Killer Meatballs

Her Killer Meatballs Are the Stuff of Fiction
By JULIA MOSKIN

CANNED peas and boiled bologna, Lara Vapnyar says, is a dish she has missed since arriving in Brooklyn from Moscow in 1994. “We also ate a lot of black caviar,” she said last week. “But I don’t feel nostalgic for that.”

Along with immigration, food and love, nostalgia for the lost world of Soviet Russia has informed Ms. Vapnyar’s fiction — two collections of stories and a novel — since her first short story was published, in 2003. “It is a little like being from Atlantis,” she said.

Ms. Vapnyar’s work is structured and elegant, despite the fact that she spoke little English when she emigrated. But she does not yet have the mastery over spinach that she does over syntax.

“I don’t seem to be able to cook fresh vegetables well,” she said, a broad and breathtaking admission for a writer whose new collection of short stories is called “Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love” (Pantheon Books). In these stories, food has the power to define characters, propel plots, cause riots and even commit manslaughter.

In “Luda and Milena,” two Russian-born women in their 70s compete for a man in their English language class, each elbowing the other aside with platters of spinach pie and cheese puffs. The man finally chokes to death on the day that both women make Russian meatballs: juicy patties enriched with cream-soaked bread, onion and garlic, and fried until crusty and brown. It is, however, impossible to know from the story which woman’s meatball was the fatal instrument.

“I couldn’t do that to either of the characters,” she said. “The point is that no one wins, and they both win, because, after all, they don’t really like to cook, and now they won’t have to.” More

Recipes

Spice-Roasted Cornish Hens With Spring Garlic Jus
Garlicky Spinach Salad With Pine Nuts and Raisins
Asparagus With Chardonnay Sabayon

Too much work?

Recipe Deal Breakers: When Step 2 Is ‘Corral Pig’
By KIM SEVERSON

I WAS reading a recipe for apple strudel when I came to a sentence that stopped me cold: “If you don’t have a helper,” it began.

If a dish needs a helper, I need to move on.

Although I didn’t end up with a strudel, I did end up on a quest. I began asking good cooks I know about recipe deal breakers — those ingredients or instructions that make them throw down the whisk and walk away.

Whether for reasons practical or psychological, even the most experienced cooks have an ingredient, technique or phrase that will make them bypass a recipe. More

Green Background

"Oh, Go with the Green Background"

"It'll make you look like the cottage cheese in a lime jello salad" Always a good look for an older gentlemen.

The aesthetics of McCain's speech, just mercifully completed before a slightly energized crowd of literally dozens, was awesome in how dreadful it was. No matter what Harold Ford thinks, who was somehow thoroughly moved by lime-jello McCain.
Attaturk

I can haz campaign slogans

9-11! 9-11! 9-11!

Only my ancient knowledge can preserve us safe from them cutthroat Arabs

Youth! Inexperience! Black!

Iraq! Iraq! Iraq!

Word to the wise: Hire a descent gay makeup man and a set decorator. Take lessons on public speaking. Either memorize the speech, or take lessons on how to use a teleprompter. In short, do everything Al Gore failed to do... Oh, and run like hell from the preznit. (He's an idiot.)

I can has reinvented the wheel!

Ain't it just cute as heck? Wonder ifn I can get me a patent on this one too? Maybe some shiny patent leather shoes too?

Red wine slows aging

I guess this means I've gotta start drinking a lotta red wine now. I wonder how it mixes with Guinness?