I love being home. At home there are cinnamon raisin English Muffins from the co-op and giant bricks of cheddar cheese and really good leftovers. And my mom and dad. And my best friend-family. And Mikey’s Gyros. And I get to be a lazy hobo girl who lives a life not unlike the life of a house cat.

The Fridge. Holds everything good and serves as a family scrapbook. Photobooth strip from Berlin, Dutch clogs, BsAs subway pass, Dad’s souvenir yamaka…. Inside: always leftovers that Mom makes into a kickass lunch. If Dad and I don’t pound it first. She kindly leaves us post-its telling us to keep our paws off.

We’ve adopted the Italian’s Xmas Eve: fish. Or, shellfish. Crab and clams and mussels, and Camie’s keeping cake. (Aka two-bottles-of-sherry-in-this-cake.) A warmup for the real thing: prime rib and scalloped potatoes and pumpkin bourbon cheesecake… it’s a good thing we go for a hike on Christmas.

Every time I go to Fat Hen, I’m charmed by it a little more. I vaguely know-ish the story of the place; there’s some kind of Italian involved and some kind of Scandinavian–but I’m not going to look into it any further, because I love my imagined love story, the Italian and the Scandinavian, loud and dark plus sweet and light, their strange Euro union bringing forth the most divine brunch on earth.

Today I fell in love with the 70th street spot even just a little more: they have a special little lonesome table for the “just-one”-ers. Squeezed up against the window with a good view of the line for macarons and kouign amann at the bakery across the street, it’s a perfect non-awkward little spot to sit and read and eat your eggs in peace. I like going out to eat by myself, but unless there’s a bar to sit at, it can be weird. Not at the little onesie table. Scone (buttery and milky in that really proper scone way) and coffee, eggs “in camica”–two eggs baked in marinara with basil and mozz with a baguette for sauce-swiping, same thing I’ve gotten on every FH visit. After the a week of pre-dawn yoga and kids hyped up on Hannukah, oh, you have no idea the joy of a long, quiet, what’s-the-word-for-lonesome-in-a-good-way brunch.

(And I skied yesterday, so no the scone and the baguette annnnd the eggs were not overkill, OK.)

My little spot:

Cleanse is over, thank god. Pretty much a bust. I’m just not a cleanser. Life without real food was a very dark time. Probably my darkest time ever. Coffee-less-ness didn’t help either. All I wanted to do was  lie in bed and listen to Elliot Smith. Or eat something that had nothing to do with mung beans. First day off the cleanse, the sun came out, my legs started working again, I felt full of joy, the world was a good place once more. I stopped thinking murderous thoughts about people in cafes doing things like eating. Stopped wanting to crawl under the porch like a dying cat. I literally felt like my eyeballs could not focus properly whilst cleansing. No spare calories left for eyeballs to do things like seeing, nope. Day after cleanse: Sight. Picking up things. Running. EATING. Carbohydrates. Energy! What magic!

I have to say, I did learn one useful lesson on le cleanse: food will still be there. If you don’t follow the delicious buttery scent and walk across the street into that heavenly smelling bakery and devour a chocolate croissant RIGHT THIS INSTANT, the world will not end, and there will (most likely, you never know) be more chocolate croissants to be had. Maybe tomorrow, when you didn’t already start the day off with toaster waffles. Self-control, I think they call this.

But sometimes, it is so good to give in, to have zero will power and go ahead and get a scone caked in sugar with your coffee. To have grilled cheese sandwiches. To eat what you want.

For example: eat a ton of sushi (and two bowls of miso soup and three gallons of tea) for lunch.

Or find a good friend, grab a baguette and a half pound of prosciutto and combine all the lingering picked things and little cheese bits from your two fridges, add red wine, and devour as you plot your lives.

Or perch on the curb at the farmers market and eat a gigantic slice of just-wood-fired pizza (veggie pizza though, not the one loaded with delicious Italian meats…hello healthy eater over here.)

I am sad to say that I am about to start… a cleanse. I hate the idea of cleansing, and people who cleanse. It’s for obnoxious yogini chicks who wear mala beads and talk about chakras all the time or for fitness weirdos who get joy out of push ups. I hate it. But. I need it. I think. My intestines are telling me so. In the past few months I’ve somehow developed the oddest eating habits ever. Actually, no, they’re not that odd; all I want is bread and sugar and coffee. Specifically cinnamon rolls. From Tall Grass Bakery. So I crave that, crave that, crave that, try and be virtuous and gag down some greens, then crumble and have half a cup of nutella then just feel all remorseful about it. Not good. And I’ve convinced myself that this is not my fault, no, I do not just have the palate of an eight year-old, but there is something wrong in my organs and stuff that it making me such a crazed sugar and peanut butter hound, and once that gets all sorted out I will be back on the quinoa bandwagon. So here is me, cleansing. But I’m not about to go quietly into that dark night. No sir. My last day of real life, real, vibrant, gluten-sugar-joyous life, was amazing.

