In the very early days of this year, I was invited to lunch by a blogger-friend*. In preparation for the meal, she said two promising things: “I hope you like Chinese food” and “Come hungry.”

In her pretty apartment filled with lovely things to look at — postcards and drawings and old vinyls and slim books with soft covers — she treated me to a cornucopian spread of Chinese dishes, all of them family recipes from her mother’s kitchen.

Among these were her Cantonese-style marinated pork ribs (siu pai gwat), sticky and lightly sweet in their caramelized protein crust, and marvelously soft underneath, so soft you could pull the bones out of your mouth neatly, with nary a shred of meat left on them. Paired with a bowl of steamed white rice from her adorable rice cooker — a doll-sized version I have not been able to shoo out of my covetous mind — it was an absolute delight.

Sticky and lightly sweet in their caramelized protein crust, the ribs were marvelously soft underneath, so soft you could pull the bones out of your mouth neatly, with nary a shred of meat on them.

The wonderful thing about being a guest at a blogger’s table is that there is a good chance that whatever you’ve eaten and loved has been featured on their site, or will soon be, so you don’t even have to badger them for a recipe.

And indeed, this one had.

Although the recipe is very simple — it’s just a matter of marinating and then roasting the meat in the oven — it took me a few weeks to muster the ingredients needed for the marinade. But when Maxence and I decided to trek over to the 13th arrondissement (where the largest Paris Chinatown is) for dim sum one Saturday, a quick dip inside Paris Store turned up the two missing ingredients.

A week later, having purchased some pork ribs — travers de porc in French — from my butcher**, I set out to follow the recipe. I lowered the oven temperature a bit, and found that it would have been good to cover the dish for the first half of the baking (as I recommend in the recipe below) to avoid excessive coloring, but aside from those details it was a smooth ride.

I cooked some short-grain white rice and made a spicy cucumber salad with rice vinegar, sesame oil and garlic, and we sat down to a felicitous lunch.

The next day, I used the leftover rice and meat to make (what else?) fried rice, with radish leaves stirred in. I also kept the bones in the freezer for my next tonkotsu ramen, happy as ever to be getting three different dishes out of one hunk of meat.

Fried Rice with Pork Rib Meat

* I’d brought her a round of starter bread slashed in her initial — or rather, the inital of her nom de plume — and a little jar of my starter. She later made a wonderful drawing of that loaf, and then embarked on her own bread-baking adventures with her freshly baptized starter, Anatole.

** I encourage you to seek out ethically raised pork meat from a provider who can answer your questions. The overwhelming majority of pork meat available in Western countries comes from concentrated animal feeding operations that have disastrous consequences on the environment, their workers, animal welfare and human health. To learn more, you can for instance read Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals.

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I have an ambivalent relationship to food memoirs.

On the one hand, a book that’s entirely devoted to food and food experiences should have my name all over it. On the other hand, I deal with food so exclusively and so intensely all day and all week long that when I sit down to read at night or on weekends, I sort of want to read about other lives entirely.

And this is one of the reasons why I so enjoyed Gabrielle Hamilton‘s memoir.

Blood, Bones & Butter is a food memoir in as much as the author is a food professional — she’s the chef and owner of Prune, a small and highly popular restaurant in NYC’s East Village* — but it is, in truth, a lot wider in scope than “the inadvertent education of a reluctant chef,” as the (somewhat clunky) subtitle reads.

I won’t reveal anything about the arc of her life story: I like to know as little as possible about books before I read them so I’m not about to spoil this one for you, but let’s just say (and I’ve provided links below if you want to know more) that it hasn’t been the smoothest of rides.

And the book she has drawn from it is the rawest, most plainspoken, no-holds-barred memoir I have ever read. It is marvelously engrossing, and it pulls you in with the author’s naked honesty and the way she looks back at her life, dark passages included, with no glossing over, retracing her steps without making excuses or trying to shed a flattering light on herself.

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Moss garden at Gio-ji temple in Arashiyama (Kyoto).

I seldom invite world events to appear on Chocolate & Zucchini, because we live in an age of such hyperinformation that we don’t need — and often don’t want — to see the same topics on the news and on the food blogs we read.

But in light of what has happened in Japan, what is still happening in Japan, and what I fear is going to happen next in Japan, I need a bit of time before we go back to our regular programming.

There is little we can do but despair over the nuclear crisis, but what we can do now is contribute however much or little we can to the emergency relief effort for the hundreds of thousands of victims of the earthquake and tsunami.

My friend Chika has set up a fundraising page to support the International Rescue Committee, and Tamami has created one in favor of Save the Children.

Beyond these initiatives, Elizabeth Andoh, who runs A Taste of Culture in Tokyo and Osaka, suggests making donations to Doctors without Borders, NetHope, or International Medical Corps.

Edited to add:
~ Reader Filicophyta sends a link to NPR’s list of organizations taking Japan tsunami donations,
~ Reader Eri sends a link to detailed list of organizations edited by Devex,
~ Reader Viviane has set up a fundraising page benefiting Red Cross Australia,
~ Reader Moonstruckinmt points to Jason Kelly’s Socks for Japan initiative,
~ Reader Stacey sends a link to a fundraising page in favor of ShelterBox.

I realize the world has not been holding its breath waiting for me to share my recipe for hummus.

But it does seem like the world, or at least a portion of its inhabitants, could use a friendly reminder about homemade hummus: how good it is, how easy, and how cheap, too.

Just out of curiosity, I’ve calculated the approximate cost of my hummus, which I make from dried chickpeas, and with organic ingredients, and I’ve worked out that it costs me under 2€ to produce the generous batch below. I’m not counting my time (maybe fifteen minutes of active work all in all), nor the electricity needed to cook the chickpeas on the stove and purée the hummus in the blender, but it adds up to roughly 3€/kg ($2/lb).

If you consume as much hummus as Natalie Portman and I do, it is worth calculating what that delicious habit is costing you.

Now, if you buy it at the supermarket, where it is most definitely not organic and a few non-pantry items creep uninvited into the ingredients list, it costs 13.50€/kg ($9/lb). And if you were to get it fresh from the Middle-Eastern deli in my neighborhood, because you have friends coming over for the apéro and you happen to be walking past the shop, you may pay up to — insert gasp here — 18.70€/kg ($12.50/lb). That’s over six times what it costs to make your own.

Your mileage may vary, and perhaps you live near a provider who sells an excellent hummus for less than that, but if you consume as much hummus as Natalie and I do, it is worth calculating what that delicious habit is costing you.

Naturally, the obstacle for most would-be hummus makers is the pre-soaking of the dried chickpeas, the long cooking time of legumes, yada yada yada.

To that I say: pshaw. 1- Just a few hours’ soaking is enough for chickpeas — I sometimes go as low as five or six and that’s plenty; 2- consider getting a pressure cooker and slash down the cooking time significantly; and 3- cooked chickpeas freeze perfectly, especially if they’re intended for puréed preparations such as this one, so make a double or triple batch and store the extra in the freezer for hummus-in-a-pinch later.

I’ve read here and there that some cooks peel their chickpeas for hummus, as in disrobe every single cooked chickpea from its translucent outer skin. This is a testament to their angelic meticulosity, I’m sure, and it is said to yield a smoother texture, but it robs you of some of the nutrients and fiber, too, so I’ve never bothered.

To conclude, I will note that I once tried making raw hummus, for which you soak the chickpeas, let them sprout for a few days, and then blend them with the rest of the ingredients as if they were cooked. I did not like it one bit.

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