Rogan quotes Marianne Faithfull: ‘The Kinks were very gothic. Creepy and silent. They never spoke. They were uptight and fearful of everyone. Underneath there was all this weird dysfunctional family stuff going on.’ Great quote. The trouble is, it manages to say more in a few lines than Rogan manages in 750-plus pages. In the absence of any obvious psychological acuity, Rogan interviews an apparently endless supply of people who testify to what a horror show it was dealing (separately) with Ray or Dave, or with Dave and Ray together. I don’t think I’ve ever read a biography in which such a gap emerged between the public image of a beloved entertainer (and the affection it is generally guaranteed), and how much they were privately loathed by anyone who ever had to work with them. If the book’s testimony is to be believed, it seems that no one who ever worked with Ray has a good word to say about him. The nearest we get to anything like a tender emotion would be the strained sort of pity people feel for Dave because he’s had to put up with even more of Ray’s awful behaviour than they have. But then it turns out they don’t have anything better to say about Dave.”
 — This is one of those great reviews that obviates any need to read the book in question, if that were even something one might be inclined to do. Anyway, if you’ve never heard of The Kinks, they were like your grandparents’ version of Oasis, and if you’ve never heard of Oasis ask your parents, they’ll probably remember.

by Matthew J.X. Malady

People drop things on the Internet and run all the time. So we have to ask. In this edition, BuzzFeed Beauty Editor Arabelle Sicardi tells us more about having very creative fans on the Internet.

oh my god pic.twitter.com/vYuwAYRXIp

— Arabelle Sicardi (@arabellesicardi) March 3, 2015

Arabelle! So what happened here?

The short story is that someone wrote a really lovely and…florid fan fiction about selfies I posted on tumblr. The longer story is that I have a really dedicated and absurdly lovely following that totally pampers me in ways I think is quite rare in online writing communities, particularly in a feminist space, which is what I occupy? My Tumblr followers are really loyal and dedicated in ways that boggle my mind. I’ve gotten really sweet fan letters and fan art, people have bought lipstick on my recommendation and sent me selfies wearing it (the highest compliment they can give to me, truly), translated passages from books they thought I would enjoy. It’s really lovely. I print out every piece of fan art I get. Someone did their senior thesis based on my Tumblr and gave me a copy. That was surreal. That’s all the good stuff.

I’ve had legitimate stalkers who have found out where I live (or lived, I’ve since moved) and have left me letters and magazines and, I guess, offerings. And I’ve had people try to bribe me to unblock them after they’ve weirded me out, too. I guess it’s the Internet version of getting recognized in the street? That happens too, but this was just a really lovely fan fiction, totally harmless. I thought the line about whales was great. I don’t know what compels people to spend so much time on Internet strangers such as myself. I go through the tags of people who have reblogged me sometimes and I don’t think they realize I am also an actual breathing human person who poops. Like, I’m not real to people. They think I’m my Internet presence, and not that I am a person that happens to use tumblr. Not a person, an idea. They think of me as like…well, worthy of fan fiction, I suppose. Which is both terrifying and fantastic in equal measure. I’ve truly become a cyborg.

That fan fiction piece is pretty heavy stuff! Could you take a shot at unpacking some of the themes that show up in there, and perhaps discuss the ways in which it may or may not relate to your selfies?

Sure. It’s a myth about gods and scars and bodies and ascension and death, because those are things I talk about and explore on my personal blog a lot. I have categories of research that I document publicly outside my “published work”: gods, monsters, mortality, skin, and bodies are all things I discuss every day, so it’s no surprise to see it in a fiction about me. I am fascinated with monsters and how we articulate ourselves through fantasies and nightmares. I write — and point out — the patterns between gods and the traumatics of being a woman (and inevitably of) being a monster under patriarchal conditions — a lot. So a fiction about me that talks about that kind of stuff seems pretty on point. Beauty is terror, and gods are not good. I’m what my friend calls a closet Catholic…I don’t believe, but I want to, and I still totally have that Catholic shame in me that I love to pervert and dismantle and discuss. I love talking about bodies, and shame, gods and gory human mechanics of being. Bodies are totally gross but also divine, the things we’re capable of doing and feeling, how can there not be something more? It’s nice to think about. Beauty is super erotic to me, gods are super erotic, everything is so deliciously visceral and ripe to explore and corrupt and pull apart in new ways. This fiction, I guess, is a morally ambiguous fantasy where the dark spaces are infinitely more interesting to explore than the stuff illuminated by goodness and what is obviously right. How flattering that it was based on me. I guess my selfies show that I am not really interested in being good or nice? I don’t know. I never smile in them, or I do tend to look wicked. Wickedness is very me. I want to be Gabriel, the Tilda Swinton kind.

Lesson learned (if any)?

Sometimes I’m like “No one will ever love me,” but there are people that literally write fan fiction based on my photos, so I’m sure I’ll find someone to make out with eventually. I remain optimistic? Ha.

Just one more thing.

Photo by NMCIL

Join the Tell Us More Street Team today! Have you spotted a tweet or some other web thing that you think would make for a perfect Tell Us More column? Get in touch through the Tell Us More tip line.

If you’ve been “on the blogging scene” for a decade or more (oh my God you guys it is so hard for me to write this sentence without typing “kill yourself” as the next two words, but because I’m a pro I will somehow pull it out) one of the more difficult contemporary concepts you are forced to contend with is the idea that there is no longer any stock placed in currency. Time was, if you shared something that had already been extant for over an hour you were immediately assailed with imprecations of “OLD!” from commenters and sneering derision from your peers, who would mock you mercilessly and were probably right to do so. These days nothing is never not new and it doesn’t make a difference how long ago it was created or how many people have seen it already because Facebook moms don’t care about dates and young people have spent so many years bombarding their brains with varying forms of flickery that it all blurs together in a blob so indistinguishable that it is impossible for them to recall whether or not they’ve seen it before in the first place. Also everything is terrible and only getting worse now. Is there a connection? Possibly. Anyway, this is a roundabout way of letting you know that this bit has been out there for a couple of weeks and as shameful as I feel in putting it up I’m trying my best to keep up with the kids who have no such sense of tardiness in that regard. Also, it comes from Ghostly International, who are behind some of the music I like most these days, so why not? Anyway, enjoy.