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09/15/1999 Archived Entry: "Las Cruces, NM; the Salernitani Visit & Rosh Hashonah"

I can’t believe it’s been 10 days since I filed a diary item. I wrote something about my trip to New Mexico on my laptop and haven’t even transferred it. I won’t bother at this point.

Let me start again. I went to Las Cruces, New Mexico to visit my old friend Alexis Bespaloff, dean of American wine writers, and his wife of three years, the fabulous Cecilia Lewis, who has had such an interesting life I can’t even begin to outline it here. Suffice to say, she started life as a model in Swinging London of the 1960s – Mary Quant et al -- and is now an accomplished photographer. You would never expect two such urbane people to be thriving in the desert of southeastern New Mexico – 40 miles up the Rio Grand from El Paso – but the vast sky and quieter life seem to agree with them., and Las Cruces, home of New Mexico State University, seems to attract more than its share of artists and individualists.

As for food experiences, I learned and saw from the extensive groves that Las Cruces is a major producer of pecans, and that it produces 60 percent of the nation’s chili peppers, but we ate out only once, for lunch, at a charming, casual place called Guacamole. Very Hawaiian. I say that only because it is owned by a Hawaiian, who has invested it with some Hawaiian attitude, although you probably couldn’t detect that unless you knew he was Hawaiian. (He does wear Aloha shirts.)

Almost all the tables are inside a walled, but roofless courtyard, which is sort of Hawaiian (well, I suppose it is Southwestern, too); and there are no waiters, which is certainly Hawaiian. The salad bar was invented in Hawaii. Bet you didn’t know that. Legend has it, a couple of lazy surfer boys decided to open a restaurant on the beach. They provided the steaks and the grill, the salad fixings, and the table settings, but the customers cooked the meat themselves (who could complain about doneness?) and tossed their own greens. There’s still a restaurant like it on Waikiki, open to the beach. (If you can remember the name, write me – and no, it is not the Boardwalk Broiler.)

The way the self-service works at Guacamole is you go to a counter by the open grill and give your order. Someone else cooks it, then you transport your order to your table. As far as I know, because Alex and I did not budge from our chairs while Cecilia got lunch, there are only two things on the menu – good hamburgers with guacamole, and chicken cubes grilled on a skewer, a sort of yakitori, which is served in a basket with, of course, guacamole and corn chips. What could be more Hawaiian than Japanese yakitori with New Mexican guacamole. Hawaii is the most inter-racial, cross-cultural state in the Union.

Alexis and Cecilia also took us to some friends for a wonderful Mexican-style dinner. Lowell and Joni – he’s an economics professor at NMSU, she’s a city commissioner -- cook together and, I could tell by their dining room choreography, they entertain often.

For us, they made chicken empanadas, which they served with Champagne in their large kitchen. We also got to walk into their garden, which sports a large pomegranate tree laden with slightly underripe fruit.

In the dining room, we sipped bowls of a chicken-based lime and chili soup with strips of fried corn tortilla, a salad with pickled nopales cactus, then filet mignon with an ancho chili sauce, a battered and fried, cheese-filled chili (chili relleno), and finely minced melange of vegetables that I suppose one could call a salsa. For dessert, there was a triple-layered chocolate and caramel cream pie made with cacita, which is the Mexican name for what we in the upper 40 are beginning to know as dulce de leche, caramelized milk.

(Just for the record, the barbecue-sauced chicken breast on Delta Airlines going to El Paso was edible, although I left over the frozen vegetables. And coming home, I thought the “snack” was disgraceful – a sliver of smoked turkey and Lorraine no-fat cheese on half of a stale pita.)


The Italians Descend
From one Cecilia to another: As soon as I came back from Las Cruces, my friend Cecilia Bellelli Baratta arrived from Salerno with three of her four sisters and one brother-in-law, Gerardo, who is a chain-smoking cardiologist in Rome. Gerardo was alarmed at how much weight I’ve gained since the last he saw me. (Well, when we met I was at a particularly low point.) In retaliation I questioned his incessant smoking. It became a joke: Eat less, smoke more, was Gerardo’s constant jibe. He believes Americans eat entirely too much and are overly concerned about smoking.

For their first big dinner, I took them to the Hudson River Club because Cecilia – mainly Cecilia – wants to eat in at least one contemporary American restaurant and try local ingredients when she’s here. Most Italians I know don’t really appreciate high-style cooking and are not adventurous eaters. They want to eat pasta, and try an American steak; although many I know, adore pastrami. Cecilia’s family proved no different, as worldly as they are. On the other hand, Cecilia, who with her adult sons runs a farm and inn in Paestum (where you eat very well, indeed), is one of us, a foodie.

I did the ordering, and as a clam-loving people, I figured the Salernitani would like HRC’s New England-style clam chowder, which they did. And the crab bisque with scallops that was a special that night. Gerardo ordered the chicken with mashed potatoes, which he instantly declared was portioned for at least two Italians, if not a family of four. The sisters – Rosaria, Enrica, and Paola – took either the lamb or striped bass. Cecilia ordered the soft-shell crabs, which don’t exist in Southern Italy, but are a delicacy, she told me, in Venice. I ordered the Millbrook (N.Y.) venison, which Cecilia tasted, but everyone else thought was too exotic for them. There are no deer left in Southern Italy. They were all killed off long before WWII.

The next afternoon, the group insisted on coming to Brooklyn to see my new neighborhood, this Park Slope place I keep talking about. It was so hot and humid we couldn’t walk much, but we did stroll over to Rozanne Gold and Michael Whiteman’s house, one of the beautiful Victorian town houses that line the streets here. We were expecting only a drink, but naturally Rozanne put out a spread. There were a few things she had invented that day for her next book, Recipes 1,2,3 Healthy Cookbook, among them fennel cooked in V-8 Juice that had been reduced to an almost jammy consistency. I can’t give away the rest.

As usual, the Salernitani wanted only a little spaghetti for dinner. But I knew Cecilia wanted a “New Yorkese” experience. So we ordered in Chinese. They thought it was a hoot. Italians don’t usually like Chinese food, but over the years I’ve figured out which dishes they will not only eat, but love: Lo mein or cold noodles with sesame sauce fills their pasta needs. Spare ribs look familiar and comforting and taste only slightly different. The loved the spare ribs. This time they also went for the shrimp in black bean sauce.


The Jewish New Year
So as soon as my friends from Salerno left – they were actually just passing through New York on their way to the massive Brimfield, Mass. flea market – it was Rosh Hashonah. You may have noticed my radio program was not live last Friday. I was home cooking for the New Year.

I know you have to know the menu, so here it is: Don’t be disappointed that it was very traditional. In the living room, I put out chopped liver, vegetarian chopped liver (another try with another recipe), and chopped herring, with crackers. At the table, we started with chicken soup with kreplach, which are the Eastern European Jewish version of ravioli, a soft pasta turnover filled with ground or shredded potted beef. The main course was a pot-roasted, rolled veal shoulder, which I served with a traditional potato kugel, kasha varnishkas (buckwheat groats with bow tie pasta and lots of fried onions), and asparagus. I really didn’t want the meal to be the over-taxing New Year’s dinner of my youth, so we only had three desserts – a chocolate layer cake and an almond-apple tart brought by my sister, and a chocolate honey cake baked and brought by my cousin Erica Marcus (of Newsday fame) from a recipe by Marcy Goldman, the Montreal-based author of “Jewish Holiday Baking.” (Marcy’s web-site, betterbaking.com, is one of my favorite links. Check it out on my links page. She has many great recipes there.)