Who didn’t read the C.S.Lewis classic late at night by the reedy glow of a nightlight and drool, wondering how to get one’s hands on some Turkish Delight? Never mind the burning question: What WAS it? Delight as an adult in this centuries’ old sweetmeat at long last, at any time of the day you choose. Eating whilst inside of a wardrobe strictly optional. As is waiting for Mr. Tumnus. (recipe care of Saad Fayed)

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Cook Time: 1 hour, 10 minutes

Total Time: 1 hour, 25 minutes

Ingredients:

4 cups granulated sugar
1 1/4 cups cornstarch
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
4 1/4 cups water
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 1/2 tablespoons rosewater
1 cup confectioners sugar
Vegetable oil or shortening

Preparation:

In a 9 inch baking pan, grease the sides and bottom with vegetable oil or shortening. Line with wax paper and grease the wax paper.

In a saucepan, combine lemon juice, sugar and 1 1/2 cups water on medium heat. Stir constantly until sugar dissolves. Allow mixture to boil. Reduce heat to low and allow to simmer, until the mixture reaches 240 degrees on a candy thermometer. Remove from heat and set aside.

Combine cream of tartar, 1 cup corn starch and remaining water in saucepan over medium heat. Stir until all lumps are gone and the mixture begins to boil. Stop stirring when the mixture has a glue like consistency.

Stir in the lemon juice, water and sugar mixture. Stir constantly for about 5 minutes. Reduce heat to low, and allow to simmer for 1 hour, stirring frequently.

Once the mixture has become a golden color, stir in rosewater. Pour mixture into wax paper lined pan. Spread evenly and allow to cool overnight.

Once it has cooled overnight, sift together confectioners sugar and remaining cornstarch.

Turn over baking pan containing Turkish delight onto clean counter or table and cut with oiled knife into one inch pieces.

Coat with confectioners sugar mixture. Serve or store in airtight container in layers separated with wax or parchment paper.

What a week. I got a sunburn that may warrant a trip to the dermatologist’s office, leaving me with cracking and peeling on my ears, and shoulders that feel like they spent a fortnight moving refrigerators.

Monday was mostly a travel day, but offered a couple of charming joints. Johnson’s Drive-In in Acampo sported a somewhat limited menu (that magically included an ostrich burger that’s to die for).

A take-no-guff old broad took our orders, and we paid cash and had to futz around a bit with getting our receipts straight for our expense reports. The burgers came after the ten minute wait that was spent making eyes with the handful of grass farmers who came in for a visit and a shake. My burger was juicy, cooked medium, and had good char on it. Delicious, juicy ostrich – the “other red meat.” Burgers always taste better when lovingly slung by a butch dyke in a do-rag. The drippy ketchup and melted American cheese dumbed it down to the pedestrian levels expected by local folks and the road-weary, and I’d have it no other way. The French fries tasted of days-old oil. Thank god fish wasn’t on the menu.

A some-hour drive south brought us to our hotel and a dearth of culinaria. The only store within 15 miles was a Mobil Food-Mart. Fortunately, every little shit town I’ve worked in has a joint called “(Some Dude’s Name)’s Roadhouse”. In Kettleman City, it’s Mike.

Tragically, Mike’s Roadhouse did NOT have my go-to Salisbury steak (I was crestfallen), but they did have liver and onions. Topped with bacon! How could I say no? I channeled my inner geriatric and ordered without a shred of irony, with my potato mashed and my salad dressed in Thousand Island. I don’t take this diner business lightly—it’s all the way or no way.

Other selections included the California-style chicken burger, but since you had to request avocado I wondered what made it California-style. My compatriots had said California burger, steak and eggs, and Heineken. One, a fellow foodie, tried my liver but failed to share my enthusiasm.

The following day I was trying to ramp down the grease and red meat scene in my intestines, and opted to eat some chips and salsa with some store-bought guac. It’s kind of nice – since they grow so much produce in California, these simple things taste really good there. Even the free oranges from the hotel lobby were succulent and chin-dripping sweet orbs of sunshine.

