The Theme is Discoloration

How do you cook for good friends you doesn't often see? Is it better to wheel out an old stalwart-- and thereby devote more time to socializing-- or to throw caution to the winds and tinker out something new? The conclusion seems foregone. Throw something in the oven and join 'em.

The logic certainly stacks up. The well-oiled machine produces fewer anomalies. The new, after all, is not necessarily the good. Why risk the suddenly sated appetites and delicate words that follow a failed experiment: "so— you're still cooking these days, I see. I guess you enjoy it?"

There's a social component here, too. When old friends come to visit, there's far more to an evening than simply the display of competence. To fritter away all one's time in the kitchen would be a disaster far more grave than any undercooked chicken or underwashed salad.

All the same, Saturday night found me spurning my own better judgment. I cast my lot with the new. Is there not something in friendship that refuses to be measured in terms of either aesthetic quality or, for that matter, time spent? Is not the very thing one enjoys about one's friends a certain élan, a flair for excitement and experiment? To fall back on practiced efforts risks reducing one's friends to mere company: it presumes that aesthetics precedes intentions.

With B. and L. visiting from Lower Appalachia this weekend, we made a meal whose theme was, however, based on an aesthetic glitch: the theme was discoloration. This was not a design realized in the planning phase. The theme, shall we say, emerged.

First came a salad with tiny beets from the season's final CSA box. The beets added a much-heralded purple hue to the lettuce and bacon they accompanied. A royal stain.

The theme continued with the side dish of "Turnips Anna" we served. (The title is a double homage: it is, first of all, a regular old shout-out to Potatoes Anna, which it mimics. Second, it is an homage to L's and B's friend Anna, whose casual remarks last December inspired this blog). Turnips Anna was made cheese-free for H's benefit, with a touch of mustard added to the Béchamel sauce for piquancy. And there was a stain, too, if ever so faint: amid the sliced turnips was a layer of purple potatoes— the vestiges, again, of the season's final CSA box. I thought the purple potatoes might dye the otherwise lily-white dish a garish blue. Yet the effect was subtle, even slight; just enough to continue the theme.

The true engine of the meal consisted of cod fillets braised in a red wine reduction. The recipe, which was adapted from James Peterson's Fish and Shellfish book, calls originally for salmon. I was in the mood for something less particular in flavor, however, so I used cod instead. And the cod stained triumphantly. The fillets were so purple that they might as well have been salmon. Nobody would have known the difference.

The preparation, which I will certainly use again, is simplified from the original recipe: combine 2 cups of fish stock with a bottle of red wine in a large saucepan, and add 2 cloves garlic, 2 bay leaves, a bouquet garni, and some chopped onion and celery, and reduce until you're left with about a cup of liquid. Then pour the strained liquid over 4 fillets in a roasting pan, and cook at 375° for 10 minutes per inch of thickness. When the fish is cooked, remove and keep warm; then, in a saucepan, reduce the sauce even further at high heat, adding 2 tablespoons of red wine vinegar and a dose of parsley.

We served this with the turnips and a side dish of roasted asparagus and red onions.

Now, really, none of this was especially experimental: it's basically beef-n'-two-sides with fish standing in for the beef. And the discoloration was strangely accidental, though at some point I must have noticed all the purple ingredients. And there was even time to chat with the friends. For the best part about braising and roasting— and this is precisely why such preparations are stalwarts in our kitchen— is that they require remarkably little oversight. And thus we could direct our attention elsewhere, where it belonged.

Some notes on, about, and toward Turkeys

November is "novel month," which makes for an amusing play on words. There are few months less novel than November. The other principle offender is December. Mind you, January and February never feel especially new either, in spite of the calendars they require us to buy.

All the same, November is the month during which we are asked not only to stomach a lack of novelty, but also to issue forth novels of our own. I was working in the local café today and noticed a sign advertising something called "national novel month." The plan is for everyone (!) to write a 50,000 word narrative within a single month. The design here is less to advance the progress of literary history than to promote bookish loitering in places such as cafés and bookstores. Needless to say, I'm utterly in favor.

Yet this announcement prompted some uneasy reflections on the blog format. Although the proposition of writing a "food" novel on this blog was fleetingly entertained, the parties responsible have been silenced. And besides, it's impossible. The temporality is all backward. There's simply no way to read it in order. Chapter one, no sooner written, would be treampled underfoot by chapter two. Chapter three, in turn, would spread itself leisurely atop chapter two, only to await the inevitable heft of its successor. And chapter four, flush in the prime of its creation, would have but a brief tenure before it, too, bent its head in deference to chapter five. And so forth, into obscurity.

This temporal difficulty goes beyond the novel form. A similar problem arises any time one attempts to pursue an older line of inquiry: last week, I began speculating about Thanksgiving menus, only to grow distracted. Rather than postponing the post indefinately, I cut bait, and posted it. And there it lies, half-baked, yet fully formed. To continue the same line of inquiry is impossible. I was trying to make some plans for Thanksgiving dinner. But now the whole proposition seens unsettled.

I'm wondering if the same kinds of tricks can be played on Thanksgiving itself. We'ere having friends over, so the sky's the limit. Why not tinker with the whole danged meal, and not simply tackle the turkey problem I was so concerned with last week?

Here's a possible menu:

Starter:
Turkey roulades: braised turkey thighs rolled with sausage/chestnut stuffing and cranberry sauce. Served sliced on a bed of dandelion greens?

Next:
Trio of autumnal soups, served in, you know, precious little cups of some kind:
1) white: turnip and leek soup
2) orange: squash bisque
3) red: borscht

After that:
Sweet potato soufflé with roasted brussels sprouts

And, to conclude, perhaps it's best to keep dessert last. So cheeses, naturally, and pumpkin pies or custards.

This is all just a fanciful thought, but I'm just sick, sick, sick of brown food at Thanksgiving.

Now, there's a whole other line of inquiry to pursue, here, which would involve swinging the doors in the other direction and make things much more, er, colonial. Open fires, lots of roasting, things cooked in coals.

So many decisions to make. So many decisions. And so much time.

This is why it's never too early to think about Thanksgiving.

It's Never Too Early...

It's never too early to start planning for Thanksgiving. With the holiday just over a month away, October 25 seems comically late. Imagine if one waited until this point before deciding to breed or even to fatten a turkey. Or to dry some corn. No dice. The whole thing would be a wash.

We lack, of course, the means to breed a turkey, and our back yard has no room for corn. We are humble consumers, and not farmers. And so such decisions regarding when and how to plan the harvest do not fall on us. Our greatest concerns are more banal: whether the bird has defrosted in time, or whether the meal should include soup.

Much of the colonial New England desperation implicit in this holiday meal is thus, frankly, lost on us. One year we spiced things up considerably by deep-frying the turkey outside. With a gas flame raging under a pot of hot oil, we felt, if only fleetingly, a shiver of Pilgrim fear.

More interesting still would be a thanksgiving dinner cooked and eaten entirely out of doors, with guest huddled together on the frosty ground. This wouldn't necessarily be authentic— the Pilgrims did, after all, have houses— but it would certainly feel old-fashioned. Such a plan would work better, though, if Thanksgiving were celebrated at its proper time: that is, in mid October, when the harvest occurs, and not in late November, when it's already winter.

This year I want to focus on the menu rather than on the danger. Thanksgiving dinner is rarely anything more than a buffet, a fatigue-inducing assortment of brown foods. Must this be the case? Might it be possible to choreograph the meal a bit further without losing sight of the seasonal ingredients, most of which are, it should be said, either brown, or roots, or both.

The central problem— as every cookbook will tell us— is the turkey. The fact is, I'm indifferent to it, finding the roast bird utterly humdrum and, what's more, a caricature of Early Modern cuisine. Yet the idea of matching savory roast fowl with rich forcemeats and spiced confectionery is deeply appealing. The problem is that the regal turkey has been propelled beyond its means. The dressings are now afterthoughts, or ornaments. This hubris has, for me, proven fatal: the bird, bloated from additives and adulation, can no longer soar to the heights to which it aspires. Bulky and swollen, falsely tenderized by a lifetime of captivity, it has little more appeal than a 15-pound potato.

Here, then, is the first thing to revise. Why not bring back the chestnuts, the citrus peel, the cranberries, and the forcemeat as the key elements of the presentation? Turkey is, after all, a game bird, not an institution. I've usually sneered at "alternative" preparations, as they tend to address the problem of tenderness (i.e., how do we avoid the dryness of roasting) rather than the dullness of the breed itself. I, for one, enjoy a good roast.

I love the image of a dozen or so small, scrawny wild turkeys roasting on a spit: this would necessitate the myriad flavoring agents and tenderizers used to mediate the strong flavors of the game. But this just isn't practical.

