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.
The slight but meaningful increase in temperature from last week to this–from 40s to 50s, basically–has made a huge impact outside, not least in the form of turning our last two winter storm warnings into plain old rain. All those tentative early shoots have emboldened, and are pushing forth with enthusiasm. It rained again today, and I’ve been leaving the plastic off the hooped salad bed so it can soak up the water. Today I got some asparagus crowns so I can put in another bed parallel to the existing one but outside the garden fence since the deer ignore it. I grabbed a few herbs to stick in the herb garden, and some lavender to go in a bed outside the front garden fence. Once it’s in, all four sides of the garden will have mulched beds or just plain mulch outside them, which should provide an extra measure of protection against the tenacious and ever-encroaching lawn.
While I picked this stuff up, along with less-sexy things like rock phosphate, lime, and green sand to amend the big-ass truck full of compost that’s coming tomorrow, I also hit the fish counter since the store in question has a decent one. Soft-shell crabs are in season, and Milo loves them, so I got three. I also bought a nice Pacific albacore steak, figuring that some tataki would be a nice complement to crispy fried crab.
Friday I went down to have make lunch with for Claudia and her Mom and friend, and on my way home I stopped at the good fish market there and picked up some things. Among those things were some beautiful sushi-grade yellowfin and opah and a small container of ikura. Other treats went in the freezer for another time. After the impromptu free catering gig, this stop was an excellent idea; there’s not much that I find more inspiring than gleamingly fresh seafood like this. I was most cheerful as I washed the rice.
I often encourage everyone to buy whole chickens and bone-in cuts of meat because the bones–either trimmed off while still raw, or gathered after eating–allow the luxury of meat to be enjoyed again as stock later on. As I told a recent class I taught here, stock is the single most useful from-scratch ingredient one can have in the kitchen; it’s the easiest way to make your food better and more like things you pay big bucks for out in the world. And I used a shrimp shell reduction (to make paella-flavored fettucine) in that class to illustrate the point; crustacean shells are pure gold in the stock pot the next day. But when it comes to fin fish, I often buy fillets instead of whole fish. And that’s missing an opportunity. I had this epiphanette last night as I stood over a steaming pot of beautiful fish stock.
A dear friend’s impending birthday gave me an excuse to spend an afternoon cooking, so after I ran a bunch of errands (including picking up 12 lbs. of pork belly for bacon) I got down to business in the kitchen. In the five hours between my return home and the arrival of the guests, I made a few dishes that turned out pretty well, and one that was damn good. And the wine, courtesy of John, was a beautifully curated study in Bordeaux-type wines vinified in places that (mostly) were not Bordeaux.
Seafood inspires me. Faced with some wild shrimp and semi-local (RI) clams, I thought about all the ways I could use them–together or separately–to good effect. I went around and around, and ultimately I settled on soup. Amazing, right? All the visions of multiple small plates (each cradling one elegant concoction) collapsed in the din of the ticking clock. I did have enough time to prepare the components individually, though, and it made a huge difference to the result.
Sometimes when making dinner I have just a little bit of time and the inclination to use it well. This is the sort of food that would normally get the one-plate treatment, but the simple act of approaching and presenting it as a multi-dish meal made it so much more interesting and satisfying than it would have been. Presentation matters, and that intention works to inform the cooking process with more care and attention.
A recent outing to a place that carries decent if inconsistent seafood yielded a dozen littleneck clams and a bag of wild Pacific shrimp. Our seafood options are limited up here, so I was thinking of ways to mix up what we can get that is both tasty and defensible. So on the ride home I did some thinking, and then some more once safely back in the kitchen. The results were quite good, and paved the way for a very compelling meal the following night. The difference between good and great food often lies in saving bits and pieces from previous meals.
I spent some time last Thursday talking to students about the practice of painting, and how after all these years building said practice I have total confidence in it, even if as now I’m on a hiatus from working in the studio. That trust makes for a real absence of stress, since I know that it will be right there when I start to feel the pull to get back to it. It’s a dividend of all the time and effort I’ve invested in working over all of these years. And cooking is the same, in a way; I don’t beat myself up if I’m not really feeling it, and sooner or later I get it back and all is well. The difference is that taking a hiatus is not really an option, so when I’m not in the mood I still have to do it. But diligence does pay off, and sometimes a really good idea just sort of falls out of the sky.