Running to run

I am learning to run again like I have learned how to eat again.

If you're like I am, you may have spent too many years on the treadmill or on the roads, in the pool or in the weight room, trying to shape your body into something different from what it is. In high school I was a runner, a swimmer, a lacrosse player, and a skier; exercise started out as an excuse to spend time with friends and compete with other teams, but became a full-blown obsession once I entered college. I kept an exercise log during my freshman year, where I wrote down every minute that I spent in exercise, chiding myself if I missed a day. I rarely did. Thirty-day streaks of exercise were the rule rather than the exception, and if I felt tired or injured, well, I just ran right through it.

About four years ago, when I was midway through my recovery, I came down with a case of mononucleosis that had me out of commission for months. No more "I'm training for a marathon," no more gym workouts at 10 p.m., no more books read on the elliptical machine. Just rest, and more rest, and some yoga now and then.

It took me about two years of recovery -- from both mono and my eating disorder -- before I began to consider running again. I was living in Brazil, and found that I was spending far too much of my time indoors. Running gave me an excuse to get out and see the city and its parks, and it put an order to my week and structure to my time. But since I returned from the U.S. in 2006, I haven't pursued running seriously. Part of me knows how easy it is for me to go overboard when it comes to exercise: a few workouts a week easily turns into a mandatory schedule of one a day, plus stretching, plus cool-downs. I can't afford to follow this kind of regimen right now, what with my studies and my job, and so I mostly don't. Besides, there is little joy in such practice, and these days I try to fill my free time with things that I like to do.

But this laissez-faire attitude towards running (or other forms of hard exercise) doesn't suit me, either. I like routine, but not obsession. I like seeing myself improve over time, something that doesn't happen if I just run "when I feel like it." And there's much to be said about mood and exercise: I just feel better, all around, when I get some exercise. Tentatively, I have created a schedule for myself: three brief runs (or rides) during the week, and one or two longer runs on the weekends, depending on how I feel. I love rising early to exercise, and find that it makes the rest of the day feel so much better, knowing that I have already seen some beauty in the world, used my body to creative ends, and have given myself time that is all mine.

Strangely, this must be the first time that I am running without the expectation of perfecting my body from exercise. In fact, I seem to finally accept that fact that my body, when it changes, rarely follows the rules that I would expect it to. So this time, I am running for other things. I am running to feel the cold air in my chest; running to see the sun rise; running to keep up with my husband; running to remind myself that I am fast, strong, and resilient; running because I don't need to, but I can.

Why are you running (or not)? Why or why not do you exercise, and what does exercise mean for you these days?

Pão de queijo

The more I cook, the more satisfaction I get out of making things that most people take for granted as coming out of a box, or jar, or can -- like mayonnaise, beans, soup, lemonade, rye bread, whipped cream, mochi, and kimchi -- all of which I have attempted over the last few years. I still understand why people buy these things at the supermarket -- I know the value of one's time as well as anybody -- but there is a part of me that mourns the loss of our intimate knowledge of how such things are supposed to work, that is, how ordinary recipes are made and how the food is supposed to taste.

I was offered so many plastic-wrapped chicken and tuna salad sandwiches as a child that I developed an aversion to mayonnaise that has lasted until this year, when I learned to make my own and discovered how tasty the real thing is (sorry, Hellman's). Other foods that I had considered inedible have become much more palatable to me now that I have a better grasp of what they're supposed to taste like, having made them myself with some success: mutton doesn't need to be gamby, beans shouldn't give you gas, and omelettes needn't be rubbery and tasteless, for example.

All of this lead-up about home-made food, and I must admit that I'm a bit disappointed with my efforts tonight to make pão de queijo, Brazilian cheese-bread.

I ate pão de queijo every day when I lived in Brazil, for several reasons:

1) Pão de queijo contains no wheat, which my body doesn't like (tapioca flour takes its place)
2) Pão de queijo is sold on every street corner in the city where I lived in Brazil
3) Pão de queijo is delicious!

So it was my hankering to recreate my time in Brazil that lead me to a pão de queijo recipe of dubious origin (wikipedia), and got me to turn on my large, inefficient oven despite the New York heat. (Coincidentally, two men from ConEdison stopped by in the midst, to offer me a fixed-rate plan to offset the summer spikes in our electricity bill, which was surely suffering from that oven and the air conditioning unit on at the same time!)

In its most basic form, pão de queijo contains polvilho (fine manioc or tapioca flour), fresh cheese, milk, eggs, water, and salt. Obviously, the polvilho would be the hardest ingredient to find, but up here in the Heights, my Dominican neighbors are almost as fond of manioc as the Brazilians are, and I easily found manioc flour at the local supermarket.

The rest was quite easy: a little mixing, boiling, stirring, waiting -- and a quick bite with jam, once the little balls had come out of the oven.

The texture wasn't bad -- it had the characteristic chewiness of anything made with manioc -- but my version seemed to lack a bit of flavor. Perhaps I didn't use enough cheese, as I was just guessing as to how much grated Piave equals 6 ounces. The batter also seemed a bit lumpy, and my pães are hardly the round spheres that I was accustomed to seeing in Brazil. Still, I couldn't stop eating it, piping hot from the oven, with a touch of jam, and decided to make a dinner of it:

bacalhau / cod

Last night we had two friends over for dinner, and I was in charge.

The menu:

• red cabbage salad with avocado, carrot, pumpkin seed, figs, and a honey-mustard-almond butter vinaigrette
• Bacalhau à Gomes de Sá with tomato pesto garnish
• steamed aspargus with Argentine reggianito cheese
• dessert: cherry and almond clafoutis
  

I began to search for a way to prepare bacalhau after a Spanish friend brought a dish of red peppers stuffed with salt cod to a dinner party at our apartment a few months ago. The cod in bechamel sauce was a perfect complement to the roasted peppers, and Pedro insisted that "it was the easiest thing in the world to make." Was it? I wasn't convinced.

Though I had seen the sheets of flat, dried fish at La Rosa Fine Foods and other bodegas up here in the Heights, and I'd certainly eaten plenty of bolinhos de bacalhau (cod fritters) during my time in Brazil, I was always a bit intimidated by the raw look of the fillets, and the fact that they required an overnight soak. This fear is somewhat unwarranted, I must admit now that I've made the dish, because soaking salt cod is about as easy as soaking beans, which I do at least once a week.

Leite's Culinaria provided me with the recipe for Bacalhau à Gomes de Sá, but before I was ready to try making it, I wanted to know what it tasted like. A few weeks ago we went to Via Brasil, a Brazilian restaurant near Times Square, and I ordered an uninspiring version of the dish, drenched in too much oil, the fish almost flavorless, the potatoes without seasoning. Yet I suspected that the recipe had the potential to be so much more; it shouldn't be hard to bring out the flavor in the combination of cod, potatoes, and onions -- almost like a tortilla española with some Portugues cod thrown in for variation, ¡a la portuguesa!

My suspicions were correct: made in a large cast-iron skillet in the oven, this version of Bacalhau à Gomes de Sá was just as I had hoped: easy, mellow, and rich. I added a couple of eggs and a few tablespoons of cream to the mix before popping it in the oven, and the result was fantastic!

When I told my mother about my determination to find some use for bacalhau, and my fond memories of Brazilian cod fritters, she responded with her own recollections of the New England version: fried cod cakes that her great-aunts made for her in Maine in the 1950s. I'm not surprised that cod, so strongly linked to the Portuguese-Atlantic trade, has now made its way full circle in my kitchen: from the waters of colonial New England to imperial Portugal; from the Portuguese colonies of the Azores to its crown jewel, Brazil; and from Brazil to New York, Atlantic metropole:

B A C A L H A U is in my blood and on my dinner table.

Bananinha!

In Brazil, there is a banana candy that is often sold at kiosks, the check-out of convenience stores, and gas stations: the BANANINHA. Bananinha is not much more than dried banana and sugar, but the flavor is about ten times as intense as a super-market variety Cavendish.

When I lived in Brazil, I ate these at least twice a week. I found this bananinha at Búzios, a Brazilian grocery on W. 46th St. between 5th and 6th Avenues, where the owner is a bahiana (for those who do not speak Portuguese, this is not the same thing as a bananinha; bahianas are women from Bahia, a state in Northeastern Brazil; bananinhas are the little banana candies which are the subject of this post).
At Búzios they sell queijo de minas (fresh cheese wheels from Minas Gerais), guaraná (Brazilian soda), dried beans, bikinis, perfumes, and BANANINHA.

It's too good not to eat the whole thing right away.

É bom demais.

All gone.

Acabou.