Here are two possible alternatives: the first is a recipe from the Dean & DeLuca cookbook for stuffed drumsticks with bacon, brandy, and thyme: this dish maintains the roasted flavor and dark, complementary richness of game, but in microcosm.
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This is where this post left off, about a week ago. Nothing earth-shattering; the ending simply never came to pass. What was that second alternative? I don't even remember.

It seems it's never to early to stop thinking about Thanksgiving.

A Note on Carrot Jam

Much of our cooking these days has been rushed off the stove, short-order style. After a while this becomes depressing: some of our recent meals, stretching into last week, have been decidedly monochromatic. A warm French potato salad with bacon and red onion. Tasty, sure, in moderation. But it's a side dish. So when there's nothing else to accompany it, it grows tedious P.D.Q. A bowl of potatoes can only take you so far.

So it was with no small relief that we broke out of our funk this past weekend and made a few things.

I even invented a recipe. This may be a first.

The dish even has a name. It's called "Pork with Carrot Confit." (Pork with Carrot Jam sounds peculiar, after all). The idea began with the details for a "Breakfast in Cairo" from Rozanne Gold's Recipes 1-2-3 Menu Cookbook, which is perhaps the most minimalist cookbook I've ever come across. Every dish uses only three ingredients, save salt and pepper. Pretty remarkable, especially since this allows plenty of room for experimentation.

Along with strained yogurt and Ful Madammas, beakfast in Cairo included a carrot jam: this is essentially a marmalade made from grated carrots, lemon, and sugar.

We now have a jar of it in our fridge.

For the pork recipe, I braised 4 pork ribs in carrot juice and garlic: first browning the ribs on all sides in a little olive oil, and then adding two cloves of chopped garlic and about two cups of carrot juice to deglaze the pan. I kept the temperature very low so as not to scorch the juice. The meat simmered, covered, for two hours or so.

Meanwhile, I made the jam by combining 2 pounds of grated carrots with six cups of sugar, two cups of water, and the juice of three lemons (to make 1/2 cup of lemon juice). This simmers for about an hour and a half, until the liquid thickens.

I then added about half a cup of the jam to the simmering pork chops; I also added a few whole miniature carrots, which were peeled. (The carrots had arrived with our farm share, and consisted of a mix of sizes and shapes. The tiniest were annoying enough to peel, and simply impossible to grate. So I tossed 'em in whole).

The addition of the jam makes the pork rather sweet, so one is advised to be judicious at this point. I wanted to be bold, but found that the pork could handle more jam than I'd suspected. I finished the dish by reducing the braising liquid to a fairly thick consistency and adding about a 1/2 tablespoon of sherry vinegar.

To complement the glazed pork I served it with tomato rice and some swiss chard sautéed with raisins and pine nuts; the chard added a useful note of bitterness to the plate.

All in all, not bad. Some ginger might have complemented the carrots nicely, and I wonder how else I might have finished the dish; in concept, the whole thing wasn't far off from many of the meat recipes in the Silver Palate cookbook, which make ready use of jams, jellies and compotes.

And now the next question is how best to use a jar of carrot jam.

Nostalgia-Free Cookies

First of all, there's no such thing.

That, at least, is what everyone told me. "The nose," Coach Taylor explained, "is the organ of nostalgia par excellence." Her paramour, whom I'll call A/V, agreed. "Smell and memory are inextricable," he said.

But herein lay my opening. "Nostalgia and memory are not the same thing. Memory has to do with events that actually happened; nostalgia is fictional sentiment."

Across town, my friends P. and J-M concurred. "Nostalgia refers to something that never took place." But then a slight correction: "Or at least, it refers to something that has become fictionalized, even if it was real to start. You turn it into myth."

I was in Philadelphia for two evenings this week, and I used the occasion to bore my friends with a question that had occurred to me as I was reading about the world financial crisis. The crash, as everyone knows, stems from the surfeit of McMansions. And we've all heard, of course, about the real-estate sales ploy of baking cookies in otherwise soulless houses; the smell of baking was designed to counteract this. Fanned throughout the empty husk of home model A, this smell induced a sense of homeyness that prompted potential home-buyers to ferret out desperate mortgages they could not afford. The smell of cookies drives us homeward; yet in driving madly homeward, we arrive to find little more than fumes.

This may seem more prosaic than any Proustian involuntary memory, but for a spell it was a whole lot more profitable. Until now, of course. No superabundance of cookies can offset global panic.

All the same, it comes back to cookies. If you ask me, the global financial crisis has to do with the unfortunate bond between cookies and nostalgia. (What a sad fate for such an unassuming pastry. First it was heart attacks, and now this. It simply isn't fair!) But since there are fat-free cookies, might it not be possible to develop nostalgia-free cookies as well?

This was the idea.

For Coach T. and A/V, who are marvelously rational people, the proposition would call for a massive shift in cookie composition. The olfactory agents would have to change entirely. What is it we smell when we bake cookies? The caramelization of sugar; the browning of butter; the melting of cocoa butter. These elements— so fundamental to our sense of the familiar— would have to go. Cookies could be made instead from savory ingredients. "Why not meat?" A/V offered. But by this time it was becoming clear that my inquiry had overstayed its welcome: it was, after all, time for dinner. And attention was turning toward meatier things.

For the ever tactful P. and J-M, the question soon shifted into a discussion of nostalgia itself; this spared me the embarassment of conversational overkill. Was nostalgia purely a fiction? Or could it refer to something specific? To put the question another way: do realtors bake cookies in order that the smell remind homebuyers of their actual homes, or only that it remind them of an idea or ideal of home they carry around with them?

I'm no Des Esseintes; but I'm wondering all the same whether the whole emotional register of cookie baking might be pried open entirely. Why limit the exploration of scent to the narrow margin between memory and nostalgia, when the whole range of sentiment can provide a terrain for exploration. Might it be possible to bake cookies whose scent made everyone sad, or eager, or triumphant? What about a batch of brownies that reduced one's guests to speculation, or to uneasiness?

We're straying ever closer to molecular gastronomy here. But this is not simply a matter of synthesizing olfactory effects. If a batch of cookies were to give off the odor of tobacco, or of burning leaves, would this alter their ties to nostalgia? Or would it be simply a different nostalgia? The real question— kidding aside— is whether the activation of our sense of smell is tied simply to memories (whether "real" or imaginary), or whether, like tastes, it's possible to access other forms of cognition, whether conscious or unconscious. Are there smells to which we might react in terms of danger, for instance?

Imagine what "danger cookies" might taste like.

Or perhaps realtors have been baking danger cookies all along, and we simply haven't learned to react to them properly.

Easy Targets

One of the great autumnal pleasures— other than raking leaves, which comes later in the season— is staying up late to make tomato sauce. I'm now on my third batch. Two weeks ago, as batch #2 simmered happily away, I suddenly realized that time had escaped my grasp: it was 2:30 in the morning. And on a work night! My mind must have been wandering.

What snapped me to attention— and what directed this attention, in turn, to the lateness of the hour— was the cavalcade of sirens wailing down the street outside. One of the houses nearby was on fire. The house had been an 1870s miracle, a Queen Anne stone mansion whose fate now hangs on the scales of the insurance companies.

My sauce, however, bubbled along contentedly, even as I padded barefoot over to the next street, straining to determine which house was burning. The cause of the fire, it turns out, was an electrical malfunction. But it could just as easily have been a kitchen fire— an unwatched stove, say, left burning too far into the night. So I rushed home to turn off my own stove, lest those flames get any wild ideas.

My hope tonight— needless to say— is that the new batch of tomato sauce will bring no such drama, and that the pleasure of late-night sauce-making will be unmarred by disaster or tragedy.

One might even say that the entire home cooking industry shares my hope, or at least bases its marketing upon it. What is a cookbook, after all, other than a bulwark against failure? Why resort to trial and error when a trial can be so trying, and when an error— in a situation wherein high heat, sharp instruments, and perishable foodstuffs are involved— can be dangerous as well as unsatisfying.

So, too, does the technology of the home cook serve a prophylactic function. Whether against waste, or strain, or lost time, or ineptitude, these instruments line our counters and cabinets like enamel soldiers primed for battle. Just look at the young lady on the cover of the Hamilton Beach food mixer cookbook, above; notice how keenly her face radiates pride, and how staunchly her unmarred apron testifies to the machine's efficiency.

Books like this are easy targets; indeed, it's far too easy to snicker at such a portrait of the 1940s domestic goddess, brandishing her cake like a toddler beaming after a successful trip to the potty.

Nor is it any real fun to marvel at the mixer's place in the tableau: how it quietly dominates the scene, a magician soliciting applause for his tireless and lovely assistant. The mixer takes its bow, too; the domestic goddess has distracted us just long enough for the mixer to pull off its sleight-of-hand.

Again, all this is simply too easy. The real pleasure here lies in following these protestations of joy as they change over time. I recently came across a number of such pamphlet-sized cookbooks (or cookbooks-cum-instruction manuals) at a local antique store, shortly after the night of the fire. They were all remarkably cheap, which is why I bought them. And they are remarkable documents. But documents of what?

