Leaving (Left) Nashvegas: Pushing further South(west)

 

I meant to send this a month ago. It’s news, capital N. It’s an explanation for all those endless drawing-down-inventory posts about cleaning out my freezer. And it is, quite possibly, motivation to get back to my blog.

I’ve left Vanderbilt, which means I’ve left Nashville (a little ‘Hurrah!’ is not out of place). Before I left I was going to blog a list of the top 10 things I won’t miss, but I couldn’t narrow it down. Besides, this is a food blog. So I decided to make a list of the top food things I would miss. This too proved really, really hard—in part related to what I won’t miss. I came up with one, maybe two things. Not exactly a list. So I’ll just tell you about the leaving part.

Leaving was fun. I had a great last semester of teaching, thanks to my uniformly wonderful students and my few sane and supportive friends. Lots of feting, drinks, dinners from both. As typical, there was food for my last classes. And as typical, I forgot to take photos, because I wasn’t specifically cooking for the blog. Fortunately, in my graduate ethics class, a few students snapped these photos with their phones. We had quite a spread, with many contributions from students. I  made cold sesame noodles, summer rolls, Asian-style pickles, and orange-scented date bars with the gorgeous medjool dates I use for date-nut bread. Students brought everything from beer cheese and pretzels to sweet rice rolls, sushi, pasta, veggies and dip, and desserts—brownies, cookies, peanut butter bars, pineapple “casserole,” a kind of crumble. We fixed ourselves plates before sitting down to watch an ethics movie, The Insider, about a whistleblower (Russell Crowe) and the journalist who works with him to reveal his story (Al Pacino). For another class, I made a lemon meringue pie and a yellow 3-layer cake with buttercream fillng and a ganache frosting. Forgot to take a picture of the cake. But really good. 

Leaving implies arriving somewhere; that was fun, too. I’ve moved to Tucson to join the University of Arizona faculty. Can I tell you how happy I was to see a chile roaster at the farmer’s market selling entire bags of fresh, warm-from-the-roaster bags of roasted and peeled poblanos and red peppers, maybe 8 to a bag, for $5.00? So many locally made tortillas, including these mesquite flour tortillas? The amazing El Super, where everything “cuesta menos”?

More about all that later, because now for the really good news…for me, but also, hopefully, for you:

I’m in Little Compton!