First, I woke up at 6:30 in order to be first (or second) in line a Crumble & Flake, the bakery that got a James Beard nod before it opened, that sells out before the clock strikes ten. It’s tiny and seat-less, perched up high on a hilly corner in Capitol Hill. I met my partner in pastry addiction Amanda and her energetic, adorable pup Hadrian there and we got: a cinnamon roll, an apricot blue cheese scone, a kouign amann, a macaron, a cream puff, and a huckleberry financier. Though the cinnamon rolls were touted as some of the best in the city, we had to disagree. Made of croissant-y, flaky dough. Yummy and buttery, but not warm and soft and comforting, like Wonderbread sprinkled with spice and twisted into a knot, as a cinnamon roll should really be. Scone; tiny and understandably so, as it was purely butter and sugar with maybe a tablespoon of flour to hold it together. Macaron tasted like a Pez. Financier was dreamy, the sweetness countered by the tart berries. (Plus I already love financiers and huckleberries.) A filled-to-order with banana-caramel-cream cream puff, which neither of us coulg really gag down more than a lick of, so creamy and intense. (Good, but lordy…. intense.) Kouign amann, who couldn’t love what’s basically a croissant with sugar caramelized around the outside? And coffee, at a hip little place you may have heard of.

Then lunch. Obviously I have to rid my house of anything worth eating (there are boatloats of beets and gallons of green smoothies in my future) and how else wold one do that other than eat it, really. Not too hard of a job, seeing as all there is in my fridge is ten pounds of apples, a thousand condiments, bubbly water, and a ton of fancy cheese. And then bread and tomatoes. So: blue cheese and tomato grilled cheese dipped in Sriracha ketchup.
And then just more blue–Cambazola, my love–on crackers, with honey. I am allowed to have honey on this frickin thing, thank god.

Ok, now dinner. Remember, I’m about to live on ruffage and mung beans for a couple weeks here. Randomly, Madison Park Conservatory–whose name makes you imagine white tablecloths and stodginess and is truly like a cozy delightful friend’s house, a friend who can cook–was doing 50% off everything. Say the code word and shazam, bill cut in half. So Madeline, Jessica and I toodled down to Madison Park (in the gawd awful downpour) for dinner. Bread and divine butter, the best deviled eggs ever made ever (with crab and everything good), beef tongue (as good as taco truck lengua and that is saying something) with pickled veg and awesome mustard, salads peppered with herbs and pears and giant hunks of creamy blue cheese, tagliatelle with octopus ragu (fo’ real, with aioli and cilantro, an odd and perfect counterpart), and risotto bolognese with a fried egg. Yes. Okay, yes. Bitterbitterbittersweet farewell. On cleanse I could have eaten… the greens in the salad. That is seriously it. Wah. AND. Dessert, of course. Panna cotta, OF course. With sour cherry compote. Bay leaf panna cotta, just ever so savory. And a cheese plate, a beautiful melty cow cheese, that same salty blue, a boring goat cheese, and come jams. Yum. Ran into two of my favorite fellow yoga trainees at the restaurant, which was beyond delightful. Coming from a cozy town, I miss knowing folks, and running into people in this big ol’ city is my favorite thing in the entire world.

Okay then. Goodby sweet world. I will be back in two weeks, with a revived digestive track and a hunger for bread and coffee the likes of which this world has never known.

Anna Cotta needs more people pictures:

Food carts. I’m kind of an undecided voter on this one. Never really SO cheap that that’s the draw… no seats… cash only… often slow. But, fun for the same reasons; funky, underground-y feeling, novel, a little bit hipsterific. I’ve been driving by this Michael’s Bibimbap place for ages and been meaning to stop and today was finally the day. Hunger and convenience and cash all came together at once.

My order: Rice, shredded carrots, zucchini, and lettuce, a big bunch of bean sprouts, some seaweed, “spicy” sauce, kim chi, bulgogi. Extra kim chi for moi (I am my father the kim chi master’s daughter, after all.) There’s one guy in there (Michael?) taking orders and whipping up b-bops for the growing line. Got mine after a few minutes and was going to take it home and eat it at a table like a civilized human, but that just seemed totally inappropriate. Instead, I plopped down on the curb and mixed it all up, as per instructions, and chowed down. Pretty good. Not nearly spicy enough. (Although I’m pretty sure I’ve demolished my spice sensors because I was at Homegrown getting my usual avocado-egg-post-horrifically-early-morning-yoga-sandwich, and realized that the habanero sauce I once daintily spread an incredibly thin little layer of, I now dunk my sandwich in like ketchup. So that’s good.) And the kim chi was very zing-less. And I wished I had chop sticks so I would feel all Korean and legit/wouldn’t eat so fast. But warm and good. After a few years of self-imposed brown rice and quinoa law, man, I forgot how freakin’ good a big ol’ scoop of sticky white rice is. And how fun it is to eat perched on a parking barrier.