Of gender, certainly. The calm, smiling grandmother of the 1930s gives way to the eager hausfrau of the 1940s and 1950s, suggesting slight alterations, but no major ones, in the picture of domesticity they present. The womenfolk help the machines cook all that food, and the experts at Syracuse University safely test the recipes.

One cookbook (to the right) offers a slightly different spectacle, depicting a curious hybrid of grandmother and infant, grinning girlishly out at us over her bifocals. She seems to have leapt over adult sexuality altogether. The book is dedicated to "carefree cooking," suggesting that the recipes are simple enough for our quaint little humunculus to prepare the dishes herself— no need for technology here! She holds the cookbook upside down, of course.

Again: easy targets. But there's something more to these little books than their ham-fisted identifications with the pre-war status quo. For other titles are more straightforwardly hortatory, appealing to their readers to "Be Original" or to "Cook with Cheese." Here we have a paean to the aesthetic sensibility that home kitchen products— whether instruments, implements, or condiments— can introduce into our lives. Technology offers more than just efficiency; it can fulfill cooking's appeal to pleasure.

Here, to the left, is a book that became an immediate favorite of mine, a pamphlet put out by the makers of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce sometime during the 1970s. A real marketing gambit, for certain: the versatility of a condiment made from fermented anchovies, raisins, garlic, molasses, and tamarind may not seem immediately apparent. But this obscure condiment, the book claims, can become a vehicle for unfettered creativity.

And I can imagine no vehicle more perfect— and certainly no more original!— than a meat loaf train. Chugging along on its carrot-disk wheels across a landscape of mashed potatoes, it bears a salutary cargo of vegetables to the good little boys and girls around the table.

"Just the dish to enchant the youngsters at any party," the recipe claims.

The dish enchants because it offers us, rather than the perfect dish, an incarnation of the perfect train. Its cargo notwithstanding, the train delivers because it was designed to careen off the tracks, to break into bits, to disappear. Railway accident— normally the stuff of tragedy— becomes a raison d'être, and, in doing so, becomes the stuff of pure entertainment. The meat loaf train, which serves 8-10, titillates the youngsters with its spectacle of immanent consumption, who tear into it like a roomfull of pre-teen de Quinceys running to gape at a fire.

Perhaps this, rather than the more pastoral pleasures of late-night sauce, represents the epitome of home cooking technology: disaster is not so much avoided as embraced, transformed into the very purpose of cooking itself.

Mollycules and Gastropods

H. has been out of commission this weekend with a stomach flu, but the kitchen has been busy all the same. For some reason— perhaps as a means of passing the time until the second shoe inevitably drops— the level of activity in our kitchen has intensified. Does flu strike in pairs? In threes?

H. has more of less recovered, thank goodness; she was fit enough this evening for a dinner of beef shanks braised in white wine and celery. But even as the shanks bubbled happily away in their pot, I noticed that the big blue Hubbard squash we'd picked up at a recent fair was starting to develop soft spots. It, too, was showing signs of disease.

Sadly, Old Hubbard would not be recovering quite as quickly as her human counterpart(s); to my knowledge there's no remedy for vegetable illness other than a swift execution. I decided to act fast.

The squash is now simmering away in chicken stock, on its way to becoming tomorrow's soup. I have a peck of tomatoes awaiting a similar fate: when their moment approaches, they will become a short batch of marinara sauce, destined for the freezer.

Two long-stewing dishes in one night, with a third in the wings. Hardly a feat, yet it has brought about a certain philosophical calm. Or, more precisely, a deadpan reflection on the nature of transformation.

Onward, then, to transformation. A recent New Yorker article — whose title escapes me — assesses the career of Grant Achatz, a Chicago chef who was diagnosed with tongue cancer after living for nearly a year with painful lesions similar to the blackened sores on my now- butchered Hubbard squash. Achatz's diseased tongue is strongly metaphorical, connoting far more than simply the vegetables decaying in my home kitchen. What makes the Achatz story truly remarkable is that his illness has transformed the chef's cancerous tongue into a metaphor for his own food as well.

Achatz has undergone numerous courses of chemotherapy and radiation in order to save his tongue, which is, of course, one of his principal professional assets. The procedures seem to be working (although the story closes inconclusively, in classic New Yorker fashion, so we never know for certain). Achatz is a living pharmakon; his tongue is the focus of myriad scientific procedures. The point of the article seems clear: the barrage of chemicals and techniques to which the chef's body has been subjected is uncannily similar to the battery of chemicals and procedures to which Achatz subjects his food.

Achatz, you see, is a practitioner of molecular gastronomy.

Now, it strikes me that the way one reacts to— or even describes— the phenomenon of molecular gastronomy serves as an instant determinant: call it a fad, and you're already a grumpy traditionalist shaking your fist at those fussy, foam-blowing gastropods and longing for a simple snack of pig's trotters and snouts, just like grandma used to make. Or, at least, just like they make 'em at your favorite Parisian brasserie. You know, where they really know how to make onion soup.

Call it "the future of cooking," however, and you're already entrenched in the other camp, lecturing to the infidels about the fact that the culinary arts were once on par with the world of science. Remember the good old days? Lavoisier! Rumford! Recall Brillat-Savarin, who wrote in The Physiology of Taste that

"Gastronomy is a part of: Natural history, by its classification of alimentary substances; Physics, because of the examination of the composition and quality of these substances; Chemistry, by the various analyses and catalyses to which it subjects them; Cookery, because of the art of adapting dishes and making them pleasant to the taste; Business, by the seeking out of methods of buying as cheaply as possible what is needed, and of selling most advantageously what can be produced for sale; Finally, political economy, because of the sources of revenue which gastronomy creates and the means of exchange which it establishes between nations."

"It rules," he concludes, "over our whole life."

In the interest of teetering on the brink of a disease without succumbing to it, I will suggest simply this: molecular gastronomy is a manner of food-production that treats its food and seeks to cure it.

For indeed, it might seem unfair to all parties to deem it mere cooking. As a science of transformation, it surpasses in degree what happens to a tough shank of beef, say, when you stew it for several hours in a savory broth. But does it surpass this in kind? Flatly, no. The history of gastronomy dictates otherwise: the science of gelatin was no paltry affair, after all.

So it's cooking, and, in the right hands, it's good cooking, too. Just look at the kinds of mollycules they serve up at a restaurant like Alinea. Scroll through the pictures and tell me those little morsels don't look delicious. This isn't just a matter of using food as the brute matter upon which to excercise a series of techniques; here, each concept seems to derive expressly from the ingredients themselves.

I say this, of course, with utterly no authority— since restaurants such as Alinea tend to be prohibitively expensive, and there are scandalously few culinary equivalents of the public art museum. Let's not forget to read those last lines of Brillat-Savarin: gastronomy, molecular or otherwise, is never far from political economy.

Perhaps I'm coming down with something after all. For I've run my feverish course through the basic concepts of the molecular gastropods, and all this without ever having the pleasure of their mollycules running through me.

So does this mean that I'm a fan? No: it just means that I would suggest that we recall the tendency of arts and sciences alike to benefit mutually from a salutary catholicism of taste. To claim that mollycules are the future of all cooking is a bit like suggesting that Futurism represented the future of all art. This is more than just foolish; it's dangerous. There are plenty of ways to experiment, and technological advancement is but one of them.

To consider molecular gastronomy as little more than a fad, however, seems no less troublesome. Imagine standing irrevocably by the claim that eggs should never be beaten or separated. In the case of livestock, or of children: yes, certainly. But to deny the "molecular" properties of egg proteins, and thus prohibit that a soufflé never come to pass, or that a meringue never take shape? Futurism, for all its political rants and affiliations, still referred to a kind of painting; and molecular gastronomy, for all its alembics and gases and fairy-dust powders, is no less a kind of cooking.

So in short, my point is this: I've done a lot of cooking this weekend. It wouldn't kill me to try out one of these molecular-gastronomy restaurants, now, would it? Certainly not. Especially if you pay for it.

Damn Those Two Little Gardeners!

It's an ugly truth. Margaret Wise Brown, beloved children's author and master of the soporific line, has kicked my ass.

This has nothing to do with her magnum opus. With its bowls of mush and quiet old women whispering "hush," Goodnight, Moon leaves me cold. For the book's faux- Flemish interiors lend it an air of religious quietude that relegates it firmly to the realm of infancy. This is especially true for the board-book version, which (I admit) does stand up rather well to the ravages of early childhood.

Our daughter, for one, has moved on to more sophisticated fare. Dr. Seuss is a favorite, of course. Ever more popular is the inimitable Everyone Poops, with its sublime gesture toward universality.