After a 12-hour day in the field, on Wednesday I went for the In-N-Out experience. I’m a huge fan of Can Only Find it Here specialties, fast food meibutsu being no exception. Travelling with natives offered a peek into the (not-so) secret menu, and I went full bore, ordering a Double-Double with fries, both Animal Style. “Animal-style” means coated with gooey cheese, grilled onions, and “spread” (a mélange of ketchup, mayonnaise and pickle relish). “Spread” and “animal-style” are not evocative of fast food, but of something else.

Day four was another long one – by then we had covered more than 30 miles of spiny grassland overlaying gypsum and ancient sea floor on foot. It was June bug mating season, and orgies of giant, teddy bear beetles were grasping grasses with their tiny tarsi, clustered in shiny, brown lovemaking. Some of the guys wanted to drive a few miles out of the way for a steak at Harris Ranch, and even though I really just wanted to shower and get drunk, I tagged along. Since we looked like we’d been in the sun and dust all day, we were seated in the Ranch Kitchen instead of the nicer side of the restaurant. I took a quick paper towel bath at the restroom sink like a common hobo.

I had the prime rib sandwich au jus (medium rare) with fries and a green salad, the rest of the crew had tri-tip in either sandwich or steak form, with various sides. The sandwich was delicious and the meat was of excellent quality, but the service was gastropodan. It took at least 15 minutes before anyone even acknowledged our presence after being seated, another 15 or 20 before our order was taken, another 15 to see our drinks. This, at 5:00 on a Thursday. It was after 7:00 before we got back to our hotel, and I went to bed shortly after that.

The fifth day was another travel day, this time homeward. I was happy to return to grayer skies and the comfort of my own kitchen, but nonetheless picked up a tuna salad sandwich on white at the airport periodicals kiosk. I have a soft spot for these; a latent craving from the days when my dad would bring them home from his 7-11 graveyard shift.

I still hanker for the road food, but don’t miss the road. Tuna casserole, patty melts, chili cheese fries (with ranch for the chililess ends): when I get wistful for these tributes to simple home comforts, I opt to simply stay home. Nothing tastes better than a meatloaf sandwich made of your own meatloaf.

Salisbury steak with mushroom gravy

Mix a pound of grass-fed ground beef with a lightly-beaten egg; a few pinches of dried thyme, salt and pepper; a small handful of panko bread crumbs sprinkled with Worcestershire sauce; and one small shallot that’s been finely minced and browned in bacon fat. Form into four patties and brown on both sides in a large frying pan (add a little butter or oil if the meat is very lean). Remove the patties and add a handful of sliced mushrooms (such as crimini). Deglaze the pan by stirring the mushroom juices that are released during cooking, then add about a cup of beef stock into which a spoonful of flour has been whisked. Simmer until thickened (if necessary, add a little cornstarch mixed with a bit of water to assist thickening). Return the patties to the gravy to rewarm. Serve with mashed potatoes and buttered peas and carrots.

Big Sur is where I’d go mad, if that was how it had to be.

Big Sur is almost like a madness, in and of itself.

These were the two things that I was thinking, listening to the boom of the surf through a hole in a wall of rock, surrounded by the arthritic gnarls of a wind-bent evergreen, cold sand between my toes, the sense that I was being watched by something somewhere putting little cold hands between my shoulder blades as I sat on a sea-thigh of driftwood. Fog and spice. Sea-sharpness and deep green breath. Full-bladdered tangles of kelp, spelling things out in the sand in a language only for the natives to know and understand. Big Sur, I thought, was like visiting the moon.

When my boyfriend and I had decided to go on vacation, the only destination that we knew we had to hit eventually was San Francisco, where we were meeting up with my parents for a few days. Save a layover outside of L.A., I’d never properly seen anything of California. Redwoods were on the menu. The coast road, naturally. And, I insisted, Big Sur.