Finding huckleberries is one of the sweetest, simplest, best joys in the world. Not unlike the beautiful little surprise bits of joy that crop up from day to day in real life; round, ripe, purply blue huckleberries always pop up when you’re not expecting them, while you’re slogging uphill in the early morning, already tired after the first tenth of the ambitious hike you’ve planned. And like struggling and striving for happiness in life ultimately ends in the opposite, heading out with the intent to fill buckets with huckleberries always ends in disappointment, in a pie filled with bland grocery store blueberries. But head down, feet getting hot in your boots, quads starting to protest, heading uphill; there they are. And here’s me, squatting on the side of the trail, as ravenous for the berries as a baby bear must be after a long, sad, berryless winter.

A dozen tiny berries later, either picked and popped straight down the hatch or hoarded into a tiny but infinitely pleasing palmful, everything is restored, all is good; we bravely tromp onwards and upwards. For five minutes, until we stop at another irresistible berry bush, the humans hurriedly plucking them off like they might disappear, the dog mangling the entire bush with equal eagerness. And the berries lined the entire trail. Led us all the way up to 7,000 feet or so, when they finally petered out and we were left to fuel ourselves with only determination and honey sandwiches up to the top of Jug Mountain at 8,340 feet.

Then they helped us down, after we’d all had our fill of being upright and moving our legs long ago, done hiking when we got to the top of the mountain and looked down at the green-brown valley splotched with blue lakes like paint spills, ringed with low mountains and higher peaks in the distance, a veil of smoke hanging over it all, drifted up from the fires down south. Though we were sure we’d sapped the berry bushes for all they were worth on the way up, still, an abundance of sweetness on the way down, each little berry quietly waiting between two green leaves, easily popped off the bush with a tiny pinch of the fingers; each berry as satisfying and delightful as the last, as the first.

“Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.”

-Wendell Berry (an appropriately named man…)

Comparing regular ol’ Spanish food to regular ol’ American food makes me really wonder why I live in the country that I do. What’s there to eat at an American gas station: dried out hot dogs made from unidentifiable animals, taquitos from the 1980′s, ding dongs, and slushies. (Okay, slushies… not so bad.) At Spanish truck stops: baguettes filled with jamon and chorizo, big wedges of tortilla, copas of flan, arroz con leche, steak cooked to order. And weensy bottles of wine. On the way to L’Escala (our home) from the Airport in Barcelona, Ross, Tania and I stopped and had a delightful little roadside meal full of all those sedition-inspiring things. Food in Spain is just generally good, no need to Yelp or Urban Spoon to make sure you’re not going to get a plate of overcooked pasta or a sad salad– just go to whichever restaurant is busy, full of Spaniards, and you’re sure to at the very very least get a dang good sammich made of crusty bread and some sort of cured pork product.

One day Tania and I hoofed it down into town to go to a swap-meet-Louie kind of market (espadrilles were purchased) and when hunger inevitably came, we just plopped down at a little seaside place and boom, voila, vale, here’s us with a beautiful lunch unfolding around us. To our left, an older couple, the woman with dyed red hair nursing a cocktail and the large-pusing-fat man with a glass of cava, splitting a bowl of mussels. After the moules, he got a bottle of red wine, she another cocktail, and his decadent Spanish man-lunch really began, course after course of things with shells and meats and everything arriving; he heartily enjoying, she reaching over for a dainty bite here and there. Behind us, four 70-somthing Espanolos, doing much the same; lunch and wine. So we followed suit. When in L’Escala.

First: Two glasses of cava please. The classic-for-a-reason jamon-melon deal, a pile of pan con tomat, aka bread w/the hint of a tomato smooshed around on it in the best way possible. Razor clams, which Tania had recently dug up in Massachusetts and had been dreaming of ever since, these ones bathed in olive oil. Pulpo Galecian style, chewy circles of octopus softened by a friendly relationship with that same olive oil, on top of slices of soft potato, topped with a big shake of paprika. Would you get that at some random beach restaurant in the US? No sir, you would not.

Even the grocery store: home of fresh-baked chocolate croissants and liters of fresh orange juice, a whole case of jamon, big good hunks of cheese… Dios mio. Later on in the week, a delightful beach road trip led us to some little town that I loved but can’t remember the name of because I’m a uni-langual dolt, and if it ain’t in English, I ain’t remembering it. We walked along the beach restos, picked the one with the most promising vibe, and we were rewarded with teenyweeny fried calamari, a fantastically odd salad filled with fruit and crispy jamon bits, pulpo (always the pulpo), and a sole for Ross.

Then a short walk before the mandatory ice cream stop: cinnamon-laced Catalan milky thing for Tania (the Spanish grandmother of Horchata maybe?), “cookie” for Uncle Ross (not cookie dough or cookies and cream, mind you; Spanish cookie–spelled “cockie” at one place, much to Tania and I’s delight), and for me, Maria galleta ice cream. Not something you’d find at your beachy ice cream joint at home, where there’d be a case of old ice cream sandwiches that were born around the same time as the taquitos at the gas station next door. (Although… I do love a mega-cheap ice cream thing once in a while… Choco-tacos…) So, to sum it all up. Clearly, I must move to Spain.