Yet the past months have been dominated by The Two Little Gardeners, a hitherto-unknown work in the Margaret Wise Brown canon. I started reading the book to A. in late July. By mid August I had to force it out of the rotation. But it was too late. I was utterly stricken: I could no longer write. I could barely enter the kitchen. What happened?

It was those damned children.

The story portrays two rosy-cheeked youngsters who, for all their alleged youth, comport themselves like an old married couple. Sporting floppy sun hats and high-waisted pants, they look octegenarian rather than eight. Perhaps someone miscarried a decimal point. In the early moments of the book they till the soil and plant seeds. In subsequent pages we follow the garden's progress as its vegetables begins to grow and flower. We learn about the challenges of drought and garden pests. Later, with all such conflicts resolved, our protagonists witness the garden's teeming splendor.

The story reaches its denouement in a flurry of alliteration: "The corn tassels bloomed/ And the pumpkins got fat/ And the beans grew long/ And the carrots pushed up through the ground/ And the cabbages looked like great green roses all in a row./ Day after day something was ripe and ready to pick."

To this point, I'm fine with the whole proposition. The garden grows, and produces vegetables. Dandy, I say. I get a CSA farm share delivered to my door— more or less the same thing. Just without the tilling, or the toiling, or the smug pride of a season-long agricultural project.

It's the next part that kills me. Our plucky heroes cook and cook and cook, boiling and baking everything in large casserole dishes. Then they get all gussied up in their Sunday best and gorge themselves.

But does this satisfy our little do-gooders, those apple-cheeked savants who bear the wisdom of the ages. No, far from it.

The little bastards go to work canning and preserving everything else. And here Brown's endless litanies become tauntingly matter-of fact: "So they put up some things in cans and jars and bottles/ and stored them away on the shelves."

Look at the picture! Onions hanging in bunches. Carrots plunged into barrels of sand. Potatoes and pumpkins heaped up in bins. Squash splayed out like Phoenician soldiers on the battlefield.

It's downright humiliating, I tell you.

Now, I've tried; I've tried. First it was the cordials: capturing the essence of summer fruit in liquid form, like bugs under a bell. And during the past few weeks, we've made an extra effort to keep abreast with the season's bounty.

One week it was giardiniera— cauliflower, radishes, green beans, carrots, and broccoli, lightly brined— of which there remain two Ball jars somewhere near the back of the fridge.

The next week it was fresh dill cucumber pickles, made without vinegar; these disappeared within days.

And recently I tried my hand at making tomato jam, to modest success (the jam is tasty although the consistency isn't quite right: it's a bit too runny to qualify as jam). Will any of this last beyond next Wednesday? Fat chance. Will it fill a larder with tidy rows of jars and bottles to last all winter long?

Margaret Wise Brown has, in short, left me a quivering wreck. Damn those two little gardeners! But I smell a rat (and, out of spite, I might add that the little dog in the illustration above might be smelling a rat as well). Is it really possible for a simple little garden plot to yield quite as much as it does in this accursed little book?

And can such quaint little children really be relied on to sterilize their jars and bottles properly? Just think of the bacteria! I'm just relieved that Brown didn't decide to follow the Two Little Gardeners into the Fall, when they begin potting tripe, pickling pig's feet, and making blood sausage.

CSA + Farmer's Market = Bliss

A Saturday in mid-August with a temperature of 85° is a gift, if ever something so public could be considered a gift.

In the "Victorian" hamlet of Bellefonte, PA (last I checked, the U.S. was never part of the Victorian Empire) today is ArtsFest. It's a good day for the town: people are walking, rather than driving, up and down the hills. The sun is sparkling in the sky, and the light plays off the leafy trees along the town's streets. For a day, at least, business is booming in the local restaurants and coffee shops. And this is in spite of the myriad kettle corn stalls, gyro stands, and pulled-pork sandwich carts that arrive with the fair.

Today is also market day in town: there's a growing farmer's market in Bellefonte, which takes place in the center of town every Wednesday and Saturday. It seemed to struggle a few years back, but recently it has benefited from an influx of patrons and dealers alike. There are even a few new farms; one, Setter's Farm, is a tiny acre or so outside of town that specializes in salad greens.

For lunch, minutes ago, we had a salad made from the farm's specialty green mix-- a combination of lettuces, herbs, baby greens, and edible flowers-- served with sliced heirloom cherry tomatoes and quartered hard-boiled egg. Alongside it was a secondary salad of micro-greens, dressed simply with a walnut oil vinaigrette.

How easy it is to forget that salads have flavor. But what a pleasure to be reminded. When a salad is more a bouquet than a bed of greens, this becomes increasingly possible.

What's more, there are still plenty of vegetables left over from our weekly CSA box, too. Thus tonight we're having P2 and S. over for a garden barbecue: I have fresh basil and tomatoes for a salad, and, for the grill, sweet corn and summer squash, as well as various shapes and sizes of tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. I also picked up a round loaf of dutch oven bread; sliced, grilled, and rubbed with garlic, it might make for a nice accompaniment to all those grilled vegetables.

P2 and S. will bring some pork chops and-- they claimed, mysteriously-- some vegetables from their own garden. I didn't know they even had a garden. A miracle!

I Want a General Store, Too

The village of North Hero, Vermont lies on the Eastern shore of Grand Isle, looking out over the broad expanse of Lake Champlain. On a warm August day, the lake is alive with boaters, swimmers, and water-skiers. Sun-baked piers stretch out from the shore. And in the village the cottages and farmhouses all boast rows of Adirondack chairs lined up on the lawns, waiting for the diurnal spectacles of sunrise and sunset. The gardens are alarmingly well-kept; they spill over with black-eyed susans and tall white phlox.

At the heart of this little village on an island in the middle of a lake is a general store. It is a very impressive general store. There are nice things to buy there. I want one.

Some might covet the New Englandy wonder of the tumbled-shale beaches, perfect for strolling upon with linen suits, skipping stones into the lake at sunset. Some might covet the tidy colonial houses with their cottage gardens and covered porches.

They can have it. I want the general store.

Vermont has a knack for fancy, well-groomed general stores; one of the ways you can sniff out the influx of New York- New England tourist money is by poking through the merchandise in these local stores. Wine, designer cookware, imported cheese, freshly baked breads and pastries, local crafts, and, of course, the myriad permutations of maple syrup.

In central Pennsylvania, by contrast, most the country stores I've seen look like they're holding their breath. Cluttered, depressed, and out-of-date, they're waiting to let go and follow the light, beckoned up to heaven as the last of their customers head off to Wal-Mart. In the meantime, they're stocked with nonperishable pantry items, and with chips.

In Vermont, though, the general stores don't compete with Wal-Mart. This is largely due to the fact that there aren't any Wal-Marts in Vermont. But it's also because Vermont general stores have tourists to entertain, and not just a loose handful of cigarette-buyers and lottery-players to sustain.

But here's my question: which comes first? Must the tourists preceed the store-- or might it be precisely the general store that makes passers-by feel, suddenly, like tourists?

And thus I ask: might it be possible to transplant a Vermont general store to a state that isn't Vermont, and to have it thrive?

Can I have one, please?

The general store in North Hero, named "Hero's Welcome," seems to have found both a niche and an expert store buyer. Sited in a keenly-refurbished historic building, the general store bears all the qualities of the well-rounded generalist. A generalist, that is, in the strong sense-- not in the sense of dilettante.

The store opens first into a small café, with a few wooden tables, lots of newspapers, and an array of freshly-baked pastries-- savory as well as sweet. Further down is a sandwich counter and a wall of bottled-drink coolers; on the facing wall is a scaled-down wine store, and, adjacent to it, a sweet-shop display of penny candy displayed in wide-mouthed jars (we bought some horehound candies, lemon drops, and molasses mints. Straight out of the nineteenth century... but more on nostalgic sweets anon, I hope).

After that, the room widens, and to one side lie shelves bearing the standard provisions (canned goods, ketchup and mustard, medicine, and the like). To the other side is a clothing shop, with a standard array of regionally-themed t-shirts, fleeces, windbreakers, and cowboy hats. Beyond that the store becomes truly particular. The next room boasts a cathedral ceiling and a loft. In the loft are a few shelves of whimsical toys and games, as well as local maps and a small but meticulously-chosen selection of books. With a substantial collection of books by Vermont authors and plenty of titles on Vermont history and the geography of Lake Champlain, the bookstore's real standout is the cooking section. Lots of books about canning and preserving; on garden-to-table cuisine; the L.L. Bean book of game and fish cookery; and so forth. I bought a book about Prairie food there.

Beneath the loft is a wide selection of cookware and tableware, similar to what you might find at a small but upscale cookware boutique. One wall of the store featured strange forms of cutlery, including dental equipment and an assortment of scissors, magnifying glasses, and binoculars. Then, out back in an outbuilding, there's an outdoor outfitters, with fishing gear and various boating equipment for sale or rent. Out! Out!

