Swordfish. Leftover polenta re-cooked with milk and alliums (scallions, onion, wild garlic). Miso-mustard-honey-cider vinegar sauce. Black pepper. Chervil. True story. Regular blogging will resume shortly.
Category: Lazy
As much as I complain about never having enough time to make the meals I see in my mind’s eye, very often I actually do. Sometimes, prior to the crepuscular rush to get food on the table, I have an idea, and it comes together like I imagined; other times I have no idea, but the ingredients on hand provide all the fodder (literal and figurative) that I require.
Look: another sighting of my dinner, rare as hen’s teeth these days. It’s been strange getting back into the regular cooking routine after so long out of it. It’s not the actual making of dinner, which I have not in fact forgotten how to do, but trying to reconcile all the wild flights of culinary fancy that my mind embarked upon while my hands held sandpaper and brushes (rather than knives and pan handles) with the quotidian realities of wandering into the kitchen at 5:30 and making good food from a cold start. So much of what I rely on to lift my meals up a level or two are the various time-intensive processes and ongoing experiments and just plain old leftovers that are in the fridge on any given evening, so it’s taking a little while for those secondary rhythms of production to catch up and I feel a little clumsy.
Bread-baking never stopped, although there were some hiccups. The vinegars are thriving. Cheesemaking is back under way, which is grand, so whey is in the mix, and of course there’s plenty of charcuterie about for mincing into soffriti to lend that lavish depth in an instant: salami, guanciale, duck prosciutto, bresaola, and lardo. And the freezer always has something worth eating in it. What galls me most at this time of year really is the dearth of good vegetables; there are still greens in the garden, sure, and a few roots, but I daydream about being able to walk outside and load up a basket with all the fat bounty that is still invisible over the horizon. This mild hardly winter isn’t helping, either; I keep feeling like I should plant stuff. The birds and spring bulbs are equally confused. I’m sure we’ll get some monster blizzard in a few weeks after everything is all budded out and lose it all.
Meantime, comfort food is still on the menu, though this example was leavened some with a couple of summery ingredients to symbolize my yearning for spring and the ephemerality of life, man.
I blather on regularly about how leftovers are a blessing rather than a curse, and how having a family with a low tolerance for them makes me a better cook because I have to innovate and transform the remnants of last night’s dinner into something new and different if I want it to get eaten and thus make room in the fridge for either A) a giant pork butt or B) uneaten portions of a meal to be named later. And it’s true. I spend far too much time thinking about how great it would be if I had all day every day to cook, drilling down into the experimentation, fabrication, and execution that leads to a deep relationship with techniques and results. But in the absence of that life of leisure, leftovers are the next best thing.
As fall gets into full swing, I become suffused with the mixture of joy and nostalgia that makes this time of year so powerful. The samenesses of green all around have given way to an infinity of subtle gradients; where summer is bright, garish, major-key flowers on a green background, fall is a symphony of microtonal subtlety fading in inexorable diminuendo toward the minimal months ahead.
I had nothing at all planned for dinner the other night, and I can’t remember why. In any case, come time to wrangle of the grub, I was a little short. Fortunately, just like any normal person I had eight local duck legs in the fridge–confit is imminent–so I peeled off two and built a decent dinner around them. For bonus points, it was autumnal as all get-out, coloristically speaking, on account of I have a Master’s degree in that shit.
I know I’ve been slacking here, but between the last article and my ostensible main gig as a painter it’s been hard to find the time. Now that summer is over, I’m hoping to get back into more of a routine. Another plus to the advent of fall is the cooler weather, of course, which allows for such lavish luxuries as baking bread after 7AM without wanting to kill oneself, wearing pants (actually kind of a hardship), and braising tough, inexpensive cuts of meat to transform them into unctuous and sensual delights. And having a pressure cooker makes this last item possible in half an hour flat.
The boy has been clamoring for ribs lately, but we were foiled in our attempt to procure them for him last week. This week, however, found the goddess Costa smiling upon us, so today I took a mid-afternoon break to get a slab and a half cosy in the oven so they’d be falling-apart by the time the dinner bell sounded.
I love this time of year. The bulk of good weather still lies ahead, and the speed of growth in and outside the garden mean that there are new inspirations for dinner every single day as I make my rounds. Right now, apart from the asparagus and some wild things, the salad stuff is the mother lode of culinary riches right now.
Last night I went to Nobu Next Door with a couple of friends after a thing in the city. It was far from our first choice, but since it came on the heels of another event and I had 110 miles to drive afterwards, we settled for what was right there, around the corner. I haven’t been to a Nobu franchise since a lunch party several years ago at the decorative trainwreck that is Nobu 57–it looks like 5 different interior designers mudwrestled to see who would get to ornament which surface–but I still have respect for his Peruvian-influenced ability to actually change Japanese cuisine from outside Japan. I had a few epic meals at his joints in NY and Miami back in the day, and because of who I was with luckily didn’t pay a penny for any of them. One’s standards tend to be a tad higher when one foots the bill, I have noticed. Today it feels like a hilarious Clinton-era time capsule all the way down to the too-loud lite house music, but it was convenient. Had I known that they still have bluefin on the menu, I would have kept walking.
This is what arrived today, along with the beaming sun and a nice cool breeze to keep the sweat from getting out of control. I got half the garden planted; almost all the early stuff is in. The rest will wait for the warm-weather crops, so I can concentrate on various fruit beds and getting the asparagus in. I’m exhausted. And, just so you don’t think that every meal here is something lavishly extravagant, behold: