Mothers’ day gets a little easier each year, though I still don’t enjoy being reminded so overtly that I don’t have one any more. But my wife is a Mother, and her Mom has been in town visiting, and we’ve been having some high spring glory in the weather department, so today was pretty nice.
I’m working flat out to get a new piece ready for a show in LA at the end of the month, so posting might be spotty and/or lackluster over the next couple of weeks since I’m logging long hours in the studio (the wood shop, actually, sanding hundreds of small pieces and fabricating the aluminum plates that will hold them all together). It’s frustrating, because there’s much gardening to do but I’m not letting myself do any of it until the piece is done. And fancy cooking is likely to be another casualty of the 10+ hour days, though I’ll do what I can.
This month’s Chronogram is out, and for this issue I revised the pig-killing post from last summer. The event has stayed with me in a positive way; I try harder to use every scrap of everything I buy so that the life taken on my behalf gets the respect it deserves. If you haven’t read the original post, you can find it on the “best of” page up top.
OMG! Ramps! They’re all anyone can talk about for a few weeks, and then, suddenly, they’re gone. They’re like the Macarena of the food blogosphere. Now I get that they’re one of the first excellent greens to arrive in the spring (though a month later than my favorite, the ubiquitous wild garlic) and historically they have provided a much-needed jolt of vitamins and chlorophyll to people crawling out from under a hard winter. And they truly are a complex and stanky delicacy. But just because they’re wild doesn’t mean you should eat as many as you can before the season is over.
I had a hankering for Korean-flavored beef skewers grilled out on the porch, but lateness as always altered my plans a bit. The result was less elegant than it could have been, but sure tasted good. Plus, it’s a safe bet that nobody has ever made Korean-flavored water buffalo meatball sandwiches with ramps, charred green onions, pak choi, and homemade feta-yogurt-ramp sauce before.
Easter was a simple affair, but still a good dinner. It centered around a Flintstonian slab of lamb–a whole shoulder–that I rubbed with spices (cumin, 5-spice, coffee, coriander) and slit and stuffed with copious ramp bulbs.
Freshly returned from a few days in the city for spring break (truth be told, I really spent most of it at a Hooters in Paramus, NJ with Camille Paglia working on her script for a musical version of Caligula) I have a renewed sense of purpose when it comes to food. There’s so much about the city that I don’t miss: the parking, the noise, the smells, the noise, the expense, and how loud it is. But the food can be good. Having said that, though, I find that the older I get the fewer restaurants really do it for me. There’s the cheap ethnic hit, sure, and I could never make Indian or Thai meals as well or completely as the places we used to order from in Brooklyn, but beyond that category there are few joints in the middle range that succeed for me. Even among the high-end establishments (which every now and then I get to try) it can be hit or miss. Mostly I like to cook at home.
Not so kosher for pesach, but then I’m pretty treyf. Having made yogurt recently, and then strained it to a Greekness, I had a nice little jar of whey to use for something. That something turned out to be raisin bread, and a good thing too.
There’s a good fish market that’s just far enough away that I don’t make it there very often. When I do, though, I always try to hit their freezer section to allow for more future meals than the fresh cases can provide. On my last trip, I got the unagi we had the other night, and I also bought a package of frozen crawfish. This was right around the time I was curing the shoulder for the tasso ham, so you can probably guess what I had in mind: jambalaya.
I was talking to a friend the other night in the city about how exciting it is to watch the greens positively burst forth from the confines of the ground after a particularly long winter, and how the thrill is tempered by the frustration of waiting for them to grow. I’m desperately eager to stop buying vegetables as soon as I possibly can, and yet good-sized greens are still a few weeks away. As with so many culinary problems, the answer to this one is right outside the door.