The point is not that these types of displays don't exist anywhere else (although the petite-yet- competent bookstore is becoming rarer and rarer). What's remarkable is that each element of this general store represented its genre well: no part of the store could claim to be exhaustive, but what you found was singular enough to seem almost unique. Of course, nothing was particularly cheap. But herein lies the store's genius: you don't go there for cheap things. You go there for good things.

Yes, a little Martha Stewart. And given the locale, the idiom fits.

But I hardly think that the inverse mode of general store-keeping is any more proletarian. Just because a store's depleted stock looks like it dates from the era of Stalinism doesn't mean that the store is somehow keeping it real.

So can I have one? Can I? Pleeeeeeeeease?

CODA:

As we were driving home from Vermont yesterday we stopped at another general store near the Grand Isle Ferry. Coincidentally, in the Burlington free city newspaper, Seven Days, was a cover story on General Stores. The article is a review of a new book by Dennis Bathory-Kitsz entitled Country Stores of Vermont: A History and Guide. One key feature of this book-- which makes it especially worthy of purchase-- is its discussion of the business plans of a number of successful stores. The article, like the book, aims to dispel the mythology of the stores as nostalgic curiosities, and instead to focus on the economic realities they face-- How and why they survive; the challenges they face; and so forth.

I will gladly this book for anyone who wants to open a proper general store in my town.

Attack of the Late-Night Munchies

Some years ago there was a fair amount of press coverage devoted to a curious spike in early-morning laceration cases throughout the US. Suddenly there were all kinds of middle-class bank tellers, lawyers, and schoolteachers rushing to the emergency room with bloody palms and sliced fingers.

The culprit? Frozen bagels. At the height of the "bagel craze" of the early 90s-- itself a by-product of the coffee chain explosion-- people who weren't from New York City were buying bagels and freezing them.

The problems arose when it came time to un-freeze them. How do you toast a rock-solid frozen bagel? In our own enlightened era, of course, we know the secret: it is essential to split bagels before freezing them.

In the early 1990s, however, such wisdom had not yet made itself known. And thus the early morning found the D.I.Y. crowd struggling to cleave apart their still-frozen breakfast fare. Chef's knives-- themselves a popular gift item during this same era-- presented a ready option. But carving into a solid toroid-shaped object is no simple task. Thus the slicer's task is a treacherous one : left hand grips the bagel, right hand holds the knife. You know the rest.

Frozen or not, it was a recipe for laceration.

The injury became so common, in fact, that it spawned inventions like "the Bagel Guillotine" and the closely-related "Bagel Biter" (pictured). The principle of such devices, it seems, was to exact a measure of revenge upon the offending pastry itself. Take that, abuser! One could either execute it in swift yet definitive fashion (i.e. with the guillotine), or anticipate, in technological form, its slow, painful digestion (i.e. with the biter).

None of this is especially new. Here, for instance, is an article from franchising.com about the bagel industry's progress since those dark times. It's called "You've Come a Long Way, Bagel."

But are there any articles out there about late-night frozen pesto injuries? I think not. Yet the hazards of frozen pesto should be made known all the same.

I, for one, am the victim of a pesto injury.

It all started when K. across the street presented me with a little tupperware cup of homemade basil pesto. It was delicious. We were about to depart for Colorado, though, so I placed the tub in the freezer. It would be waiting for me when I got back.

And indeed, upon our return, there it was. On Monday night, just as I was about to go to bed, I found myself feeling somewhat peckish. The fridge was empty-- shockingly so-- since we'd only arrived back that day. There was food in the pantry, certainly. But there was no reason to do anything rash. I just needed a quick bedtime nosh, as the bagel crowd might say.

My thoughts turned to the pesto. It was frozen solid, but this was hardly a deterrent. In that sordid, bedtime way, I was ready-- eager, even-- for a few shards of pesto gelatto.

It was just a small tupperware tub, so I started hacking at with a steak knife. No need for anything heavy, I thought. No: a long, sharp, serrated blade would do the trick.

And it did.

An hour later, as I sat on a gurney in the emergency room waiting for stitches, I realized that the story I was telling about my injury sounded a bit louche. Hardly the stuff of sympathy.

"An unfortunate pesto incident," I'd explained to the triage nurse. "The blade hit mostly webbing, I think," I added, trying to sound tough. "Just between the fingers. I don't think there's any nerve damage."

"On the pain scale," the nurse asked, pointing to the diagram before me, "how much pain would you say you were in?"

This gave me pause. If I said "none," I'd be a laughing stock. One is a happy face, utterly content. Was I content? Certainly not: it was one in the morning, after all, and I never did manage to find the chunk of pesto that had popped out of the container as the knife pushed through the plastic and, in turn, my hand. I was still peckish.

"Two," I offered. That would make me look tough: yes, it was a pesto injury. But I was owning up to my pain. The injury might have been the kind of culinary disaster to befall the likes of Fraser Crane; but I was facing it like Patrick Swayze.

The doctor and I chuckled, indeed, about the classic Swayze vehicle, "Roadhouse," as he stitched up the front and back sides of the puncture.

"Imagine that," I said. "Telling the doctor he didn't need anesthetic."

"Hm," the doctor concurred. "Imagine that."

I chuckled, waiting for the anesthetic to take effect. And then I drove home and made some toast. Why hadn't I thought of that before?

A-Hole and Balls

It's all about keeping it classy, after all. Thus I promise: it's not as rude as it sounds.

It's a hot, sunny Friday afternoon in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. We've just returned from splashing around in the principal spring itself, a bubbling, sulphuric pool that trickles into the Yampa river. At this junction in the river is also a small waterfall that empties into a deeper pool beneath. This, we are told, is the A-Hole.

The A-Hole smells like sulphur.

There are numerous other holes along the Yampa river as it passes through the town of Steamboat Springs: the B-Hole, the Peep-Hole, and so forth. If you rent an inner tube you can float downstream through all these sites; at each you will find kids jumping off the rocks into the deep water. It's really fun.

After diving over the falls at the A-Hole, we went to lunch at one of the older restaurants in town, Double Z's. It's the kind of place where you expect to hear George Thorogood on the stereo, and do. (Seriously!). They sell t-shirts featuring two pigs having sex, bearing the motto: "Best Pork in Town."

The B-Hole has been renamed the ZZ-Hole in honor of this Steamboat institution.

After our plunges through the A-Hole, we visited the Double Z for lunch, because this, of course, is the restaurant in Steamboat known for serving Rocky Mountain Oysters.

And the verdict? A) the good part: bull's testicles, sliced and flattened, are similar to sweetbreads in both flavor and consistency. Thus, as I had hoped. Not only were they inoffensive, they hold the promise of being delicious. A delicacy rather than a dare.

B) the bad part: as the photo we took illustrates, the "oysters" were deep-fried virtually beyond recognition. And fried food tends to taste, well, like fried food. So if we reached a saturation point in our testicle-munching, it was less for the peculiarity of the organ than for the limitations of the preparation.

But there's a world of possibility here-- and I wonder which adventurous western chefs have explored this organ for its highbrow possibilities. Not that I think it requires a highbrow preparation. I wonder if, just like real, aquatic oysters, there's a way to enjoy them simply. Not raw, of course. But perhaps roasted over a prairie fire?

Quickly, Green

Two nights ago at Camp E-Colo we celebrated taco nite. C.W. made some fabulous shrimp tacos, marinating the shrimp in tequila, lime, and salt before pan-searing them. The other revelation was to serve the shrimp with shredded red cabbage and a salsa verde-sour cream sauce. A keeper, for sure.

I made carnitas from that wonderful recipe I've used over and over these past few months-- here, again, is the link. There was enough meat not only for the tacos but for pork po' boys last night as well.

The other element of the taco dinner was an improvised pork chili verde I'd made earlier that day. I am sure there are recipes out there for chili verde, but I refuse to look at them. Imagine composing a song in your head, only to realize that the song you'd composed was in fact something you'd heard subliminally. I find such revelations unnecessary and somewhat depressing. Besides, wasn't there a Bugs Bunny cartoon about this once?

So no need to go through the process of researching the recipe to uncover any accidental plagiarism. The idea does, in fact, have a source: one day, perhaps a year or so ago, I found myself watching a show on television about a Western-style covered-wagon cook-off competition. It was riveting, like a traffic accident. The chaps. The frontier dresses. And, perhaps most of all, the mustaches!

The essential point was that everything had to be cooked over an open flame, and to involve, it seemed, a Dutch oven. So there was a lot of cornbread, and a lots of chili.

Someone, I recall, made a green tomatillo and pork chili, and the image stuck with me. It became a fantasy. I wondered about the contents, before realizing that it was a matter of cobbling together all the green things I could think of. And what better place to experiment with such cowboy fare than in sunny Colorado?

Here, to the best of my recollection, is the recipe.