I’d just finished reading The Big Sur Bakery Cookbook—I am already the sort of person who reads cookbooks from cover to cover for entertainment purposes, but, those who are less inclined to get their jollies from the poetry of lists of ingredients would do well to take a gander at this volume. It is more than a compendium of recipes. It is a window that opens onto the heart of a place, and lets you fantasize, for the length of time that you are reading it, that you possess the stubbornness to become a native of those pages. I had lain in bed, propped up on pillows in the winter, looking at the crazy tilt of rocks on that stretch of Californian coast, and dreamt of being the sort of person who slips down to the empty sand at dawn to take fish from the salt waters for lunch later in the day. Somehow, miraculously, I would achieve a tan. I would make jam. We’d get chickens. And always, omnipresent: the susurrus of the sea, sleeping and waking, all of its sentences mine. And of course, I would become a regular at the Bakery.

There is a danger in actually visiting any place that we worship from afar, whose contours we’ve mooned over in photographs—there are travel experiences that are like nothing so much as online dating, where weeks of frenzied emailing and castle-building collapse inward upon themselves the instant reality steps in with its sharp elbows and wrong smells. You believe yourself so perfectly suited to the imagined landscape, that nothing prepares you for the strange heartbreak of simply not loving it after all—or, in the case of this trip, of suddenly feeling yourself inadequate to the task of loving it properly. The abrupt drop of land into the ocean. That ocean itself, wilder than anything I’d ever seen on the east coast, harrying the shore with muscular waves. The one thin road, clinging to the cliffs in an impossible way, asphalt as out of place here as neon. We had no business being here, I thought. No business at all—and the land knows it. Big Sur is a geography that tolerates you—even as it reminds you, at every turn, how very small you are.

Which is why the Bakery is important. When, on a fog-socketed morning, we finally made it there, it was clear that it was more than an eatery, a gathering spot, a community focal point, a tourist beacon. It was a chance to feel human again. To be able to grasp a coffee cup scaled to the size of your hand, and not the size of a jutting rock. To sit at a worn wooden table in a low-ceilinged room, and feel yourself taking the room on, like a shell, safe from the too-muchness of what lay outside beyond the fog.

And, it was, and is, a chance to eat—to be fed in a way that echoes the warmth of the human-sized rooms and the nourishing intent that drives the kitchen. You are always a guest in Big Sur, I believe, ultimately—even the natives. The landscape belongs to itself. But, for a while, eating the most perfect slice of frittata, and a revelation of a sugar-bronzed morning bun at the Bakery, you can believe yourself local, and capable of loving everything as it deserves. Grandly. And with great appetite.

Potato Frittata, from The Big Sur Bakery Cookbook

(ed: You don’t have to have spent the morning on an empty windswept beach watching the tide thunder through a hole in a giant boulder in order to enjoy this, but, I will say that it helps. Maybe it’s the salt left on your lips. Experiment.)

Ingredients:

5 tbs. rice bran oil or canola oil
1 small yellow onion, sliced
5 russet potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/8 inch-thick slices
3 tbs. unsalted butter
kosher salt
freshly ground white pepper
7 eggs
1 tbs. Minced flat-leaf parsley
1 tbs. Minced chives
2 whole scallions, trimmed and thinly sliced.

Serves 6 to 8

Adjust the oven rack to the middle position and preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Heat a medium saute pan over medium-high heat and drizzle 2 tablespoons of the oil into it. Add the onions and cook until they’re caramelized, 8 to 10 minutes. De-glaze the pan with ¼ cup water, scraping any brown bits from the bottom with a wooden spoon. Cook until the water evaporates and the onions take on a uniform brown color, about 5 minutes. Transfer the onions to a roasting pan and toss them with the potatoes. Add 1 tablespoon of the butter and the remaining 3 tabelspoons oil to the potatoes. Season them generously with salt and white pepper. Cover the pan with aluminum foil and bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until the potatoes are tender. Set them aside to cool for 15 minutes. Reduce the oven temperature to 350 degrees F.

Meanwhile whisk the eggs, herbs, and scallions together and season them with salt and white pepper.

Add the potatoes and onions to the egg mixture. Heat a 9-inch cast-iron skillet over medium-high heat. Melt the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter in the skillet, and add the egg and potato mixture. Cover the skillet with aluminum foil, transfer it to the oven, and bake for 30 minutes. Remove the foil and bake for 10 more minutes.

Slice and serve directly from the skillet, warm or at room temperature.