Stories

What I Wore: A silk beige diagonally checkered shirt that my mother bought when she was 16 from the Beverly Hills General Store [if my mother and I were both 16 at the same time we would have been best friends] and a brown Armani tweed skirt that I have never worn because it is high-waisted and way too big for the only part of my body that is truly tiny, but luckily I was in New York where there are three tailors on every block, one of which was able to pin it for me so that it added two creases that looked as if they were meant to be, and brown Ralph Lauren heels that make me feel confident because the struggle to find the second shoe amongst the insane amount of boxes at the Union Square DSW to this day still makes me feel triumphant.

The Occasion: Opening Night of the second of a rotating cast of “Love, Loss and What I Wore,” an off-Broadway play my two aunts, Nora and Delia Ephron, wrote together. Since the play is all about clothes, I knew I had to dress the part, despite getting off an airplane two hours before the curtain. I packed my best Mad Men inspired outfit freshly pressed so the suitcase could do minimal harm.

Leftovers! Even our dog, Buzz, won’t eat anything stored overnight in the fridge. Usually, when we give him some yummy leftover steak, he goes to his dog dish, looks at it, makes a pass at sniffing its aroma, drops his head, and with a heavy audible sigh and plodding gait shuffles away yet once again betrayed by the owners he so dearly trusts. Once, in exasperation, I whined, “but Buzzy, these are Mario Batali leftovers!” He looked at me with a why-didn’t-you-say-that-in-the-first-place shrug, and returned to his dog dish to enjoy his prize. (True story)

There are leftovers and there are leftovers! A thought that made me reconsider of an old cookbook – MICHAEL FIELD’S CULINARY CLASSICS and IMPROVISATIONS: Creative Leftovers Made From Main Course Masterpieces.

When I have the time, I love trekking through the dust of old cookbooks. I have some books that go back to Depression cooking – with such titles as GAS Cookery Book and The Progressive Farmer’s Southern Cookbook. (One never knows when a tasty recipe for Raccoon will come in handy when guests arrive unexpectedly: "First you shoot a raccoon…")

My brother is at odds with Thomas Wolfe. He is living proof that you can go home again. Oklahoma City is just that kind of place. I can’t really describe what makes my hometown so special to people who have never passed through the capital of the panhandle state. Perhaps the folks best suited to explain the city’s certain ‘je ne sais quoi’ are its chefs. Chefs like my brother, Jonathon Stranger, Mark Dunham, Josh Valentine, Chris Becker, Kurt Fleischfresser, Russ Johnson, and the father of Mission Chinese, Danny Bowien.

Like many members of this crew, my brother left Oklahoma City at eighteen and explored various parts of the globe through a cook’s lens. At age 27, armed with folders full of harrowing but valuable tales from the restaurant world and some culinary tools in his belt, he returned and thought about how he could make his mark on the city’s landscape without turning a blind eye to his roots. And so Ludivine was born, a farm to table restaurant set in Midtown, a newly revitalized area of the city, where Oklahomans could taste dishes inspired by and using fresh, local ingredients, like bison (the tenderloin is my personal favorite).

But what I think makes Oklahoma City’s chefs so unique is not just that they are simply introducing new approaches to food and what it means to dine out to its customers, but that they are working together, side by side, to foster a sense of community in this collective venture. They love food as much as they love the people they serve, the people they grew up with, the people of OKC.

Which is why when the devastating tornado touched ground in Moore on May 21st, leveling entire city blocks and taking 24 lives, including 9 children, it was only natural that this eclectic group would find a way to bring people together and raise money for the victims in a setting that would celebrate who we are as proud, resilient Oklahomans.

I watched Mark Bittman’s video Pasta With Anchovies and Arugula.

He’s very simpatico and easy to follow and his recipes are usually simple and good. This one is another take on aglio-olio, the iconic Roman dish of spaghetti in garlic and oil.

You can do a lot of things with this dish, adding almost anything you feel like or have around in the fridge, but you have to be careful not to get too creative and ruin what is a classic way to sauce spaghetti. Don’t, for example, throw in that leftover lox from last Sunday’s brunch. That won’t work.

Anyway, I went to the farmer’s market on Saturday – the one across from Lincoln Center – to pick up some farmer-fresh arugula to use in the dish – and every single farmer was sold out of it.arugula It seems everyone on the Upper West Side saw the Mark Bittman video and wanted to make the dish on the same night. Such is the power of the New York Times.