Starting with a pork shoulder (I couldn't find a boneless one, so the first step involved removing the awkwardly-shaped shoulder blade), cut off any hard fat and then cut the meat into a 1/2 inch dice (or so). I used about 2 1/2 or 3 pounds of meat. Salt the meat. (This can be done in advance, too, as in the carnitas recipe).

In a heavy bottomed pot, sear the pork cubes in vegetable oil, which will require several batches.

Reduce the heat to medium, and, in the accumulated fat (unless there's more than a 1/2 inch of fat in the pan, in which case, drain off the excess), sweat 2 chopped onions, 3 chopped green peppers, 2 chopped serrano peppers, and 6-8 cloves of garlic, diced. After about 5-7 minutes, add about 1 1/2 pounds of chopped tomatillos, and continue to sweat the mixture until the vegetables are soft.

Add the pork, as well as healthy doses (1 tbsp or more) of chili powder, cumin, black pepper, oregano, and ancho chili powder. Add water to cover the meat.

Simmer for several hours, until the meat falls apart and the flavors are melded. Add salt, tobasco, and additional chili powder to taste. I also added, at some point, a small amount of honey and a small amount of cider vinegar to bring out the sweetness.

Serve with diced onion, cilantro, and sour cream (or C.W.'s brilliant combo of salsa verde and sour cream).

In Search of the R.M.O.

So here we are at "Camp E-Colo," the 2008 incarnation of the immortal Camp E-Coli.

We're comfortably ensconced in a gorgeous mountainside house in Colorado (courtesy of Ron T. and Pat T.), and each night's dinner so far has surpassed its predecessor: on our arrival, we fired up some simple hot dogs and corn. That was Saturday. Sunday's dinner was a lovely set of green enchiladas. Monday's dinner was "Cowboy night," which consisted of cowboy steaks and cowboy beans, with cornbread and more corn. (I should say that this meal didn't so much surpass the enchilada dinner as involve more lubrication beforehand). And tonight we had a massive spread of Indian food-- saag, chick peas, samosas, and rice-- prepared by the almighty E. I'm still feeling bloated and content.

But there's still something missing. The feeling of contentment is no less real; but beneath it, waiting, building up pressure, there's the ever-building urgency of an unfulfilled quest.

Balls, to put it bluntly. I'm in search of balls.

It started out as little more than chit-chat. Traveling to the Rocky Mountains? Then surely you'll be trying the Rocky Mountain oysters? "Sure," I would offer, but my heart wouldn't quite be in it. For the culture of the Rocky Mountain oyster-- based on what I've learned from the internet, at least— has less to do with gastronomic pleasure than with unfettered machismo. Daring. Extremity. And, let's say, something like a homeopathic quest for a testosterone turbo-boost.

How tiresome. But I hold out hope that the victual itself might surpass its unfortunate aura. Imagine if the culture of oysters— real, aquatic oysters— focused on their aphrodisiac qualities alone.

At first it was all talk. But then we arrived in Colorado, and between the woozy air of high-altitude living and the heady excitement of collective dining, the quest has become more realistic.

Coach Taylor and A. V. were the last ones left awake on that first night; the others, travel-weary and full of corn, had long since retired for the evening. Conversation soon turned, naturally, to the matter of beef testicles. "Are you in?" "Sure, I'm in." "Me, too." "Let's do it." We made a pact.

But A. V. had only a brief window of opportunity to honor the pact; saddled with an early departure date, we had only Sunday to work with. And it must be remembered that Sunday and Monday are tough supply-chain days for local restaurants. Herein lay an important consideration: if there's anything less appealing than sub-par oysters, it's sub-par Rocky Mountain oysters.

The opportunity passed. A. left us, only to suffer through a 5.8 earthquake the next day.

So we wait. Will tomorrow be our day to strike? Coach Taylor has found a restaurant that serves them for lunch. Will our schedules permit? Will we lose our nerve?

Or will the whole quest simply turn out to be boring, and fade away entirely?

Chi Cken?

One of the more amusing ways for people to alienate themselves from others is for them to talk about their favorite experiences in Paris. Viz:

"It's the modest things about Paris that strike you most: aren't the street markets just adorable? And that crêpe stand near the Bastille is to die for."
or:

"Oh, you know, seriously, I think the best part about Paris is not the whole café or brasserie thing but the rhumeries, where they have lines of infused rums on a shelf above the bar. That's the real Paris."
or:

"Of course, this is an experience you can't really get from a short visit. You really have to live there."

Perhaps you already see where this is heading. Yep: we're those people. It's a shameful, gruesome fact, but there's no sense in denying it. I've uttered versions of all those sentences. "One of my favorite things to do in Paris..." You know, one of my favorite things. As in: there are so many; it's hard to decide. But I'll regale you with my current favorite.

Of course, the years are starting to pile up in the empty space between the present and the actual time we spent in Paris. Which was, you know, so very fleeting. (But even such nostalgic sentiment is itself disgusting, is it not? Perhaps most disgusting of all. "Oh, it's been so long since we were last in Paris. When will we ever return? It's been, like, forever").

To brush aside such sentiments: here is a story of, let's say, our Salad Days. Back in the day-- you know, before the Euro-- I was on a fellowship, living on the Rue de Lappe in the 11th (if you've just nodded in recognition, you're one of those people as well. Say five Hail Marys and pour yourself a glass of Pernod. I know you own a bottle. Or is it Ricard?).

During this séjour, H. would visit me from time to time, but otherwise I was dreadfully lonely. And hungry. Aside from the hours each day I'd spend trolling the city for food and books, I was reduced to contemplating the idea of strangling the busty-looking pigeons in the jardin de Luxembourg and braising them in a port wine reduction. Not because I had to. But because these are the sort of things you think about.

But most of the time I was just in the library.

The problem with the library, though, is that they had a nice cafe but really sub-standard food. (The food was still better than the food in your library, of course).

When H. first visited me in Paris, we realized there would be some issues with the cuisine. H. has an aversion to richness-- meaning unguent, creamy fattiness-- and is downright allergic to cultured milk products. Even on a normal day, this renders a surprising amount of food off-limits, between sour-cream sauces and pasta dishes sprinkled with "just a little bit of Parmesan." It's especially damning in the context of Parisian snack food, which consists of various dishes made with the inescapable combination of ham and gruyère cheese: omelettes, croques monsieurs, croques madames, sandwiches, crêpes, salades composées, and so forth. You name it, and it seems to have gruyère in it, and not just that "tiny little bit." But a whole hunking mass of it.

Upon reflection, years later, I wonder if this simply wasn't the result of my own preference for cafés and crêpe stands that served masses and gobs of melted gruyère cheese, which happens to be one of my stalwart favorites. Might there have been a slight prejudice at work here?

After several days of generally fruitful experimentation, we realized that the one meal for which we'd found no solution was the luncheon meal to be consumed at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Now, if you've never been to the new BN-- pour yourself another glass of pastis if you have; you're among friends-- then it should be mentioned that it is a strange, abject place, of which we're perversely quite fond. This is the new library I'm talking about, not the charming old one where Georges Bataille used to work as a coin-collector, and which is, you know, in the middle of the city. This is the one designed for Mitterand, and it's situated more of less in the middle of nowhere. The design features four giant glass towers that look like books, and then a big swimming pool in the middle, filled with trees. The symbolism of the books I comprehend. The tree-filled swimming pool less so.

This new site, in the middle of an old warehouse district, may by now have become the mecca of culinary experimentation. Who knows. But in the waning days of the French franc, and for several years afterwards, it was pretty much a gastronomic wasteland.

We tried the "Buffalo Grill," a western-themed steak (0r buffalo?) restaurant too horrific-- or really, too horrifically banal-- to describe. We tried the "Quick" hamburger chain, which we immediately renamed as the "Suck" hamburger chain. Nollo contendere.

And then there was one poor, tired little bakery, which carried some sandwiches made, of course, with ham and gruyère cheese. They did have some other French delicacies which (for me) could easily make my day: rillettes, the ground meat-and-fat spread that is unspeakably delicious for anyone who doesn't have a problem with rich, unguent, lardy food; and pâté, which is the closest that meat can come to being cheese without actually being cheese.

We needed another angle. And thus we settled on Chicken.

So here it is, the truth: one of the best things to eat in Paris-- that is, without going to a restaurant or involving cheese-- is a rotisserie chicken. You go down to your local butcher or, if you're lucky, to a specialty rotissière, and pick one up. The butcher pulls a chicken off the rack and places it in a foil-lined bag and then, if you ask, will spoon in some potatoes and vegetables that have been stewing in the juices beneath.

To this day the rotisserie chicken remains a cornerstone of our diet; we still refer to the chicken itself with the initial admixture of awe and questioning. "Chicken?" It's always a question, but again, a question mixed with hope, and wonder.

Upon its arrival home, chicken resolves itself very simply: pull off all the meat, and make a baguette sandwich. We've experimented with various sauces, fillings, and dressings. But the rules of the game have been set: spread a sliced half-baguette with Sriracha chili sauce, add the pulled chicken, and perhaps a little of the rotisserie sauce. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.

And then wrap the sandwich in a paper towel and tinfoil, and bring it to the library.

They make good espresso there, by the way. Of course they do.

Be, Cordial!

The making of fruit cordials operates on a principle of thrift analogous to ethanol production. Beyond their high alcohol contents, the two procedures share the same tendency toward hidden costs. Who knows what kinds of resources they consume in the name of "preservation." But the results? Is it all worth the trouble?

This is my second summer making fruit cordials, the bio-fuels of those who fancy a dram. Last year, inspired by a faint recollection of my father doing the same, I prepared four or five fruit cordials in mason jars.

Picture my father-- or anyone's father-- eagerly venturing down to the basement each afternoon to turn a glass bell he'd filled with raspberries and vodka. For him the dedication seemed to pay off: he spooned the berries over ice cream, and relished the liqueur for weeks. As for me, I started trotting out the cordials for guests a few weeks after my initial burst of activity. The results were, at first, uninspiring. And I subsequently became-- if not a laughing-stock-- then at least something of a pariah in the neighborhood. "Be careful," guests would warn each other, through sidelong glances. "He might try to foist some of those dreaded fruit cordials on you."

Hours of labor squandered. Pints of peak-season berries drowned in booze. And liters and liters of perfectly mediocre vodka and rum transformed into embalming fluid. Hidden costs indeed!

But then time (and, no doubt, chemistry) worked its magic. By November the same sundry neighbors and passers-by were clamoring for the stuff. "Any of the ginger one left?" "My favorite is the blueberry." "What do you mean, critical? I've always loved your cordials!" This wasn't hypocrisy; this was alchemy.

For the fact is that the classic "44 day method" for aging cordials is hooey. 44 days will make a fine limoncello-- and did, in fact. But limoncello is more an infusion than a cordial: the sugar is added later, so the effect is less about mellowing all the flavors than simply sweeting a well-infused pot of vodka. (The recipe is simple, though the internet is rife with tinkerers: place the peels (no pith) of 6 lemons in a one-quart mason jar and fill it with vodka. Wait 4 weeks, then strain out the peels. Add a simple syrup to fill the jar again, and place it in the freezer for another... oh, hell... drink it whenever).

Infusions, indeed, are quick: I recently experimented with a banana-infused rum, placing most of a ripe banana and a very small piece of vanilla in a jam jar filled with white rum. The banana almost instantaneously took on the aspect of a medical specimen. But after four or five days the rum was very flavorful, and before too long the experiment had come to an end: the rum had vanished.

Cordials take a wee bit longer. For the fruit cordials I've just made-- so far I've got one and a half jars of strawberry; one jar of black raspberry; one jar of blueberry with coriander; one jar of apricot (with honey); and one jar of limoncello-- the fruit and sugar go in at once. Indeed, I consider it best to macerate the fruit with sugar for a few hours before decanting it into the jar and adding the vodka. The fruit then stays in the jar for about two weeks or so. But then it needs time to mellow.

Does this mean that it evaporates? How does the aging process work? Part of me-- recalcitrant, obtuse-- refuses to understand the science.

Another part of me refuses to learn how to decant.

Yes, that was me-- not just another picture I stole from the internet.

Most of the fluid is young strawberry cordial. Some of it is tears.



***

Here is one of the first articles I read online about fruit cordials. Sadly, I don't own any books about cordial-making, although I hope soon to have something to say about the excellent Moonshine: Its History and Folklore, by Esther Kellner (New York, 1971).

Incidentally, another fluid currently waiting for consumption inside a mason jar is a bottle of farm-brewed Amish kombucha. A bacterial soda: literally. And quite refreshing, I might add. I'm about to pour a glass of it right now- - for unlike everything else, it's ready to drink.

A Bigger Box

Today's CSA share didn't fit in the usual half-peck box; it arrived in an Tröegs beer box. This boded well, as did the feathery tips of carrot and parsnip greens peeking out.
The box consisted of the following:
- a quart of beautiful red potatoes, which were sweet and waxy when poached (and served with butter and parsley)
- four small but tasty carrots, quickly devoured. I looked up a number of recipes for carrot greens, but couldn't decide on anything.
- two small parnsips
- a pint of snow peas
- two round white onions
- a handful of various peppers, sweet and hot
- a bag of salad greens
- a whole bag (!) of broccoli crowns
- a head of purple cabbage
- a bunch of kale (no longer just a delicate nosegay. An actual bunch)
- a bunch of swiss chard

The swiss chard instantly became a swiss chard and parsley frittata, which was rather tasty. Here's a version of the recipe, which I more or less followed, albeit without the cheese. In southern France it's called a Trouchia, to which I say: gezunteit!

I think tomorrow will require a nice salade niçoise, with the greens, the remaining potatoes, and the snow peas. But finally, the true summer conundrum has arrived: what am I going to do with all that kale and broccoli? A purple cabbage? The moment of truth has arrived. So far, the pattern of pizza, pasta, pizza, pasta, pasta, pasta, pasta has proven to be a purely binary code. What next?

Things are starting to heat up.

Coach Taylor

We've just had the pleasure of a visit from our dear friend "Coach" Taylor, who had planned originally to wing into town for our massive neighborhood 5th of July barbecue. (More on that to follow). But since her feet were tired from a cross-country hike, she delivered herself to us on Monday instead.

The exciting thing about the trip was less the food we made, than the food we planned; last night I bombed yet again in my attempt to make a decent pizza dough-- I'm cursed, I swear-- and made two pissaladières that felt like they were made out of baked library paste. "These pissaladières aren't worth the paper they're printed on," I heard Coach say.

Tonight we had carne asada tacos with store-bought corn tortillas that were, upon reflection, strikingly similar in texture.

But again, this wasn't the interesting part of the visit. By far more important has been the critical planning we've begun for "Camp E-Colo," which begins in a few weeks. For the uninitiated: Camp E-Colo is the Colorado incarnation of the more familiar Camp E-Coli, the annual core peeps retreat to inexpensive rental lodgings in Vermont and, perhaps increasingly, elsewhere (the possibilities, nearly endless, are fun to fantasize about: Camp E-Colini (Tuscany); Camp E-Cuador (Ecuador) ; Camp E-Cali (San Francisco); Camp E-Cholo (New Mexico), etc.).

The name originated one summer a few years ago, when we found that our nearby swimming lake was closed, thanks to the bacterial side-effects of heavy rains after a drought. It does not refer to the cooking, which, next to reading, drinking, swimming, and eating, is our favorite camp activity.

So with Coach Taylor on the premises, it was natural for some menu-planning to begin. "What," we asked ourselves, "best reflects the spirit and influence of Colorado-- you know, the ranches, the mountains, the swimming holes, the hippies?"

This is what we came up with. The list, incidentally, is courtesy of Coach Taylor:

Trout: grilled, smoked, or poached; for breakfast, with hollandaise sauce; trout tacos (if you know what I mean)
Elk and buffalo (but no moose. That's just not done.)
Spoon bread
Pork with tomatillo chili
Venison chili
Pancakes (but they must only be called "griddle cakes" or "flapjacks")
Fried catfish
Huevos rancheros
Moonshine

We also like to have theme meals at our camps, so we came up with some themes:

Taco Tuesday (coupled with the venison chili, the theme might be "Farty Friday")
Southern Extravaganza
Cowboy Grub, or Welcome to the Rodeo
A Taste of Iberia

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Two final notes:

1) In transcribing the list above from the original handwritten menu, Coach Taylor has edited out "grilled pizza." Dang. I think it's time to figure out how to make that dough, and properly.

2) What sentence isn't improved by adding "if you know what I mean" to the end?

Too Much Cooking, Not Enough Writing

What happened? Here it is, the mid-point of the calendar year. Summer is cruising along at full speed: a regular drunken boat. The sun is shining, the strawberries have begun to wane, and the summer squash is on the rise, proliferating, as summer squash does. The farmers' markets are bustling, and our farm-share boxes are getting heavier, if ever so slightly.

So why is it that I can hardly bring myself to write about all this?

Aside from the fact that it's much easier to write about the idea of food than about actual food-- perishable, transitory, and often more functional than delicious-- it would be safe to chalk this reluctance up to a lack of necessary idleness. To put it otherwise: I've been spending so much time scrambling to figure out what to do with a single summer squash, a sole bulb of kohlrabi, or a handful of pea pods, that the aftermath of an evening's dinner and cleanup finds me wiped clean- - a blank slate, fresh out of ideas.

Some of the improvisations have been successful. Some have achieved merely subsistence-level adequacy. Perhaps this, too, has been a factor. Who wants to write about (let alone remember) yet another pasta-with-greens-and garlic dish?

But summer's bounty is upon us all the same. Last week's farm share consisted of the following:

a bag of mixed lettuce
a nosegay of kale
three green onions
a crown of broccoli
a crown of cauliflower
a baggie of snap peas
a bulb of kohlrabi

As ever, the vegetables were gorgeous, albeit rendered all the more precious by their limited quantities; everything arrived clean, delicately packaged, and pristine. Once again-- we had our dear friends J. and E. in town-- we made grilled pizzas with the sautéed greens. Only this time I completely botched the pizza dough, and so at the last minute, with the toddlers fast approaching bedtime, we had to scramble to get everything ready. H. ran out to buy dough from a local pizzeria, and I hustled to get the pizzas on the table before everyone's nerves unraveled entirely.

How humbling. I now realize my error: the water I used to activate the yeast was far too hot. I'm ashamed even now to admit it: the water was nearly boiling. I'd heated it in the electric kettle, watching it approach the boiling point with a dull, innocent gaze. Instead of waking up the yeast with a warm bath, I murdered it. The dough, which never rose, sat inert and massive on the stove-top, hardening slowly into brick. Later that evening, I threw it away.

The pizzas themselves were perfectly adequate, thanks to the new dough.

Somewhat more noteworthy was a frittata we made the next day with the remaining ingredients from the farm share box: sautéed cauliflower, kohlrabi, and some leftover rice. The frittate was pleasant, especially when flanked by a bright salad of micro-greens from the local farmer's market. I was especially pleased by the kohlrabi: what pleasant little bulbs they are!

Today's farm-share brought some new developments, and I've been straining to think about how best to use it all:

a bunch of swiss chard
four bulbous green onions
crowns of broccoli and cauliflower
a summer squash
a small green pepper and one hot pepper
two heads of lettuce

Come to think of it, I ended up using much of this share in tonight's dinner, a humble fried rice dish made with one of the green onions, the yellow squash, and the single hot pepper, along with some corn, egg, and rice. Heck, that's already a substantial portion of the share.

What both excites and troubles me about the farm share is the micro-managerial impulse it awakens. Much of this, I am sure, derives from the novelty of the experience-- again, this is our first time trying out this sort of thing. But there's an intrinsic structural difference as well. Indeed, how different it is to receive a half-bushel box of produce than to wheel a cart through the supermarket-- or, for that matter, to stroll through some open-air market, following your nose.

In the latter cases, after all, you're the one doing the selecting. With a farm share, you simply open the box. Yet having the challenge of selection removed from the act of buying vegetables adds a whole new set of challenges. It also-- perversely-- adds a whole new layer of selection as well. What needs to be used first? Which elements belong together, and which remain incompatible, demanding separate dishes, separate meals?

The experience is, in the end, one of basic husbandry: how do I get these vegetables to yield one, two, or even three meals? How can I swell their ranks with rice, pasta, eggs, beans, or dough? Like a cured meat product, the vegetables have been reduced-- and thus elevated-- to the status of flavoring agent.

Vegetables, in other words, are the new bacon. Now there's something to get excited about.

Carbon Schmarbon

I've just finished reading an inane article on Salon.com by Roberta Kwok; it's typical of the phoned-in, shoddily-researched mumbo-jumbo that passes for left-leaning journalism (having taken its cue, perhaps, from the phoned-in, shoddily-researched mumbo-jumbo purveyed by the right wing as well). The article, "Locally Grown Food Is More Ecological? Not So Fast," points out that farmers markets and the like might not be as carbon-friendly as we think. Heck, in terms of fuel consumption, they might actually consume as much gasoline as supermarkets-- maybe even more!

Here's the logic: supermarket produce may travel further than local produce, but farmers truck the stuff in with much less mega-efficiency than the supermarkets. After all, how many farmers own 18-wheelers? And thus, Kwok comes dangerously close to launching a clarion call to Salon's self-hating pseudo-liberals: buy cosmopolitan! Maybe we're all not such bad people for wanting to enjoy our persimmons and off-season tomatoes at Whole Foods.

I recently heard Bruce Robbins, an English professor at Columbia, make a similarly narrow-minded point. His pseudo-environmentalist appeal to gastronomic cosmopolitanism had, however, a little bit of ideological bait thrown in as well. The "Buy Local" mandate, like the "Buy American" mantra, comes suspiciously close to replicating a form of cultural xenophobia; however good our intentions might be, "buying local" smacks of potential deception. We might think we're doing the right thing, but we're really acting like suckers.

Kwok, to his credit, isn't suggesting that we give up on farmers markets-- he concludes only that he should "leave his calculator at home" next time, in order to avoid getting himself all dizzy over the problem of carbon calculation in the first place.

I'm stunned, though, by the article's lack of consideration for the longer-term economic-- and thus environmental-- differences between the globalization of produce and the support for local farming. For every time a small farm goes under, yielding its land either to sub-developments or to industrial mega-farms, the effects are far more wide-ranging than simply the matter of how much gas it takes to drive to the market, or of how much greenhouse gas an actual greenhouse produces.

Farmers markets benefit farmers-- at least I hope they do-- as do programs that enable markets, restaurants, schools, businesses, and individuals to buy local produce. I'm sure, yes, that there's plenty of driving involved. But every time a farm turns into a "Fox Run Village" or a "Wayside Crest" piled high with eco-friendly McHouses, there's a new bumper crop of cars, traffic, and the inevitable highway-widening and mega-marts that follow.

And yes, the 18-wheelers that heave in the bushels of imported (and sometimes delicious) produce from California or Guatamala to the local Wegman's may be more efficient than Farmer Dan's old Chevy pickup. But I'll bet you dollars to donuts that there will be more 18-wheelers once those farms have gone.

Delayed Gratification... But Gratification

Knowing in advance that we would be out of town for our weekly vegetable delivery, we authorized (read: cajoled) A. and K. to pick up our CSA box from the porch and do with it what they liked.

When we returned home yesterday, they gave us the contents. This, I guess, is what they liked. A. and K. have their own garden, you see. But it's an act of kindness all the same.

Judging from the contents of the box, it would seem that things are starting to pick up. The results remain similar to those of previous weeks:

A small head of iceburg lettuce
A bag of mixed lettuce
A nosegay of kale
A crown of broccoli
Four green onions
A bag of mange-tout snap peas.

In addition, I bought from the farmer's market today a dozen or so garlic scapes, a packet of micro-greens, and some fresh fingerling beets with their greens intact. I'm especially pleased with the garlic scapes, which I'd never used before. They're magnificent: imagine a long bean that tastes like garlic. Eaten raw, they're rather strong, yet much more edible than the garlic bulb. Sautéed, they become much milder and sweeter in flavor.

As a result of this produce surge, virtually everything we ate today was grown within 25 miles of us. We had salad greens with our lunch and dinner. We made an omelet with garlic scapes. And for supper we made pizzas on the grill.

Grilled pizzas are a summer favorite, and for the first time I actually bothered to make the dough. Please don't judge me: it's mighty simple-- especially for a crowd-- to pick up prepared dough from the pizza parlor, and it costs almost nothing. So there's never been much need to make the dough from scratch, and thus I'd never done it. Now I have. The earth still turns on its axis.

For unlike the fussiness of oven-baked pizza, with its algorithms and alembics, grilled pizzas derive their appeal from the intense heat of the grill. They cook quickly and effectively, with wonderful crispness and irregularity. They have, I am sure, a strong following, in spite of remaining one of those cookbook secrets tucked away somewhere in the back pages near the beans, or the desserts and novelty cocktails. But they're a summer marvel; David Rosengarten raves about them in the Dean & Deluca. Ditto Steven Raichlen in his Barbecue Bible. And rightly so: there's no home pizza, in my mind, that comes even close to the texture and flavor of the crispy little pizzas you can make on the grill.

Here's how it works: you heat half the grill to high and half to low. On the hot part you lay out a thin square or a triangle of dough and let it bake for 30-45 seconds, until the dough starts to bubble and firm up. Then flip the dough, and cook the top side for about a minute. Flip again, and move the pizza crust to the cooler side. Then add the toppings; the residual heat from the grill will warm them. We don't use a lot of cheese, so melting things isn't our priority. But it does work; you just can't load the thing up like some Pizza Hut leviathan. This is, shall we say, more subtle fare.

With our vegetable bounty we made four small pizzas. Beforehand I cooked some Italian sausages and roasted a few cherry tomatoes in the oven. I also sautéed up some garlic scapes with the beet greens, adding a little chicken stock and cooking until the greens softened. I did the same thing with the kale and broccoli. These became the toppings; later in the summer, when tomatoes are in season, we'll trot out the more traditional favorites.

Our menu tonight consisted of the following:

Pizza #1: sausage, beet greens, tomatoes, olive oil
Pizza#2: kale/broccoli, tomatoes, Parmesan, olive oil
Pizza #3: sausage, kale/broccoli, tomatoes, olive oil
Pizza #4: Parmesan, olive oil, black pepper.